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Nick Turse Archive
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Something Here
Rebecca Gordon: Turning Our Backs on Nuremberg
• March 26, 2019
• 500 Words • 8 Comments • Reply
If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? The advent of sound recording deep-sixed this age-old thought experiment and offered a definitive answer: Yes! I’ve got another one for you, though: if you water-torture someone at a secure military compound and no one... Read More
Stephanie Savell: U.S. Counterterror Missions Across the Planet
• February 19, 2019
• 500 Words • 3 Comments • Reply
“Training.” It sounds so innocuous. It also sounds like something expected of a military. All professional soldiers undergo some sort of basic training. Think: calisthenics, negotiating obstacle courses, and marksmanship. Soldiers require instruction, otherwise they’re little more than rabble. Sometimes soldiers from one country even train the troops of another, imparting skills from the basic... Read More
Bases, Bases, Everywhere...
Except in the Pentagon’s Report
• January 8, 2019
• 2,600 Words • Leave a Comment
The U.S. military is finally withdrawing (or not) from its base at al-Tanf. You know, the place that the Syrian government long claimed was a training ground for Islamic State (ISIS) fighters; the land corridor just inside Syria, near both the Iraqi and Jordanian borders, that Russia has called a terrorist hotbed (while floating the... Read More
Arnold Isaacs: Misremembering Vietnam
• November 8, 2018
• 600 Words • 6 Comments • Reply
“I'm going to Saigon,” said Secretary of Defense James Mattis last month before correcting himself. “Ho Chi Minh City -- former Saigon.” It was the fifth time that Mattis would meet with his Vietnamese counterpart, Minister of National Defense Ngo Xuan Lich, and it marked the defense secretary’s first visit to a former U.S. military... Read More
Nick Turse: from the Missing Archives of a Lost War
• October 28, 2018
• 600 Words • 1 Comment • Reply
It was nearly sunset on Easter Saturday when I met Marie Dz’dza. She was sitting on a set of steps in a hospital compound in the town of Bunia. Near her was her mother, Jesinne Dhewedza, and her niece, six-year-old Irene Mave. Two weeks earlier, I might have noticed any number of things about them... Read More
Two Men, Two Legs, and Too Much Suffering
America's Forgotten Vietnamese Victims
• October 28, 2018
• 1,500 Words • Leave a Comment
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The U.S. Military Is Winning. No, Really, It Is!
A Simple Equation Proves That the U.S. Armed Forces Have Triumphed in the War on Terror
• September 4, 2018
• 2,400 Words • 111 Comments • Reply
4,000,000,029,057. Remember that number. It’s going to come up again later. But let’s begin with another number entirely: 145,000 -- as in, 145,000 uniformed soldiers striding down Washington’s Pennsylvania Avenue. That’s the number of troops who marched down that very street in May 1865 after the United States defeated the Confederate States of America. Similar... Read More
The Legacy of Infinite War
Special Ops, Generational Struggle, and the Cooperstown of Commandos
• August 5, 2018
• 2,900 Words • Leave a Comment
Raids by U.S. commandos in Afghanistan. (I could be talking about 2001 or 2018.) A U.S. drone strike in Yemen. (I could be talking about 2002 or 2018.) Missions by Green Berets in Iraq. (I could be talking about 2003 or 2018.) While so much about the War on Terror turned Global War on Terrorismturned... Read More
Commandos Sans Frontières
The Global Growth of U.S. Special Operations Forces
• July 17, 2018
• 2,600 Words • 2 Comments • Reply
Early last month, at a tiny military post near the tumbledown town of Jamaame in Somalia, small arms fire began to ring out as mortar shells crashed down. When the attack was over, one Somali soldier had been wounded -- and had that been the extent of the casualties, you undoubtedly would never have heard... Read More
Narco-Corruption, ISIS 3.0, and the Terror Drone Attack That Never Happened
Pentagon Documents Detail Dystopian Dangers
• May 29, 2018
• 3,300 Words • Leave a Comment
