I recently wrote about Karl Rove's gamble that Americans would prefer a Green-Zone version of our world to grim political reality and that, in the process of telling "Green-Zone stories" to the public, it was useful if you could also "Green Zone" history –...
As every political junkie in the country now knows, just before finding himself not indicted by Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, Karl Rove went to a fundraiser in New Hampshire and launched the Republican campaign for the 2006 midterm elections. Its simple goal...
[The person who runs TomDispatch is not usually the focus of this space, but I decided to make an exception and run this Nick Turse interview with me. It's my way of announcing some TomDispatch news: All the interviews I've done so far for the site are to be collected...
Remember Saddam's "killing fields"? By now, the Bush administration has turned whole swathes of Iraq into a charnel house. Last week Hala Jaber, a fine British reporter, returned to Baghdad and visited one of today's killing fields – that city's morgue into...
Since the British imperial moment of the late 19th century, the image of much of the world – especially Central Asia and the Middle East – as but a set of pawns in a "Great Game" on a geopolitical "chessboard" where the great powers of whatever era are at...
The history of war-atrocity snapshots did not start with the Abu Ghraib screensavers from hell. After all, photography itself came into being as the industrializing West was imposing its rule on much of the planet. That imposition meant wars of conquest; and such...
The press tells us that our "thrilled" president was "conservative" or "carefully guarded," or expressed "cautious optimism" in responding to the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the smalltime thug, beheader, fomenter of Sunni/Shia civil war, and all-around violent...
First news stories about the My Lai massacre (picked up from an Army publicity release), March 1968: The New York Times labeled the operation a significant success: "American troops caught a North Vietnamese force in a pincer movement on the central coastal plain...
You never can be too early when it comes to an anniversary. It's barely June, but a quick look down the road reminds us that the 20th anniversary of the Reagan administration's Iran-Contra Affair lies just ahead this November. As Greg Grandin reminds us, Irangate (as...
In recent months, among other uproars and scandals, Americans learned that the Defense Department has been collecting intelligence on and tracking domestic antiwar activists; that, since 2001, the National Security Agency (NSA) has had a presidentially authorized,...
