The rumbling drone of a fleet of U.S. helicopters carrying security and administrative personnel could be heard long before the eight choppers came into view over the Ramallah horizon on their way to the Palestinian Authority (PA) presidential compound in the West...
In 1798, when John Adams was president of the United States, the feds enacted four pieces of legislation called the Alien and Sedition Acts. One of these laws made it a federal crime to publish any false, scandalous or malicious writing -- even if true -- about the...
In 1939 Germany blitzkrieged into Poland and France and Britain declared war. The Germans divided the conquered country with their ally, Stalin’s Soviet Union, and the two belligerents mopped up Polish resistance, a process that subsequently included the slaughter of...
The youthful Left was once the most active antiwar current on campus: recall the days of the Vietnam era antiwar movement, when "Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?" was heard on college campuses from Berkeley to NYU and all points in between....
As usual, at the recent Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), speaker after speaker idolized the stylized image of Ronald Reagan. Unfortunately, humans believe images, which often diverge from reality; that’s why advertising on TV works. The same is true in...
Here’s how I met Nick Turse. I have a friend who’s a professor of public health and one day in 2003 he asked me if I’d be willing to spend a little time with one of his graduate students who was doing some curious work on the Vietnam War. ...
On a plane circling Baghdad in gray dawn light, a little Iraqi girl quietly sang to herself in the next row. "When I start to wonder why I’m making this trip," Sean Penn murmured to me, "I see that child and I remember what it’s about." After the...
Ten years ago today, U.S. air, sea and land forces attacked Iraq. And the great goals of Operation Iraqi Freedom? Destroy the chemical and biological weapons Saddam Hussein had amassed to use on us or transfer to al-Qaida for use against the U.S. homeland. Exact...