For almost 20 years, U.S. drone warfare was largely one-sided. Unlike Afghans and Yemenis, Iraqis and Somalis, Americans never had to worry about lethal robots hovering overhead and raining down missiles. Until, that is, one appeared in the skies above Florida. But that’s a story for later. For now, let’s focus on a 2017 executive... Read More
Drug Wars, Missing Money, and a Phantom $500 Million
Pentagon Watchdog Calls Out Two Commands for Financial Malfeasance
• February 8, 2018
• 3,000 Words • Leave a Comment
2017 was a year of investigations for U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM). There was the investigation of the two-star commander of U.S. Army Africa who allegedly sent racy texts to an enlisted man’s wife. There was the investigation into the alleged killing of a Special Forces soldier by Navy SEALs in Mali. There was the inquiry... Read More
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Special Ops at War
From Afghanistan to Somalia, Special Ops Achieves Less with More
• January 9, 2018
• 2,500 Words • 37 Comments • Reply
At around 11 o’clock that night, four Lockheed MC-130 Combat Talons, turboprop Special Operations aircraft, were flying through a moonless sky from Pakistani into Afghan airspace. On board were 199 Army Rangers with orders to seize an airstrip. One hundred miles to the northeast, Chinook and Black Hawk helicopters cruised through the darkness toward Kandahar,... Read More
Rebecca Gordon: Trump the Flamethrower
• December 17, 2017
• 600 Words • 2 Comments • Reply
In June, an American Green Beret was reportedly strangled to death in Mali by U.S. Navy SEALs, allegedly in connection with a shadowy money-skimming scheme. (The military is currently investigating.) In July, The Intercept, the London-based research firm Forensic Architecture, and Amnesty International revealed that a drone base used by U.S. forces in Cameroon was... Read More
Donald Trump’s First Year Sets Record for U.S. Special Ops
Elite Commandos Deployed to 149 Countries in 2017
• December 14, 2017
• 2,700 Words • 2 Comments • Reply
“We don’t know exactly where we’re at in the world, militarily, and what we’re doing,” said Senator Lindsey Graham, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, in October. That was in the wake of the combat deaths of four members of the Special Operations forces in the West African nation of Niger. Graham and... Read More
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From America with Love
U.S. Commandos Are a “Persistent Presence” on Russia’s Doorstep
• October 29, 2017
• 2,400 Words • Leave a Comment
“They are very concerned about their adversary next door,” said General Raymond Thomas, the head of U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM), at a national security conference in Aspen, Colorado, in July. “They make no bones about it.” The “they” in question were various Eastern European and Baltic nations. “Their adversary”? Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Thomas, the... Read More
The Journalist and the Fixer
Who Makes the Story Possible?
• October 5, 2017
• 3,000 Words • Leave a Comment
We were already roaring down the road when the young man called to me over his shoulder. There was a woman seated between us on the motorbike and with the distance, his accent, the rushing air, and the engine noise, it took a moment for me to decipher what he had just said: We might... Read More
Ann Jones: When Will They Ever Learn?
• September 19, 2017
• 700 Words • 1 Comment • Reply
Last year, an internal report commissioned by the Broadcasting Board of Governors, the agency that oversees Voice of America and other U.S. government-supported foreign news outlets, examined the “perception of U.S. international media in Afghanistan.” This study, obtained by TomDispatch via the Freedom of Information Act, concluded that Afghans saw U.S.-backed media as “useful” and... Read More
Alfred McCoy: the CIA and Me
• August 24, 2017
• 300 Words • 1 Comment • Reply
When historian Alfred McCoy began his long journey to expose some of the darkest secrets of the U.S. national security establishment, America was embroiled in wars in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. Almost 50 years later, the United States is, in one way or another, involved in so many more conflicts from Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and... Read More
Can the Pentagon Win When Putsch Comes to Shove?
