The Books

Breach of Trust
How Americans Failed Their Soldiers and Their Country
by Andrew Bacevich

Coming Soon!

Power Systems
Conversations on Global Democratic Uprisings and the New Challenges to U.S. Empire
by Noam Chomsky and David Barsamian

Now Available!

Kill Anything That Moves
The Real American War in Vietnam
by Nick Turse

Now Available!

Now Available!

Ideal Illusions
How the U.S. Government Co-opted Human Rights
by James Peck

Now Available!

Washington Rules
America's Path to Permanent War
by Andrew Bacevich

Now Available!

Dismantling The Empire
America's Last Best Hope
by Chalmers Johnson

Now Available!

Imperial Ambitions
Conversations on the Post-9/11 World
by Noam Chomsky

Now available!

Alfred McCoy on How Not to Ban Torture in Congress

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Nuclear Terror in the Middle East
Lethality Beyond the Pale

By Nick Turse

In those first minutes, they’ll be stunned. Eyes fixed in a thousand-yard stare, nerve endings numbed. They’ll just stand there. Soon, you’ll notice that they are holding their arms out at a 45-degree angle. Your eyes will be drawn to their hands and you’ll think you mind is playing tricks. But it won’t be. Their fingers will start to resemble stalactites, seeming to melt toward the ground. And it won’t be long until the screaming begins. Shrieking. Moaning. Tens of thousands of victims at once. They’ll be standing amid a sea of shattered concrete and glass, a wasteland punctuated by the shells of buildings, orphaned walls, stairways leading nowhere.

Homeland Insecurity
Seven Years, Untold Dollars to Silence One Man

By Peter Van Buren

What do words mean in a post-9/11 world? Apart from the now clichéd Orwellian twists that turn brutal torture into mere enhanced interrogation, the devil is in the details. Robert MacLean is a former air marshal fired for an act of whistleblowing.  He has continued to fight over seven long years for what once would have passed as simple justice: getting his job back. His is an all-too-twenty-first-century story of the extraordinary lengths to which the U.S. government is willing to go to thwart whistleblowers.

And Then There Was One
Imperial Gigantism and the Decline of Planet Earth

By Tom Engelhardt

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 had five million troops under arms.  There had been nothing like it in Eurasia since the Mongols conquered China, took parts of Central Asia and the Iranian plateau, and rode into the Middle East, looting Baghdad.  Yet when the Soviet Union collapsed in December 1991, by far the poorer, weaker imperial power disappeared.

Filling the Empty Battlefield
Jeremy Scahill, Blowback Reporter

By Tom Engelhardt

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 policies that were kept secret from the American people.”  In his prologue, the former consultant to the CIA and eminent scholar of both Mao Zedong’s peasant revolution and modern Japan labeled his Cold War self a “spear-carrier for empire.”

Entering a Resource-Shock World
How Resource Scarcity and Climate Change Could Produce a Global Explosion

By Michael T. Klare

Brace yourself. You may not be able to tell yet, but according to global experts and the U.S. intelligence community, the earth is already shifting under you.  Whether you know it or not, you’re on a new planet, a resource-shock world of a sort humanity has never before experienced.

The Enemy-Industrial Complex
How to Turn a World Lacking in Enemies into the Most Threatening Place in the Universe

By Tom Engelhardt

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 has been hair-raising.  The U.S. is rushing an untested missile defense system to Guam, deploying missile-interceptor ships off the South Korean coast, sending “nuclear capable” B-2 Stealth bombers thousands of miles on mock bombing runs, pressuring China, and conducting large-scale war games with its South Korean ally.

Is the Keystone XL Pipeline the “Stonewall” of the Climate Movement?
And If So, Is That Terrible News?

By Bill McKibben

A few weeks ago, Time magazine called the fight over the Keystone XL pipeline that will bring some of the dirtiest energy on the planet from Alberta, Canada, to the U.S. Gulf Coast the “Selma and Stonewall” of the climate movement.

Making Disaster Pay
From the San Francisco Earthquake to Superstorm Sandy, How Capitalism Stacks the Deck on Disaster

By Steve Fraser

In 2007, a financial firestorm ravaged Wall Street and the rest of the country.  In 2012, Hurricane Sandy obliterated a substantial chunk of the Atlantic seaboard.  We think of the first as a man-made calamity, the second as the malignant innocence of nature.  But neither the notion of a man-made nor natural disaster quite captures how the power of a few and the vulnerability of the many determine what is really going on at ground level.  Causes and consequences, who gets blamed and who leaves the scene permanently scarred, who goes down and who emerges better positioned than before: these are matters often predetermined by the structures of power and wealth, racial and ethnic hierarchies, and despised and favored forms of work, as well as moral and social prejudices in place before disaster strikes. 

