Nick Turse is a journalist, historian and author. He is the editor of The Case for Withdrawal from Afghanistan (Verso, 2010), which brings together leading analysts from across the political spectrum, and the author of The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives (Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt, 2008).[1]
Turse is the managing editor of the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com and his writing frequently appears on that website. His writing has also appeared in The Los Angeles Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Nation, Adbusters, GOOD magazine, Le Monde Diplomatique (English- and German- language), In These Times, Mother Jones and The Village Voice, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Baltimore Sun, The Chicago Tribune, The Contra-Costa Times, The Fort Worth Star Telegram, The Hartford Courant, The Indianapolis Star, The Knoxville News Sentinel, The Salt Lake Tribune, The Seattle Times, The Sydney Morning Herald, and The Tampa Tribune, among others.[2]
Turse was the recipient of a Ridenhour Prize at the National Press Club in April 2009 for his years-long investigation of mass civilian slaughter by U.S. troops in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta, in 1968-1969, during Operation Speedy Express. In his article for The Nation, “A My Lai a Month,” he also exposed a Pentagon-level cover-up of these crimes that was abetted by a major news magazine. In 2009, he also received a James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism from Hunter College for the same article.[3]
The Ridenhour Prize foundation said of Turse:
With his Nation article “A My Lai a Month”, Nick Turse proved Ron Ridenhour’s long-held conviction that the massacre at My Lai was not an aberration. Turse uncovered declassified documents that disclosed an Army investigation of “Speedy Express,” an offensive in the Mekong Delta—mere months after My Lai—in which the Ninth Infantry Division claimed an enemy body count of 10,899 while only capturing 748 weapons. In his article, Turse writes, “The investigation paints a disturbing picture of civilian slaughter on a scale that indeed dwarfs My Lai, and of a cover-up at the Army’s highest levels.”[4]
Turse has previously been a fellow at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study and New York University's Center for the United States and the Cold War. He has a Ph.D in Sociomedical Sciences from Columbia University and is an internationally-recognized authority on U.S. war crimes during the Vietnam War. He has provided expert commentary on U.S. atrocities in Southeast Asia for such publications as The New York Times and U.S. News and World Report.[5]
Turse is currently at work on Kill Anything That Moves, a history of U.S. atrocities during the Vietnam War for Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt.[6] He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for work on Kill Anything That Moves.[7]
In a press release, publisher Henry Holt describes Kill Anything That Moves this way:
Americans have long been taught that events such as the notorious My Lai massacre were isolated incidents in the Vietnam War, carried out by "a few bad apples." But as award-winning journalist and historian Nick Turse demonstrates in this groundbreaking investigation, violence against Vietnamese noncombatants was not at all exceptional during the conflict. Rather, it was pervasive and systematic, the predictable consequence of orders to "kill anything that moves."
Drawing on more than a decade of research in secret Pentagon files and extensive interviews with American veterans and Vietnamese survivors, Turse reveals for the first time how official policies resulted in millions of innocent civilians killed and wounded. In shocking detail, he lays out the workings of a military machine that made crimes in almost every major American combat unit all but inevitable. Kill Anything That Moves takes us from archives filled with Washington's long-suppressed war crime investigations to the rural Vietnamese hamlets that bore the brunt of the war; from boot camps where young American soldiers learned to hate all Vietnamese to bloodthirsty campaigns like Operation Speedy Express, in which a general obsessed with body counts led soldiers to commit what one participant called "a My Lai a month." Thousands of Vietnam books later, Kill Anything That Moves, devastating and definitive, finally brings us face-to-face with the truth of a war that haunts Americans to this day.
Kill Anything That Moves has received extensive advance praise from veterans, experts, and historians. Vietnam veteran and retired Army colonel Andrew J. Bacevich, author of Washington Rules: America’s Path To Permanent War, wrote: “This deeply disturbing book provides the fullest documentation yet of the brutality and ugliness that marked America’s war in Vietnam. No doubt some will charge Nick Turse with exaggeration or overstatement. Yet the evidence he has assembled is irrefutable. With the publication of Kill Anything That Moves, the claim that My Lai was a one-off event becomes utterly unsustainable.”