A Rare Pentagon “Success” Story
• August 10, 2017
• 2,400 Words • Leave a Comment
Winning! It’s the White House watchword when it comes to the U.S. armed forces. “We will give our military the tools you need to prevent war and, if required, to fight war and only do one thing -- you know what that is? Win! Win!” President Donald Trump exclaimed earlier this year while standing aboard... Read More
Andrew Bacevich: the Great Hysteria
• August 8, 2017
• 500 Words • Leave a Comment
“Through the National Revolution its people were purged of alien diseases and America became American again.” So ends A Cool Million, Nathanael West’s now largely forgotten skewering of classic American rags-to-riches stories. Beginning like a pluck-and-luck Horatio Alger tale, West’s very own “Ragged Dick” -- Lemuel Pitkin -- is mercilessly brutalized over the course of... Read More
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A Wide World of Winless War
Globe-Trotting U.S. Special Ops Forces Already Deployed to 137 Nations in 2017
• June 25, 2017
• 3,100 Words • 34 Comments • Reply
The tabs on their shoulders read “Special Forces,” “Ranger,” “Airborne.” And soon their guidon -- the “colors” of Company B, 3rd Battalion of the U.S. Army’s 7th Special Forces Group -- would be adorned with the “Bandera de Guerra,” a Colombian combat decoration. “Today we commemorate sixteen years of a permanent fight against drugs in... Read More
Peter Van Buren: the Human Price of Trump's Wars
• May 18, 2017
• 600 Words • 4 Comments • Reply
“The wandering scribe of war crimes” is how TomDispatch regular Ann Jones once described me. Indeed, for more than a decade, across three continents, I’ve been intermittently interviewing witnesses and victims, perpetrators and survivors of almost unspeakable atrocities. I can’t count the number of massacre survivors and rape victims and tortured women and mutilated men... Read More
Andrew Bacevich: What Obsessing About You-Know-Who Causes Us to Miss
• May 7, 2017
• 500 Words • 2 Comments • Reply
Since the late eighteenth century, the United States has been involved in an almost ceaseless string of wars, interventions, punitive expeditions, and other types of military ventures abroad -- from fighting the British and Mexicans to the Filipinos and Koreans to the Vietnamese and Laotians to the Afghans and Iraqis. The country has formally declared... Read More
America’s War-Fighting Footprint in Africa
Secret U.S. Military Documents Reveal a Constellation of American Military Bases Across That Continent
• April 27, 2017
• 2,900 Words • Leave a Comment
General Thomas Waldhauser sounded a little uneasy. “I would just say, they are on the ground. They are trying to influence the action,” commented the chief of U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) at a Pentagon press briefing in March, when asked about Russian military personnel operating in North Africa. “We watch what they do with great... Read More
The Year of the Commando
U.S. Special Operations Forces Deploy to 138 Nations, 70% of the World’s Countries
• January 5, 2017
• 3,400 Words • 3 Comments • Reply
They could be found on the outskirts of Sirte, Libya, supporting local militia fighters, and in Mukalla, Yemen, backing troops from the United Arab Emirates. At Saakow, a remote outpost in southern Somalia, they assisted local commandos in killing several members of the terror group al-Shabab. Around the cities of Jarabulus and Al-Rai in northern... Read More
Commandos Without Borders
America’s Elite Troops Partner with African Forces But Pursue U.S. Aims
• December 18, 2016
• 2,400 Words • Leave a Comment
Al-Qaeda doesn’t care about borders. Neither does the Islamic State or Boko Haram. Brigadier General Donald Bolduc thinks the same way. “[T]errorists, criminals, and non-state actors aren’t bound by arbitrary borders,” the commander of Special Operations Command Africa (SOCAFRICA) told an interviewer early this fall. “That said, everything we do is not organized around recognizing... Read More
Tim Shorrock: American Military Power in Asia and the Trump Factor
• December 13, 2016
• 600 Words • 2 Comments • Reply
“Did China ask us if it was OK to... build a massive military complex in the middle of the South China Sea? I don't think so!” tweeted President-Elect Donald Trump after shatteringnearly 40 years of U.S.-China diplomatic protocol by having a telephone conversation with Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen. The call -- the first official contact... Read More
The Manhattan White House, the Secret Service, and the Painted Bikini Lady
A Journey to the President-Elect’s Private “Public” Park
• November 27, 2016
• 2,300 Words • 2 Comments • Reply
High above, somewhere behind the black glass façade, President-elect Donald J. Trump was huddled with his inner circle, plotting just how they would “drain the swamp” and remake Washington, perhaps the world. On the street far below, inside a warren of metal fencing surrounded by hefty concrete barriers with “NYPD” emblazoned on them, two middle-aged... Read More
It Did Happen Here
Rebirth of a Nation?
