Monthly Archives: May 2004

If I Had a Million Dollars

Ads for the New York State lottery, beamed across Lake Champlain, feature groups of people singing, “If I had a million dollars, I would buy you a house.” The idea, of course, is to convince several million people to buy a lottery ticket. The odds of winning a million-dollar lottery are something on the order […]

How Far Up? For How Long?

The two questions that most urgently need answers in the Iraq torture scandal are: How far up and for how long? How far up the chain of command did authorization of torture go and how long has this been sanctioned practice? The trickle of testimony on this subject has become a stream; next week it […]

The Fuse is Burning

Last year, George W. Bush told us the U.S. had to invade Iraq to prevent Saddam Hussein from using weapons of mass destruction. Later we learned there were no weapons of mass destruction and that the Bush administration had twisted facts to make it seem as if there were. This year, Mr. Bush told us […]

Hard to Believe

When my friend Lynn was in college, a history professor assigned her to research the Holocaust by reading microfilms of American newspapers from the 1930s and 40s. Although many people claimed to have been shocked to discover in the spring of 1945 that Nazi Germany had sent the bulk of Europe’s Jews into a system […]