Nick Turse | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1975 (age 48–49) |
| Alma mater | Rutgers University-Newark, MA Columbia University, PhD |
| Occupation(s) | Journalist, author |
Nick Turse (born 1975) is an American investigative journalist, historian, and author. [1] [2] He is the associate editor and research director of the blog TomDispatch [3] [4] and a fellow at The Nation Institute. [5]
Turse earned an MA in history from Rutgers University–Newark in 1999 [6] and his doctorate in sociomedical sciences from the Columbia University's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS) in 2005. [7] As a graduate student, Turse was a fellow at Harvard University's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study in 2010-2011 [8] and at New York University's Center for the United States and the Cold War. He also worked as an associate research scientist at the Mailman School's of Public Health Center for the History and Ethics at Columbia University. [9]
In 2001, while researching in the U.S. National Archives, Turse discovered records of a Pentagon task force called the Vietnam War Crimes Working Group that was formed as a result of the My Lai massacre. These records became the focus of his doctoral dissertation, Kill Anything That Moves: United States War Crimes and Atrocities in Vietnam, 1965–1973. [10] [11]
Turse is a contributing writer at the blog TomDispatch. [3] He has written for publications such as The Guardian , The New York Times , [12] the Los Angeles Times , [13] Harper's Magazine , [14] Vice News [15] and the BBC [16] on subjects such as ethnic cleansing in South Sudan, [14] the U.S. military in Africa, [3] [15] [17] [18] the video game industry, [19] street art, [20] the war in Afghanistan, [21] and the Vietnam War. [12] [22] He has also reviewed books for the San Francisco Chronicle , [23] The Daily Beast , [24] Asia Times , [25] and other publications. [26] [27]
Turse has reported on the South Sudanese civil war that began in 2013 including an investigation of a government ethnic cleansing campaign for Harper's, and wrote a book on the South Sudanese civil war, Next Time They'll Come to Count The Dead. Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch wrote, "Turse gives a sobering account of the horrific crimes against ordinary people that define South Sudan's conflict. He shows how efforts to count the dead, investigate the crimes, and bring perpetrators to justice have so far failed. His compelling account reminds us why accountability is both urgent and necessary." [28] The Los Angeles Review of Books said Turse "delivers a scathing and deeply reported account of South Sudan's suffering since its collapse in December 2013." [29] Next Time They'll Come to Count The Dead was a finalist for the 2016 Investigative Reporters and Editors, Inc. book award. [30]
Turse was part of the investigative team at The Intercept that won the 2016 New York Press Club Award for Special Event Reporting [31] and the 2016 Online Journalism Association Award for Investigative Data Journalism for "The Drone Papers". [32] "The Intercept" had obtained a cache of secret documents detailing the inner workings of the U.S. military's assassination program in Afghanistan, Yemen, and Somalia. The documents, provided by a whistleblower, offered an unprecedented glimpse into President Obama's drone wars. [33]
Turse is the co-author of a series of articles for the Los Angeles Times that was a finalist for the 2006 Tom Renner Award for Outstanding Crime Reporting from Investigative Reporters and Editors, Inc. [34] This investigation, based on declassified Army records, interviews, and a trip to Vietnam, found that U.S. troops reported more than 800 war crimes in Vietnam. Turse asserted that many were publicly discredited even as the military uncovered evidence that they were telling the truth. [35]
In a 2008 exposé in The Nation for which he won the Ridenhour Prize, Turse reported on a veteran whistleblower who served in Operation Speedy Express. [36]
Turse has described Kill Anything That Moves... (2013) as a history of Vietnamese "civilian suffering" at the hands of U.S. troops during the Vietnam War. [1] The book is based on archival materials Turse discovered and interviews he conducted with eyewitnesses in the U.S. and Vietnam, including a hundred American Vietnam War veterans. [37] Turse won a 2014 American Book Award [6] and an Izzy (I.F. Stone) Award for Kill Anything That Moves.... [38]
Writing in The Huffington Post, Peter Van Buren called the book "one of the most important books about the American War in Vietnam." [39] John Tirman of The Washington Post wrote, "Turse forcefully argues the narrower question of how the government failed to prosecute crimes committed in Vietnam or Cambodia." [40]