• November 15, 2016
• 2,100 Words • 1 Comment • Reply
“So is he going to win?” The question washed over me as I slumped in my hard plastic chair. I had passed the day walking through a town where most homes lay in ruins and human remains were strewn across a field, a day spent looking over my shoulder for soldiers and melting in the... Read More
Nate Terani: One Veteran's War on Islamophobia
• October 30, 2016
• 500 Words • 18 Comments • Reply
Recently, I was asked a question about Kill Anything That Moves, my history of civilian suffering during the Vietnam War. An interviewer wanted to know how I responded to veterans who took offense at the (supposed) implication that every American who served in Vietnam committed atrocities. I think I softly snorted and slowly shook my... Read More
The Worst Place on Earth
Death and Life in the Lost Town of Leer
• October 20, 2016
• 7,000 Words • Leave a Comment
LEER, South Sudan -- There it is again. That sickening smell. I’m standing on the threshold of a ghost of a home. Its footprint is all that’s left. In the ruins sits a bulbous little silver teakettle -- metal, softly rounded, charred but otherwise perfect, save for two punctures. Something tore through it and ruined... Read More
Andrew Bacevich: the National Security Void
• October 4, 2016
• 700 Words • Leave a Comment
Last month, near the end of the first presidential debate, Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton laid a masterful trap for her Republican rival. Reminding viewers of Donald Trump’s frequent crude comments about women, she mentioned “a woman in a beauty contest,” and then unpacked the story of former Miss Universe Alicia Machado. “And he called this... Read More
Win, Lose, or Draw
U.S. Special Operations Command Details Dismal U.S. Military Record
• September 27, 2016
• 2,500 Words • 1 Comment • Reply
Winning: it’s written into the DNA of the U.S.A. After all, what’s more American than football legend Vince Lombardi’s famous (if purloined) maxim: “Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing”? Americans expect to be number one. First Lady Michelle Obama recently called the United States the “greatest country on Earth.” (Take that, world public opinion,... Read More
Mission Impossible
Keeping Track of U.S. Special Ops in Africa
• September 6, 2016
• 2,300 Words • Leave a Comment
Sometimes the real news is in the details -- or even in the discrepancies. Take, for instance, missions by America’s most elite troops in Africa. It was September 2014. The sky was bright and clear and ice blue as the camouflage-clad men walked to the open door and tumbled out into nothing. One moment members... Read More
Ann Jones: "I Didn't Serve, I Was Used"
• August 25, 2016
• 600 Words • 11 Comments • Reply
America has been committed to supporting the veterans of its wars since long before it had “United States of” in front of it. “It was a fearful sight to see them thus frying in the fire... horrible was the stink and scent thereof,” William Bradford wrote after soldiers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony massacred a... Read More
Breaking the Camouflage Wall of Silence
When AFRICOM Evaluates Itself, the News Is Grim
• August 2, 2016
• 1,700 Words • 2 Comments • Reply
It’s rare to hear one top military commander publicly badmouth another, call attention to his faults, or simply point out his shortcomings. Despite a seemingly endless supply of debacles from strategic setbacks to quagmire conflicts since 9/11, the top brass rarely criticize each other or, even in retirement, utter a word about the failings of... Read More
William Astore: We Have Met the Alien and He Is Us
• July 12, 2016
• 500 Words • 5 Comments • Reply
Imagine a secret government facility buried deep in the bowels of a mountain; a deluxe bomb shelter -- encased within dense, almost fissure-less rock -- for top government officials to ride out doomsday. I did. A lot. I spent an inordinate amount of time as a child reading everything I could find about a top... Read More
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Leaker, Speaker, Soldier, Spy
The Charmed Life of David Petraeus
• July 5, 2016
• 2,800 Words • 33 Comments • Reply
I ran into David Petraeus the other night. Or rather, I ran after him. It’s been more than a year since I first tried to connect with the retired four-star general and ex-CIA director -- and no luck yet. On a recent evening, as the sky was turning from a crisp ice blue into a... Read More
Thomas Frank: Worshipping Money in D.C.
