Our southern border is just checkers, man; the northern border is chess,” a Border Patrol agent tells Sylvia Longmire, author of Border Insecurity: Why Big Money, Fences, and Drones Aren’t Making Us Safer. A border-state Republican congressman calls it a “Whac-A-Mole game.” But it’s no game for the poor of Mexico and Central America, […]

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  We like to think of Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib as nasty aberrations from American justice, but what if they’re more or less par for the course? When I was at Gitmo a few years ago covering the trial of a 15-year-old captured on the Afghan battlefield, it came out that the kid’s interrogator had […]

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  As Barack Obama was being inaugurated, he stood on a red and green carpet. That bright accompaniment, welcoming those come to see a progressive sworn in—ostensibly to further a liberal agenda—was manufactured by a Koch brothers subsidiary, INVISTA, which had won the contract to provide carpeting for the quasi-monarchical presidential ceremony. It would be […]

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  In the months following 9/11, it seems Washington just couldn’t say “no” to the CIA. The agency’s budget shot through the ceiling. Suddenly the CIA not only commanded private armies, it even had a state-of-the-art air force! Between 2006-2007, the CIA drove a proxy war, mobilizing Ethiopia’s army to invade Somalia. It was perhaps […]

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  To paraphrase Desi Arnaz, American journalists “have a lot of esplainin’ to do.” How is it that in this media-marinated era, where more information is more available to more people than ever before in history, so many can be so massively misinformed? How is it that so many can ignore the cold science of […]

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