My Fellow Americans: Please Wake Up

Day after day, year after year, your government murders people and sows terror and misery on the people of the Middle East and Africa – while most of you do nothing to stop it.

On January 13, 2018, warplanes for the U.S.-led Coalition in Syria, fired missiles on Hajin city, in the eastern suburbs of Deir Ez-Zour of that devastated country, killing five civilians. According to the Syrian Network for Human Rights, their names were read more

What Military Bashing Teacher Got Right

A high school teacher is no longer teaching, and is receiving threats, because of how he spoke about the U.S. military. To read the news reports, you’d think that all he said was that people who join the military are stupid.

He did say that. He was wrong to say that. It isn’t true, and it’s bigotted.

He also said many things that are demonstrably true, valuable, useful, and generally censored:

1) The U.S. military doesn’t win any of its wars. (In the course of saying this he made bigotted read more

Tomgram: Andrew Bacevich, American Paths, Chosen and Not (1989-2018)

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

If I were to pick a single decision by an American president and his team in this century as our own August 1914, I would choose the invasion of Iraq in the spring of 2003. Of course, in that era of the “sole superpower,” there were no other great powers (as in the World War I moment) ready to leap into the fray, so the unraveling that followed across a significant read more

Talk Nation Radio: Ken Hughes on the Pentagon Papers and What Nixon Feared

Ken Hughes is an expert on secret presidential recordings, especially those of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. Hughes has spent two decades mining the Secret White House Tapes and unearthing their secrets. As a journalist writing in the pages of the New York Times Magazine, Washington Post, and Boston Globe Magazine, and, since 2000, as a researcher with the Miller Center at the University of Virginia, read more

If the Second Amendment Was Meant for Genocide, Is It Sacred?

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s new book, Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment, could be criticized for how little it seems to focus on the Second Amendment, and how much on topics familiar from the author’s past writing. But the topics are radically unfamiliar to most U.S. Americans and extremely relevant to understanding what the Second Amendment was and is.

I’ve argued in the past that the Second Amendment read more

A Treacherous Crossing

Photo: U.S. Speaker Ryan and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman – U.S. House Speaker’s Office

January 30, 2018

On January 23rd an overcrowded smuggling boat capsized off the coast of Aden in Southern Yemen. Smugglers packed 152 passengers from Somalia and Ethiopia in the boat and then, while at sea, reportedly pulled guns on the migrants to read more

What is being done versus what should be done with prisons

The United States is a global leader in putting people in cages (#1 in prisoners, second in prisoners per capita to the Seychelles, where the United Nations locks up “pirates,” and whose whole population is a fraction of the U.S. prison population). The U.S. is also in the top 10 for state executions.

How’s this method of crime prevention working for us?

Well, the United States is #11 in gun deaths, read more

Who Is a Hero?

In the aftermath of World War II, the U.S. occupation authorities in Germany, checking on the effectiveness of their “denazification” program, polled Germans on whether they believed a civilian was “less worthy than a soldier.”  One wonders what they would think of the exalted status that many Americans currently accord to anyone serving in the U.S. armed forces, as announcements ring out―from airline flights to sporting events―with calls to applaud “Our Heroes.”

This adulation read more

The Post should be viewed by current editors of The Post

I was afraid that The Post would give us a Hollywood film version of the publication of the Pentagon Papers and manage never to say what was in the Pentagon Papers. I was afraid it would be turned into a pro-war movie. I was afraid we’d be told that the Washington Post was a courageous institution while Daniel Ellsberg was a dirty traitor. I am pleased to have had no reason for such concerns.

The Post is not exactly an anti-war movie, Ellsberg is not a main character, the peace movement read more