In September 1998, I was handed a submission for a proposed book by Chalmers Johnson. I was then (as I am now) consulting editor at Metropolitan Books. 9/11 was three years away, the Bush administration still an unimaginable nightmare, and though the prospective...
The other day I visited a Web site I check regularly for all things military, Noah Shachtman's Danger Room blog at Wired magazine. One of its correspondents, Spencer Ackerman, was just then at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, the sort of place that – with its multiple...
As the WikiLeaks document-dump week ends, perhaps the real significance of what happened lay not in the specific revelations in those 92,000 pieces of raw data from American frustration-ville in Afghanistan, 2004-2009 (much of which would have been no news to anyone...
Have you ever thought about just how strange this country's version of normal truly is? Let me make my point with a single, hardly noticed Washington Post news story that's been on my mind for a while. It represents the sort of reporting that, in our world, zips by...
One striking aspect of the Vietnam years – and the antiwar movement of that era – was the degree to which you could see images of Vietnamese civilian suffering here in the United States. Among the iconic images of that war, for instance, was Nick Ut's photo of a young...
July 12, 2011, Washington, D.C. - In triumphant testimony before a joint committee of Congress in which he was greeted on both sides of the aisle as a conquering hero, Gen. David Petraeus announced the withdrawal this month of the first 1,000 American troops from...
