Click-through for a look back at ten years of Iraq coverage in The New Yorker: http://nyr.kr/16K4PRo

Aaron Swartz was brilliant and beloved. But the people who knew him best saw a darker side. 

In this week’s issue, Larissa MacFarquhar looks at the various events that led to Internet activist Aaron Swartz’s suicide earlier this year, through interviews with those closest to Swartz, including his parents and girlfriend at the time. Since his death, “his family and closest friends have tried to hone his story into a message, in order to direct the public sadness and anger aroused by his suicide to political purposes,” MacFarquhar writes. “They have done this because it is what he would have wanted.” Continue reading: http://nyr.kr/YEO7ei

(Source: newyorker.com)

(Source: newyorker.com)

Ryan Lizza on the political writer Richard Ben Cramer, who died Monday at age sixty-two: Cramer’s book “taught a generation of political writers that the two pillars of great nonfiction—immersive reporting and expert storytelling—could turn even a mediocre campaign into high drama.” http://nyr.kr/11d2EEB

Photograph: AP

Jon Lee Anderson on Richard Engel’s return and the risks of reporting in Syria: http://nyr.kr/Ubagng

It is a hornet’s nest of potential betrayals…

(Source: newyorker.com)

Colonel James S. Ketchum dreamed of a war without killing…

In this week’s issue, Raffi Khatchadourian illuminates the history and the contested legacy of a secret Cold War experiment that tested chemical weapons on thousands of American soldiers. “The drugs under review ranged from tear gas and LSD to highly lethal nerve agents, like VX, a substance developed at Edgewood and, later, sought by Saddam Hussein,” Khatchadourian writes. Some veterans of the tests believe that they sustained permanent damage. Next year, a San Francisco law firm will bring to trial a class-action lawsuit against the federal government, on behalf of former test subjects. 

After the Second World War, the American government acquired the formulas for Nazi chemical weapons and brought scientists and doctors to the Edgewood Arsenal, a secret Army research facility near the Chesapeake Bay, to study them. In the mid-nineteen-fifties, the research gained a new component, as the Army began searching for “compounds that would create the same debilitating mental side effects as nerve gas, but without the lethality.”  

Khatchadourian speaks with Colonel James S. Ketchum, now eighty-one and the most prominent defender of Edgewood, who will presumably be the star witness in the class-action suit. Ketchum, who was involved in human experiments at the arsenal for nearly a decade, eventually becoming the head of the Clinical Research Department, “went about his work in the belief that chemicals are more humane instruments of warfare than bullets and shrapnel,” Khatchadourian writes.  Ketchum “insists that there was never any ambiguity about the drug experiments during the recruitment process,” Khatchadourian writes. Even though soldiers were told that they could excuse themselves from an experiment, many felt that they could not back down on a commitment to a superior officer. And the volunteers, after their stay at the arsenal, “were blindly pushed back into the Army at large, with no follow-up care.” 

The Army has determined the “fundamental impracticality” of psychochemical warfare, and has not employed the drugs that were tested at Edgewood in combat. Within the Army, and in the world of medical research, “the secret clinical trials are a faint memory,” Khatchadourian writes. “But for some of the surviving test subjects, and the doctors who tested them, what happened at Edgewood remains deeply unresolved. Were the human experiments there a Dachau-like horror, or were they sound and necessary science?” For his part, Ketchum tells Khatchadourian, “I struggle with these things. But I have always had the feeling that I am doing more the right thing than the wrong thing, here.” 

Follow this link to read “Operation Delirium”: http://nyr.kr/UjBXFJ

So impress this upon your leaders there, in the West there. What they have done to us! After slavery, there was colonization. After colonization there was neo-colonialism instead of independence. We never had independence here—not yet. And now again, you impose Kabila on us with this democracy of complacency. So it’s neo-slavery. We continue to suffer. Go inform your leaders there: if they continue to place at the head of this country these idiots, these imbeciles, these political homosexuals, we’re going to create Al Qaeda à l’Africaine here. That’s what we’ll become.

- Salvador Muhindo

Philip Gourevitch reports from Goma, where, as the violence continues to spread, some Congolese blame the larger international community: http://nyr.kr/TjSzy9

Photograph by Phil Moore/AFP/Getty.

How does one photograph a story that has not yet occurred? How does one evoke a sense of what might happen, or of what could?

This was the challenge for the Afghan-Swiss photographer Zalmaï: to capture the sense of foreboding that, as Dexter Filkins writes in this week’s issue, permeates Afghanistan as American troops prepare to withdraw. “People forget that almost thirty million people live in Afghanistan,” Zalmaï told me from Kabul. “Yet twenty thousand Taliban can completely destroy these thirty million lives. How Afghanistan will avoid falling into civil war again, I just don’t know.”

Zalmaï’s work is currently on display in Kabul as part of Documenta, an internationally renowned exhibition series that occurs every five years. Click-through for a slideshow of his images: http://nyr.kr/KOkx0j

Weekend Reading: ASME Edition

Get started on your weekend reading with our five ASME-nominated pieces from 2011:

“A Murder Foretold” by David Grann: http://nyr.kr/ed7wwU

“The Apostate” by Lawrence Wright: http://nyr.kr/Hs5jf9

“Getting Bin Laden” by Nicholas Schmidle: http://nyr.kr/qvcTzm

“The Aquarium” by Aleksandar Hemon: http://nyr.kr/jdTco3

“The Invisible Army” by Sarah Stillman: http://nyr.kr/Hf0Z8I