Sarah Stillman, The Invisible Army: For foreign workers on U.S. bases in Iraq and Afghanistan, war can be hell. The New Yorker, 6 June 2011. “More than seventy thousand ‘third-country nationals’ work for the American military in war zones; many report being held in conditions resembling indentured servitude by subcontractors who operate outside the law.”
June 6, 2011
The Invisible Army: For foreign workers on U.S. bases in Iraq and Afghanistan, war can be hell
February 18, 2011
Covert Drone War: Tracking CIA drone strikes and other US covert actions in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia
Chris Woods, Alice Ross and Jack Serle, Covert Drone War: Tracking CIA drone strikes and other US covert actions in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, 18 February 2011 to the present (18 April 2014). John Pilger: “This [is] extraordinary work on Barack Obama’s lawless use of drones in a campaign of assassination across south Asia. Woods, Ross and Serle stripped away the façade of the secret drone ‘war’, including how it is reported and not reported in the United States: how civilian casualties are covered-up and how rescuers and funerals are targeted.”
June 22, 2010
The Runaway General: The Rolling Stone profile of McChrystal that changed history
Michael Hastings, The Runaway General: The Rolling Stone profile of McChrystal that changed history. Rolling Stone, 22 June 2010. In this profile of General Stanley McChrystal, Michael Hastings reported remarks made by McChrystal’s staff that were critical and scornful of Vice President Biden, US Ambassador to Afghanistan Karl Eikenberry, and Special Representative to Afghanistan Richard Holbrooke. The day after the article was published, President Obama accepted McChrystal’s resignation, saying McChrystal’s conduct did ‘not meet the standard that should be set by a commanding general. It undermines the civilian control of the military that is at the core of our democratic system.'”
March 1, 2010
The Guantánamo “Suicides”
Scott Horton, The Guantánamo Suicides. Harper’s, March 2010. “Late on the evening of June 9 [2006]…, three prisoners at Guantánamo died suddenly and violently. Salah Ahmed Al-Salami, from Yemen, was thirty-seven. Mani Shaman Al-Utaybi, from Saudi Arabia, was thirty. Yasser Talal Al-Zahrani, also from Saudi Arabia, was twenty-two, and had been imprisoned at Guantánamo since he was captured at the age of seventeen. None of the men had been charged with a crime, though all three had been engaged in hunger strikes to protest the conditions of their imprisonment. They were being held in a cell block, known as Alpha Block, reserved for particularly troublesome or high-value prisoners.” See also Scott Horton, Uncovering the Cover Ups: Death Camp in Delta. Harper’s, 4 June 2014. “Mark Denbeaux [professor at Seton Hall Law School] on the NCIS cover-up of three ‘suicides’ at Guantánamo Bay Detention Camp.” (This article also has a link for the Seton Hall Law School 2009 report, “Death in Camp Delta.“)
April 30, 2009
The Red Cross Torture Report: What It Means
Mark Danner, The Red Cross Torture Report: What It Means. The New York Review of Books, 30 April 2009. “Working through the forty-three pages of the International Committee of the Red Cross’s report [of February 2007], one finds a strikingly detailed account of horrors inflicted on fourteen ‘high-value detainees’ over a period of weeks and months—horrors that Red Cross officials conclude, quite unequivocally, ‘constituted torture.'”
April 9, 2009
US Torture: Voices from the Black Sites
Mark Danner, US Torture: Voices from the Black Sites. The New York Review of Books. 9 April 2009. “The [ICRC Report on the Treatment of Fourteen “High Value Detainees” in CIA Custody by the International Committee of the Red Cross, February 2007] is based on extensive interviews, carried out in October and December 2006, with fourteen so-called “high-value detainees,” who had been imprisoned and interrogated for extended periods at the “black sites,” a series of secret prisons operated by the CIA in a number of countries around the world, including, at various times, Thailand, Afghanistan, Poland, Romania, and Morocco.” From footnote #2 in Mark Danner’s The Red Cross Torture Report: What It Means. (The sequel to US Torture: Voices from the Black Sites.) The New York Review of Books, 30 April 2009.
November 21, 2008
A My Lai a Month: How the US Fought the Vietnam War
Nick Turse, A My Lai a Month: How the US Fought the Vietnam War. The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, 21 November 2008. By the mid-1960s, the Mekong Delta, with its verdant paddies and canal-side hamlets, was the rice bowl of South Vietnam and home to nearly 6 million Vietnamese. It was also one of the most important revolutionary strongholds during the Vietnam War. Despite its military significance, State Department officials were “deeply concerned” about introducing a large number of US troops into the densely populated area, fearing that it would be impossible to limit civilian carnage.”
Yet in late 1968, as peace talks in Paris got under way in earnest, US officials launched a “land rush” to pacify huge swaths of the Delta and bring the population under the control of the South Vietnamese government in Saigon. To this end, from December 1968 through May 1969, a large-scale operation was carried out by the Ninth Infantry Division, with support from nondivision assets ranging from helicopter gunships to B-52 bombers. The offensive, known as Operation Speedy Express, claimed an enemy body count of 10,899 at a cost of only 267 American lives. Although guerrillas were known to be well armed, the division captured only 748 weapons.
In late 1969 Seymour Hersh broke the story of the 1968 My Lai massacre, during which US troops slaughtered more than 500 civilians in Quang Ngai Province, far north of the Delta. Some months later, in May 1970, a self-described “grunt” who participated in Speedy Express wrote a confidential letter to William Westmoreland, then Army chief of staff, saying that the Ninth Division’s atrocities amounted to “a My Lay each month for over a year.” In his 1976 memoir A Soldier Reports, Westmoreland insisted, “The Army investigated every case [of possible war crimes], no matter who made the allegation,” and claimed that “none of the crimes even remotely approached the magnitude and horror of My Lai.” Yet he personally took action to quash an investigation into the large-scale atrocities described in the soldier’s letter.
April 20, 2008
Message Machine: Behind TV Military Analysts, Pentagon’s Hidden Hand
David Barstow, Message Machine: Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon’s Hidden Hand. The New York Times, 20 April 2008. Part 1 of a two-part series. (Part 2, One Man’s Military-Industrial-Media Complex: Barry McCaffrey’s World, 29 November 2008.) In a Pentagon campaign, “retired [military] officers have been used to shape terrorism coverage from inside the TV and radio networks.”