Katherine Boo

About the Author: Katherine Boo is an editor of The Washington Monthly, a magazine of political analysis and public affairs that opposed the Persian Gulf War.

The headless corpse of one of the [Iraqi] soldiers was on its back a short distance from the truck. Another body was wedged inside the engine compartment. Two more lay face up in the bed of the truck, their feet sticking grotesquely over the side. —The Washington Post, March 3, 1991

As the ground war drew neatly to its close, it seemed the most perverse and peripheral of causes: a group of left-leaning reporters suing the government in federal court to open Dover Air Force Base to the public. They wanted us to see the body bags roll in. And in that desire, they...