culture September 16, 2015

Objective Troy: A Terrorist, a President, and the Rise of the Drone by Scott Shane

When Mohammad Youssuf Abdulazeez opened fire on two US military centers in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in July, killing four Marines and a Navy sailor, he was acting, at least in part, at the suggestion of a man who had been dead for four years. Among Abdulazeez’s possessions, investigators reportedly found various CDs of sermons by Anwar al-Awlaki, a bookish, US-born al-Qaeda cleric who spread a vernacular, and thus deeply effective and reproducible, call for global jihad.

When Mohammad Youssuf Abdulazeez opened fire on two US military centers in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in July, killing four Marines and a Navy sailor, he was acting, at least in part, at the suggestion of a man who had been dead for four years. Among Abdulazeez’s possessions, investigators reportedly found various CDs of sermons by Anwar al-Awlaki, a bookish, US-born al-Qaeda cleric who spread a vernacular, and thus deeply effective and reproducible, call for global jihad. Though Awlaki, who was killed in a drone strike in Yemen in 2011, never committed an act of terrorism himself, his name has

culture May 15, 2015

Sudden Justice: America’s Secret Drone Wars by Chris Woods

One of the many unnamed intelligence officials quoted in Chris Woods’s Sudden Justice: America’s Secret Drone Wars declares that the drone is “the most precise weapon in the history of warfare.” It is a claim that’s repeated throughout the book. For General David Deptula, who oversaw the Air Force drone program in its early years, this aerial tool represents a radical departure from “the industrial age of warfare,” when pilots would simply drop thousands of unguided tons of ordinance in the general direction of their targets. Drones, which can loiter over a target for days, if not weeks, are

culture November 03, 2014

The Story of Pain by Joanna Bourke

For some, pain is a living hell. For others, it is a symptom of life, or even a pleasure. There is no answer, then, to the question “What is pain?” But we do try to understand it, and Joanna Bourke's new book is a timely examination of how we grapple with pain through law, medicine, religion, and philosophy.

This summer, I had ophthalmic shingles. For a month, pain and I walked, as one nineteenth-century pain-sufferer put it, arm in arm. At the end of this cruel and unfair partnership, I still did not understand my companion, much as I wanted to. So when I heard about Joanna Bourke’s The Story of Pain: From Prayer to Painkillers, an accomplished account of our strange and often contradictory attempts to comprehend, communicate, and relieve pain, I had my next read set for me.

For some, pain is a living hell. For others, pain is a curative, a symptom of life. It can be a medium for both communion

interviews June 02, 2014

Bookforum talks with Richard A. Clarke

Clarke, the US Counterterrorism Czar during the Clinton and Bush years (who was once targeted by Osama bin Ladan), discusses his new thriller, Sting of the Drone, which takes on drone warfare—a topic he knows all too well.

In 1999, Richard A. Clarke, the US Counterterrorism Czar for Clinton and Bush, wanted to attach Hellfire missiles to unarmed Predator drones so that he could kill Osama bin Laden. In the months before September 11, Predators set their cameras upon the al Qaeda leader several times, but Tomahawk cruise missiles—then the only option for unmanned strikes—took hours to reach Afghanistan from the launch submarines off the coast of Pakistan. After the attacks, lethal drones were an easy sell.

Thirteen years and four-hundred covert drone strikes later, Clarke has written a thriller about the program

culture March 24, 2014

The Improbability Principle: Why Coincidences, Rare Events, and Miracles Happen Everyday by David J. Hand

Very unlikely things happen all the time. In New York, a city of eight million inhabitants, you frequently run into people you know. Sometimes, poker players get dealt a Royal Flush (the chance of that happening is roughly 1 in 650,000). You’ve probably had the experience of opening a book to the page you were looking for, as I did twice while preparing this review. Less fortunate souls get struck by lightning (1 in 300,000).

Very unlikely things happen all the time. In New York, a city of eight million inhabitants, you frequently run into people you know—quite often, it’s the people you least want to run into. Sometimes, poker players get dealt a Royal Flush (the chance of that happening is roughly 1 in 650,000). You’ve probably had the experience of opening a book to the page you were looking for, as I did twice while preparing this review. Less fortunate souls get struck by lightning (1 in 300,000). The creation of life itself was an event so unlikely that it would seem impossible—and yet here we are.

Why is

interviews January 06, 2014

Bookforum talks with Peter W. Singer

Peter W. Singer’s Cybersecurity and Cyberwar: What Everyone Needs to Know doesn’t take us to some distant, hypohtetical battlefield, but rather into our own computers, to the dark digital world that he calls "a place of risk and danger." His descriptions of threats to our national security are disturbing, and his revelations about the weakness of our personal security will send you in search of the best Norton Antivirus program you can find. But is that enough?

Peter W. Singer’s previous books introduced the public to an unfamiliar world of privatized armies, child soldiers, and frightening robotic military machines. His latest offering, Cybersecurity and Cyberwar: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press), coauthored by cybersecurity specialist Allan Friedman, doesn’t take us to some distant, hypothetical battlefield, but rather into our own computers, to the dark—and, at times, bizarre—cyberworld that he calls “a place of risk and danger.” Singer, who is a Senior Fellow at Brookings Institution and the Director of the Center for 21st

culture November 14, 2013

Killing Machine by Lloyd Gardner

For a long time, even when we didn’t trust the president, we could rely on our government's checks and balances designed to prevent the commander in chief from doing anything too terrible. But with revelations about the NSA's unchecked surveillance program, and the CIA's covert drone operations, the president has jettisoned the traditional institutions of democratic accountability. How, Lloyd Gardner asks, did this happen?

Until recently, many people—even the Nobel Peace Prize Committee—trusted Barack Obama. And even if they didn’t trust the person in the Oval Office, the American civic tradition tells them to find solace in the genius of the U.S. system of government, with its carefully calibrated array of checks and balances designed to prevent presidents from doing anything too terrible.

But the wishful thinking surrounding the Obama presidency’s role in the world has collapsed, beginning roughly around 2011, as details about the CIA’s program of covert drone operations in Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, and

Arthur Holland Michel