In its miniseries about the missteps that led to 9/11, ABC spared not only Bill Clinton but also George W. Bush. Our hawkish War President had almost nine months to respond to the USS Cole attack and did nothing, even as his security staff fired off memo after memo...
NEW DELHI - The three bomb explosions, which ripped through a mosque and an adjoining graveyard, killing 30 people in Malegaon in India's western state of Maharashtra on Sept. 8, have outraged the Indian public. They have also set some tough challenges before the...
For the War Party, deception isn't just a tactic, or even a strategy – it's a lifestyle. That's why they're indifferent to getting caught. Like a hardened criminal arrested for his umpteenth felony, the neocons see brazen lying as just a routine procedure. Caught...
During World War II, one of the Fuhrer's favorite sayings was, "All generals lie." Today, Washington prefers the word "spin" to lie, although the difference is often difficult to parse. As an 18th-century man, I prefer an 18th century word: puffery. If we consider...
Recently, the Washington Post, and then the New York Times, reported a top-secret assessment by the Marines' chief of intelligence that focused on the catastrophic situation of his undermanned Corps in the heartlands of Iraq's Sunni insurgency. He concluded, according...
Without Precedent: The Inside Story of the 9/11 Commission Thomas H. Kean and Lee H. Hamilton Alfred A. Knopf, 2006 370 pp. By every measure, Sept. 11 was a disaster. The most obvious victims were the nearly 3,000 people who died in the terrorist attacks in New York...
In a recent speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld declared that, "The enemy is so much better at communicating. I wish we were better at countering that because the constant drumbeat of things they say – all of which are...
The Bush administration is objecting to a groundbreaking treaty that set up a nuclear weapon-free zone in Central Asia. Under the treaty signed Friday, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan committed themselves not to produce, buy, or allow...
Empire Runs Into a Wall It has been five years since hijacked airliners slammed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and much has changed since. The supposedly swift campaign of vengeance to root out Osama bin Laden from the caves of Afghanistan failed. The...
Two years before the 2008 presidential election, Newt Gingrich, the former Republican speaker of the House of Representatives, is trying desperately to grab the national spotlight by declaring he'd be a lot tougher than George W. Bush in prosecuting what he calls...