Vietnam veteran and National Book Award winner Tim O’Brien, author of The Things They Carried, said “This book is an overdue and powerfully detailed account of widespread war crimes—homicide and torture and mutilation and rape—committed by American soldiers over the course of our military engagement in Vietnam. Nick Turse’s research and reportage is based in part on the U.S. military’s own records, reports, and transcripts, many of them long hidden from public scrutiny. Kill Anything That Moves is not only a compendium of pervasive and illegal and sickening savagery toward Vietnamese civilians, but it is also a record of repetitive deceit and cover-ups on the part of high ranking officers and officials. In the end, I hope, Turse’s book will become a hard-to-avoid, hard-to-dismiss corrective to the very common belief that war crimes and tolerance for war crimes were mere anomalies during our country’s military involvement in Vietnam.”
Jonathan Schell,who covered the Vietnam War for The New Yorker, called Kill Anything that Moves a “tour de force of reporting and research: the first time comprehensive portrait, written with dignity and skill, of what American forces actually were doing in Vietnam. The findings, hidden behind a screen of official lies and cover-ups all these years, are shocking almost beyond words.… Some thirty thousand books have been written about the Vietnam War. Many more will now be needed, and they must begin with Kill Anything That Moves.”
James Bradley, co-author of the New York Times bestseller, Flags of Our Fathers, said that “American patriots will appreciate Nick Turse’s meticulously documented book, which for the first time reveals the real war in Vietnam and explains why it has taken so long to learn the whole truth.”
Pulitzer Prize winner Seymour Hersh,who exposed the My Lai massacre, wrote that “Nick Turse reminds us again, in this painful and important book, why war should always be a last resort, and especially wars that have little to do with American national security. We failed, as Turse makes clear, to deal after the Vietnam War with the murders that took place, and today—four decades later—the lessons have yet to be learned. We still prefer kicking down doors to talking.”
Marine Corps veteran Daniel Ellsberg, who served in Vietnam with the State Department and leaked the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times, wrote that “No book I have read in decades has so shaken me, as an American. Turse lays open the ground-level reality of a war that was far more atrocious than Americans at home have ever been allowed to know. He exposes official policies that encouraged ordinary American soldiers and airmen to inflict almost unimaginable horror and suffering on ordinary Vietnamese, followed by official cover-ups as tenacious as Turse’s own decade of investigative effort against them. Kill Anything That Moves is obligatory reading for Americans, because its implications for the likely scale of atrocities and civilian casualties inflicted and covered up in our latest wars are inescapable and staggering.”
Pulitzer Prize and National book award winner Frances FitzGerald, author of Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam, said: “Meticulously researched, Kill Anything That Moves is the most comprehensive account to date of the war crimes committed by U.S. forces in Vietnam and the efforts made at the highest levels of the military to cover them up. It’s an important piece of history.”
Christian Appy, author of Patriots: The Vietnam War Remembered From All Sides, wrote: “Nick Turse has done more than anyone to demonstrate—and document—what should finally be incontrovertible: American atrocities in Vietnam were not infrequent and inadvertent, but the commonplace and inevitable result of official U.S. military policy. And he does it with a narrative that is gripping and deeply humane.”
John Prados, author of Vietnam: The History of an Unwinnable War, 1945–1975, says “In this deeply researched and provocative book Nick Turse returns us to Vietnam to raise anew the classic dilemmas of warfare and civil society. My Lai was not the full story of atrocities in Vietnam, and honestly facing the moral questions inherent in a ‘way of war’ is absolutely necessary to an effective military strategy. Turse documents a shortfall in accountability during the Vietnam War that should be disturbing to every reader.”