Writing in Proceedings Magazine, the official publication of the U.S. Naval Institute, Richard Ruth, a professor of SE Asian Studies at the U.S. Naval Academy wrote: "Turse argues that the enormous toll of civilian victims was neither accidental nor unpredictable. The Pentagon's demand for quantifiable corpses surged down the chain of command, through all branches of the U.S. military, until many units had become fixated on producing indiscriminate casualties that they could claim as enemy kills. Under this system, killing was incentivized: those with high body counts not only got promoted more quickly, their units were treated better and enjoyed greater safety than those who missed their 'killing quotas'... The incentivizing of death encouraged some U.S. soldiers to rack up thousands of kills over multiple tours. In a telling detail repeated in many of the case studies examined, the alleged Viet Cong eliminated by these American super killers often had no weapons on them when they were gunned down. Turse makes it clear that such high numbers would have been all but impossible without the inclusion of innocent bystanders." [41] Ruth also wrote: "Turse combines original on-site investigations and fresh archival research with a rich sampling of supporting material from several well-known histories and memoirs. A journalist by training, he interviewed survivors from several massacres as a supplement to the Criminal Investigation Command files he uncovered. The disparity in details between the survivors' horrific recollections and the doubting tone of the official military files is jarring. In many of the cases the reported war crimes, most of them based on evidence from concerned GIs, are dismissed for lack of interest as much as for lack of evidence," and "Turse's study is not anti-veteran, anti-military, or anti-American." [41]
In Military Review , journalist and Vietnam war correspondent Arnold R. Isaacs states, "it would be a mistake to dismiss the facts set out in this book just because one dislikes the author's political slant. His conclusions may be overstated, but Turse makes a strong case that the dark side of America's war in Vietnam was a good deal darker than is commonly remembered. If the American war was not a crime against humanity, Turse confronts us with convincing evidence that there was an American war that it is hard to call anything else—and that we should not scrub this out of our history." [42]
In another review of Turse's book, Peter Zinoman and Gary Kulik have accused Turse of omitting crucial context, selectively quoting "inflammatory witness comments" without corroboration, and pursuing an "ideologically driven caricature of the war in Vietnam. They also criticized Turse's approach as outdated and isolated from the current revisionist trends in the historical study of military violence against civilians. They stated that Turse's book continues following the orthodox approach—the "Americanist view of the war in Vietnam in history and memory". Turse's work was pointed out as partial, misleading, and flawed methodologically." [43] Gary Kulik contends that the works of Nick Turse and one of his mentors, Christian Appy, are overly-supportive of the official Vietnamese communist narrative of the war that attempts to erase any histories/memories of South Vietnam before and after the North Vietnamese communist government violated the 1972 Paris Peace Accord, attacked, and took over Saigon and the South Vietnam. [44]
Noting that the U.S. Africa Command (Africom) contends that it maintains only a token presence on the African continent, Turse found recent U.S. military involvement with 49 African nations. [3] He investigated the size and scope of U.S. military operations in Africa and concluded, "From north to south, east to west, the Horn of Africa to the Sahel, the heart of the continent to the islands off its coasts, the U.S. military is at work. Base construction, security cooperation engagements, training exercises, advisory deployments, special operations missions, and a growing logistics network, all undeniable evidence of expansion—except at U.S. Africa Command. [3] In an investigation for The Intercept , Turse revealed U.S. Africa Command's previously unreported claims the African continent is home to almost 50 terrorist organizations and "illicit groups" that threaten U.S. interests. [17]
Kelley B. Vlahos, the managing editor at The American Conservative , called Turse "by far the most dogged reporter of the U.S. military operations in Africa." [45]
Turse has carried out extensive investigations of the U.S. military's most elite troops. [46] [47] Turse uncovered that in 2014, elite U.S. troops were dispatched to 70 percent of the countries on the planet and were carrying out missions in 80 to 90 nations each day. [48] In a 2015 article for The Nation, Turse revealed that under the Obama administration, U.S. special operations forces deployed to 147 countries that year. [49] Turse followed up to show that elite forces like Navy SEALs and Army Special forces deployed to 138 nations in 2016. [50] In 2017, Turse wrote an article that revealed U.S. special forces had already deployed to 137 countries by mid-year. [51]
In a major investigation carried out by 100Reporters and The Intercept, Turse revealed "...the largely unknown details of a vast constellation of global training exercises, operations, facilities, and schools—a shadowy network of U.S. programs that every year provides instruction and assistance to approximately 200,000 foreign soldiers, police, and other personnel." Data leaked by a whistleblower showed that training was carried out at no fewer than 471 locations in 120 countries—on every continent but Antarctica—involving, on the U.S. side, 150 defense agencies, civilian agencies, armed forces colleges, defense training centers, military units, private companies, and NGOs, as well as the National Guard forces of five states. [52]
In a separate investigation, Turse analyzed the expansion of the U.S. military's Joint Combined Exchange Training (JCET) program, which is designed to train America's special operators in a variety of missions from "foreign internal defense" to "unconventional warfare". Analyzing government files, Turse found that U.S. troops carried out approximately one mission every two days in 2014. Navy SEALs, Army Green Berets, and others on 176 individual JCETs, a 13 percent increase from 2013. The number of countries involved jumped even further, from 63 to 87. [53]
