War Is A Crime

Mushroom cloud of unspeakable destruction rises over Hiroshima following the first wartime dropping of an atomic bomb on August 6, 1945 (US government photo)

By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, August 5, 2021

In 2015, Alice Sabatini was an 18-year-old contestant in the Miss Italia contest in Italy. She was asked what epoch of the past she would have liked to live in. She replied: WWII. Her explanation was that her text books go on and on about it, so she’d like to actually see it, and she wouldn’t read more

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

In what seems like another life, I used to interview American veterans of the Vietnam War. Over the course of a decade, I spoke with hundreds of them, mostly about one topic: war crimes. Some were unrepentant. An interrogator who had tortured prisoners, for instance, told me that such actions — beatings, waterboarding, electric shock — were standard operating procedure read more

Talk World Radio is recorded as audio and video on Riverside.fm. Here is this week’s video and all the videos on Youtube.

This week on Talk World Radio: Peace in the Streets. Our guest Robert Gray is Co-Founder of Uhuru, an organization based where I am, in Charlottesville, Virginia. Gray is a visionary, businessman, brand strategist, and social entrepreneur with a passion for education reform and economic empowerment. He’s done a wide range of organizing work, and in 2019 received read more

A U.S. soldier stands guard in March of 2003 next to an oil well at the Rumayla oil fields set ablaze by retreating Iraqi troops. (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images)

By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, July 29, 2021

William Astore’s latest article on TomDispatch proposes to “Reinvent the U.S. Military for Real National Defense.” The specific proposals are all to the good: stop adding to the nuclear weapons pile, shrink the Army read more

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

Seven years after the Soviet Union collapsed in a heap of post-Afghan-War rubble and seven years after President George H.W. Bush fought the First Gulf War against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq to what looked like typical all-American success, we were on a planet that seemed unimaginably all-American. That February of 1998, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was read more

Talk World Radio is recorded as audio and video on Riverside.fm. Here is this week’s video and all the videos on Youtube.

This week on Talk World Radio: Remembering the Alamo, or — better yet — forgetting it. Our guest Bryan Burrough is a special correspondent for Vanity Fair and the author of seven books, including the New York Times #1 best-selling Barbarians at the Gate (with John Helyar) and Public Enemies. He is co-author of a terrific new book called Forget the Alamo.

Total read more

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

The Forbidden Word Is This Country Heading for the Exit? By Tom Engelhardt

It was all so long ago, in a world seemingly without challengers. Do you even remember when we Americans lived on a planet with a recumbent Russia, a barely rising China, and no obvious foes except what later came to be known as an “ read more

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

In my younger years, I had significant experience with futuristic worlds, sometimes of the grimmest sort. After all, I went to the moon with Jules Verne; saw London being destroyed with read more