War Is A Crime

By a vote of 219 to 210, at 2:31 p.m. on Thursday, the U.S. House of Representatives passed an amendment introduced by Congresswoman Ilhan Omar requiring that the U.S. military provide Congress with the cost and the supposed national security benefits of every foreign military base or foreign military operation.

World BEYOND War had flooded Congressional offices with the demand for Yes votes.

Here is the text of the amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act as passed:

At the end of read more

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

What more did you need to know once Secretary of State Mike Pompeo insisted that a suicide bombing in Kabul, Afghanistan, claimed by the Taliban, was Iranian-inspired or plotted, one “in a series of attacks instigated by the Islamic Republic read more

In the year 2000, the CIA gave Iran (slightly and obviously flawed) blueprints for a key component of a nuclear weapon. In 2006 James Risen wrote about this “operation” in his book State of War. In 2015, the United States prosecuted a former CIA agent, Jeffrey Sterling, for supposedly having leaked the story to Risen. In the course of the prosecution, the CIA made read more

By “the Obama wars” I don’t mean some overgrown infants on television screaming racist insults or pretending that opposing racism requires cheering for Obama.

I mean: the widespread indiscriminate murder of human beings with missiles — many of them from robot airplanes — let loose to threaten any non-white country on earth by Obama and expanded by Trump. I mean the catastrophic destruction of Libya — still continued by Trump. I mean the war on Afghanistan, the vast bulk of which was read more

Donald E. McInnis is the author of She’s So Cold: Murder, Accusations, and the System that Devastated a Family. He is a California criminal defense attorney, and he represented one of the three accused boys, Aaron Houser, in the Stephanie Crowe murder case. Over the span of his 40-year legal career, Mr. McInnis has worked alternately for the prosecution and for the defense, having served as a deputy district attorney for two California counties read more

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

It’s no small thing to lodge a word or phrase of your own in our language. So give Dwight D. Eisenhower credit. In his presidential farewell address to the American people in 1961, the former five-star general of World War II warned — and who would have known better — of the growth of what he called read more

The true story of British whistleblower Katharine Gun is public. The new movie dramatizing that story, with Keira Knightley in the starring role is called a thriller. And that it is.

How can a known event be made into a suspenseful thriller? In part this is possible because the story is a complex one that few know the details of, and in part because most people don’t know anything about anything. There’s too much information in the world, and most of it is useless or worse. The story read more