According to Marilyn Young, author of The Vietnam Wars, 1945–1990, “Nick Turse’s Kill Anything That Moves is essential reading, a powerful and moving account of the dark heart of the Vietnam War: the systematic killing of civilians, not as aberration but as standard operating procedure. Until this history is acknowledged it will be repeated, one way or another, in the wars the U.S. continues to fight.”[8]
Publishers Weekly wrote that "After a decade of scouring Pentagon archives and interviewing Vietnamese survivors and American vets, Turse offers this detailed, well-documented account of the “real” Vietnam War... The author shows that, contrary to popular belief, the massacre at My Lai was not an isolated incident... and Turse leaves little room for doubt that “[m]urder, torture, rape, abuse, forced displacement, home burnings, specious arrests, [and] imprisonment without due process” were encouraged by body count–minded war managers and badly trained junior officers, and abetted by Gen. William Westmoreland’s search-and-destroy strategy."[9]
Turse is also the author of an exposé of a 1970 massacre by U.S. Marines. In an article for In These Times magazine, Turse wrote:
In another of the central provinces, Quang Nam, we headed to Le Bac hamlet. I had long suspected something very dark happened there.
During the war, the Liberation Press Agency — the communications wing of the Provisional Revolutionary Government (PRG) — reported that U.S. Marines “shot 38 persons[,] mostly women and children[,] in Le Bac hamlet, Quang Nam Province on April 15, 1970.” Only weeks before those alleged killings, Marines had carried out a massacre in a neighboring district.
In his book, Son Thang: An American War Crime, Gary Solis, a war crimes scholar and veteran of the war, laid bare the details of that massacre — of 16 unarmed women and children at Son Thang — by a Marine Corps “killer team.”
Only after a group of Vietnamese complained about the deaths to Marines based near the hamlet did the Corps launch an investigation into the killing of civilians in Le Bac. The Marines eventually claimed, according to press reports at the time, that an unspecified number of civilians had indeed been killed, but that it could not be ascertained if they were killed by the Marines.
An official Marine Corps history, produced later, states that “Company B, 1st Battalion, 5th Marines engaged enemy troops near Le Bac (2) … The company called in jets and Cobra gunships; a dozen enemy troops died in the action, but so did about 30 people in the nearby hamlet.”
In 1971, during the Paris Peace talks, the PRG gave U.S. Rep. Robert L. Leggett (D-Calif.) an awkwardly translated copy of the Vietnamese document that provided information for the Liberation Press Agency broadcast. He, in turn, sent a copy to the Pentagon, which I found in the Army’s files. The typo-ridden source mentioned a survivor — a young girl named Hoang Thi Ai. Locals informed us that Hoang was not a hamlet surname, but pointed us to a woman named Ho Thi A who lived in Le Bac as a child.
She said she remembered Marines entering the hamlet on March 10, 1970, on the lunar calendar — the equivalent of the solar date of April 15, 1970. She recalled civilian deaths, too — but not the way the Marines claim they occurred. Just 8 years old at the time, Ho Thi A said she was playing in her home that morning when the aerial assault began. People ran for their bomb shelters and waited out the attack. When the bombardment ended, U.S. troops entered the hamlet on foot and people scrambled from their bunkers, fearing the Americans would throw grenades inside.
“There were three of us standing at the entrance to the bunker: me and two old women — my neighbor and my grandmother,” Ho Thi A said. One of the American troops was standing only 15 feet away when he fired. “Miss Chay was shot dead,” she said. “Then he shot my grandmother. She died too. At that moment I was so scared and ran into the bunker and hid.”
The U.S. troops threw grenades into her bunker, but because of its shape, she was shielded from the blast. Later, after the Americans left the area, she emerged just as local guerrillas, who had been hiding nearby, also appeared. She followed them to the front part of the hamlet. What they found was a scene of horror.
Lying at the entrance of a bunker were nine bodies — two families — who had been shot. All were women and children. All were civilians. In total, Ho Thi A said, Marines killed 15 people that day.[10]
Turse is the co-author of a major series of articles for the Los Angeles Times on U.S. war crimes in Vietnam that was a finalist for the 2006 Tom Renner Award for Outstanding Crime Reporting from Investigative Reporters and Editors, Inc.
This investigation, based on thousands of declassified records from the Army chief of staff's office, scores of interviews and a trip to Vietnam, found that U.S. troops reported more than 800 war crimes in Vietnam, yet many were publicly discredited even as the military uncovered evidence that they were telling the truth.
