Author: Common Dreams

As we approach the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, it is past time to reckon with “war on terror” approaches that have cast too many Americans as national security threats. Two decades of permissive rules for intelligence collection, coupled with weak protections for speech and against discrimination, have subverted legitimate counterterrorism aims. We must revisit those rules to ban invidious profiling under the guise of national security. Several changes in law and policy after 9/11 have facilitated profiling on the basis of constitutionally protected characteristics. The attorney general’s guidelines for FBI investigations, for instance, were dramatically loosened in...

As a ROTC cadet and an Air Force officer, I was a tiny part of America’s vast Department of Defense (DoD) for 24 years until I retired and returned to civilian life as a history professor. My time in the military ran from the election of Ronald Reagan to the reign of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. It was defined by the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union, America’s brief unipolar moment of dominance and the beginning of its end, as Washington embroiled itself in needless, disastrous wars in Afghanistan and Iraq after the 9/11 attacks....

Honoring the loss and the inestimable gifts left behind, we mark what would have been the 97th birthday of James Baldwin. An incandescent writer, masterful orator, out gay Black man, and fierce advocate for justice who long and incisively spoke “the naked truth” about the racist history of a country “caught in the lie of their pretended humanism… cruelly trapped between what we would like to be and what we actually are.” For Baldwin, despite efforts in his lifetime to heal the divide, the fault lines of always-inextricable race and power remained brutally clear, often outlined in the righteous,...

As the Capitol attack inquiry began with emotional testimony by police officers who came face-to-face with Trump’s racist and proto-fascist mob, one cannot help but draw the conclusion that what happened on January 6, 2021, a day that will also live in infamy, is that the chickens came home to roost. The racist system that has prevailed for nearly 250 years got for a taste of its own medicine on that day as a large crowd of White Americans attacked the very foundation of the country. Calling White police officers “traitors” and using racial slurs against black officers speak...