Farewell to Ground Zero

Jonathan Schell, who lives in downtown New York City, began writing his "Letter from Ground Zero" column – still unnamed – almost before the white dust storm of 9/11 had settled. The first of what would become almost four-and-a-half years of such columns...

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Can You Say ‘Permanent Bases’?

We're in a new period in the war in Iraq – one that brings to mind the Nixonian era of "Vietnamization": A president presiding over an increasingly unpopular war that won't end; an election bearing down; the need to placate a restive American public; and an army...

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The Bureaucracy Strikes Back

In the first installment of this series, I offered 42 names to begin what now seems an endless – and ever growing – list of top officials as well as beleaguered administrators, managers, and career civil servants who quit their government posts in protest or...

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How Not to Ban Torture in Congress

Alfred McCoy, an expert on the CIA and its history of torture, has some actual news – the sort that's been sitting unnoticed right in front of our collective, reportorial eyes. Last year's clash between John McCain and the Bush administration over the senator's...

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When Two Worlds Collide

The president passed through his State of the Union address – ill-digested chunks of so many other speeches he's given ("We're writing a new chapter in the story of self-government – with women lining up to vote in Afghanistan, and millions of Iraqis marking...

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Spying, Lying, and Saying No

On the day that Ayman al-Zawahiri appeared in his nine thousandth video from – assumedly – the remarkably technologized wilds of the Afghan-Pakistan border region, mocking President Bush for a botched Predator-drone missile attempt on his life, another...

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The Devastation We Inflict

Vietnam was, for the United States, the war that never ended. Administration after administration has tried, with remarkable lack of success, to wipe it from memory or turn it, at least, into a curable medical condition ("the Vietnam syndrome"). After that war, a...

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Our Indian Wars Are Not Over Yet

In the 1940s and 1950s, when the generation of men now ruling over us were growing up, boys could disappear into a form of war play – barely noticed by adults and hardly recorded anywhere – that was already perhaps a couple of hundred years old. In this kind...

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Does the President Really Know Best?

In every way they could imagine – unnoticed in broad daylight and in the darkness of eternal secrecy – the president and his top officials have been hardest at work not at governing the country but at bulking up presidential powers. This, it now seems, was...

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