The War Crimes Files used to write the story are "part of a once-secret archive, assembled by a Pentagon task force in the early 1970s, that shows that confirmed atrocities by U.S. forces in Vietnam were more extensive than was previously known."
They detail 320 alleged incidents that were substantiated by Army investigators — not including the most notorious U.S. atrocity, the 1968 My Lai massacre. They are not a complete accounting of Vietnam war crimes, but the archive remains the largest such collection to surface to date.
The records describe recurrent attacks on ordinary Vietnamese civilians — families in their homes, farmers in rice paddies, teenagers out fishing. Hundreds of American soldiers, in interviews with Army investigators and letters to commanders, described fellow troops who murdered, raped and tortured with impunity.
Among the substantiated cases in the archive:
Seven massacres from 1967 through 1971 in which at least 137 civilians died.
Seventy-eight other attacks on noncombatants in which at least 57 were killed, 56 wounded and 15 sexually assaulted.
One hundred forty-one instances in which U.S. soldiers tortured civilian detainees or prisoners of war with fists, sticks, bats, water or electric shock.
Investigators determined that evidence against 203 soldiers accused of harming Vietnamese civilians or prisoners was strong enough to warrant formal charges. These "founded" cases were referred to the soldiers' superiors for action. Ultimately, 57 of them were court-martialed and just 23 convicted, the records show. Fourteen received prison sentences ranging from six months to 20 years, but most won significant reductions on appeal. The stiffest sentence went to a military intelligence interrogator convicted of committing indecent acts on a 13-year-old girl in an interrogation hut in 1967. He served seven months of a 20-year term, the records show.
Many substantiated cases were closed with a letter of reprimand, a fine or, in more than half the cases, no action at all.
There was little interest in prosecuting Vietnam war crimes, said Steven Chucala, who in the early 1970s was legal advisor to the commanding officer of the Army's Criminal Investigation Division. He says he disagreed with the attitude but understood it. "Everyone wanted Vietnam to go away," Chucala told the Los Angeles Times.
The investigation of the records found that these abuses were not confined to a few rogue units. They were uncovered in every Army division that operated in Vietnam.[11]
From December 1, 1968 through May 31, 1969, the U.S. 9th Infantry Division and allied units carried out Operation Speedy Express in Vietnam's Mekong Delta. The U.S. military claimed 10,889 enemy dead, with only 40 soldiers killed in this operation, but only 748 weapons were recovered (a ratio of enemy killed to weapons seized of 14.6:1). The U.S. Army after-action report attributed this to the fact the high percentage of kills made during night hours (estimated at 40%), and by air cavalry and other aerial units, as well as admitting that "many of the guerilla units were not armed with weapons". The commander of the 9th Division, Julian Ewell, was allegedly known to be obsessed with body counts and favorable kill ratios and said "the hearts and minds approach can be overdone....in the delta the only way to overcome VC control and terror is with brute force applied against the VC."[12]
The operation caused controversy when in 1972 Kevin Buckley, writing for Newsweek in the article "Pacification's Deadly Price", questioned the spectacular ratio of U.S. dead to claimed NLF (Vietcong) as well the low number of weapons recovered, and suggested that perhaps over 5,000 were innocent civilians (quoting an U.S. official).[13]
In 2008, Turse published an article in The Nation magazine that revealed an American whistle-blower had contacted the Pentagon to offer evidence of a mass killing of civilians even larger than Buckley's source indicated.
In a letter to Army Chief of Staff General William Westmoreland, the whistle-blower wrote not of a handful of massacres but of official command policies that had led to the killings of thousands of innocents:
Sir, the 9th Division did nothing to prevent the killing, and by pushing the body the count so hard, we were "told" to kill many times more Vietnamese than at My Lay, and very few per cents of them did we know were enemy....
In case you don't think I mean lots of Vietnamese got killed this way, I can give you some idea how many. A battalion would kill maybe 15 to 20 a day. With 4 battalions in the Brigade that would be maybe 40 to 50 a day or 1200 to 1500 a month, easy. (One battalion claimed almost 1000 body counts one month!) If I am only 10% right, and believe me its lots more, then I am trying to tell you about 120-150 murders, or a My Lay each month for over a year....
