Tomgram: Engelhardt, Nixon’s Children

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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

Focus: Tax Reform – Oct 16, 2017

Wrongful Rhetoric and Trump’s Strategy on Iran

October 14, 2017

Mordechai Vanunu was imprisoned in Israel for eighteen years because he blew the whistle on Israel’s secret nuclear weapons program. He felt he had “an obligation to tell the people of Israel what was going on behind their backs” at a supposed nuclear research facility which was actually producing plutonium for nuclear weapons. His punishment for breaking the silence about Israel’s capacity to manufacture nuclear weapons included eleven years of solitary confinement.

Yesterday, read more

My letter to Larry Flynt on Trump Impeachment

Larry Flynt,

Your grounds for impeachment #s 2 through 6 (plus that of the paragraph that follows them) are already documented by overwhelming, incontrovertible evidence. What is required is to recognize that and to remove from the list the impediment of the ground you have placed as #1 which helps create the illusion of requiring more information, which risks increased militarism, and which could derail this entire impeachment project due to the lack of evidence for any of its central claims.

That’s read more

The Secure, the Dispossessed, and the Mentally Deranged Dotards

In The Secure and the Dispossessed, Nick Buxton and Ben Hayes have collected an unflinching survey of a species gone mad. The book’s subtitle is “How the Military and Corporations Are Shaping a Climate-Changed World.” In short, the Authoritarian Exceptionalist Military Corporate Complex is flamboyantly recognizing the hole it is in, and exponentially increasing the rate of digging, while hiring PR firms to redefine “digging” as “robust engagement in advanced resilient green read more

What About Weinstein’s Public Offenses?

Harvey Weinstein, I’ve just read, is “the disgraced Pulp Fiction producer.” But isn’t someone who encourages millions of people to think of murder and torture as super cool and fun already pre-disgraced? Doesn’t he arrive in the locked office with the actress cowering in the corner already publicly disgraced and intent on disgracing himself in private?

This is a man whom we have to thank for Reservoir Dogs, Gangs of New York, Kill Bill, Rambo, Inglorious Basterds, Django read more

Tomgram: Danny Sjursen, Embracing Our Inner Empire

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

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

Focus: North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) – Oct 11, 2017

PBS’s Vietnam Acknowledges Nixon’s Treason

After reading and hearing wildly contradictory accounts of Ken Burns & Lynn Novick’s Vietnam War documentary on PBS, I decided I had to watch the thing. I agree with some of the criticism and some of the praise.

The documentary begins with the ludicrous idea that the U.S. government had good intentions. It ends with praise for the memorial in DC and its tragic list of names, without mention of the greater number of U.S. veterans of that war who have since died from suicide, much less the read more