Special Investigations

Press Freedom Defense Fund

The Trump Administration’s Shameless Snuff-Film Fixation

Twenty years ago, U.S. military officials condemned terrorist “snuff films.” Now our top officials post them.

With the wreckage of the Twin Towers still smoldering in October 2001, Tom Engelhardt started sending emails to a select group of friends and colleagues to make sense of that increasingly imperial moment.

Tom was a renowned book editor with an eye for the idiosyncratic masterpiece: Studs Terkel’s oral histories, Matt Groening’s pre-Simpsons “Life Is Hell” books, Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “Maus,” Chalmers Johnson’s prescient “Blowback,” among them.

In November 2002, TomDispatch gained its name and quickly became a staple of the progressive media landscape, providing its readers “a regular antidote to the mainstream media,” as its tagline reads. Over the following 20-plus years, TomDispatch grew into a home for thoughtful and provocative writing that questioned American empire. It’s published thinkers including Johnson, Andy Bacevich, Mike Davis, Barbara Ehrenreich, Ann Jones, Howard Zinn, and many others; and has been syndicated by publications such as The Nation and Salon; cited in newspapers from the New York Times to the Washington Post; translated into more than a dozen languages; and read by millions.

After a quarter-century of publishing groundbreaking essays at a breakneck pace, Tom has handed over the reins of the site he has built into an institution of progressive media. And he has entrusted TomDispatch to me, and to The Intercept.

I’ve been a TomDispatch reader since its earliest days, and a contributor for more than two decades, rising from research director to managing editor, and editing thousands of essays along the way. I also authored hundreds of TomDispatch articles of my own, covering U.S. national security and foreign policy, and reported from locales as diverse as the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York City to former U.S. battlefields in Vietnam to a killing field in South Sudan.

I also worked as a freelance reporter, specializing in exposing crimes of war. A decade ago, I began writing for The Intercept, reporting from conflict and crisis zones around the world, investigating civilian casualties from Cambodia to Somalia; drone strikes from Libya to Yemen; secret wars across Africa and the Middle East; even an Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Lately I’ve broken news on the Trump administration’s wars from the Middle East to Latin America.

In an era marked by the demise of iconic newspapers and online outlets, TomDispatch has been a staple of the independent media ecosphere. Similarly, The Intercept has weathered extreme economic pressures and stands as one of the bulwarks of nonprofit journalism, investigating the most powerful individuals and institutions to expose crime, corruption, and injustice. I’m proud to help unite these two iconic independent media outlets at a time when the free press is ever more under siege.

At The Intercept, TomDispatch will remain devoted to well-crafted essays, tough-minded commentary, and hard-hitting analysis. We will dig below the headlines — in TomDispatch’s signature style — taking you on an unexpected journey while analyzing and exploring the vast, vexing, and violent forces shaping an increasingly imperial America and a world on the brink. We aim to live up to the standard set by Tom and the demands of these troubled times. TomDispatch remains and will always be “a regular antidote to the mainstream media.”

Below, you’ll find the latest edition.

Nick Turse, editor of TomDispatch

Turning Murder Into Content

Half a decade later and I still remember his voice. A young man lies on the ground, begging, pleading, screaming as another man, swinging a machete, forces him to place his right arm on a small wooden bench. The attacker wants to make things easier on himself.

But it was never going to be easy.

The assailant begins hacking away. Swinging the panga again and again and again, taunting his victim as he delivers the blows. It unfolds slowly. You learn that even for a strong man with a large, sharp blade, it’s difficult to amputate an arm. Excruciatingly difficult.

It’s got to be the longest 1 minute and 18 seconds ever. After the final swing, you see the victim kicking his legs back and forth — in a way I’ve never seen another human move — writhing in agony on the ground.

For a while, my sources in conflict zones, and others who knew I investigated atrocities, would regularly send me such gruesome videos. There was the man lying in a street in the Democratic Republic of Congo as an assailant with a machete attempts to cut off his leg below the knee; I can still remember the exact sound of his cries. There’s the video of the captured Kurdish fighters. I recall how the second woman to be killed — just before she’s shot, point blank, in the head — watches the execution of her comrade. She doesn’t plead or cry or even flinch.

I would dutifully watch the videos, analyze them, and then pitch an article if I could make something of the footage. “You are going to die,” said a Cameroonian soldier, speaking to a group of women he referred to as “BH” — shorthand for the terrorist group, Boko Haram. In that video, which I reported on for The Intercept back in 2018, soldiers force their victims to kneel, including a woman with a toddler strapped to her back. One of those men directs the tiny girl to stand next to her mother. He then pulls the little girl’s shirt over her head, blindfolding her. You can guess........

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