The snipers would get 5 or 10 a day, and I think all 4 battalions had sniper teams. That's 20 a day or at least 600 each month. Again, if I am 10% right then the snipers [alone] were a My Lay every other month.
Turse revealed that in this letter, and two more sent the following year to other high-ranking generals, the Army informant reported that artillery, airstrikes and helicopter gunships had wreaked havoc on populated areas. All it would take, he said, were a few shots from a village or a nearby tree line and troops would "always call for artillery or gunships or airstrikes." "Lots of times," he wrote, "it would get called for even if we didn't get shot at. And then when [we would] get in the village there would be women and kids crying and sometimes hurt or dead." The attacks were excused, he said, because the areas were deemed free-fire zones.
He continued: "None [of] us wanted to get blown away," he wrote, "but it wasn't right to use...civilians to set the mines off." He also explained the pitifully low weapons ratio:
compare them [body count records] with the number of weapons we got. Not the cashays [caches], or the weapons we found after a big fight with the hard cores, but a dead VC with a weapon. The General just had to know about the wrong killings over the weapons. If we reported weapons we had to turn them in, so we would say that the weapons was destroyed by bullets or dropped in a canal or pad[d]y. In the dry season, before the moonsoons, there was places where lots of the canals was dry and all the pad[dies] were. The General must have known this was made up.[14]
Turse revealed that the U.S. military had buried this evidence for decades and lied about it when contacted by Buckley.[15]
In a subsequent article, Turse revealed that the U.S. went further and investigated Operation Speedy Express themselves and also found evidence of mass killing greater than that suggested by Buckley, vindicating the Newsweek reporter.[16]
Turse won a Ridenhour Prize and a a James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism from Hunter College for his work on exposing the mass killing of Vietnamese civilians during Speedy Express.
Years before David Petraeus retired from the CIA in the wake of a sex scandal, Turse published a blistering critique of Petraeus' contentions about the Vietnam War and his boosters' efforts to recast that war as a victory for the United States. In "The Pentagon Book Club," a long book review essay published in The Nation magazine, Turse investigated Petareus' claims and weighed in on several recent histories of the Vietnam War. Turse wrote, "To a segment of the military establishment... dubbed the "Crusaders," officers who "see the Army's problems in Iraq as self-inflicted," the consequence of excessive post-Vietnam caution, Petraeus is seen as a successor to another top Army general, Creighton Abrams. A West Point grad and World War II tank commander under Gen. George Patton, Abrams assumed command of US forces in Vietnam in 1968 when his predecessor, William Westmoreland, was kicked up and out, to Army chief of staff, after a four-year run of failure in Southeast Asia." Turse ends his review by writing:
There's a moment in Petraeus's dissertation when he pauses to take stock of the "impact of America's longest war" and its fallout. He devotes not a word to Vietnamese civilians. There's no mention of women with shrapnel still lurking beneath their skin, or the men with faces melted years ago by incendiary weapons, or the inconsolable people still grieving for mothers, fathers, siblings and children gunned down decades ago. Instead, Petraeus wrote, without apparent irony, that "the psychic scars of the war may be deepest among the Army and Marine Corps leadership." Drawing too many conclusions from a years-old dissertation is a risky proposition, but Petraeus's writings then and his efforts since raise serious questions about just who he believes has suffered most because of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, what role he has played in that misery and the lessons he has drawn from the carnage. Given the Crusaders' cheery (and bizarre) conclusions that Petraeus turned the bloody US war in Iraq into a victory and that his "surge" there offers a template for similar success in Afghanistan, one also worries what dubious lessons the next generation of Crusaders will draw from him and his "better wars."[17]
Turse became the first journalist to reveal the true number of U.S. special forces operations in foreign countries in a 2011 article at TomDispatch.com. In 2010, the Washington Post claimed that that U.S. Special Operations forces were deployed in 75 countries, up from 60 at the end of the Bush presidency.[18]
Turse's interview with a Special Operations spokesman revealed that the true number was 120 countries. “We do a lot of traveling -- a lot more than Afghanistan or Iraq,” the spokesman told Turse. Turse would go on to note that this revelation mean that the U.S. military's most elite warriors, including Navy SEALs and Army Green Berets, were active in『about 60% of the world’s nations』and this was "far larger than previously acknowledged."
