Tom Engelhardt on Washington’s increasing war focus to the exclusion of everything else and its indiscriminate use of drones
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Tom Engelhardt
This week’s guest is Tom Engelhardt, creator of the TomDispatch.com website, a project of the Nation Institute, a non-profit media center based in New York, where he is a fellow. Englehardt is the author of two collections of his TomDispatch columns: The United States of Fear and The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s, as well as The End of Victory Culture, a highly praised history of American triumphalism in the Cold War. Another of his recent books Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare 2001-2050, which he co-authored with Nick Turse. Note: This particular interview was recorded in summer 2012, before the November election. Topics discussed include the Department of Homeland Security, the continuing epidemic of gun violence in the U.S., America’s use of drones and sales of drone weaponry to an expanding number of nations, the constantly looming threat of U.S./Russian nuclear war, how politicians use fear and paranoia to control the public, Afghanistan and weapons in space. Check out Engelhardt’s December 2012 article Dreams for Obama: From Community Organizer to Robot President: The updated story of a president in a straitjacket of his own making. Also related to this interview are the articles Revealed: US and Britain Launched 1,200 Drone Strikes in Recent Wars, Decade of US ‘War on Terror’ Yields More ‘Terrorism’: Inaugural study says that terror attacks worldwide have grown rapidly in the years since 9/11 and spiked during the US occupation of Iraq, and Pentagon, CIA Lines Blur as US Wars Step Further into Shadows: New Pentagon strategy ‘reflects the Obama administration’s affinity for espionage and covert action’.