Portside

There are still 30 detainees at Guantánamo. Sixteen of them have been deemed no longer threats to the United States and cleared for release, but arrangements have yet to be made to transfer them... Now there are tiny steps toward closure.

As those Canadian wildfires suggest, we’re now living on a new, not terribly recognizable, ever more perilous world in which not just this country but Planet Earth itself is in decline. Climate change is quickly becoming the climate emergency.

The topsy-turvy nature of the Trumpian version of the American century is something this country — and certainly the Biden administration — still hasn’t fully come to grips with.

Reader Comments: 9/11 Failed Policy; Medicare Advantage for Profit Scam; Myth of Robert E. Lee; We Remember Birmingham Church Bombing; Chile; Resources - Jobs Report; Climate Change; Lots and lots of Announcements...

The tragic impacts of the September 11 attacks stretch far beyond the nearly three thousand people who lost their lives 20 years ago. Over the last two decades, government forces have trampled on civil rights and liberties in the name of 9/11.

A reckoning with America’s failed national security policy is long overdue. America’s current vision of security has been ruinous both to the world and to the American people. A different future is possible.

At the dawn of the new millennium, we directed our national resources in the exact wrong direction. But it’s not too late to turn things around.

In just 20 years, the total cost of the US increasing homeland security and waging wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere since Sept. 11, 2001, have exceeded $8 trillion, according to new estimates by the Costs of War project at Brown University.

Reader Comments: Texas Outlaws Women Rights; End of Afghan War; Remembering Ed Asner; Star Trek as Anti-Imperialism; Tax Billionaires; Nabisco Workers on Strike; Labor Day; Take Action - Hurricane Ida; 9/11 Restaurant Worker Reunion & Memorial; more

When she was 30, Suzy Hansen left the US for Istanbul – and began to realize that Americans will never understand their own country until they see it as the rest of the world does. In college, she read James Baldwin, giving the sense of meeting someone who knew her better, than she had herself. This came as a shock, not necessarily because he said I was sick. It was because he kept calling me that thing: “white American”.