In 1964, a book entitled The Invisible Government shocked Americans with its revelations of a growing world of intelligence agencies playing fast and loose around the planet, a secret government lodged inside the one they knew that even the president didn't fully control. Almost half a century later, everything about that "invisible government" has grown vastly larger, more disturbing, and far more visible.
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In 2008, when the US National Intelligence Council issued its latest report meant for the administration of newly elected President Barack Obama, it predicted that the planet's "sole superpower" would suffer a modest decline and a soft landing fifteen years hence. In his new book The United States of Fear, Tom Engelhardt makes clear that Americans should don their crash helmets and buckle their seat belts...
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The first history of drone warfare, written as it happened.
From the opening missile salvo in the skies over Afghanistan in 2001 to a secret strike in the Philippines early this year, or a future in which drones dogfight off the coast of Africa, Terminator Planet takes you to the front lines of combat, Washington war rooms, and beyond.
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In The American Way of War, Engelhardt documents Washington's ongoing commitment to military bases to preserve and extend its empire; reveals damning information about the American reliance on air power, at great cost to civilians in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan.
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For many of us, these are the key pieces of analysis that made sense of our post-9/11 world.
- Naomi Klein
The publication of this splendid collection of dispatches is cause for celebration.
- Andrew Bacevich
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America Victorious has been our country's postulate since its birth. Tom Engelhardt, with a burning clarity, recounts the end of this fantasy, from the split atom to Vietnam. It begins at our dawn's early light and ends with the twilight's last gleaming. It is as powerful as a Joe Louis jab to the solar plexus.
--Studs Terkel
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At a time when the mainstream media leave out half of what the public needs to know, while at the same time purveying oceans of official nonsense, the public needs an alternative source of news. For years now, Tom Engelhardt's Tomdispatch has been that for me. He is my mainstream. Now he presents a series of brilliant interviews he has done for the site, and they, taken as a whole, themselves form a searching chronicle of our time.
--Jonathan Schell
Click to read about this book, author interview, reviews and blurbs, excerpt or to buy.
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A satisfyingly virulent, comical, absurd, deeply grieving true portrait of how things work today in the sleek factories of conglomerate book producers... a skillful novel of manners -- of very bad manners"
--Herb Gold, LA Times
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In this razor-sharp analysis, TomDispatch.com commentator Michael Schwartz turns every mainstream conclusion about Iraq on its head. He shows how U.S. occupation is fueling civil war in Iraq and beyond, and how U.S. officials dismantled the Iraqi state and economy, helping to destroy rather than rebuild the country.
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Leading commentators examine the Afghan debacle and its parallels with previous British and Soviet occupations.
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Here is the new, hip, high-tech military-industrial complex -- an omnipresent, hidden-in-plain-sight system of systems that penetrates all our lives. Mapping out what should more properly be called the Military - Industrial - Technological - Entertainment - Scientific - Media - Intelligence - Corporate Complex, historian Nick Turse demonstrates just how extensively the Pentagon, through its little-noticed contacts (and contracts) with America's major corporations, has taken hold of the nation.
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In a revelatory examination of urban terror, Author Mike Davis charts the car bomb's evolution from obscure agent of mayhem to lethal universality.
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In this book, former federal prosecutor Elizabeth de la Vega brings her twenty years of experience and passion for justice to what may be the most important case of her career.
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[Note to TomDispatch Readers: On a day when we have a powerful new piece by John Feffer, I just wanted to remind you to pick up a copy of his remarkable dystopian novel, Splinterlands, the latest in Dispatch Books’ series of original works. Barbara Ehrenreich wrote of it: “A startling portrait of a post-apocalyptic tomorrow that is fast becoming a reality today. Fast-paced yet strangely haunting.” If you’ve already bought a copy, then pick another up for a friend and give this website a bit of extra support in our future publishing endeavors. Alternatively, if you go to the TomDispatch donation page and contribute $100 ($125 if you live outside the USA), Feffer will send you a signed, personalized copy of the book. It’s one hell of a novel, as well as a kind of owner’s manual for the age of Trump. And keep in mind that, as you might imagine, TD needs all the help it can get in 2017.
