Newsday’s Walt Handelsman, aided by Roy Furchgott, has a wonderful animated cartoon featuring singing spies. The cartoon is here. This makes the National Security Agency wiretap issue so simple even a congressman might be able to get the point. ...
Intrepid Washington reporter Robert Dreyfuss interviews Salah Mukhtar, who is "close" to the Iraq opposition. It's clearly as bad or worse than you think. Our choices seem to be: 1. Stay the course of installing the dictatorship of the Iran parties, 2. Switch sides...
 I was reading the July 17 New Yorker & found "The Agent: Did the C.I.A. stop an F.B.I. detective from preventing 9/11?" (pdf file here) by Lawrence Wright. It's a long article, so some excerpts follow, starting with the main point: In March, the C.I.A. learned...
Along the lines of Justin Raimondo's article about Jonah Goldberg and the Ledeen Doctrine, one of the most sickening yet, as far as I can tell, unremarked upon bits of hearsay in Bob Woodward's new book, State of Denial, is about the bloodlust of Henry Kissinger,...
There's a strict taboo in the column-writing business against recycling ideas. So let me start with something fresh. Jonah Goldberg is a lying sack of bad arguments. I know, I know. I've said it before. And I enjoy saying it now. So, what's fresh about my...
Most commentary on North Korea, by hawks and doves alike, posits a false dilemma: either "get tough" with Kim Jong-Il (thus far, this has meant talk tough, because there's no military solution that doesn't end with Seoul in ashes), or send him money. This naturally...
Last week, a mortar attack on a U.S. ammo-storage site in Baghdad "set off a series of explosions … that shook buildings miles away." If you're wondering what such a thing looks like, watch the video below. Note in particular the explosion at 3:57....
From The History of Torture by George Riley Scott (London, 1940), we read: Often in combination with the rack was applied the "torture of water." This was generally adopted when racking, in itself, proved ineffectual. The victim, while pinioned on the rack, was...
In Japan, that is – one of our closest allies, whose discussion of developing nukes was only a response to Kim Jong-Il's growing arsenal – but, hey, let's go ahead and chalk this up to Dubya's refusal to tolerate Saddam's WMD.
According to former CIA officer Philip Giraldi, writing in the October 9th edition of the American Conservative magazine, the Bush administration is withholding a new CIA National Intelligence Estimate on Iran. "The United States government’s intelligence community...