• June 30, 2016
• 500 Words • 12 Comments • Reply
I’m no stranger to shakedowns. I’ve experienced them, in one form or another, from Asia to Africa. Sometimes the corruption is subtle. Sometimes it’s naked. Sometimes you press folded currency into someone’s palm. Sometimes there’s a more official procedure. Sometimes a payment is demanded outright. (A weapon might even be involved.) Other times, it’s up... Read More
The Numbers Racket
AFRICOM Clams Up After Commander Peddles Contradictory Statements to Congress
• June 23, 2016
• 2,200 Words • Leave a Comment
General David Rodriguez might be a modern military celebrity -- if he hadn’t spent his career ducking the spotlight. After graduating from West Point in 1976, he began his long march up the chain of command, serving in Operation Just Cause (the U.S. invasion of Panama) and Operation Desert Storm (Iraq War 1.0) before becoming... Read More
Mark Wilkerson: Batman in a Hospital Bed
• June 9, 2016
• 800 Words • 1 Comment • Reply
I can’t tell you exactly why I clicked on the article, but it was probably the title: “The Double-Tap Couple.” To me, a “double tap” is the technique of firing two gunshots in quick succession or employing two strikes in a row, as when U.S. drones or Hamas carry out attacks and then follow-up strikes... Read More
Nick Turse: from the Missing Archives of a Lost War
• May 29, 2016
• 700 Words • Leave a Comment
[Note for TomDispatch Readers: On this Memorial Day weekend dedicated to remembering those who died in America’s wars, TomDispatch brings back a powerful 2008 Nick Turse piece about two civilians, two Vietnamese, who did not, in fact, die in the long ago American conflict in their country, but did lose parts of themselves. We hope... Read More
Two Men, Two Legs, and Too Much Suffering
America's Forgotten Vietnamese Victims
• May 29, 2016
• 1,500 Words • 1 Comment • Reply
Nguyen Van Tu asks if I'm serious. Am I really willing to tell his story -- to tell the story of the Vietnamese who live in this rural corner of the Mekong Delta? Almost 40 years after guerrilla fighters in his country threw the limits of U.S. military power into stark relief -- during the... Read More
William Hartung: How to Disappear Money, Pentagon-Style
• May 24, 2016
• 700 Words • 1 Comment • Reply
Colonel Mark Cheadle, a spokesman for U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM), recently made a startling disclosure to Voice of America (VOA). AFRICOM, he said, is currently mulling over 11 possible locations for its second base on the continent. If, however, there was a frontrunner among them Cheadle wasn’t about to disclose it. All he would say... Read More
Donald Trump in South Sudan
What Trumps the Horrors of a Hellscape? The Donald!
• May 3, 2016
• 2,500 Words • 11 Comments • Reply
LEER, South Sudan -- I’m sitting in the dark, sweating. The blinding white sun has long since set, but it’s still in the high 90s, which is a relief since it was above 110 earlier. Slumped in a blue plastic chair, I’m thinking back on the day, trying to process everything I saw, the people... Read More
Engler: the Transformative Power of Democratic Uprisings
• March 6, 2016
• 700 Words • 4 Comments • Reply
“‘Do not go into Iraq. Do not attack Iraq’... I said it loud and clear, ‘You’ll destabilize the Middle East.’” So the ever-prescient Donald Trump recently recalled of his role in the months before the Bush administration launched its invasion of Iraq. An apparently committed anti-war activist in the lead-up to that conflict, he proudly... Read More
Andrew Bacevich: Donald Trump and the Remaking of America
• March 1, 2016
• 600 Words • 7 Comments • Reply
As a child of the 1980s, certain touchstones, figures, and moments are seared into my brain: Pac-Man and Michael Jackson, the personal computer, Yuppies, crack hysteria, AIDs, the Challenger disaster, and in the waning days of the decade, the fall of the Berlin Wall. Two newsmakers also stand out in my mind. From my local... Read More
Ann Jones: Social Democracy for Dummies
• January 28, 2016
• 500 Words • 11 Comments • Reply
Water drips from a leaky roof. The heat brings on a “moldy, rancid odor.” A child volunteer is tasked with killing giant roaches. Welcome to the Detroit public school system, which,according to a recent New York Times report, is “run down after years of neglect” and “teetering on the edge of financial collapse.” And yet,... Read More
The Pentagon’s Progress
Will American “Successes” Lead to More Iraqi Military Failures?
• January 21, 2016
• 4,300 Words • 1 Comment • Reply
There’s good news coming out of Iraq... again. The efforts of a 65-nation coalition and punishing U.S. airstrikes have helped local ground forces roll back gains by the Islamic State (IS). Government forces and Shiite militias, for example, recaptured the city of Tikrit, while Kurdish troops ousted IS fighters from the town of Sinjar and... Read More
America’s Secret African Drone War Against the Islamic State
Predators and the “Neutralization” of 69 People in Iraq and Syria
• December 17, 2015
• 2,400 Words • Leave a Comment
On October 7th, at an “undisclosed location” somewhere in “Southwest Asia,” men wearing different types of camouflage and dun-colored boots gathered before a black backdrop adorned with Arabic script. They were attending a ceremony that mixed solemnity with celebration, the commemoration of a year of combat that left scores of their enemies slain. One of... Read More
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About Nick Turse

Nick Turse is the associate editor of TomDispatch.com and the winner of a 2009 Ridenhour Prize for Reportorial Distinction as well as a James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism. His work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Nation, In These Times, and regularly at TomDispatch. Turse is currently a fellow at New York University's Center for the United States and the Cold War. A paperback edition of his book The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives (Metropolitan Books) was published earlier this year. His website is NickTurse.com.


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