Finally, if (like me) you happen to live in New York City, Feffer will be at the New School on the evening of February 16th to discuss Splinterlands with TD author William Hartung. Hope you’ll join me there! For the details on that event, click on this link. Tom]
In a sense, the damage is already done and who can doubt that what follows will be a demolition derby -- with an exception almost too obvious to mention. In the pre-inaugural period, one simple fact of the Trumpian accession stood out boldly: just about every one of his appointees to a non-national-security post was prepared to rip his or her agency (or its mission) to shreds. Former Texas Governor Rick Perry essentially had to apologize for once claiming that he’d like to abolish the Energy Department, which he is now to head. Former Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, historically in the pay of big energy, is to take over the Environmental Protection Agency, which he sued 14 times in his home state and challenged fiercely about its desire to protect the environment. Betsy DeVos, prospective head of the Department of Education, would like to tear up those “failing government schools” and turn “public” education into a voucher-driven phenomenon. Tom Price, the soon-to-be head of Health and Human Services, not only wants to rip out Obamacare at the roots, but essentially cripple Medicaid and Medicare, too. And though we have no details yet on labor secretary nominee Andrew Puzder’s plans, given his record and his views (he’d like to replace workers with machines that don’t take vacations), it’s easy enough to guess that he will prove another dismantler.
And so it’s likely to go in Donald Trump’s version of America. The first news from his administration’s budget front, for instance, indicates that an axe will soon be taken to the departments of commerce, energy, justice, transportation, and state. In addition, the Hill reports, "The Corporation for Public Broadcasting would be privatized, while the National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities would be eliminated entirely."
As I mentioned, however, there is a major exception to all of this that fits well with essential Republicanism in these years -- a “small government” philosophy until you reach the oppressive powers of the state and then “big” doesn’t even cover it. So the major exceptions to all this will be the U.S. military and the Department of Homeland Security (that wall!). At the inaugural concert, Donald Trump once again emphasized that money will indeed flow in ever-increasing amounts into reversing the supposed “very sad depletion of our military.” (“We’re going to build up our great military. We’re going to build it up. We’re going to strengthen our borders.”) In other words: for the civilian side of the government, no, but for the Defense Department, it’s thumb’s up all the way.
If you thought Washington had a military-first policy in these last years, just wait. In essence, there may not be much left but the military to make policy with. Keep that in mind as TomDispatch regular John Feffer, author of the unforgettable new dystopian novel Splinterlands, the latest Dispatch Book, explores how Donald Trump plans to blow up the present world order, backed by that “great military” and that “big, fat, beautiful wall,” and give birth to a new internationalism led by a global confederacy of oligarchs. It’s a daunting vision on an increasingly daunting planet. Tom
Donald Trump Against the World
The Birth of a New Nationalist World Order
By John FefferDonald Trump is a worldly fellow. He travels the globe on his private jet. He’s married to a Slovene and divorced from a Czech. He doesn’t speak any other languages, but hey, he’s an American, so monolingualism is his birthright.
His fortune depends in large part on the global economy. He has business interests in nearly two-dozen countries on four continents. Many of the products anointed with the Trump brand roll off a global assembly line: Trump furniture made in Turkey and Germany, Trump eyeglasses from China, Trump shirts via Bangladesh and Honduras (among other countries). Just as wealthy Americans often slight the role the domestic infrastructure has played in the making of their fortunes, Trump routinely disregards how much his depends on the infrastructure of the global economy.
The new president's cabinet nominees are a similarly worldly lot, being either generals or multi-millionaires (or both), or simply, like their president, straight-out billionaires. Rich people jet off to exotic places for vacations or to make deals; generals are dispatched to all points of the compass to kill people. With an estimated net wealth of more than $13 billion, Trump’s cabinet could be its own small island nation. Make that a very aggressive island nation: the military men in his proposed cabinet -- former generals Mike Flynn (national security adviser), James Mattis (defense secretary), and John Kelly (head of Homeland Security), as well as former Navy Seal Ryan Zinke (interior secretary) -- have fought in nearly as many countries as Trump has done business.
As worldly as they might be, Trump’s nominees don’t look much like the world. Mostly rich white men, they look more like the American electorate... circa 1817. Still, the media has bent over backward to find as much diversity as it could in this panorama of homogeneity. It has, for instance, identified the nominees according to their different ideological milieus: Wall Street, the Pentagon, the Republican Party, the lunatic fringe.
In this taxonomy of Trumpism, the media continues to miss the obvious. The incoming administration is, in fact, united around one key mission: it’s about to declare war on the world.
