The 2022-2023 Feinberg Series: Confronting Empire

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.

This is the first annual Ellsberg Lecture, co-sponsored this year by the Feinberg Series and 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 event also has a zoom alternative, for online registration: https://umass-amherst.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_JYqimc17R1WA1A_e6g9NfA