Reading Time: 6 minutes This month marks the 75th anniversary of JFK’s famed WWII heroic moment. A perfect time to examine whatever correlations there may be between leadership, military service, and views on war and peace.
Reading Time: 4 minutes On Memorial Day, the media usually serves up images of cemeteries, rows of tombstones, and endless American flags. However, the other images associated with war get short thrift — but not here at WhoWhatWhy.
Reading Time: 1 minute In November, WhoWhatWhy alerted its readers to the fact that President Donald Trump is continuing the Obama administration’s drone war while suppressing important information on the drone strikes conducted this year.While that is bad enough, things are actually much worse.The number of drone strikes in Somalia and Yemen has soared as Trump appears to have Read More
Reading Time: 3 minutes Veterans Day is a celebrated affair, and veterans are revered in the US. So why hasn’t the government done more to ease their challenging transition to civilian life?
Reading Time: 20 minutes A look at how the US has favored and funded terror groups since long before 9/11.
Reading Time: 2 minutes President Donald Trump commemorated the 16th anniversary of America’s longest and costliest war by deploying an additional 3500 troops — a $1 billion annual investment to prolong US involvement in Afghanistan.
Reading Time: 23 minutes A highly engrossing essay on the images of war, what they do to us, and what the military does about that.
Reading Time: 2 minutes Minerals found in thousands of products Americans use every day are paying for weapons in one of the bloodiest conflicts in Africa. Federal rules intended to get companies to stop buying them have proven ineffective.
Reading Time: 1 minute Just how bad is the situation in Syria? Four million Syrians have fled the country in the past four years as its cities smolder and civil war rages on. Strategic dysfunction on the part of the international community, led by the US, continued airstrikes, and growing violence perpetrated by the Islamic State are definitely part of the story that led to Syria’s descent into chaos. RadioWhoWhatWhy’s Jeff Schechtman sits down with Charles Glass, author of Syria Burning, to learn the rest of it.
Reading Time: 15 minutes If you want to know the who, what, why of how things got so bad in the Syria (and, in some ways, the rest of the Middle East)—read this excerpt from Syria Burning by Charles Glass, a book so beautifully written you will hardly know you are reading. It is more like seeing.
Published by OR Books, New York and London, 2015.
Reading Time: 1 minute WhoWhatWhy Founder and Editor-in-Chief Russ Baker talks about US and world history, GroupThink, propaganda, disinformation, war, profits, bank failures and other crimes, scandals that destroy those who defy the system, and the role of the Bush clan in it all—with popular Denver radio host Peter Boyles. Some context as a third Bush contests the White House.
Reading Time: 1 minute Blackwater may have become a symbol of all that can go wrong when government contractors outnumber trained military personnel, but what really happened in the killing fields of Iraq and Afghanistan? WhoWhatWhy’s Jeff Schechtman sits down with Blackwater founder Erik Prince to discuss the history and future of “outsourced” warfare.
Reading Time: 1 minute Paul DeRienzo appeared on the Thom Hartmann Program to talk about the risk of contamination and explosions from America’s nuclear stockpile waste.
Reading Time: 1 minute Earlier this year, two innocent hostages—one American, one Italian—were killed by a US-led unmanned drone strike meant to target al-Qaeda. By some estimates, the drone strikes that President Obama has authorized have murdered more innocent people than the 9/11 attacks. As war rages on across the Middle East and the US continues to fire unmanned strikes that are killing civilians, it’s worth looking back and discovering how this technology came to be… and how it could be put to positive uses instead. See this documentary.
Reading Time: 4 minutes In honor of Memorial Day, we present works of art depicting scenes from various American wars of the last two centuries.
Reading Time: 3 minutes The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) recently found that half of all the money poured into reconstruction efforts has been wasted, misappropriated, or missing. The embassy in Kabul responded with bold moves to recuperate the funds: ordering SIGAR to cut its staff by 40 percent.
Reading Time: 3 minutes Check out the latest outrageous waste of US taxpayer dollars for not helping the Afghan people. It truly is like pouring a sack of cash into a sinkhole.
Reading Time: 1 minute This excerpt from Bob Coen and Eric Nadler’s film Shadow War of the Sahara, originally broadcast on the Franco-German channel ARTE, charts the rise of the US military’s AFRICA COMAND (AFRICOM). The video reveals why AFRICOM’s chief critic, Libya’s Mohammar Gaddafi, had to be removed from power for the project to succeed.
Reading Time: 2 minutes The War on Drugs has caused just as much damage, destruction, and loss of life as any war in the traditional sense. Rebecca Gordon, University of San Francisco professor and author of the book Mainstreaming Torture: Ethical Approaches in the Post-9/11 United States, joins us to discuss.
Reading Time: 2 minutes $35 billion of the Department of Defense’s Afghanistan reconstruction budget can’t be accounted for. That’s $10 billion more than Afghanistan’s entire GDP in 2013.