September 9th is my cousin Laura’s birthday. She would have been 62. She died Wednesday, of lung cancer, shortly after I arrived from a 14-hour marathon drive from Bremerton, Wash. On my way down, I prayed that she would die peacefully. Instead she died gasping for her last breaths. It was horrific and heartbreaking.
In this …
In an era where yellow “Support the Troops” magnets adorn every other vehicle on the road and where rubber bracelets (color-coded for the cause célèbre) serve more as accessories than symbols of true compassion, I find myself wondering what we have learned as a nation during a decade of war. As the tenth anniversary of 9/11 …
As the commentaries, retrospectives and meditations pile up ten years after 9/11, expect quite a few in their closing paragraphs to look toward the next grand geo-political challenge facing the U.S. A decade of costly adventurism in the Middle East and Afghanistan, many will argue, distracted U.S. policy making from the new realities of …
It’s a fair question as the 10th anniversary of the horrific attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon looms. After all, it was the most shocking macro-event most Americans alive have experienced. It changed our way of life, or at least our way of living. It also triggered two costly and continuing wars. If we did overreact, …
In this week of massive 9/11 coverage, it’s important to keep terror threats in perspective. The recent hot threat seems to be “lone wolves” who become jihadists over the Internet while living somewhere in America. To be sure, there are such animals; Exhibit A is Army Major Nidal Hassan, who killed 13 at Fort Hood in 2009. …
The 10th anniversary of 9/11 closes in on us this week. Try as you might, you will not be able to avoid it. Amid the pathos and bathos, it’s time to take a knee and conduct a map check.
Just to cut to the chase: you can’t argue with success, and on 9/12 most Americans were petrified a second wave of attacks was likely. It hasn’t …
Greg Jaffe had a spot-on piece in the Washington Post‘s Labor Day edition discussing the U.S. government’s notion that permanent war is now the American way of life. He captures the all-but-paranoid notion that foreign enemies are forever plotting ways to end the American way of life, as we know it.
But while that is the view of …
It’s hard to believe — at least for some of us — that it has been a decade since 9/11. Before then, covering the military meant going out to the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, California, to witness future ways of war that, in hindsight, seem obsolete. For the past decade, the U.S. military — and indeed, the U.S. …
The latest in the alleged role the U.S. played in enhanced interrogation — or torture, if you prefer — from a former ace TIME correspondent:
By Adam Zagorin
Last June the U.S. Supreme Court decided not to consider a case brought by former U.S. war-on-terror prisoners seeking damages from a Boeing subsidiary that had allegedly …
Here’s an eye-opener: the number of U.S. troops killed in action in Afghanistan in August — 61 so far, according to the independent iCasualties.org — is more than the total who died in the first three years of the war: 59.
In fact, the deaths of 30 U.S. troops — including 17 Navy SEALs — shot down in their CH-47 Chinook …
The Pentagon is always praising competition. So it’s a disconcerting piece that Sharon Weinberger has just posted on the Center for Public Integrity’s website:
While the Pentagon says its overall level of competition has remained steady over the past 10 years, publicly available data shows that Defense Department dollars flowing into
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There was a pretty big movement of U.S. troops this weekend, and here’s betting you didn’t even hear about it. Some 200 wounded military personnel traveled five miles from the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., to Bethesda Naval Hospital in Maryland. That’s because, on September 15, after 102 years in operation, …
Colleague Joe Klein has a great cover story this week on the flip side of veterans’ joblessness, PTSD and suicide: the exemplary examples being set in fields far removed from the battlefields by vets of our post-9/11 wars. As he notes, it’s currently behind the Time paywall, which means you won’t be able to read it online for awhile. …
