Author: Tom Engelhardt

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

Typical of last week’s news when it came to immigration and the U.S. border was a Soviet-style “purge” of the Department of Homeland Security, or to cite another grimly appropriate word, as an unnamed official of the Department of Homeland Security did read more

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

American War Is Off the Charts
How the U.S. Military Feeds at the Terror Trough
By Tom Engelhardt

Here’s a statement it might be hard to disagree with: American war is off the charts.

Still, I’d like to explain — but I’m nervous about doing so. I know perfectly well that the next word I plan to write will send most of you tumbling elsewhere in a universe in which “news” read more

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

Here was a tweet from October 2014 about a president who liked to golf: “Can you believe that, with all of the problems and difficulties facing the U.S., President Obama spent the day playing golf. Worse than Carter.” And that was just one of 27 times between 2011 and 2016 read more

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

He was a graduate student when, in the midst of the Vietnam War, he started to explore the history behind the heroin epidemic then infecting the U.S. Army in Vietnam. He soon found himself, almost inadvertently, on the heroin trail across Southeast Asia and deep into the CIA’s involvement in an earlier version of America’s drug wars. In a shadow world of black ops, mercenaries, read more

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

Once upon a time, it was an “invisible government” — or, at least, that’s what David Wise and Thomas Ross called it in their famed 1964 book of that title. Those two journalists, shining read more

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

There are a few genuinely upbeat news stories when it comes to this planet and people trying to figure out how to save us from ourselves and our fossil-fuel addiction.  This at a moment of record global surface temperatures and record ocean read more

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

Charles W. Engelhard, Jr., was “the platinum king” of South Africa (and was evidently the model for Ian Fleming’s James Bond nemesis Goldfinger). He lived mainly in a “Rhinelike castle, turrets and all,” in Far Hills, New Jersey, but did shuttle via his own fleet of aircraft among read more

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

It turns out that I can thank former Army colonel and historian Andrew Bacevich for the fact that U.S. Army Major Danny Sjursen began his article-writing career at TomDispatch. That was in February 2017. His first piece was headlined read more

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

The 47-Minute Presidency
The Reign of King Toot
By Tom Engelhardt

Recently, I did something rare in my life. Over a long weekend, I took a few days away and almost uniquely — I might even say miraculously — never saw Donald Trump’s face, since I didn’t watch TV and barely checked the news. They were admittedly terrible days in which 50 people were slaughtered read more

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

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

The advent of sound recording deep-sixed this age-old thought experiment and offered a definitive answer: Yes!

I’ve got another one for you, though: if you water-torture someone at a secure military compound and no one is around to see it, is it a war crime?

Tricky, right?

Well, what if someone read more