FOR THE TLS, I’VE reviewed the journalist Seth Harp’s frustrating, excellent, and excellently frustrating The Fort Bragg Cartel: Drug Trafficking and Murder in the Special Forces:
His method is seductive. The Fort Bragg Cartel has the slick sheen of the True Crime thriller—propulsive, sinister, twisty. But this is surface, disguise. Really it is an interrogation of the American Empire, and the mouldering underbelly of the War on Terror. Harp’s story forms two halves. The first a narrative of the American dependence on elite soldiers to carry out a globe-spanning reign of violence, and the cult those operators built around themselves—a culture of excess licensed by the state which made men into junked-up killers, rapists, and war criminals who were never punished for their abuses at home or abroad. The second is shadier still: a twilight world of half-truths tough to verify but which rhymes powerfully with a history of US intelligence agencies using drug trafficking to raise money for covert action—from the Kuomintang to the “Golden Triangle” in Indochina, from the famous “French Connection” to Iran-Contra in the 1980s.
Read the full review: A look at the ‘mouldering underbelly’ of the War on Terror