What’s Up With Obama, Torture, and Secrecy?

On torture and secrecy, Obama is carefully treading a path laid by his predecessor. What gives?

What They Don’t Tell You About Oil Industry Tax Breaks

Wonder why the Senate couldn’t bring itself to clamp down on oil industry freebies? Because the “black gold” outfits can be one scary bunch. How scary? You have no idea….

The CIA-Pentagon Shuffle: The Fake Story and The Real One

There’s the story they want you to believe about Obama’s palace shakeup. And then there’s the real, more disturbing one.

Musical Chairs in CIA and Pentagon: Now, Name That Tune

Few will pay attention to this reshuffling of power in the military-spy-diplomat axis. And we’ll probably never get the real story anyway. But we can always try to understand….

Bush, Rumsfeld and Iraq: Is the Real Reason for the Invasion Finally Emerging?

In Donald Rumsfeld’s new book, Known and Unknown, out February 8, Rumsfeld offers an account of George W. Bush’s early interest in Iraq.  This was just days after the 9/11 attacks.  There were no apparent reasons for Bush to focus on Iraq, instead of on the actual perpetrators of the attacks. Here’s...

Wild Acorns?

Conservative activists and talk show hosts, continuing a crusade begun during the presidential campaign, have been calling for their compatriots to dig up dirt on appointees and beneficiaries of Obama administration funding. The result has been an effort by the Democrats to quickly blunt any controversy by...

Silenzio! Demands Silvio

There’s a fascinating political-media brouhaha going on in Italy that is a kind of turbocharged mega-Lewinsky scandal, but it is getting comparatively little coverage in the United States. One of the country’s leading newspapers is challenging Silvio Berlusconi, the 72-year-old Italian prime minister as...

US Attys: Missing The Origins

The New York Times reports on new documents showing that Bush White House political honcho Karl Rove was much more deeply involved in the early moves that led to the firings of numerous United States Attorneys, seemingly for partisan reasons. But the article fails to focus on what matters most: Why? Internal...

The Foreign-Policy Establishment

Stephen M. Walt, a professor of international relations at Harvard University, recently wrote an interesting piece for Foreign Policy magazine about what topics are considered “taboo” among establishment foreign-policy wonks—a group that includes Walt himself as a member. The article is...

A Drive for Unrestricted Executive Power

The New York Times comes out with a strong editorial, calling for an investigation into Bush administration security abuses, now that it is clear that the practices were not necessary to protect the national interest. We’ve known for years that the Bush administration ignored and broke the law repeatedly...