Author: Tom Engelhardt

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

In September 2007, Karen Greenberg ominously titled her third report for TomDispatch “Guantanamo Forever.” Give her credit. So many years ago, she grasped all too clearly the nightmarish nature of that bastion of injustice. Sixteen years and three presidencies later, read more

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

Uh… gulp… you thought it was bad when that experienced pilot ejected from one of the Air Force’s hottest “new” planes, the F-35 combat fighter, near — no, not China or somewhere in the Middle East — but Charleston, South Carolina. The plane then flew on its own for another 60 miles before crashing into an empty field. And that was without an enemy in sight.

Perhaps read more

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

The Slow-Motion Equivalent of a Nuclear War?
A “New Cold War” on an Ever-Hotter Planet

By Tom Engelhardt

Tell me, what planet are we actually on? All these decades later, are we really involved in a “second” or “new” Cold War? It’s certainly true that, as late as the 1980s, the superpowers (or so they then liked to think of themselves), the United States and the Soviet Union, read more

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

Here’s something strange about our all-too-nuclearized planet: in my youth during the 1950s and early 1960s, the possibility of an obliterating nuclear war played a significant role in our everyday nightmares. We schoolkids then regularly engaged in “ read more

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

What a criminal enterprise our country truly is. And I do mean enterprise. After all, according to the latest figures, there are… honestly, you’re not going to believe this… but, according to PrisonPolicy.org, read more

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

In September 2007, retired Air Force lieutenant colonel and historian William Astore emailed me out of the blue. He’d been reading TomDispatch articles on this country’s Global War on Terror, especially the invasion of, and never-ending conflict in, Iraq. And as a former military man, something struck him: the staggering rows of medals and ribbons our military read more

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

Yes, I know, I know. There are all-too-modern ways to keep your friends’ addresses, phone numbers, and emails, but this old guy still uses an address book. Unfortunately, the pages of the one I’d kept for endless years finally grew so worn, so tattered, that I bought a new one and, name by name, copied my contacts, my friends, my family from one to the other.

That, however, read more

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

It’s strange to try to come to grips with this increasing wreck of a planet. When you’re my age, you have to wonder about the future. That’s especially true in a world where the two top greenhouse gas emitters, the historically most massive one (the United States) and the present leader read more

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

At an earlier moment in history when anti-immigrant and racist feelings were soaring, a silent film, The Birth of a Nation, helped revive the Ku Klux Klan. That movie had been adapted from a novel with the ominous read more

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

I began writing this introduction on a record-breaking September day in New York City. It was 93 degrees (and humid as hell). Until then, my hometown had largely missed the worst read more