Filling the Empty Battlefield Tom Engelhard

Filling the Empty Battlefield Tom Engelhardthttp://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175691/tomgram%3A_engelhardt%2C_field_of_nightmares/#more

[Note for TomDispatch readers: This is part two of my series on how Washington helped create its enemies in the post-9/11 era. Part one was “The Enemy-Industrial Complex.” Also, I can't resist mentioning that I -- and so TomDispatch -- was named "Truthdigger of the week" at the invaluable website Truthdig.com. To read Alexander Kelly's piece on TD and me accompanying that honor, click here. Tom]
Filling the Empty Battlefield 
Jeremy Scahill, Blowback Reporter 
By Tom Engelhardt
Chalmers Johnson’s book Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire was published in March 2000 -- and just about no one noticed.  Until then, blowback had been an obscure term of CIA tradecraft, which Johnson defined as “the unintended consequences of policies that were kept secret from the American people.”  In his prologue, the former consultant to the CIA and eminent scholar of both Mao Zedong’s peasant revolution and modern Japan labeled his Cold War self a “spear-carrier for empire.”

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