On the Torturable and the Untorturable

In Wednesday's Wall Street Journal, reporter Siobhan Gorman offered a striking little portrait of José A. Rodriguez, who, in 2005, as chief of the CIA's National Clandestine Service, ordered the destruction of those "hundreds of hours" of CIA videotapes of...

read more

The Zero-Sum Fiasco

Whatever else the release of the 16-agency National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on the Iranian bomb may be, it is certainly a reasonable measure of inside-the-Beltway Bush administration decline. Whether that release represented "a preemptive strike against the White...

read more

Trying to Dispel a Mist with a Machine Gun

Enter his small office at the Nation Institute only if you don't mind experiencing a slightly vertiginous feeling. Books are everywhere – in boxes on the floor, on every surface, in, along, and perilously stacked above shelves. If you took a wrong step, you could...

read more

Iraq as a Pentagon
Construction Site

The title of the agreement, signed by President Bush and Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki in a "video conference" last week, and carefully labeled as a "non-binding" set of principles for further negotiations, was a mouthful: a "Declaration of Principles for a Long-Term...

read more

The Proliferation Game

Globalization, what a concept. You can get a burger prepared your way practically anywhere in the world. The Nike Swoosh appears at elite athletic venues across the United States and on the skinny frames of T-shirted children playing in the streets of Calcutta. For...

read more

How to Control the Story, Pentagon-Style

Acts matter. Here's how Dahr Jamail, a young mountain guide and volunteer rescue ranger in Alaska (who did freelance writing in the "off-season") describes his rash decision, back in 2003, to cover George W. Bush's Iraq War in person: "I decided that the one thing I...

read more

Invading Washington

Over the last seven years, it's often been said that George W. Bush exists in a bubble. When it comes to the cast of characters in his administration – and the Washington Consensus generally – it turns out he isn't alone. The other night I watched Harvard...

read more

Are You With Us… or Against Us?

Before I met Jonathan Schell, I already knew him in the best way possible: on the page. Even in his days as a neophyte journalist in Vietnam, he committed a writer's greatest act of generosity. First in the pages of The New Yorker, and then in his books, he took...

read more

Fighting Whom in Iraq?

Think for a moment of what has happened in Iraq since the Bush administration's shock-and-awe invasion in March 2003. There are, by now, perhaps a million dead Iraqis, give or take a few hundred thousand. If a typical wounded-to-dead ratio of 3:1 holds, then you're...

read more