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war on terror

  • SOURCE: Tom Dispatch
    2/19/19

    New Interactive Tool Maps the American War on Terror

    by Stephanie Savell

    In general, the American public has largely ignored these post-9/11 wars and their costs. But the vastness of Washington’s counterterror activities suggests, now more than ever, that it’s time to pay attention.

  • SOURCE: TomDispatch
    3-19-14

    Advice Too Secret to Ignore

    by Tom Engelhardt

    Col. Manners Answers Your Questions on CIA Practices, Proper Cyberwar Behavior, and Invasion Etiquette

  • SOURCE: TomDispatch
    12-20-13

    “Bride and Boom!”

    by Tom Engelhardt

    We’re number one... in obliterating wedding parties.

  • 12-2-13

    The American Way of Manners

    by Tom Engelhardt

    Col. Manners answers your questions on the etiquette of war, nuclear threats, and surveillance.

  • SOURCE: U.S. News and World Report
    7-8-13

    Louis René Beres: Beyond Good and Evil in U.S. Counterterrorism Policies

    Louis René Beres is a professor of Political Science at Purdue UniversityAll of America's national security strategy on counterterrorism is based, in part, on a single core assumption: that our terrorist enemies are plainly and uniformly "abnormal." Significantly, however, such presumptively stark polarities between normal and abnormal, good and evil, represent a debilitating caricature. In order to better understand and combat these enemies, we must first learn to acknowledge that even "normal" individuals can sometimes do us great harm.What does this mean? By definition, at least, psychopathology and normalcy would appear to be mutually exclusive. Yet some of our most insightful thinkers have reasoned otherwise. In these examples, they have willingly looked beyond the seductive veneers of orthodox psychological investigation.Sigmund Freud wrote about the "Psychopathology of Everyday Life" (1914) while tracing some intriguing connections between "the abnormal" and "the normal," and was genuinely surprised to learn just how faint the line of demarcation could be. More precisely, in exploring parapraxes, or slips of the tongue, a phenomenon that we now conventionally call "Freudian slips," he concluded that certain psychopathologic traits could occasionally be discovered in normal persons....

  • Writing About the Military Will Screw with Your Life

    by Nick Turse

     “Why the officer stopped you is beyond me, but what the officer discovered is something of interest, especially for national security... It’s not every day you see someone traveling with information like this.” 

  • SOURCE: TomDispatch
    7-2-13

    Tom Engelhardt: The Dictionary of the Global War on You (GWOY)

    Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project and author of "The United States of Fear" as well as a history of the Cold War, "The End of Victory Culture" (just published in a Kindle edition), runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. His latest book, co-authored with Nick Turse, is "Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050."

  • The Case for Sparing the Rosenbergs

    by Lori Clune

    Credit: Wiki Commons.Sixty years ago this week, Ethel Rosenberg was strapped into the same electric chair that killed her husband Julius moments before. Her gruesome death ended the spy case that captured worldwide attention. Julius Rosenberg had been arrested and charged with conspiracy to commit espionage, specifically passing atomic bomb secrets to the Soviets.FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had also ordered the arrest of Julius’ wife Ethel, hoping to use her as a “lever” to get Julius to name other spies. He never spoke. They both died instead.The grisly executions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in 1953 made their sons orphans and shocked the world. The Rosenbergs remain the only married couple executed for a federal crime and the only civilians killed for spying.

  • How We Name Our Wars Matters

    by Andrew J. Bacevich

    Clockwise from top: Buffalo Soldiers in the Spanish American War; a Soviet officer in World War II; Canadian troops in World War I, and dead Confederate soldiers in the American Civil War.Originally posted on TomDispatch.com For well over a decade now the United States has been “a nation at war.” Does that war have a name?

  • The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of Obama's Terrorism Speech

    by Juan Cole

    Originally posted on Informed Comment.Here are the good, the bad and the ugly things in President Obama’s important speech on counter-terrorism Thursday, and in the off-stage steps he has announced that mysteriously did not appear in the speech:The Good:

  • Filling the Empty Battlefield

    by Tom Engelhardt

    Federal Street in Boston, deserted during the manhunt for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev on April 19, 2013. Credit: Flickr/Brian BirkeOriginally posted on TomDispatch.com

  • SOURCE: NYT
    4-16-13

    U.S. Practiced Torture After 9/11, Nonpartisan Review Concludes

    WASHINGTON — A nonpartisan, independent review of interrogation and detention programs in the years after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks concludes that “it is indisputable that the United States engaged in the practice of torture” and that the nation’s highest officials bore ultimate responsibility for it.