Tom Engelhardt - Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World

Praise for Shadow Government

This is a book about secrets and surveillance, but Im here to tell you one secret its contents wont. For more than a dozen years, Tom Engelhardt and his website or blog or post-newspaper wire service Tomdispatch.com have been one of the great forces on the side of clarity, democracy, openness, and really good writing. Tom himself, a legendary book editor, is also one of the countrys most eloquent and tenacious political writers, electronically publishing three essays a week for all these years and writing many of them himself. This collection, focused on the new Orwellianism, is some of the finest writing and finest public service gathered together in book form for your portable pleasure and outrage.

Rebecca Solnit, author of Men Explain Things to Me

Tom Engelhardt is an iconoclast, but he also is the latest exemplar of a great American tradition. Like George Seldes and I. F. Stone before him, he has bypassed conventionally minded newspapers and magazines, and, with his remarkable website and in books like this, found a way of addressing readers directly about the issues central to our time. Again and again, he goes to the heart of the matter, drawing on his awesomely wide reading, his knowledge of history, and his acute political radar system that uncovers small but deeply revealing nuggets of news and often makes me feel, enviously: How could I have missed that?

Adam Hochschild, author of King Leopolds Ghost

Tom Engelhardts writing on the new forms of government surveillance is crucial because he has spent a lifetime studying the rise of the national security state. He can therefore put the contemporary practices of the National Security Agency and the destruction of the Fourth Amendment in the context of the rise of a twenty-first-century Leviathan that he has chronicled for us for decades. As we arrive a few decades late at Orwells 1984 , Tom Engelhardt is our antiWinston Smith, writing the newspaper articles back into their original form and washing out the propaganda.

Juan Cole, Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History at the University of Michigan

Praise for The United States of Fear

Tom Engelhardt, as always, focuses his laser-like intelligence on a core problem that the media avoid: Obamas stunning embrace of Bushs secret government by surveillance, torture, and sanctioned assassination. A stunning polemic.

Mike Davis, author of In Praise of Barbarians and Planet of Slums

Praise for The American Way of War

A tour de force.

Jeremy Scahill, author of Blackwater

There are a lot of ways to describe Tom Engelhardts astonishing service to this countrys conscience and imagination: you could portray him as our generations Orwell, standing aside from all conventional framings to see afresh our dilemmas and blind spots, as the diligent little boy sending in regular dispatches on the nakedness of the emperor and his empire, as a Bodhisattva dedicated to saving all beings through compassion and awareness, but analogies dont really describe the mix of clear and sometimes hilarious writing, deep insight, superb information, empathy, and outrage that has been the core of Toms TomDispatches for almost a decade, or the extraordinary contribution theyve made to the American dialogue. Check out this bundle of some of the best from that time span.

Rebecca Solnit, author of Men Explain Things to Me

They may have Blackwater/Xe, Halliburton, aircraft carrier battle groups, deadly drones by the score, and the worlds largest military budget, but we have Tom Engelhardtand a more powerful truth-seeking missile has seldom been invented. Long-time fans like me will be happy to see some of his most memorable pieces reprinted here, although woven together in a way that makes them still stronger; for anyone not yet familiar with his work, this is your chance to meet one of the most forceful analysts alive of our countrys dangerous, costly addiction to all things military.

Adam Hochschild, author of King Leopolds Ghost

Tom Engelhardt is the I. F. Stone of the post9/11 ageseeing what others miss, calling attention to contradictions that others willfully ignore, insisting that Americans examine in full precisely those things that make us most uncomfortable.

Andrew J. Bacevich, author of Washington Rules

Tom Engelhardt is among our most trenchant critics of American perpetual war. Like I. F. Stone in the 1960s, he has an uncanny ability to ferret out and see clearly the ugly truths hidden in government reports and statistics. No cynic, he always measures the sordid reality against a bright vision of an America that lives up to its highest ideals.

Juan Cole, Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History at the University of Michigan

Like an extended Motown shuffle with some hard-hitting Stax breaks, and never devoid of an all too human sense of humor and pathos, Toms book takes us for the ride. And though the landscape surveyed is all too familiar for anyone who has followed George Dubyas wars, it aint pretty; and it does lead to a black hole in our collective soul.... [I]nvaluable in showing how the empire walks the walk and talks the talk.

Pepe Escobar, Asia Times

If a person could approach you on the street, gently caress your cheek, and walk away leaving you with the feeling of having been violently slapped and dowsed with a bucket of ice water, they would approximate Tom Engelhardts writing, including that in his newest book The American Way of War: How Bushs Wars Became Obamas....What Engelhardt has written over the past several years and collected here on the subject of war needed to be said and will continue to need to be said more loudly with each passing day.

David Swanson, Fire Dog Lake

In The American Way of War: How Bushs Wars Became Obamas (Haymarket Books, 2010), Tom Engelhardt provides a clear-eyed examination of U.S. foreign policy in the Bush and Obama years, and details unsparingly how Obama has inheritedand in many cases exacerbatedthe ills of the Bush era.... an important book for anyone hoping to understand how the U.S. arrived at its current predicament during the Bush years, and how it remains in this predicament despite Obamas best effortsor perhaps because of them.

Inter Press Service

Tom Engelhardts biting look at United States militarism, The American Way of War: How Bushs Wars Became Obamas... [is] pithy... [and] alarming.... He takes on our war-possessed world with clear-eyed, penetrating precision.

Mother Jones Online

Essential.... seamlessly edited.... establishes him as one of the grand chroniclers of the post9/11 era.

Dan Froomkin, Nieman Watchdog

These simple pleas for readers to reconsider an idea they might previously have taken for granted are one of the strengths of this book. Demonstrating Engelhardts experience as a professional editor, he avoids the overly strident or self-righteous condescension that characterizes too much online political writing, instead using clear and unvarnished prose to attack the fundamental principles of the postSeptember 11 mindset.

Foreign Policy in Focus

American history does not begin with 9/11, yet the worldview of so many in the United States since then has been shaped by how the mainstream media had coloured events following the terrorist attacks. But to break free from that distorted perception which bears little resemblance to realityas people once knew itone needs the help of a little imagination. In Tom Engelhardts The American Way of War: How Bushs Wars Became Obamas , you could step back and see all the views that you had taken for granted challenged, as you indulge yourself in a world of ideas that are logical and straightforward but just were not quite visible to you before. All of course are backed by key facts, sound analysis and invaluable context.