Mission Unaccomplished

By Peter Van Buren, TomDispatch Mar 8, 2013 By invading Iraq, the U.S. did more to destabilize the Middle East than we could possibly have imagined at the time. On the 10th anniversary of the war, we recognize that we -- and so many others -- will pay the price for it for a long, long time. Dig deeper ( 10 Min. Read )

An All-American Nightmare

By Peter Van Buren, TomDispatch Dec 19, 2012 Torture can’t be disappeared like the body of a political prisoner, or conveniently deep-sixed simply by wishing it elsewhere or pretending it never happened or closing our bureaucratic eyes. After the fact, it can be dealt with only by staring directly into the nightmare that changed us -- that, like it or not, helped make us who we now are. Dig deeper ( 9 Min. Read )

How Not to Reconstruct Iraq, Afghanistan — or America

By Peter Van Buren, TomDispatch Aug 18, 2012 Why has the United States spent so much money and time so disastrously trying to rebuild occupied nations abroad, while allowing its own infrastructure to crumble untended? Why do we even think of that as “policy”? Dig deeper ( 9 Min. Read )

Leaking War

By Peter Van Buren, TomDispatch Jun 12, 2012 What lies at the nexus of Obama’s targeted drone killings, his self-serving leaks, and his aggressive prosecution of whistleblowers is a president who believes himself above the law, and seems convinced that he alone has a preternatural ability to determine right from wrong. Dig deeper ( 8 Min. Read )

Silent State: Washington’s Campaign Against Whistle-Blowers

By Peter Van Buren, TomDispatch Feb 10, 2012 There can be little doubt that government retaliation against whistle-blowers is not an isolated event, nor even an agency-by-agency practice. The number of cases in play suggests an organized strategy to deprive Americans of knowledge of the more disreputable things their government does. Dig deeper ( 11 Min. Read )

Freedom Isn’t Free at the State Department

Staff / Truthdig Oct 3, 2011 On the same day that more than 250,000 unredacted State Department cables hemorrhaged out onto the Internet, I was interrogated for the first time in my 23-year State Department career by State’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security for posting on my blog a link to a WikiLeaks document already available elsewhere on the Web. Dig deeper ( 9 Min. Read )