War Is A Crime

Albion Winegar Tourgée may be best known now, though not in his lifetime, as the lead attorney in the Plessy v. Ferguson case, which was a set-up, a staged incident, with the cooperation even of the railroad company, to get a man arrested for sitting in the wrong car, take the matter to court, and end segregation on trains — except that it backfired horribly and legalized apartheid for over 50 years.

Tourgée’s work was not one incident alone, and his positive influence hasn’t ceased. His read more

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

Election-Meddling Follies, 1945-2019
Living in a Nation of Political Narcissists
By Tom Engelhardt

In this country, reactions to the Mueller report have been all-American beyond belief. Let’s face it, when it comes to election meddling, it’s been me, me, me, 24/7 here. Yes, in some fashion some set of Russians meddled in the last election campaign, whether it was, as read more

Danny Haiphong is an activist, journalist, and scholar. For the last five years, Haiphong has been a weekly contributor to Black Agenda Report. His articles have also appeared in The American Herald Tribune, MintPressNews, and CounterPunch. His work was featured in former Congresswoman and Green Party presidential candidate Cynthia McKinney’s latest book How the U.S. Creates Sh*thole Countries (2018). Haiphong recently co-authored the book American read more

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

As William Hartung and Mandy Smithberger reported at TomDispatch recently, the national security budget has reached $1.25 trillion annually without evidently peaking, while the U.S. military fights wars read more

A coalition organized as DivestCville.org is asking the City of Charlottesville, Va., to divest all public money from weapons companies, major war profiteers, and fossil fuel companies.

At its Monday, May 6, 2019, meeting, and through subsequent discussions, Charlottesville City Council decided that it would vote on a resolution on June 3rd to divest its general operating fund from weapons and fossil fuels. It also sketched out a plan to establish new policies for its retirement fund over the coming read more

If Iran had spent the last few decades lying about and threatening the United States, and had attacked and built military bases in Canada and Mexico, and had imposed sanctions on the United States that were creating great suffering, and then a lying scheming war-crazed Iranian official announced that he believed the United States had put some missiles on some fishing boats in the Chesapeake Bay, would you believe that . . .

a) The United States was a dangerous rogue state threatening Iran with read more

A new book called Bitten: The Secret History of Lyme Disease and Biological Weapons by Kris Newby adds significantly to our understanding of Lyme disease, while oddly seeming to avoid mention of what we already knew.

Newby claims (in 2019) that if a scientist named Willy Burgdorfer had not made a confession in 2013, the secret that Lyme disease came from a biological weapons program would have died with him. Yet, in 2004 Michael Christopher Carroll published a book called read more

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

Back in 2012, I stumbled across figures on the U.S. government’s classification of documents and was stunned. In 2011, 92,064,862 of them had been sequestered and 26,058,678 of those given “top secret” status. (Who even knew that so many documents could be generated read more