Author: Tom Engelhardt

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Memo to Senator John McCain: Senator, the other day I noticed that, as chairman of the Armed Services Committee, you threatened to read more

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Once upon a time, long ago in another universe, the end of the world was left in the hands of the gods, not human beings. Today, however, humanity, in its curious ingenuity, has managed to come up with two ways of destroying itself, as well as the very habitat that welcomed and nourished it all these eons. For the first of these, two dates suffice: August 6th and 9th, 1945.  read more

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Stop thinking of this country as the sole superpower or the indispensable nation on Earth and start reimagining it as the great fracturer, the exceptional smasher, the indispensable fragmenter.  Its wars of the twenty-first century are starting to come home big time — home being not just this particular country (though that’s read more

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Born with the proverbial silver spoon in his mouth, a former businessman who had helped run companies into the ground, he was widely considered ill-prepared for the presidency, out of his depth, a lightweight in a heavyweight world. Still, having won the Republican nomination and then a uniquely read more

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Gladiatorial contests were the “sport” of choice of the Roman Empire for more than 650 years.  Losing gladiators were regularly wounded or killed, outcomes in which the audience often had the final say (thumbs up or down or a closed fist with two fingers extended). Such decisions were reportedly accompanied by screams of “let him go!” or “slay him!”  These days, read more

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“Tell Me How This Ends?”
David Petraeus Finally Answers His Own Question
By Tom Engelhardt

It took 14 years, but now we have an answer.

It was March 2003, the invasion of Iraq was underway, and Major General David Petraeus was in command of the 101st Airborne Division heading for the Iraqi capital, Baghdad.  Rick Atkinson, Washington Post journalist and military read more

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Karen Greenberg first arrived at TomDispatch in January 2005 in tandem with defense attorney Joshua Dratel.  Their book The Torture Papers was just being published and they were asking read more

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“Bring the war home”: once, a long, lost time ago — in October 1969, to be exact — that slogan represented a promise made by the most radical wing of the vast movement against the war in Vietnam.  Wearing football helmets and wielding lead pipes, that tiny crew of extreme leftists carried out what they read more

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We tend to think of them as separate and distinct wars: the war in Afghanistan, the war in Iraq.  Yet it’s not hard to trace the ways in which America’s knee-jerk overreaction to the terrorist attack of 9/11 and the “preemptive” invasion of Iraq that followed in 2003 destabilized read more

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I first “met” Noam Chomsky in 1969 by reading these words of his about the My Lai massacre:

“And now there is Song My — ‘Pinkville.’  More than two decades of indoctrination and counterrevolutionary interventions have created the possibility of a name like ‘Pinkville’ — and the acts that may be done in a place so named.  Orville and Jonathan Schell read more