Consider the ultimate gift in a homeland security country: the iTaser, a weapon with its own MP3 player and earphones that can deliver a 50,000 volt electrical charge while you catch your favorite tunes. This new Taser, on display at the Consumer Electronics Show in...
The $100 Barrel of Oil vs. the Global War on Terror: The Bush Legacy (Take Two)
Consider the debate among four Democratic presidential candidates on ABC News last Saturday night. In the previous week, the price of a barrel of oil briefly touched $100, unemployment hit 5 percent, the stock market had the worst three-day start since the Great...
An Imperialist Comedy
Open Steve Coll's aptly titled book, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001, at almost any page and you're likely to find something that makes a mockery of the film Charlie Wilson's War....
Journey to the Dark Side: The Bush Legacy
"Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!" Emma Lazarus, 1883 If you don't mind thinking about...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Catch 22 in Iraq: Why American Troops Can’t Go Home
Whoa, let's hold those surging horses in check a moment. Violence has lessened in Iraq. That seems to be a fact of the last two months and, for the Iraqis, a positive one, obviously. What to make of the "good news" from Iraq is another matter entirely, one made...
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...


