Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com

I worked for years as an editor at Pantheon Books. Its publisher, maybe the most adventurous in the business, was André Schiffrin. Among his many accomplishments, he "discovered" Studs Terkel (already a well-known Chicago radio personality), published his first oral history (Division Street: America), and...

Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com

Every now and then, news about U.S. military bases abroad actually gets a little attention. The most recent example: Afghan President Hamid Karzai's announcement that the U.S. will be able to keep nine bases after the 2014 withdrawal of its combat troops. ("'They...

Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com

Has a weapon ever been invented, no matter how terrible, and not used? The crossbow, the dreadnought, poison gas, the tank, the landmine, chemical weapons, napalm, the B-29, the drone: all had their day and for some that day remains now. Even the most terrible...

Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com

Indefinite detention of the innocent and guilty alike, without any hope of charges, trial, or release: this is now the American way. Most Americans, however, may not care to take that in, not even when the indefinitely detained go on a

Imperial Gigantism and the Decline of Planet Earth

Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com

It stretched from the Caspian to the Baltic Sea, from the middle of Europe to the Kurile Islands in the Pacific, from Siberia to Central Asia.  Its nuclear arsenal held 45,000 warheads, and its military...

[A bow to Eduardo Galeano on the publication of his new book Children of the Days: A Calendar of Human History. Excerpts from the book can be read by clicking here.]

As a teenager, you dreamed of being a writer and I imagine you dream of...

Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com

After all these decades, here's the strange thing: what I remember are his hands, not his face. But perhaps that's fitting for a writer. His name was Robert Shaplen and he was a correspondent for The New Yorker. My parents knew him and,...

Jeremy Scahill, Blowback Reporter

Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com

Chalmers Johnson’s book Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire was published in March 2000 -- and just about no one noticed.  Until then, blowback had been an obscure term of CIA tradecraft, which Johnson defined as “the unintended consequences of...

The Enemy-Industrial Complex

Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com

The communist enemy, with the “world’s fourth largest military,” has been trundling missiles around and threatening the United States with nuclear obliteration.  Guam, Hawaii, Washington: all, it claims, are targetable.  The coverage in the media...

Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com

Recently, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel gave a major speech at the National Defense University on cutting military -- a.k.a. defense -- spending. Hagel is considered a "realist" and so when it comes to such cuts, this is undoubtedly the best we're likely...

Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com

At 72, climate scientist James Hansen is retiring as head of NASA's Goddard Institute of Space Studies to work even more actively on climate-change issues. Keep in mind that, in congressional testimony in 1988, he first put climate change on the national map. "It is...

Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com

Even if you set aside the man-made environmental disaster that is China (at a cost now estimated conservatively at $230 billion annually), ever more expensive disasters seem to be on the rise globally. Moreover, thanks to climate change -- that is, the greenhouse...

Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com

America's post-9/11 conflicts have been wars of corruption, a point surprisingly seldom made in the mainstream media. Keep in mind that George W. Bush's administration was a monster of privatization. It had its own set of crony corporations, including Halliburton, KBR,...

Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com

Had you searched for "Israel, nuclear weapons" at Google News in the wake of President Obama's recent trip to the Middle East, you would have gotten a series of headlines like this: "Obama: Iran more than a year away from developing nuclear weapon" (CNN),...

What You Don't Know Can Hurt You

Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com

It’s true that, last week, few in Congress cared to discuss, no less memorialize, the 10th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq.  Nonetheless, two anniversaries of American disasters and crimes abroad -- the “mission accomplished” debacle of...

Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com

We don't get it. We really don't. We may not, in military terms, know how to win any more, but as a society we don't get losing either. We don't recognize it, even when it's staring us in the face, when nothing -- and...

Why It’s So Tough to Get Your Head Around Climate Change

Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com

Two Sundays ago, I traveled to the nation’s capital to attend what was billed as “the largest climate rally in history” and I haven’t been able to get the experience --...

Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com

Once upon a time, "homeland" was a word of little significance in the American context. What American before 9/11 would have called the United States his or her "homeland" rather than "country"? Who sang "My homeland, 'tis of thee, sweet land of liberty"? Between my...

It was, in a sense, so expectable, so leave-no-child-behind. I'm talking about the arming of American schools. Think of it as the next step in the militarization of this country, which follows all-too-logically from developments since September 11, 2001. In the wake of 9/11, police departments nationwide began to

Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com

Sometimes, the world can be such a simple, black-and-white sort of place. Let me give you an example. Imagine for a moment that the Iranians kidnap an American citizen from a third country. (If you prefer, feel free to substitute al-Qaeda or the...