American Anniversaries from Hell
What You Don’t Know Can Hurt You

By Tom Engelhardt

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 2003 and the 45th anniversary of the My Lai massacre -- were at least noted in passing in our world.  In my hometown paper, the New York Times, the Iraq anniversary was memorialized with a lead op-ed by a former advisor to General David Petraeus who, amid the rubble, went in search of all-American “silver linings.”

Who Did You Rape in the War, Daddy?
A Question for Veterans that Needs Answering

By Nick Turse

On August 31, 1969, a rape was committed in Vietnam.  Maybe numerous rapes were committed there that day, but this was a rare one involving American GIs that actually made its way into the military justice system. 

Mission Unaccomplished
Why the Invasion of Iraq Was the Single Worst Foreign Policy Decision in American History

By Peter Van Buren

I was there. And “there” was nowhere. And nowhere was the place to be if you wanted to see the signs of end times for the American Empire up close. It was the place to be if you wanted to see the madness -- and oh yes, it was madness -- not filtered through a complacent and sleepy media that made Washington’s war policy seem, if not sensible, at least sane and serious enough. I stood at Ground Zero of what was intended to be the new centerpiece for a Pax Americana in the Greater Middle East.

Iraq Report
U.S. Spent Too Much Money On Post-War Reconstruction For Too Little Results

An important follow-up to Peter van Buren’s book We Meant Well, which charts the State Department’s blundering efforts to rebuild Iraq.

Where Is Everybody?
Why It’s So Tough to Get Your Head Around Climate Change

By Tom Engelhardt

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 -- or a question that haunted me -- out of my mind.  Where was everybody?

“I Begged for Them to Stop”
Waterboarding Americans and the Redefinition of Torture

By Nick Turse

Try to remain calm -- even as you begin to feel your chest tighten and your heart race.  Try not to panic as water starts flowing into your nose and mouth, while you attempt to constrict your throat and slow your breathing and keep some air in your lungs and fight that growing feeling of suffocation.  Try not to think about dying, because there’s nothing you can do about it, because you’re tied down, because someone is pouring that water over your face, forcing it into you, drowning you slowly and deliberately.  You’re helpless.  You’re in agony. 

The Latin American Exception
How a Washington Global Torture Gulag Was Turned Into the Only Gulag-Free Zone on Earth

By Greg Grandin

The map tells the story.  To illustrate a damning new report, “Globalizing Torture: CIA Secret Detentions and Extraordinary Rendition,” recently published by the Open Society Institute, the Washington Post put together an equally damning graphic: it’s soaked in red, as if with blood, showing that in the years after 9/11, the CIA turned just about the whole world into a gulag archipelago.

Dumb and Dumber
A Secret CIA Drone Base, a Blowback World, and Why Washington Has No Learning Curve

By Tom Engelhardt

You could, of course, sit there, slack-jawed, thinking about how mindlessly repetitive American foreign and military policy is these days. Or you could wield all sorts of fancy analytic words to explain it.  Or you could just settle for a few simple, all-American ones.  Like dumb. Stupid. Dimwitted. Thick-headed. Or you could speak about the second administration in a row that wanted to leave no child behind, but was itself incapable of learning, or reasonably assessing its situation in the world.

A Presidential Decision That Could Change the World
The Strategic Importance of Keystone XL

By Michael T. Klare

Presidential decisions often turn out to be far less significant than imagined, but every now and then what a president decides actually determines how the world turns. Such is the case with the Keystone XL pipeline, which, if built, is slated to bring some of the “dirtiest,” carbon-rich oil on the planet from Alberta, Canada, to refineries on the U.S. Gulf Coast.  In the near future, President Obama is expected to give its construction a definitive thumbs up or thumbs down, and the decision he makes could prove far more important than anyone imagines.  It could determine the fate of the Canadian tar-sands industry and, with it, the future well-being of the planet.  If that sounds overly dramatic, let me explain.

The Paranoia of the Superrich and Superpowerful
Washington’s Dilemma on a “Lost” Planet

By Noam Chomsky and David Barsamian

[This post is adapted from “Uprisings,” a chapter in Power Systems: Conversations on Global Democratic Uprisings and the New Challenges to U.S. Empire, Noam Chomsky’s new interview book with David Barsamian (with thanks to the publisher, Metropolitan Books).  The questions are Barsamian’s, the answers Chomsky’s.]

