Matilda is waltzing home from Iraq, and the Australians are lucky but chastened. Lucky for having lost not one soldier in combat of the 2,000 sent to join the "coalition of the willing" attack on Iraq in March 2003. Chastened because Australian Prime...
Stop! Please. Get beneath the hype over former White House press secretary Scott McClellan's book, What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception. Don't miss the forest for the trees. Not since John Dean told the truth about President...
Dear Admiral Fallon, I have not been able to find out how to reach you directly, so I drafted this letter in the hope it will be brought to your attention. First, thank you for honoring the oath we commissioned officers take to protect and defend the Constitution of...
Is it because John Yoo, the former Justice Department's hired hand, is such an easy target? Is it because of the cheeky, in-your-face way in which Yoo argues that the president has the authority to have your eyes poked out and your sons' testicles crushed, because we...
Events of the last week offer a metaphorical glimpse at the delusion pervading President George W. Bush's White House and other enclaves of Iraq supporters in Washington. Bush and the First Lady spent last Monday clowning with the Easter Bunny (White House counsel...
Frontline's "Bush's War" on PBS Monday and Tuesday evening was a nicely put-together rehash of the top players' trickery that led to the attack on Iraq, together with the power-grabbing, back-stabbing, and limitless incompetence of the occupation. Except for...
After one spends 45 years in Washington, high farce does not normally throw one off balance. I found the past few days, however, an acid test of my equilibrium. I missed the National Prayer Breakfast – for the 45th time in a row. But as I drove to work I listened...
Yesterday was a difficult day for Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity. It was hard to celebrate the fifth anniversary of our first corporate memorandum, a same-day critique of Colin Powell's Feb. 5, 2002 UN address, when we could not escape the reality that...
When the Tonkin Gulf incident took place in early August 1964, I was a journeyman CIA analyst in what Condoleezza Rice refers to as "the bowels of the agency." As a current intelligence analyst responsible for Russian policy toward Southeast Asia and China, I worked...
"There are few things as odd as the calm, superior indifference with which I and those like me watched the beginnings of the Nazi revolution in Germany, as if from a box at the theater...Perhaps the only comparably odd thing is the way that now, years...