“We’re obviously going to have some places where it’s not advantageous for us to list where we’re at,” the source told Turse. “Not all host nations want it known, for whatever reasons they have -- it may be internal, it may be regional.”[19]
Turse has written many articles that investigate aspect of what Chalmers Johnson called the U.S. "empire of bases." In 2010, Turse was the first journalist to reveal there were more than 700 military bases in Afghanistan.[20] In a separate article Turse also revealed the number of U.S. bases by their size and the number of troops based on their premises.[21]
In 2011, Turse broke a story detailing the whereabouts of more than 1,000 U.S. bases around the world.[22]
From 2010-2012, Turse investigated U.S. military base-building in Afghanistan. In 2010, a spokesperson from the U.S.-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) told Turse that colaition forces had nearly 400 Afghan bases. In early 2012, Turse reported that the number had grown to 450. By the end of 2012, ISAF admitted to Turse that the command had around 550 bases in Afghanistan, but Turse wrote, "that may only be the tip of the iceberg." He continued, "When you add in ISAF checkpoints -- those small baselets used to secure roads and villages -- to the already bloated number of mega-bases, forward operating bases, combat outposts, and patrol bases, the number jumps to 750. Count all foreign military installations of every type, including logistical, administrative, and support facilities, and the official count offered by ISAF Joint Command reaches a whopping 1,500 sites."[23]
In 2012, Turse conducted a wide-ranging investigation of U.S. military operations, base-building and infrastructure creation in Africa. Turse was the first mainstream journalist to reveal the existence of the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) Surface Distribution Network, a series of roads and sea routes that the Pentagon has dubbed "the New Spice Route," an homage to the medieval trade network that connected Europe, Africa, and Asia. Turse wrote:
On the highway from Djibouti to Ethiopia, for example, one can see the bare outlines of this shadow war at the truck stops where local drivers take a break from their long-haul routes. The same is true in other African countries. The nodes of the network tell part of the story: Manda Bay, Garissa, and Mombasa in Kenya; Kampala and Entebbe in Uganda; Bangui and Djema in the Central African Republic; Nzara in South Sudan; Dire Dawa in Ethiopia; and the Pentagon’s showpiece African base, Camp Lemonnier, in Djibouti on the coast of the Gulf of Aden, among others.
Turse quotes Pat Barnes, a spokesman for U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM), as stating that Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti "serves as the only official U.S. base on the continent." Barnes eventually admitted that in “several locations in Africa, AFRICOM has a small and temporary presence of personnel. In all cases, these military personnel are guests within host-nation facilities, and work alongside or coordinate with host-nation personnel.” Turse demonstrated that "official designations aside -- the U.S. maintains a surprising number of bases in Africa. And 'strengthening' African armies turns out to be a truly elastic rubric for what’s going on."
Turse revealed that the U.S. is now involved, directly and by proxy, in military and surveillance operations against an expanding list of regional enemies. They include al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb in North Africa; the Islamist movement Boko Haram in Nigeria; possible al-Qaeda-linked militants in post-Qaddafi Libya; Joseph Kony’s murderous Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) in the Central African Republic, Congo, and South Sudan; Mali’s Islamist Rebels of the Ansar Dine, al-Shabaab in Somalia; and guerrillas from al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula across the Gulf of Aden in Yemen. Specifically, Turse noted that U.S. contractor-operated surveillance aircraft are flying missions out of Entebbe, Uganda, are scouring the territory used by Kony’s LRA at the Pentagon’s behest, and that 100 to 200 U.S. commandos share a base with the Kenyan military at Manda Bay. Additionally, U.S. drones are being flown out of Arba Minch airport in Ethiopia and from the Seychelles Islands in the Indian Ocean, while drones and F-15 fighter-bombers have been operating out of Camp Lemonnier as part of the shadow wars being waged by the U.S. military and the CIA in Yemen and Somalia. Surveillance planes used for spy missions over Mali, Mauritania, and the Sahara desert are also flying missions from Ouagadougou in Burkina Faso, and plans are reportedly in the works for a similar base in the newborn nation of South Sudan.
