Addressing the use of torture Wednesday, President George W. Bush played to the baser instincts of Americans as he strained to turn his violation of national and international law into Exhibit A on how "tough" he is on terrorists. His tour de force brought...
Talk about chutzpah! I was suffering a bit from outrage fatigue yesterday but was shaken out of it as soon as I downloaded an unusually slick paper, "Recognizing Iran as a Strategic Threat: An Intelligence Challenge for the United States," released this week by House...
Who can forget the chutzpah of President George W. Bush as he bragged to Bob Woodward, "I'm commander in chief.... That's the interesting thing about being president ... I don't feel like I owe anybody an explanation." Wrong, Mr. President. You and Vice President...
But the world desperately needs an "E" for EXIT from the march of folly toward a wider Middle East war that is increasingly likely to result from plural U.S. foreign policy fiascos – in Iraq, Israel, and Lebanon, for starters; in Syria and Iran for the next...
The truth will out. If you fabricate, or acquiesce in the fabrication of, evidence used to "justify" launching a war of choice, you will have to live with that for the rest of your life. Call me quaint, but having spent 27 years in intelligence on both the...
This may seem a bit quaint, perhaps even obsolete, but it used to be standard procedure to require intelligence before deciding to make war. Unless you have been asleep these past several months, you know that this sequence was reversed in 2002 when the White House...
Hope is here. The cold light of truth is piercing the cloud of lies conjured by Donald Rumsfeld and others about the war in Iraq – even in the defense secretary's own bailiwick. A Matter of Conscience… Several months ago, U.S. Army 1st Lt. Ehren Watada...
Is the National Security Agency being "turned against the people," as the Congressional committee led by Sen. Frank Church warned might happen? We the people cannot know; it's classified. Thursday's slick but evasive testimony by Gen. Mike Hayden, the president's...
"Court-martialed," says one highly-respected former DIRNSA (which, for the uninitiated, stands for "director, National Security Agency"). The comment came amid a private burst of indignation at the news that Gen. Mike Hayden had bowed to administration pressure to...
Is Congress aiding and abetting the creation of a police state? Recently, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Pete Hoekstra, R-Mich., helped to give the CIA and NSA unprecedented police powers. By inserting a provision in the FY07 Intelligence...