The Future by Committee
The Collective "Wisdom" of the U.S. Intelligence Community
By Tom Engelhardt
They call themselves the U.S. “Intelligence Community,” or the IC. If you include the office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), which in 2005 began as a crew of 12 people, including its director, and by 2008 had already grown to a staff of 1,750, there are 17 members (adding up to an alphabet soup of acronyms including the CIA, the NSA, and the DIA). The IC spends something like $70 billion of your taxpayer dollars annually, mostly in secret, hires staggering numbers of private contractors from various warrior corporations to lend a hand, sucks up communications of every sort across the planet, runs a drone air force, monitors satellites galore, builds its agencies multi-billion-dollar headquarters and storage facilities, and does all of this, ostensibly, to provide the president and the rest of the government with the best information imaginable on what’s happening in the world and what dangers the United States faces.
Since 9/11, expansion has been the name of its game, as the leading intelligence agencies gained ever more power, prestige, and the big bucks, while wrapping themselves in an unprecedented blanket of secrecy. Typically, in the final days of the Obama administration, the National Security Agency was given yet more leeway to share the warrantless data it scoops up worldwide (including from American citizens) with ever more members of the IC.
And oh yes, in the weeks leading up to the inauguration of Donald Trump, several of those intelligence outfits found themselves in a knock-down, drag-out barroom brawl with our new tweeter-in-chief (who has begun threatening to downsize parts of the IC) over the possible Russian hacking of an American election and his relations with Russian President Vladimir Putin. In the process, they have received regular media plaudits for their crucial importance to all of us, our security and safety, along with tweeted curses from the then-president-elect.
Let me lay my own cards on the table here. Based on the relatively little we can know about the information the Intelligence Community has been delivering to the president and his people in these years, I’ve never been particularly impressed with its work. Again, given what’s available to judge from, it seems as if, despite its size, reach, money, and power, the IC has been caught “off-guard” by developments in our world with startling regularity and might be thought of as something closer to an “un-intelligence machine.” It’s always been my suspicion that, if a group of smart, out-of-the-box thinkers were let loose on purely open-source material, the U.S. government might actually end up with a far more accurate view of our world and how it works, not to speak of what dangers lie in store for us.
In case you hadn’t noticed, someone recently loosed a satirist in American politics. Let me give you an example. You remember FBI Director James Comey, who gained a certain notoriety by stepping into the limelight 11 days before the recent presidential election via a very publicly dispatched letter to the Congressional leadership. It focused on an FBI investigation into emails from Hillary Clinton believed to be on a computer that disgraced former Congressman Anthony Weiner shared with his wife and Clinton aide Huma Abedin. As Comey admitted three days before the election, when it came to that investigation, there was no there there. This seeming non-event about an investigation of no significance would, in fact, prove historic. It represented the first intervention by the national security state, that ever more powerful fourth branch of our government, in an American election campaign and might well have played a role in putting Donald Trump in the Oval Office. (Just last week, the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General announced that it would look into the FBI’s investigation of Clinton’s email and, in particular, whether Comey’s late-in-the-day intervention “violated policy or procedure when he sent Congress notification about new evidence his department had discovered.”)
You may by now be wondering where the promised satire is, but be patient. Comey made his first public appearance since his pre-election dramatics at a recent Senate hearing and was asked whether the FBI might be investigating possible ties between Russian officials and the Trump campaign. In response, he offered this: "I would never comment on investigations -- whether we have one or not -- in an open forum like this, so I can't answer one way or another.”
Of course he wouldn’t! As Senator Angus King of Maine responded (in an understated but tickle-your-ribs fashion that would have been quite suitable for Saturday Night Live), "The irony of your making that statement, I cannot avoid."
Indeed, who could? In the Trump era, we now clearly live in a world created expressly for SNL. But instead of belaboring the point, let me turn you over to TomDispatch regular William deBuys so he can outline the series of absurdist events that gave us our new huckster-in-chief, our very own billionaire in the Oval Office in what can only be termed the most improbable election of the 1% era of American politics or perhaps any era at all. Tom
New From Trump University
Election Rigging 101
By William deBuysDonald Trump was right. The election was rigged. What Trump got wrong (and, boy, does he get things wrong) is that the rigging worked in his favor. The manipulations took three monumental forms: Russian cyber-sabotage; FBI meddling; and systematic Republican efforts, especially in swing states, to prevent minority citizens from casting votes. The cumulative effect was more than sufficient to shift the outcome in Trump’s favor and put the least qualified major-party candidate in the history of the republic into the White House.
