Nick Turse: Who is Nick Turse?

Who Is Nick Turse?
Nick Turse is a historian, journalist, essayist and the associate editor and research director of the Nation Institute’s Tomdispatch.com. He is the author of The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives (Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt, 2008) and has written for The Los Angeles Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, Adbusters, GOOD magazine, The Nation, Le Monde Diplomatique (english-language), In These Times, Mother Jones and The Village Voice, among other print and on-line publications. His articles have also appeared in such foreign and U.S. newspapers as The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Baltimore Sun, The Contra-Costa Times, Daily Ireland, 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.

Turse 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 not only wrote a 1,000-page dissertation on the topic, but also has provided expert commentary on U.S. atrocities in Southeast Asia to such publications as The New York Times and U.S. News and World Report as well as to fellow scholars and professionals in the fields of international humanitarian law and the laws of armed conflict, including Cornell University’s Workshop on “Human Rights at War: A Comparative Study of the Effectiveness of the Geneva Conventions.”

Turse is also 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.

Turse is currently at work on a history of U.S. atrocities in Indochina for Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt.

Additionally, Turse has authored works on everything from the militarization of MySpace.com to leprosy in Hawaii during the late nineteenth century. He has reported from locales as diverse as a military “urban operations” conference in Washington, D.C. and rural hamlets in Southeast Asia.

Turse’s work on “The Rise of the Homeland Security State” received special mention in Bill Moyers’ now iconic 2004 “Journalism Under Fire” speech at the annual conference of The Society of Professional Journalists (as well as his book Moyers on America), while Norman Solomon of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) praised his coverage of the U.S. air war in Iraq for “pull[ing] no punches” and for “shin[ing] a bright light on fundamental aspects of a U.S. air war that has seldom seen any light of day in big American media outlets.”

Note from Nick Turse to right-wing bloggers: Far too many of you are obsessed with answering “Who is Nick Turse?” Often, you 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 if I could, but I can’t, so if that’s the best you’ve got, have at it.