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Tom Engelhardt launched TomDispatch in November 2001 as an e-mail publication offering commentary and collected articles from the world press. In December 2002, it gained its name, became a project of The Nation Institute, and went online as "a regular antidote to the mainstream media." The site now features Tom Engelhardt’s regular commentaries and the original work of authors ranging from Rebecca Solnit, Bill McKibben and Mike Davis to Chalmers Johnson, Michael Klare, Adam Hochschild, Robert Lipsyte and Elizabeth de la Vega. Nick Turse, who also writes for the site, is associate editor and research director.
TomDispatch is intended to introduce readers to voices and perspectives from elsewhere (even when the elsewhere is here). Its mission is to connect some of the global dots regularly left unconnected by the mainstream media and to offer a clearer sense of how this imperial globe of ours actually works.
Despite all the focus on Guantánamo, are a great many of America’s domestic prisons also beyond the rule of law?
Tom Engelhardt and Jonathan Schell discuss American involvement in Vietnam and Afghanistan, US nuclear policy from the 1960s to the present and the dilemma of nuclear weaponry in the Obama era.
This report, first posted at TomDispatch.com, comes from historian and retired Lieutenant Colonel William J. Astore:
A leaner, meaner, higher tech force -- that was what George W. Bush and his Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld promised to transform the American military into. Instead, they came close to turning it into a foreign legion. Foreign as in being constantly deployed overseas on imperial errands; foreign as in being ever more reliant on private military contractors; foreign as in being increasingly segregated from the elites that profit most from its actions, yet serve the least in its ranks.
Now would be a good time for President Barack Obama and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates to begin to reclaim that military for its proper purpose: to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic. Now would be a good time to ask exactly why, and for whom, our troops are currently fighting and dying in the urban jungles of Iraq and the hostile hills of Afghanistan.