When I was young, the Philadelphia Bulletin ran cartoon ads that usually featured a man in trouble — dangling by his fingers, say, from an outdoor clock. There would always be people all around him, but far too engrossed in the daily paper to notice. The tagline was:...
Why al-Qaeda Won
With the 10th anniversary of the crime that was 9/11, the question inevitably crops up: Who won, the United States or al-Qaeda? According to the politically correct answer, although al-Qaeda has been decimated, it has been a Pyrrhic victory for Washington. In...
Comparing Obama and Bush on Civil Liberties and War
Documents found in the files of Muammar Gadhafi’s intelligence services in Libya, which indicated that the now overthrown dictator cooperated closely with U.S. rendition of terrorist suspects to his torture chambers, should prompt questions about how much President...
Obama’s Bush-League World
George W. who? I mean, the guy is so over. He turned the big six-five the other day, and it was barely a footnote in the news. And Dick Cheney, tick-tick-tick. Condoleezza Rice? She’s already onto her next memoir, and yet it's as if she's been wiped from history, too....
Worse Than a Third Bush Term?
If in 2008 someone had said that Obama's war policy would be more belligerent and costlier than another round of Bush's, nearly no one would have believed it. Bush started a preventive war in Iraq, killing hundreds of thousands without any credible correlation to U.S....
US Refusal of 2001 Taliban Offer Gave bin Laden a Free Pass
When George W. Bush rejected a Taliban offer to have Osama bin Laden tried by a moderate group of Islamic states in mid-October 2001, he gave up the only opportunity the United States would have to end bin Laden's terrorist career for the next nine years.The al-Qaeda...
America’s Stay-at-Home Ex-President
US Intelligence Thwarted Attack on Iran
Why should George W. Bush have been “angry” to learn in late 2007 of the “high-confidence” unanimous judgment of all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies that Iran had stopped working on a nuclear weapon four years earlier? Seems to me he might have said “Hot Dog!” rather...
Outrage Mounts over Bush’s Waterboarding ‘Confession’
After a three-year investigation, President Barack Obama's mantra – "look forward and not backwards" – appears to have trumped the rule of law as a special prosecutor declined to pursue criminal charges against the Central Intelligence Agency operatives...
Can W. Reinvent His Presidency?
As George W. Bush does a rash of media interviews to promote his new book, Decision Points, some people – even his nemesis, hip-hop star Kanye West – have begun to mute their criticisms of his presidency. This is nothing new; as time passes and old wounds heal, the...