Author: Tom Engelhardt

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What’s the value of an American life in the age of Donald Trump? If you were judging by the death of Nawres Hamid, an Iraqi-American contractor killed in late December after an American base in Iraq was mortared by a Shiite militia believed to have ties to Iran, the answer would be obvious: enough to risk read more

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In late December 2018, when James “Mad Dog” Mattis resigned as secretary of defense after President Trump announced that he was going to pull U.S. troops out of Syria, it was a hell of a story. read more

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In these years, Washington has, in a sense, tortured history.

Early in this century, the Guantánamo Bay detention facility would become the crown jewel of a mini-gulag of torture and mistreatment that the CIA and the U.S. military — remember those infamous photos from Abu Ghraib prison in read more

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Lately, we Americans have had little choice but to think about this country’s imperiled Eastern border. No, I don’t mean the Atlantic coast. What I had in mind were those borderlands in the Middle East where another 4,500 American military personnel have recently been sent and perhaps read more

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Today, TomDispatch regular Rebecca Gordon, author of American Nuremberg: The U.S. Officials Who Should Stand Trial for Post-9/11 War Crimes, offers us a striking look read more

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“Be assured of one thing: whichever candidate you choose at the polls in November, you aren’t just electing a president of the United States; you are also electing an assassin-in-chief… In previous eras… presidents either stayed above the assassination fray or practiced a kind of plausible deniability about the acts. We are surely at a new stage in the history read more

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In a way, many of us spent the Cold War years under our school desks. It was there that we kids were taught to “duck and cover,” theoretically sheltering ourselves against a Soviet nuclear attack. However, when only a read more

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Next August 6th and 9th will be the 75th anniversaries of the devastating U.S. atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. To this day, they remain the only wartime uses of nuclear weapons. Given read more

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Is Donald Trump the Second 9/11?
Or Is He the Third?
By Tom Engelhardt

Here’s the question at hand — and I guarantee you that you’ll read it here first: Is Donald Trump the second or even possibly the third 9/11? Because truly, he has to be one or the other.

Let me explain, and while I do, keep this in mind: as 2019 ends, thanks to Brexit and the victory of Boris read more

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America’s forever wars and their fallout over these last 18 years have been hell for kids. Just ask Ismail or any of the other 56 wounded children who survived an August 2018 attack on their school bus in northern Yemen by Saudi read more