The "new" ceasefire in Syria seems a lot like the one from earlier this year. This time, according to John Kerry, the Syrian government has to ask permission from the US before it bombs rebels in the country. In exchange the US has agreed (or not, depending on which...
Snowden is a helluva movie, kicking an audience’s ass on a number of levels. I had a chance to see the film last night at a preview event; it opens everywhere on September 16. Go see it.On one level the film presents Snowden’s story as a political...
As a teenager, I read Joe Haldeman’s book, The Forever War. The title intrigued, as did the interstellar setting. Haldeman’s soldiers are caught up in a conflict whose rules keep changing, in part due to time dilation as predicted by Einstein’s...
After the events of September 11, 2001, as a longtime FBI agent and division legal counsel, I blew the whistle on the FBI's failure to act on information provided by the Minneapolis field office that could have prevented the attacks.On this sad 15th anniversary of...
Happy 9/11 Day, our fifteenth anniversary together. If it was a child, she’d be almost ready to drive. They do grow up so fast, don’t they?We’re instituted full background checks, body scanners and cavity searches at my home for all guests and pets (can’t be too...
On this 15th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks in 2001, we should ask ourselves what those attacks inaugurated. In a word, calamity. The wildly successful actions of Al Qaeda, combined with the wild overreactions of the Bush/Cheney administration, marked the 21st...
Ten years ago, Iraqi and Coalition Forces were boots-deep in Operation Together Forward, a two-phase mission to reduce violence and increase security in a war-torn Iraq. Soon after, the Iraq Study Group concluded that the operation’s results were...
The United States government spent over $42,000 per Afghan to create 500 jobs over there.And that’s the good news. The ever-cheerful Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction (SIGAR; we have been paying to rebuild Afghanistan for the past 15 years with...
Phyllis Schlafly was a giant of the conservative movement. And she opposed America’s recent wars. An early fighter, who started up with opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment to the constitution, died at 92 years old. I knew her for 30 years and she had known my...
Reports out of the Republican leadership say that the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act, or JASTA, is expected to come up for a vote in the House of Representatives this week, likely on Friday. The JASTA allows for 9/11 victims to sue Saudi Arabia for damages...