Additionally, Turse revealed that U.S. special operations forces are stationed at a string of even more shadowy forward operating posts on the continent, including one in Djema in the Central Africa Republic and others in Nzara in South Sudan and Dungu in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The U.S. also has had troops deployed in Mali, despite having officially suspended military relations with that country following a coup. Further, Turse found that the U.S. Navy also has a forward operating location, manned mostly by Seabees, Civil Affairs personnel, and force-protection troops, known as Camp Gilbert in Dire Dawa, Ethiopia. U.S. military documents indicate that there may be other even lower-profile U.S. facilities in the country. In addition to Camp Lemonnier, the U.S. military also maintains another hole-and-corner outpost in Djibouti—a Navy port facility that lacks even a name.[24]
Colonel Tom Davis of AFRICOM took exception to Turse's expose and issued a response in which he attempted to undercut Turse's reporting. Turse countered with a blistering point-by-point refutation of Davis's contentions. It turned out that many of the supposed errors and inaccuracies were misreadings, matters of opinion or semantics, or were actually issues that David had with other media outlets like The Washington Post.[25]
In the winter 2000 issue of the academic journal 49th parallel Nicholas Turse, wrote of the Columbine High School massacre: "[Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold] may be the Mark Rudd and Abbie Hoffman figures of today." Turse wrote: Approve or disapprove of their methods, vilify them as miscreants, but don’t dare disregard these modern radicals...[26]
Turse has disavowed the sentiments expressed in that article and publicly responded to those who paint his more than a decade-old article as representative of his thinking or his work as a whole, writing that some critics “ignore the scores of articles I’ve written in recent years and seize on the first (and worst) thing I ever published -- an ill-conceived, poorly written piece on violent radical youth that fails to accurately reflect my beliefs today. I’d disown it if I could, but I can’t, so if that’s the best you’ve got, have at it.”[27]
In a 2011 expose, Turse interviewed U.S. congressmen who fought against the so-called "Ground Zero Mosque" on behalf of 9/11 families and like-minded Americans but supported the training of Saudi pilots in the United States despite the fact that 9/11 families were against it.
"I do not believe the construction of this Islamic centre so near to Ground Zero is proper," said Senator Mike Crapo. "This construction proposal is proving highly divisive to Americans across the political spectrum who are still seeking to recover fully from the emotional, economic and social scars caused by the terrorist attacks."
Peter Gadiel, whose son was killed in the World Trade Center attacks told Turse: "Americans will die and the people in Washington don't give a damn."
But Crapo touted the economic benefits to Turse. "Saudis will have to build and pay for their own infrastructure and housing that will enhance the bases' [sic] capacity for many years," he wrote. "In addition, [Royal Saudi Air Force] members and their families personal spending will boost the local community."[28]
Turse has written extensively on the U.S. arms trade in the Middle East, including investigations of U.S. military-brokered arms sales to Yemen and Bahrain.[29]
Turse investigated U.S. military drone bases around the world and found there were more than 60 of them.[30]
Turse wrote an investigative report on Pentagon efforts to train surrogate forces around the world, including Honduras, Antigua and Barbuda, Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Canada, Dominica, the Dominican Republic, Grenada, Guyana, Haiti, Jamaica, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Lucia, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Suriname, Trinidad and Tobago, Bahamas, Belize, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Guyana, Honduras, Jamaica, Mexico, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Trinidad and Tobago, Uruguay, India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, New Zealand, Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Thailand, Tonga, Benin, Ethiopia, Malawi, Togo, Uganda, Burundi, Senegal, Burkina Faso, Guinea, Gambia, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Kenya, Iraq, Afghanistan and many other countries.[31]
