Imperial Gigantism and the Decline of Planet Earth 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 [...]

Jeremy Scahill, Blowback Reporter 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 [...]

Amo la noche, por esa especie de terciopelo negro que la habita… Me gusta la forma en que la oscuridad todo lo cubre… Prefiero no tener que ver… Me gusta la oscuridad… Encuentro en ella sosiego, placidez, calma…

Peace activist Carlos Arredondo has come to be known as “the man in the hat” and widely described as a hero for a viral image of him in a cowboy hat pinching the severed artery of a bloodied, wheelchair-bound victim in the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombings. Arredondo is no stranger to tragedy: He [...]

No estoy seguro de la fecha exacta en la que tuvo lugar la muerte de las noticias en la televisión. El descenso fue gradual, un deslizamiento hacia lo chabacano, lo trivial y lo fútil, hacia la charada en los canales de noticias por cable como Fox y MSNBC en los cuales los conductores presentan a [...]

En aquellos días todos escribían sobre Iraq, pero es sorprendente la poca atención que los estadounidenses, incluidos los periodistas, prestaban al sufrimiento de los iraquíes. Ahora Iraq vuelve a aparecer en las noticias. Se acumulan las palabras, los homenajes y las retrospectivas y de nuevo a nadie le importa el sufrimiento de los iraquíes. Por [...]

I am not sure exactly when the death of television news took place. The descent was gradual—a slide into the tawdry, the trivial and the inane, into the charade on cable news channels such as Fox and MSNBC in which hosts hold up corporate political puppets to laud or ridicule, and treat celebrity foibles as legitimate [...]

En el día del 2 de abril, la Asamblea General de las Naciones Unidas aprobó un tratado sobre comcercio de armas por 154 votos a favor, 3 en contra (Corea del Norte, Iran y Siria), 21 abstenciones ( Angola, Arabia Saudí, Bahrein, Bielorusia, Bolivia, China, Cuba, Ecuador, Egipto, Fidji, India, Indonesia, Koweit, Laos, Myanmar, Nicaragua, [...]

What You Don’t Know Can Hurt You 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 [...]

Sunni radicals hit Baghdad Tuesday morning on the anniversary of the beginning of the US war on Iraq, killing over 50 people in attacks on soft targets (shopkeepers, pedestrians) in Shiite areas of the capital. They were signaling their continued die-hard opposition to the new Iraq, which is dominated by Shiite political parties, in which [...]