Trumpist internet trolls and Trump himself dismiss such concerns as sour grapes, but for anyone who takes seriously the importance of operating a democracy these assaults on the nation’s core political process constitute threats to the country’s very being. Let’s look at each of these areas of electoral interference in detail.
Heading into the Trump era, our American world already feels like it’s overheating badly. The headlines careen from the president-elect’s tweets against Meryl Streep (“one of the most over-rated actresses in Hollywood...!”) to conflicts over conflicts of interest to secret briefings by the intelligence community on highly compromising (but unsubstantiated and possibly completely insubstantial) “personal and financial information” about the president-elect supposedly gathered by the Russians, including sex videos of him with prostitutes in Moscow (“‘kompromat,’ or compromising material, with the possible goal of blackmailing Mr. Trump in the future”). The Trump-Russian “dossier,” paid for by his political opponents, including claims about contacts between his campaign and Russian officials, has reportedly been circulating for some time “among intelligence agencies, senior members of Congress, and other government officials in Washington.”
In such an extreme hothouse atmosphere, it’s not surprising when even the most curious of figures can start to look like -- as one former State Department official testifying before Congress put it recently -- a “stabilizing and moderating force, preventing wildly stupid, dangerous, and illegal things from happening.” That was Eliot Cohen discussing retired Marine General James “Mad Dog” Mattis, Trump’s nominee for secretary of defense, and it’s true that if you’re comparing him to retired Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, the new national security adviser, or Mike Pompeo, the prospective head of the CIA, Mattis may indeed look remarkably sane and even moderate.
But let’s try to keep things in perspective. Recently, the Washington Post featured a piece by Greg Jaffe and Adam Entous on General Mattis’s tenure as the head of U.S. Central Command that, amid the screaming headlines of this moment, came and went unnoticed. Embedded in it was this little gem: in 2011, when Iranian-backed insurgents in Iraq, using Iranian-supplied rockets, were killing American troops, Mattis grew increasingly incensed. As a result, he formulated a plan, which made it to (and was rejected by) the Obama White House, to launch a direct American “dead-of-night” attack on Iran either to take out a power plant or an oil refinery. This “World War III scenario” -- the willingness to take a chance, that is, on sparking a regional conflagration -- and the urge to act preemptively (including against “Iranian swarm boats” in the Persian Gulf) finally led to his being replaced as CENTCOM commander five months early.
This, then, is what we know of the man generally agreed to be the sanest, most down-to-earth figure on Trump’s national security team. Keep that in mind as TomDispatch regular Michael Klare takes us on a quick tour of our present planetary hot spots (including Iran), any of which could blow sky high as Donald Trump and his team of “mad dogs” take office. Tom
Escalation Watch
Four Looming Flashpoints Facing President Trump
By Michael T. KlareWithin months of taking office, President Donald Trump is likely to face one or more major international crises, possibly entailing a risk of nuclear escalation. Not since the end of the Cold War has a new chief executive been confronted with as many potential flashpoints involving such a risk of explosive conflict. This proliferation of crises has been brewing for some time, but the situation appears especially ominous now given Trump’s pledge to bring American military force swiftly to bear on any threats of foreign transgression. With so much at risk, it’s none too soon to go on a permanent escalation watch, monitoring the major global hotspots for any sign of imminent flare-ups, hoping that early warnings (and the outcry that goes with them) might help avert catastrophe.
Looking at the world today, four areas appear to pose an especially high risk of sudden crisis and conflict: North Korea, the South China Sea, the Baltic Sea region, and the Middle East. Each of them has been the past site of recurring clashes, and all are primed to explode early in the Trump presidency.
Why are we seeing so many potential crises now? Is this period really different from earlier presidential transitions?
[Note for TomDispatch Readers: There will be no post for Martin Luther King Jr. Day. The next TD post will be Tuesday, January 17th. Tom]
Tell me if this sounds familiar: the leadership of a distant nation has its own ideas about whom you should vote for, or who should rule your country, and acts decisively on them, affecting an election. Such interference in the political life of another country must be a reference to... no, I’m not thinking about Vladimir Putin and the American election of 2016, but perhaps the Italian election of 1948, or the Japanese election of 1958, or the Nicaraguan election of 1990 -- all ones in which the U.S. had a significant hand and affected the outcome. Or what about an even cruder scenario than just handing over suitcases of cash to those you support or producing “fake news” to influence another country’s voting behavior? How about just overthrowing an already elected democratic government you find distasteful and installing one more to your liking, as in Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954, or Chile in 1973?
