Shortly before 9/11 the National Security Agency (NSA) asked Thomas Drake to join its senior staff. As things turned out, Sept. 11 was his first day on the job. Already au courant with key NSA programs via his earlier contract work, Tom was immediately tasked to find...
Washington’s sole success in the 9/11 wars was Afghanistan. Barely two months after the destruction of the Twin Towers and strike on the Pentagon, U.S. forces had wrecked al-Qaeda and defeated the Taliban. With a little more effort, Osama bin Laden might have been...
Much ink has been spilled on the cause of our current American malaise. Immigration, race, integration, and economics have been bandied about as causes for our current political strife. However, all of these are insufficient to explain our current political and...
U.S. war crimes in the so-called War on Terror were back in the spotlight Tuesday as pretrial hearings for alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four co-defendants resumed at Guantánamo Bay, with a lawyer for one of the men asserting that a...
After twenty years of the War on Terror, $6.4 trillion spent, some 801,000 deaths (including about 335,000 civilian deaths) from direct violence by 2019 (and many more because of factors related to the War on Terror not calculated in war deaths), at least 1.8 million...
Twenty years after the event, I can recall with perfect clarity where I was the morning Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda suicide hijackers changed all our lives. At home, nursing a nasty cold, I had to beg off of a meeting at the Pentagon I was supposed to attend on behalf...
Looking back on it now, the 1990s were an age of innocence for America. The Cold War was over and our leaders promised us a "peace dividend." There was no TSA to make us take off our shoes at airports (how many bombs have they found in those billions of...
Twenty years after the 9/11 attacks, the US government is finally – well, probably, kinda sorta – ending its lost war with Afghanistan, drawing down its presence in Iraq, and reducing the heat of its “global war on terror” from a rolling boil...
America may famously be pivoting to China, but so is everyone else: and not in the intended way. Vice President Kamala Harris’ invitation to Vietnam to join the US against China was coldly rejected by an unaligned Vietnam who wishes to enhance relations with China....