In an earlier investigation for The Intercept , Turse revealed "that from 2012 to 2014 some of America's most elite troops—including Navy SEALs and Army Green Berets—carried out 500 Joint Combined Exchange Training missions around the world", a number that the U.S. military had previously refused to reveal. [54]
With journalists Robert Dreyfuss and Sarah Holewinski, Turse investigated civilian casualties in Afghanistan in a special issue of The Nation. [55] They found that no agency or entity had tracked civilian casualties over the entire conflict. [55] In 2008, the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) and the U.S. military set up a Civilian Casualty Tracking Cell whose goal was to track and lower civilian casualties. According to Dreyfuss and Turse, most civilians who died in the conflict did so at the hands of the Taliban and its allies, [55] but that many thousands of Afghan civilians had been killed by U.S. and allied forces. [55]
In the winter 2000 issue of the journal 49th Parallel, Turse wrote of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the perpetrators of the Columbine High School massacre, "Who would not concede that terrorizing the American machine, at the very site where it exerts its most powerful influence, is a truly revolutionary task? To be inarticulate about your goals, even to not understand them, does not negate their existence. Approve or disapprove of their methods, vilify them as miscreants, but don't dare disregard these modern radicals as anything less than the latest incarnation of disaffected insurgents waging the ongoing American revolution." [56] Historian David Farber of Temple University wrote that Turse's assertion "only makes sense in an academic culture in which transgression is by definition political and in which any rage against society can be considered radical." [57]
The Vietnam War was an armed conflict in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia fought between North Vietnam and South Vietnam and their allies. North Vietnam was supported by the Soviet Union and China, while South Vietnam was supported by the United States and other anti-communist nations. The conflict was the second of the Indochina Wars and a major proxy war of the Cold War between the Soviet Union and US. Direct US military involvement greatly escalated from 1965 until its withdrawal in 1973. The fighting spilled over into the Laotian and Cambodian Civil Wars, which ended with all three countries becoming communist in 1975.
William Childs Westmoreland was a United States Army general, most notably the commander of United States forces during the Vietnam War from 1964 to 1968. He served as Chief of Staff of the United States Army from 1968 to 1972.
The Phoenix Program was designed and initially coordinated by the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) during the Vietnam War, involving the American, South Vietnamese militaries, and a small amount of Special forces operatives from the Australian Army Training Team Vietnam. In 1970, CIA responsibility was phased out, and the program was put under the authority of the Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support (CORDS).
Estimates of casualties of the Vietnam War vary widely. Estimates can include both civilian and military deaths in North and South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.
Michael T. Klare is a Five Colleges professor of Peace and World Security Studies, whose department is located at Hampshire College, defense correspondent of The Nation magazine and author of Resource Wars and Blood and Oil: The Dangers and Consequences of America's Growing Petroleum Dependency (Metropolitan). His 2019 book is, All Hell Breaking Loose: the Pentagon's Perspective on Climate Change (Metropolitan). Klare also teaches at Amherst College, Smith College, Mount Holyoke College and the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
The "Winter Soldier Investigation" was a media event sponsored by the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) from January 31, 1971, to February 2, 1971. It was intended to publicize war crimes and atrocities by the United States Armed Forces and their allies in the Vietnam War. The VVAW challenged the morality and conduct of the war by showing the direct relationship between military policies and war crimes in Vietnam. The three-day gathering of 109 veterans and 16 civilians took place in Detroit, Michigan. Discharged servicemen from each branch of the armed forces, as well as civilian contractors, medical personnel and academics, all gave testimony about war crimes they had committed or witnessed during the years 1963–1970.
Operation Speedy Express was a controversial military operation conducted by the United States Army's 9th Infantry Division during the Vietnam War in the Mekong Delta provinces of Kiến Hòa and Vĩnh Bình. The operation, led by Major-General Julian Ewell, was part of counterinsurgency operations by the United States Armed Forces which targeted the Viet Cong (VC). U.S. forces aimed to interdict VC lines of communication and prevent Viet Cong personnel from establishing outposts in the region via the operation. The U.S. claimed the operation was successful in achieving its objectives, although the VC denied this and claimed the operation failed to stop their activities in the region.
