Article
The Logic of Torture
what is difficult is separating what we now know from what we have long known but have mostly refused to admit.
June 24, 2004
Menu
Archives
Search
Categories
Category: Article
Article
Torture and Truth
Last November in Iraq, I traveled to Fallujah during the early days of what would become known as the “Ramadan Offensive”—when suicide bombers in the space of less than an hour destroyed the Red Cross headquarters and four police stations, and daily attacks by insurgents against US troops doubled, and the American adventure in Iraq entered a bleak tunnel from which it has yet to emerge.
June 10, 2004
Article
Campaigns
As the war in Iraq enters its second year, Americans find themselves trapped in an epistemological black hole: the war’s end recedes into an indefinite future while its beginning grows daily more contentious and obscure.
April 5, 2004
Article
Delusions in Baghdad: An Exchange
I am glad that Ambassador Horan finds my article “interesting and accurate, as far as it goes.” I must confess that I feel the same way about his letter—up to and including the implication that the writer does not, alas, go quite far enough.
February 12, 2004
Article
Delusions in Baghdad
Autumn in Baghdad is cloudy and gray. Trapped in rush-hour traffic one October morning, without warning my car bucked up and back, like a horse whose reins had been brutally pulled.
December 18, 2003
Article
The Struggles of Democracy and Empire
A year after a tiny band of religious zealots managed with stunning audacity to mutilate the face of America, the world’s sole superpower trembles on the threshold of a new imperial season.
October 8, 2003
Article
Iraq: How Not to Win a War
We see the world through the stories we tell, and until recently the story most Americans told themselves about the war in Iraq was a simple and dramatic narrative of imminent threat, daring triumph, and heroic liberation —a story neatly embodied in images of a dictator’s toppling statue and a president in full flight gear swaggering across a carrier deck.
September 25, 2003
Article
The Erotic Pull of the Strange: An Introduction
The first time I was killed, or nearly so, came
July 19, 2003
Article
The War Behind Closed Doors: A Frontline Interview with Mark Danner
PBS Frontline Documentary A “Frontline” interview with Mark Danner Can
February 20, 2003
Article
The Battlefield in the American Mind
In Afghanistan, the targets are running out. Such are the frustrations of the powerful; Joseph Conrad, writing of an African “heart of darkness” a century ago, well understood: “Once, I remember, we came upon a man-of-war anchored off the coast.
October 16, 2001
Article
The Road to Illegitimacy
After you have spent some days searching for the secret of political legitimacy in Miami and West Palm Beach, you want to go further.
February 22, 2001
Article
Scandal and the Road to Deadlock
Gaze upward, through the gaseous clouds of rhetoric littering the sky from the campaign that would not end—”I will never let you down,” “I will restore honor and dignity to the White House”—and you can spy, casting a shadow on the land like Barthelme’s Dead Father, an enormous pair of lips, belonging not to the Vice President or the Texas governor but to a young woman from Beverly Hills who one fateful day delivered a slice of pizza to the President of the United States.
December 21, 2000