Peter Maass

A poem that stops you in your tracks, from @joriegraham.bsky.social.

That was me in Sarajevo ~35 years ago except the Post didn't have a cretin billionaire owner who laid me off, so I went on to write a book about Bosnia and cover Iraq, Afghanistan etc on the dime of news outlets that now do much less of this work. It's a rug pull of journalists present *and future.*

St. Peter police chief intervenes, prevents federal agents from arresting resident The police chief of St. Peter intervened to prevent federal agents from taking a local resident who was observing ICE enforcement actions into custody. It is believed to be the first time local police...

I encountered paramilitary goons who looked and acted just like this in Bosnia, Iraq, and other conflict zones. www.mprnews.org/story/2026/0...

Cannot repeat the Obama-era dodge of saying "we tortured some folks" and not holding accountable the torturers and especially the chain of command. You want to stop state-sanctioned crimes? Trials not words are the only way.

Bovino’s retirement needs to be a cage. His command environment yielded Renee Good’s death, Alex Pretti’s death & Julio Sosa-Celis’ shooting. Failure to prosecute Bovino & everyone else materially responsible for these atrocities will be understood by ICE, CBP, etc as a green light for the next ones

Either ICE Is Abolished or It Will Kill Many More Renee Goods Minnesota is just the beginning of ICE's transformation into a right-wing death squad. But it can be the end

"Government agents who wear plate carriers to kidnap day laborers and Uber drivers are not the ones in danger. They are the danger...ICE must be abolished." -- @attackerman.bsky.social www.forever-wars.com/either-ice-i...

Either ICE Is Abolished or It Will Kill Many More Renee Goods Minnesota is just the beginning of ICE's transformation into a right-wing death squad. But it can be the end

We are far past the stage of permissiveness with white-supremacist violence inside DHS. We are witnessing ICE transition into a death squad.

This cannot be reformed. The only question is who will fight to abolish it, and who will accommodate it instead.

Not excusing this omission, but America proved definitively during Covid that high death tolls *even among Americans* are acceptable (also: gun deaths, traffic violence, predatory health system, etc). theintercept.com/2023/03/18/i...

A Criminal Empire The United States launches a conquest and occupation of Venezuela to extract its oil wealth. The neocon dream is the America First dream

The kidnapping of Maduro inaugurates a highly dangerous era of U.S. empire that for perhaps the first time in an era of mass media is not pretending to be anything other than a violent, extractive enterprise of domination.

Harvard Secretly Investigates Students Over Larry Summers Video on Epstein

Chef's kiss moment in this story about Larry Summers being forced to withdraw from teaching at Harvard is that Tony Blair was the guest lecturer for the next session of his class. Blair is regarded by many as complicit in war crimes wrt the Iraq invasion. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/17/u...

The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand.

Co-sign

If you need a chaser to Spencer Ackerman's Dick Cheney masterwork, here's my 2021 obituary of Colin Powell, who helped kill hundreds of thousands of people (millions if you count indirect deaths) in the so-called war on terror. theintercept.com/2021/10/18/c...

Other than a trial at the Hague, what Dick Cheney deserved most is an obituary by Spencer Ackerman.

How America’s First Star War Reporter Set the Tone For a Century of Journalism Richard Harding Davis is regarded by many as the first war correspondent of modern American journalism—not because he was the first to cover nineteenth-century warfare, but because he attracted a l…

@maassp.bsky.social unpacks the sensationalist journalism of Richard Harding Davis, America’s first star war reporter.

Thank you, truly appreciate it. Fwiw I kind of think the Swedish Academy is getting the fate it deserves -- the awarding of its cherished prize treated as trashy performance art.

The Nobel Prize in Literature Is Boring Now László Krasznahorkai, who was awarded the Prize on Thursday, is a brilliant novelist and consummate laureate. But has the Swedish Academy lost its sense of fun?

Take it from me, the guy who derided/dunked/nuked the Swedish Academy for awarding the 2019 Nobel Literature Prize to genocide denialist Peter Handke -- this hilarious takedown by @alexshephard.bsky.social and @markkrotov.bsky.social merits its own Nobel. newrepublic.com/article/2015...

How America’s First Star War Reporter Set the Tone For a Century of Journalism Richard Harding Davis is regarded by many as the first war correspondent of modern American journalism—not because he was the first to cover nineteenth-century warfare, but because he attracted a l…

Very proud that LitHub published my retrospective on the first great war reporter, Richard Harding Davis, whose coverage of the Spanish-American war set the flawed standard for conflict journalism. My piece introduces a new publication of Davis's "Cuba in War Time." lithub.com/how-americas...

Baghdad 1979 is calling, wants its Baath Party purge back.

How Lachlan Murdoch Went From Studying Philosophy at Princeton to Exploiting White Nationalism at Fox News Rupert Murdoch's oldest son has taken charge of Fox News. The family's role in the far-right network is coming under greater scrutiny.

With Lachlan Murdoch in the headlines, thanks to his buyout of his siblings for full control of Fox News, I'm re-upping my deep dive into his (revealing) years as a philosophy student at Princeton. theintercept.com/2019/03/30/l...

What Labor Day Sales Say About the American Dream Alissa Quart writes about the relationship between Labor Day sales and economic opportunity in America.

My latest story for @timemagazine.bsky.social on Labor Day, Labor Day Sales and the American Dream. A very personal essay time.com/7313480/labo... @eccobooks.bsky.social @economichardship.bsky.social @jillgrinberglit.bsky.social @maiasz.bsky.social @maassp.bsky.social @economichardship.bsky.social

What I'm doing in the coming year -- a fellowship at the Leon Levy Center for Biography to work on my book about Jacob Schiff, Felix Warburg and their philanthropic support for Jewish emigration to British-controlled Palestine in the context of non-Zionism.

Friends, a funny but cautionary tale of how wrong GROK gets things.

I am neither Jewish, nor "Whitewashing myself" nor Antisemitic. Follow this thread my pal @maassp.bsky.social posted..you may need to go back to Peter's account to follow the whole damn thread...which gets comically absurd

"Crime" And The Occupation of D.C. What is the meaning of crime? Is it Criminals Robbing Innocent Motherfuckers Everytime?

“[W]hen you disregard ‘crime in the strict legal sense’ as the criterion for enforcement, grand new vistas of violence against "disordered" social populations open,” writes @attackerman.bsky.social

Meanwhile, in upstate New York…

LLMs are black boxes but it seems fair to conclude that Grok used Janine's posts to form its opinion of her and failed to discern that her use of "I'm Jewish" was not a reference to her own lineage but a quote from a story she linked to. A fifth grader wouldn't make that mistake.

Grok hadn't mentioned my article in its first response, so I wondered what was going on. I vaguely recalled that Janine retweeted my article in 2024, so I checked her timeline and yes, bingo, she had done so and quoted my "I'm Jewish" line.

Someone then asked if she was actually Jewish, and Grok fessed up that it "misattributed" my Washington Post story -- headlined "I'm Jewish, and I've covered wars. I know war crimes when I see them" -- to her.

Here's a funny yet revealing tale about Grok (Elon Musk's AI) attributing a story I wrote to my friend @janinedigi.bsky.social, and as a result saying she's Jewish (which she's not, though I am).
It starts with a query from an X account that didn't like a post from Janine and asked Grok about her.

Pulitzer Prize for Best Use of Habibi…