The American Lockdown State
Post-Legal Drones, the Bin Laden Tax, and Other Wonders of Our American World

By Tom Engelhardt

Consider Inauguration Day, more than two weeks gone and already part of our distant past.  In its wake, President Obama was hailed (or reviled) for his “liberal” second inaugural address.  On that day everything from his invocation of women’s rights (“Seneca Falls”), the civil rights movement (“Selma”), and the gay rights movement (“Stonewall”) to his wife’s new bangs and Beyoncé’s lip-syncing was fodder for the media extravaganza.  The president was even praised (or reviled) for what he took pains not to bring up: the budget deficit.  Was anything, in fact, not grist for the media mill, the hordes of talking heads, and the chattering classes?

The Hagel Hearings
The Last Best Chance for the Truth About a Lost War and America’s War-Making Future

By Nick Turse

He’s been battered by big-money conservative groups looking to derail his bid for secretary of defense.  Critics say he wants to end America’s nuclear program.  They claim he’s anti-Israel and soft on Iran.  So you can expect intense questioning -- if only for theatrical effect -- about all of the above (and undoubtedly then some) as Chuck Hagel faces his Senate confirmation hearings today.    

The Politics of Debt in America
From Debtor’s Prison to Debtor Nation

By Steve Fraser

Shakespeare’s Polonius offered this classic advice to his son: “neither a borrower nor a lender be.”  Many of our nation’s Founding Fathers emphatically saw it otherwise.  They often lived by the maxim: always a borrower, never a lender be.  As tobacco and rice planters, slave traders, and merchants, as well as land and currency speculators, they depended upon long lines of credit to finance their livelihoods and splendid ways of life.  So, too, in those days, did shopkeepers, tradesmen, artisans, and farmers, as well as casual laborers and sailors.  Without debt, the seedlings of a commercial economy could never have grown to maturity.

Counting Down to 2014 in Afghanistan
Three Lousy Options: Pick One

By Ann Jones

Kabul, Afghanistan -- Compromise, conflict, or collapse: ask an Afghan what to expect in 2014 and you’re likely to get a scenario that falls under one of those three headings. 2014, of course, is the year of the double whammy in Afghanistan: the next presidential election coupled with the departure of most American and other foreign forces. Many Afghans fear a turn for the worse, while others are no less afraid that everything will stay the same.  Some even think things will get better when the occupying forces leave.  Most predict a more conservative climate, but everyone is quick to say that it’s anybody’s guess.

Powder Keg in the Pacific
Will China-Japan-U.S. Tensions in the Pacific Ignite a Conflict and Sink the Global Economy?

By Michael T. Klare

Don’t look now, but conditions are deteriorating in the western Pacific.  Things are turning ugly, with consequences that could prove deadly and spell catastrophe for the global economy.

How Did the Gates of Hell Open in Vietnam?
A New Book Transforms Our Understanding of What the Vietnam War Actually Was

By Jonathan Schell

For half a century we have been arguing about “the Vietnam War.” Is it possible that we didn’t know what we were talking about? After all that has been written (some 30,000 books and counting), it scarcely seems possible, but such, it turns out, has literally been the case.

The Pentagon as a Global NRA
For Washington, There Is No Arms Control Abroad

By Tom Engelhardt

Given these last weeks, who doesn’t know what an AR-15 is?  Who hasn’t seen the mind-boggling stats on the way assault rifles have flooded this country, or tabulations of accumulating Newtown-style mass killings, or noted that there are barely more gas stations nationwide than federally licensed firearms dealers, or heard the renewed debates over the Second Amendment, or been struck by the rapid shifts in public opinion on gun control, or checked out the disputes over how effective an assault-rifle ban was the last time around?  Who doesn’t know about the NRA’s suggestion to weaponize schools, or about the price poor neighborhoods may be paying in gun deaths for the present expansive interpretation of the Second Amendment?  Who hasn’t seen the legions of stories about how, in the wake of the Newtown slaughter, sales of guns, especially AR-15 assault rifles, have soared, ammunition sales have surged, background checks for future gun purchases have risen sharply, and gun shows have been besieged with customers?

“So Many People Died”
The American System of Suffering, 1965-2014

By Nick Turse

Pham To looked great for 78 years old.  (At least, that’s about how old he thought he was.)  His hair was thin, gray, and receding at the temples, but his eyes were lively and his physique robust -- all the more remarkable given what he had lived through.  I listened intently, as I had so many times before to so many similar stories, but it was still beyond my ability to comprehend.  It’s probably beyond yours, too.