Nick Turse

Education

Turse received a Ph.D. in Sociomedical Sciences from the Columbia University's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS). As a graduate student, Turse was a fellow at Harvard University's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study in 2000-2001 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.

In 2001, while researching in the U.S. National Archives, he 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 Ph.D dissertation, Kill Anything That Moves: United States War Crimes and Atrocities in Vietnam, 1965-1973.

Journalism career

Turse is the managing editor of the blog TomDispatch.com. He has written for publications such as The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times,

Harper's Magazine, Vice News and the BBC on subjects such as ethnic cleansing in South Sudan, the U.S. military in Africa, the video game industry, street art, the war in Afghanistan, and the Vietnam War. He has also reviewed books for the San Francisco Chronicle, The Daily Beast, Asia Times, and other publications. He is the author of several non-fiction works on foreign and military policy. Turse is a contributing writer at The Intercept.

South Sudanese Civil War

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 Magazine in which he chronicled the killing of civilians by soldiers. Turse spoke with more than 150 refugees and internally displaced people from villages across South Sudan. Eyewitnesses described to him attacks by South Sudanese government soldiers on twenty-six villages resulting "in no fewer than 141 deaths and possibly close to 400."

He also wrote a 2016 series for The Intercept known as "New Nation, Long War." In this series Turse investigated the torture and murder of journalists in South Sudan, unsolved murders and abuses by soldiers, and United States support for the use of child soldiers.

In The Nation Turse exposed the massacre of the town of Leer, South Sudan. Turse reported that soldiers burnt down the town and raped many women. Turse reported finding bodies in a field and photographed skulls of men suffocated to death in a shipping container.

Turse's book on the South Sudanese civil war, Next Time They'll Come to Count The Dead investigated the origins of the war. 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." 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." Next Time They'll Come to Count The Dead was a finalist for the 2016 Investigative Reporters and Editors, Inc. book award.

Turse has also written about South Sudanese efforts to count and memorialize their dead, violence resulting from the civil war, and the arrest of journalist Alfred Taban.

Drone Papers

Turse was part of the investigative team at The Intercept that won the 2016 New York Press Club Award for Special Event Reporting and the 2016 Online Journalism Association Award for Investigative Data Journalism for “The Drone Papers.” The Intercept 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.

Los Angeles Times series

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. 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.

One article exposed water-boarding and electrical torture carried out by the U.S. 172nd Military Intelligence unit of the 173rd Airborne Division. Turse wrote, "Fifteen of them admitted the acts. Yet only three were punished, records show. They received fines or reductions in rank. None served any prison time." Another article exposed the U.S. massacre of about 19 Vietnamese women and children by members of B Company. Military investigators determined that many men could be court martialed, but official records give no indication that action was taken against any of them.

Turse stated that official military documents show that on February 25, 1969, Sergeant Roy Bumgarner captured and executed Vietnamese civilians, then planted weapons on their bodies and reported them to his superior officers as enemy Vietnamese soldiers killed during combat. A military court convicted Bumgarner of manslaughter, reduced his rank and cut his pay. But he served no prison time for the killings of three innocent Vietnamese. Bumgarner remained in Vietnam and, approximately six months later, reenlisted for another tour, and remained in the Army until 1981.

Operation Speedy Express exposé

In a 2008 expose in The Nation for which he won the Ridenhour Prize, Turse reported on a veteran whistle-blower who served in Operation Speedy Express. This man told the Army’s top generals that Julian Ewell’s use of heavy firepower on the countryside resulted in a “My Lai each month.” In a letter to Army Chief of Staff General William Westmoreland, the whistle-blower wrote that official command policies in Vietnam had led to the killings of thousands of innocents.

In other letters, Turse reported, the Army informant complained "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," the whistle-blower 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."

Turse went on to assert that the veteran’s allegations were kept secret and an inquiry into them was suppressed by the Pentagon.

A later Newsweek investigation concluded that as many as five thousand civilians were killed during Speedy Express. Turse claimed that evidence showed that the U.S. military lied about the operation when contacted by Newsweek and that the military's own investigation estimated that as many as seven thousand civilians had been killed during the operation.

Turse's reporting asserted that Newsweek partially suppressed its own investigation as a favor to the Pentagon and Richard Nixon's White House, and that during the war, efforts by U.S. senators to look into Speedy Express were thwarted by Pentagon officials.

Kill Anything That Moves

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. 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. Turse won a 2014 American Book Award and a I.F. Stone Award for Kill Anything That Moves.

Writing in The Huffington Post, Peter Van Buren called the book "one of the most important books about the American War in Vietnam." 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." Writing in Proceedings Magazine, the official publication of the U.S. Naval Institute, Richard Ruth, a professor 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."

Kill Anything That Moves was criticized for downplaying the scope and importance of the contribution Vietnam veterans made to the antiwar effort in the United States. During the war, U.S. antiwar activists repeatedly pointed to atrocities that Turse claimed to have "discovered." Another criticism is that his book focuses on crimes by individual U.S. soldiers while ignoring policies such as the bombing of North Vietnam that killed tens of thousands of Vietnamese civilians. Wrote Michael Uhl in CounterPunch, "(Turse) seems to weigh the vile handiwork of individual GIs operating in the field on a par with the far more deadly toll that sprang from coldhearted policies of mass murder designed by high level commanders, political bureaucrats and academics: the indiscriminate use of artillery and air power to remove and disrupt populations, and which caused the overwhelming number of deaths and casualties among the South Vietnamese.".

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 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."

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."

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. " Gary Kulik contends that the works of Nick Turse and one of his mentors, Christian Appy, are overly- supportive to 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.

U.S. military operations in Africa

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. 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.

Turse used previously secret military documents to prove that the U.S. military maintains many military bases across the African continent. He also exposed the building of a $100 million U.S. military drone base in West Africa. On Vice News, he also investigated a U.S. shadow war in Africa using America's elite Special Operations Forces including Navy SEALs.

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.

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."

Special Operations Forces

Turse has carried out extensive investigations of the U.S. military's most elite troops. Turse uncovered that in 2014, elite U.S. troops were dispatched to 70% of the countries on the planet and were carrying out missions in 80 to 90 nations each day. 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. Turse followed up to show that elite forces like Navy SEALs and Army Special forces deployed to 138 nations in 2016. In 2017, Turse wrote an article that revealed U.S. special forces had already deployed to 137 countries by mid-year.

U.S. Military Training Programs

In a major investigation carried out by 100Reporters and The Intercept, Turse revealed "the chaotic and 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 whistle-blower 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.

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.

In an earlier inbvestigation 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.

Afghan War victims

With journalist Robert Dreyfuss, Turse investigated civilian casualties in Afghanistan in a special issue of The Nation magazine. They found that no agency or entity had tracked civilian casualties over the entire conflict. 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, but that many thousands of Afghan civilians had been killed by U.S. and allied forces.

Columbine as revolutionary act

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." 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."

Other

During the global economic recession, Turse wrote about hard times at food banks, municipal meltdowns and other human costs of the economic crisis.

He has written articles on the U.S. "empire of bases", reporting in 2010 that there were more than 700 military bases in Afghanistan, and describing them by size and number of troops.

Turse has written on the U.S. arms trade in the Middle East, including U.S. military-brokered arms sales to Yemen and Bahrain.

Recognition

Works