Peter Maass

From 2024, @mollycrabapple.bsky.social:

JD Vance’s team had water level of Ohio river raised for family’s boating trip Exclusive: Incident raises questions of exploitation of public services, but Secret Service says it was requested for ‘safe navigation’

Perfect 10 on the North Korea scale. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

Inside the Battle Over 'Napalm Girl' A new documentary, 'The Stringer,' investigates the story of the famous Vietnam War photo "Napalm Girl," raising questions about who actually took it

A fascinating and meticulous article by Gary Knight about the likelihood that one of the most famous war photos of the 20th century was taken by one photographer but attributed to another. www.rollingstone.com/culture/cult...

“There is a campaign in the Israeli media about Israel starving Gazans. From the pictures I see I think they need to lose some weight.”
Right-wing Israeli network Channel 14 hosts mock the mother of four-year-old Razan Abu Zaher, who died last week of starvation.
Read: zeteo.com?utm_source=n...

The Belated Voices Against The U.S.-Israeli Genocide of The Palestinians Why did the onset of famine, and not any of the previous 21 months of collective slaughter, not compel them to speak out?

Every word of this www.forever-wars.com/the-belated-...

Opinion | My Mother, the Artist, Discovered at 90

One of the loveliest articles you can read today was written by my wife, Alissa Quart, about her mother’s paintings and what spreading them in our world means. www.nytimes.com/2025/07/22/o...

Weekend - Gulf states urge Trump to help achieve Gaza ceasefire - BBC Sounds A Gaza hospital says 24 people were killed on Saturday near an aid distribution site

This morning on BBC World Service we took time to Remember Srebrenica.
We recalled what happened&heard from survivors & relatives. David Rhode told us how he uncovered the first mass graves 30 years ago. With guests Arminka Helic and Steven Erlanger👇from min 26:30
www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/...

Will be tapping this sign for years.

NATASHA | NATASHA DOCUMENTARY FILM NATASHA documentary is the story of a fearless human rights investigator in Vladimir Putin’s Russia and war in Chechnya.

Upcoming at the Tribeca film festival, the short documentary "Natasha," co-directed by my friend Andrew Meier, about the slain human rights investigator in Chechnya, Natasha Estemirova. www.natashadoc.com

New York Review of Books announcement of the 2025-2026 fellows at the Leon Levy Center for Biography: Peter Maass, Deborah Solomon, Alex Traub, Vanessa Troiana, Autumn Womack, J. Arvid Agren.

Personal news: I will be a fellow at the Leon Levy Center for Biography at CUNY, working on my next book, "End of a Fortune: The Warburgs and Schiffs and the World They Tried to Make." To be published by Hachette's Grand Central imprint, it's about my family's complicated role in Israel's creation.

Silver lining, I don't need to travel to a distant country to cover the Forever Wars anymore.

Hello, I've visited North Korea and watched its propaganda broadcasts -- this is the same stuff!

"Mainstream American Jewish leaders have ... effectively redefined what it means to be a Jew. To silence condemnation of Israel, they have equated support for the state with Jewishness itself." -- @peterbeinart.bsky.social www.nytimes.com/2025/04/28/o...

If you'd like to read a narrative version of this thread that goes into greater depth and complexity, I wrote a feature story for ProPublica and The New Yorker in 2011 that was headlined, "The Toppling: How the Media Inflated a Minor Moment in a Long War." www.newyorker.com/magazine/201...

Since the war began in 2003, at least several hundred thousand Iraqi civilians were killed. The total, including indirect deaths from malnutrition & illness, is far higher. None of the U.S. political or military leaders who ordered the illegal invasion have been prosecuted.

On the front page of the New York Times, celebratory pictures from Baghdad showed the toppling of the statue of Saddam Hussein. The headline described President George W. Bush as "elated."

And then, suddenly and finally, Saddam Hussein was gone.

It was time for the statue to come down. The M88 started to back up, pulling on the chain around the statue, and it began to tilt forward.

This politically-astute maneuver wasn't directed by the Pentagon. A lieutenant in the battalion, Casey Kuhlman, got an Iraqi flag during the invasion and realized, when the American one went up, that it was a bad idea. So he handed his flag through the crowd, and up it went.

At the statue, Chin didn't receive any of these orders. With his work finishing, he took the flag off Saddam's face -- it had been there for a minute and a half. Soon after, an Iraqi flag was handed up to him. Here's a picture I took of the Iraqi flag heading up the crane.

McCoy, too busy to keep an eye on the statue, didn't see the flag go up. Once he noticed, his first thought was "Oh shit." He ordered it down. Alarms were going off everywhere. His commander, Col. Hummer, received an order from *his* commander, Gen. James Mattis, to get it down.

This triggered another famous moment that was also the result of improvisation. I've written before in this thread that war is chaos -- and the events at Firdos are no exception. Whether it's fighting or flags, much of what happens in warfare is unplanned, ad-hoc.

After Col. McCoy gave Capt. Lewis a green light to tear down the statue, Lewis told McLaughlin to get his flag -- his chance had come. The flag was handed from Marine to Marine until it got to Chin and covered Saddam's face.

During the invasion, McLaughlin had tried to raise the flag -- he wanted a picture of it flying in Iraq. One time, there was too much shooting going on. Another time, a tank rolled over the flagpole he was going to use. His failed efforts became a joke in his tank company.

Where did the flag come from, how did it get into Chin's hands?

The flag belonged to Lt. Tim McLaughlin, a tank commander. McLaughlin was at the Pentagon on 9/11, and after the attack, a friend gave him a flag she purchased at a store in the U.S. Senate. He brought it to Iraq.

For a bit more visual context, here's a photo I shot from a short distance away.

Then it went onto the statue's face (photos by Bryan Mangan).

Before I explain the improvisation, it's useful to see what happened.

The flag was handed to Chin and he began to unfurl it.

The flag would become deeply controversial. It was popular in the United States but unpopular elsewhere, a sign of U.S. domination of Iraq. How and why did this seminal and divisive moment happen? The bizarre truth: it was a spur-of-the moment improvisation by a few Marines.

Chin was a member of the M88 crew and he climbed up its crane to attach a cable around the statue's neck, so it could be pulled down. Here's a photo I shot of Chin climbing the crane. He was about to become world famous for putting an American flag on the statue's face.