All of the above were, of course, classic American operations in which the CIA, in particular, “hacked” foreign elections (so to speak) or simply wiped out democratically elected governments. In the post-World War II era, this sort of thing was a commonplace. As Joshua Keating of Slate reports, a recent study “found evidence of interference by either the United States or the Soviet Union/Russia in 117 elections around the world between 1946 and 2000, or 11.3% of the 937 competitive national-level elections held during this period. Eighty-one of those interventions were by the U.S. while 36 were by the USSR/Russia.”
While people may still be arguing about what exactly Russia hacked into during the recent U.S. election and which Russians did it, the history of U.S. interference in, or in response to, elections in other countries is at best a fringe story in our world. And yet, here’s the strange thing: given the official shock and outrage in Washington right now over the very idea of the Russians tampering with an American election, you can search the historical record in vain for past public hints of remorse in Washington, no less apologies for overthrowing or even killing foreign leaders or undermining, or simply ditching, elections. And yet you have to wonder what the world might have been like had the U.S. not interfered so relentlessly in electoral politics globally. How might the history of Chile, Guatemala, or Iran been different if the U.S. hadn’t been quite so focused on destroying democracy in each of those countries?
Such thoughts came to my mind because, in today’s piece, Rajan Menon, author of The Conceit of Humanitarian Intervention, explores Donald Trump’s possible plans for tearing up (or living with) the Obama administration’s Iranian nuclear deal -- and for tearing into or living with Iran itself. After all, if there is one thing the men he’s appointing to his national security team seem to have in common, it’s their obvious Iranophobia. Their sky-high level of animus and anger toward that mid-sized regional power is, or at least should be, striking. It would be inconceivable, had the CIA, in cahoots with Britain’s MI6, on the orders of American President Dwight Eisenhower and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, not taken out the popular elected government of Mohammad Mossadeq in August 1953. They did so in response to its nationalization of the properties of the British oil company we now know as BP. That CIA-engineered military coup, which put an autocratic and oppressive Shah firmly on the Peacock Throne for the next quarter century and consigned democracy to the trash heap of history, led directly to the rise of Ayatollah Khomeini, the revolution of 1979, the embassy hostage situation of that year, and all the decades of enmity that followed. The present Iranian situation -- now one of the most combustible on the planet, as Menon points out -- might as well be stamped “creation of the Great Satan.” But who would know it here? Who cares? Who remembers?
Those who forget history are fated to... well, perhaps be Trumped by it, as we may soon see. Tom
Will Trump Shred the Iran Nuclear Deal?
Or Is That the Least of Our Problems When It Comes to U.S.-Iranian Relations?
By Rajan MenonStack up the op-eds and essays on the disasters that await the world once Donald Trump moves into the White House and you’ll have a long list of dismaying scenarios.
One that makes the lineups of most pundits involves a crisis with Iran. So imagine this. Trump struts to the podium for his first presidential press conference, the trademark jutting jaw prominent. He’s spent the previous several days using Twitter to trash the nuclear agreement with Iran, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). Unlike former President Barack Obama, Trump loves drama. But the JCPOA runs 159 pages, so he can’t literally tear it up on live television as part of his performance. (And no, it’s not the small hands problem.) Instead, he announces that the nuclear deal is a dead letter, effective immediately.
You won't see segments about it on the nightly news or read about it on the front page of America’s newspapers, but the Pentagon is fighting a new shadow war in Africa, helping to destabilize whole countries and preparing the ground for future blowback. Behind closed doors, U.S. officers now claim that "Africa is the battlefield of tomorrow, today." In Tomorrow's Battlefield, award-winning journalist and bestselling author Nick Turse exposes the shocking true story of the U.S. military’s spreading secret wars in Africa.
In 1964, a book entitled The Invisible Government shocked Americans with its revelations of a growing world of intelligence agencies playing fast and loose around the planet, a secret government lodged inside the one they knew that even the president didn't fully control. Almost half a century later, everything about that "invisible government" has grown vastly larger, more disturbing, and far more visible.
At 73, having spent years focusing on the civilian toll from Washington’s Afghan War, Ann Jones embedded on an American forward operating base to experience what that war was like for the U.S. troops in the field. The next year, she began following grievously wounded American soldiers from the moment they came off the battlefield all the way back home. Her journey proved to be nothing short of an odyssey. Despite all the talk in this country about our “wounded warriors,” no other book gives us a more powerful sense of the genuine cost of war to Americans.
