Category: Until This Day–Historical Perspectives on the News

SCOTT RITTER: The Atomic Executioner’s Lament

While the world focuses on the trials and travails of the scientists who invented the atomic bomb, little attention is paid to the hard positions taken by the nuclear executioners, the men called upon to drop these bombs in time of war.

The US Press, Spooks & the Church Committee

Nineteen fifty-three was a peculiar year for The Washington Post to question the C.I.A.’s drift into activist intrigues, writes Patrick Lawrence in this excerpt from his forthcoming book, Journalists and Their Shadows.

The US’s Reckless Arming of Taiwan

As Washington follows the neocon Wolfowitz Doctrine in East Asia, John V. Walsh says U.S. provocation must stop. Biden should instead take up China’s offer of peaceful coexistence.    

Oppenheimer’s Posthumous Exoneration

When AEC hearings that ended the physicist’s security clearance were declassified, historians were amazed they contained virtually no damning evidence against him, writes Robert C. Koehler.

Burning Qurans in a Time of Crisis

Notice how Islam’s Holy book gets desecrated whenever the West is undergoing a crisis and is desperate to either ignite an anti-Muslim public frenzy or distract from its own failures, writes Ramzy Baroud.