In the 1930s, Woody Guthrie liked to write “This machine kills fascists” on his guitar. It was a period when folk musicians stood with the people against corporate greed. This is one of the reasons that folk musicians were attacked and blacklisted during the McCarthy era. But they rose again as the reporters that offered the soundtrack for the civil rights movement in the mid to late 50s. Phil Ochs told us more about what was going on in Mississippi than scholars and intellectuals.

Today, if you want to know what’s going on in the world, you want an accurate report on where injustice is being done and people are being oppressed, the best single source of news is David Rovics. I consider him one of the greatest singer-songwriters of our time. In the same way many people watch The Daily Show over the corporate for-profit news shows, Rovics albums give us a far more insightful view on what’s really going on in the world today.

HO CHI MINH CITY, Vietnam -- Weeping while gazing around a crowded market, U.S. Vietnam War veteran William H. Kruckmeyer says he is delighted to return, for the first time, to a country he knew as horrific battlefield.

Wiping his eyes, he's dressed like a walking neon sign: a baseball cap emblazoned "Vietnam Veteran" in golden letters, and a Hawaiian-style shirt festooned with American flags and motorcycles.

Grey-bearded Mr. Kruckmeyer is also a portal into the suffering experienced by many Americans who waged war on this side of the world, and his emotional story symbolizes their often blinkered lives today -- mostly forgotten as his generation ages.

"Please call me 'Krash,' all of my friends for 30 years do," Mr. Kruckmeyer, 67, said in an interview conducted via e-mail during August and September while he traveled through Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and Thailand with his wife, and after their return home to Westminster, California.

The Pentagon spent $50,000 of our money to buy up the first edition of "Operation Dark Heart" by Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer and destroy every copy. The second printing has lots of words blacked out. Wikileaks claims to have a first edition, but hasn't shared it. However, reading the bleeped-through version reveals plenty.

Shaffer and others in the military-spying complex knew about U.S. al Qaeda cells and leaders before 9-11 and were prevented from pursuing the matter. Shaffer believes they could have prevented 9-11. He so informed the 9-11 Commission, which ignored him. The Defense Intelligence Agency retaliated against Shaffer for having spoken up. We knew this, but the book adds context and details, and names names.

Drone warfare — assassination by unmanned aircraft — is arguably one of the most hellish spawns of the modern military-industrial era, and its use is becoming routine in the Af-Pak war, yet (what else is new?) there’s no debate about it at the level of national policy, just a shrug and a void.

The nation’s future is itself on a sort of autopilot. It belongs to the market forces, in tandem with the reckless, short-term strategic interests of the Pentagon and the politics of empire. There’s no moral voice at the core of this system — not even, any longer, a voice of common sense. We live in a spectator democracy: Our role is to gape at the spectacle. The news cycle runs 24/7 and tells us nothing, if the act of “telling” includes in its meaning an invitation to participate.

Like the students who sat in at segregated lunch counters and otherwise disrupted the nation’s Jim Crow status quo nearly half a century ago, we have to find a way to interrupt the false consensus of military-industrial America at the level at which it wages war and engages with the rest of the planet. Doing so takes persistence and courage — and sometimes a breakthrough occurs.

Paging through Bob Woodward’s Obama’s Wars, I should not have been surprised that the index lacks any entry for "intelligence." The excerpts that dribbled out earlier this week had made unavoidably clear that there was, in fact, no entry for intelligence in the disorderly process last fall that got the Obama administration neck-deep in the Big Muddy — to borrow from Pete Seeger’s song from the Vietnam era.

Before reading through Woodward’s book, the excerpts already published had left doubts in my mind that the Obama White House could be host to such an amateurish decision-process-without-real-process. I had seen a lot of White House fecklessness in my 30 years in intelligence analysis, but it was, frankly, hard to believe that it could be so bad this time.

Could it be true that, after going from knee-deep to waist-deep in the Big Muddy by his early 2009 decision to insert 21,000 additional troops, the President would decide to plunge neck-deep without a comprehensive intelligence review of the impact of the earlier reinforcement and a formal estimate of the likely impact of further escalation?