The National Committee for a Citizens Commission of Inquiry on U.S. war crimes in Vietnam was founded in New York by Ralph Schoenman in November 1969 to document American atrocities throughout Indochina. The formation of the organization was prompted by the disclosure of the My Lai Massacre on November 12, 1969, by Seymour Hersh, writing for the New York Times. The group was the first to bring to public attention the testimony of American Vietnam War veterans who had witnessed or participated in atrocities.
Thomas M. Engelhardt is an American writer and editor. He is the creator of Type Media Center's tomdispatch.com, an online blog. He is also the co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of the 1998 book, The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation.
The United States Armed Forces and its members have violated the law of war after the signing of the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 and the signing of the Geneva Conventions. The United States prosecutes offenders through the War Crimes Act of 1996 as well as through articles in the Uniform Code of Military Justice. The United States signed the 1999 Rome Statute but it never ratified the treaty, taking the position that the International Criminal Court (ICC) lacks fundamental checks and balances. The American Service-Members' Protection Act of 2002 further limited US involvement with the ICC. The ICC reserves the right of states to prosecute war crimes, and the ICC can only proceed with prosecution of crimes when states do not have willingness or effective and reliable processes to investigate for themselves. The United States says that it has investigated many of the accusations alleged by the ICC prosecutors as having occurred in Afghanistan, and thus does not accept ICC jurisdiction over its nationals.
The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives is a book about the United States military, written by journalist Nick Turse. It was published in 2008 in hardcover format by Metropolitan Books. The book describes the vast changes in the industrial complex of the U.S. military from the days of President Dwight D. Eisenhower to 2008, its effect on American society, and how the military and private business spheres interact with each other. The book received positive reviews in Mother Jones and Inter Press Service, and a critical review in Kirkus Reviews.
The Vietnam War Crimes Working Group (VWCWG) was a Pentagon task force set up in the wake of the My Lai massacre and its media disclosure. The goal of the VWCWG was to attempt to ascertain the veracity of emerging claims of war crimes and atrocities by U.S. armed forces in Vietnam allegedly committed during the Vietnam War period.
The American Empire Project is a book series that deals with imperialist and exceptionalist tendencies in US foreign policy in the early 21st century. The series is published by Metropolitan Books and includes contributions by such notable American thinkers and authors as Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Chalmers Johnson and Andrew Bacevich. The project's goal is to critique what the authors consider the imperial ambitions of the United States and to explore viable alternatives for foreign policy.
Alexander Demitri "Alex" Shimkin was an American war correspondent who was killed in the Vietnam War. He is notable for his investigation of non-combatant casualties in Operation Speedy Express.
Julian Johnson Ewell was a career United States Army officer who served in World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War. He commanded the 9th Infantry Division and II Field Force in Vietnam, and attained the rank of lieutenant general.
Deborah Nelson is a Pulitzer prize-winning freelance journalist at Reuters and the Associate Professor of Investigative Reporting at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland.
The "Mere Gook Rule" (MGR) was a controversial name that U.S. soldiers in the Vietnam War had for what they claim was an unofficial policy under which soldiers would be prosecuted very leniently, if at all, for harming or killing "gooks" – a commonly-used derogatory slang term for the Vietnamese – even if the victims turned out to be civilians with no connection to the Viet Cong or to the North Vietnamese Army.
The Thuy Bo incident was the killing of civilians by U.S. Marines from 31 January to 1 February 1967, during the Vietnam War in Thủy Bồ village in Điện Bàn District, Quảng Nam Province 15 km southwest of Đà Nẵng, in an area close to the foothills of the Central Highlands and situated near the Bo Bo Hills. Vietnamese communist sources claim that the Marines massacred civilians here and the memorial erected to the event records 145 civilian deaths, mainly women, children and elderly men. US sources claim that 22 civilians were killed in two days of fighting between Marines and the Vietcong who occupied the village.
Terry Marvell Whitmore was an American soldier, deserter and actor.
127e programs, also known as 127 Echo programs, refers to a number of counterterrorism operations led by United States special operations forces under the legal authority of Section 127e of Title 10 of the United States Code. According to The Intercept, at least 23 different operations were conducted by the American military under 127e authority between 2017 and 2020, costing at least $310 million.
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