Author: Tom Engelhardt

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In June, an American Green Beret was reportedly strangled to death in Mali by U.S. Navy SEALs, allegedly in connection with a shadowy money-skimming scheme.  (The military is currently investigating.) In July, The Intercept, the London-based research firm Forensic read more

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Ambassadors of the traditional kind?  Who needs them?  Diplomats?  What a waste!  The State Department?  Why bother?  Its budget is to be slashed and its senior officials are leaving in droves read more

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Sometimes I wonder what school I went to. I mean, I know perfectly well. I attended a place I never wanted to go: Yale.  But when I was 17 years old, my parents — and a familial urge to be upwardly mobile — more than overwhelmed my personal and private desire to go elsewhere. So, in 1962, I ended up at that all-male college in New Haven, Connecticut, and, despite read more

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It’s been going on for so many years — Predators cruising, looking for their prey. Some attention has since been paid to the phenomenon and to the devastating effect their actions have had on their victims, but it hasn’t really mattered. The predation has only spread.

Oh, before I go any further, let me clear up one possible bit of confusion. I’m not talking about read more

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com.

By the time you read this, the latest brouhaha will undoubtedly be history — or do I mean “fake history”? — and largely forgotten. It will have been replaced by an explosion of media coverage about some other nightmarish set of presidential tweets or comments. After all, it’s a pattern. I’m referring to President Trump’s recent retweeting read more

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com.

Few Americans ever took in the vastness of the prison outsourcing system the administration of George W. Bush set up from Afghanistan to Iraq, Thailand to Poland, read more

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Texas, Florida, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands.  The U.S. got clobbered.  Three category 4 or 5 Atlantic hurricanes of startling intensity, a record read more

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If you want a gauge of the state of America, the country that put billionaire Donald Trump in the White House, consider this: the three richest Americans — Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Warren Buffett — now have the wealth of the bottom read more

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Consider the latest news from America’s war zones, still spreading across the Greater Middle East and Africa.  The U.S. military is now reportedly building up its troop strength (mostly Special Operations forces) in Somalia. Their number has already doubled, read more

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Who even remembers that, back in September 2002, Lawrence Lindsey, then President George W. Bush’s chief economic adviser, offered an upper limit estimate on the cost of a future war in Iraq at $100 billion to $200 billion?  He also suggested that the “successful prosecution” of such a war “would read more