The Human Toll Of America’s Air Wars: The First Annual Ellsberg Lecture, Featuring Pulitzer Prize Winner Azmat Khan, November 15 At UMass
Photo: UMass Department of History
Source: UMass Amherst Department of History
Pulitzer Prize winner Azmat Khan will present the first annual Ellsberg Lecture at UMass on November 15 at 7 p.m. in the Student Union Ballroom. The lecture will also be broadcast over Zoom (register here for link). The event is free and open to the public.
The Lecture: The Human Toll Of America’s Air Wars
In recent American wars, the United States traded many of its troops on the ground for an arsenal of aircraft, high flying drones, and precision weapons, often directed by controllers thousands of miles away. Successive U.S. administrations have boasted America’s air wars are the “most precise” in the history of warfare, replete with pledges of transparency and accountability. Investigative reporter Azmat Khan set out to test those claims on the ground in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan, and within confidential troves of documents she obtained through years-long lawsuits against the Department of Defense. In this lecture, Khan will detail the culmination of her findings and the pattern of impunity within this new way of war.
Azmat Khan
Azmat Khan is a Pulitzer-Prize winning investigative reporter whose work grapples with the human costs of war. She is a writer for the New York Times Magazine, a Carnegie Fellow, and the Birch Assistant Professor at Columbia Journalism School, where she also leads the Li Center for Global Journalism. Khan is writing a book for Random House investigating America’s air wars. Her multi-part series in the New York Times, The Civilian Casualty Files, was awarded the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in International Reporting. The project was the culmination of more than five years of Khan’s reporting, including ground investigation at the sites of more than 100 civilian casualty incidents in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan, more than 1,300 formerly secret military records she obtained in a legal battle with the Pentagon, and scores of interviews with military and local sources. Read more….
The Ellsberg Lecture
The Ellsberg Lecture The first annual Ellsberg Lecture is presented by the Ellsberg Initiative for Peace and Democracy. The Ellsberg Initiative was inspired by the acquisition of the papers of Daniel Ellsberg, the Pentagon Papers whistleblower, by the Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives at UMass. The Initiative’s mission is to promote public awareness, scholarship, and activism on the overlapping causes that define Ellsberg’s legacy: peace, anti-imperialism, democracy, truth-telling, nuclear disarmament, and social and environmental justice.
This year’s Ellsberg Lecture is co-presented by the 2022-2023 Feinberg Series, Confronting Empire, which is exploring histories of U.S. imperialism and anti-imperialist resistance. The Feinberg Series is presented by the UMass Amherst History Departme with the Ellsberg Initiative for Peace and Democracy and partners. Contact us.
Location Information
The UMass Amherst Student Union (41 Campus Center Way) is a short distance from the Campus Parking Garage (1 Campus Center Way, off of Commonwealth Ave, $1.75/hour). See map for free parking.
Bus Schedule | Campus Map with Venue and Parking Indicated | Directions to the Student Union | Accessible Parking