Just one week after the New York Times revealed the existence of secret Bush administration memos condoning an uninterrupted policy of detainee torture by the CIA, it appears to be payback time. In a highly unusual move, CIA Director Michael Hayden has ordered an investigation into the agency's watchdog office itself, led by Inspector General […]

Over just the past 24 hours, a flurry of stories have highlighted the growing and evolving burden facing the overstretched United States military. In Washington, Defense Secretary Robert Gates stressed the need to transform the American military to address the "fundamentally political nature" of its current and future conflicts. While the Marine Corps has proposed […]

Just one day after revelations by the private security firm SITE Institute that a U.S. government leak of its clandestinely obtained Osama Bin Laden video compromised its penetration of Al Qaeda's global computing network, U.S. intelligence officials announced a probe of the damaging episode. But in the Animal Farm world of the right-wing blogosphere where […]

Today's revelations in the Washington Post regarding the Bush administration's September 7th leaking of an Osama Bin Laden videotape served to once again highlight the hypocritical Republican double-standard when it comes to the publication of classified national security information. As the CIA black sites and illegal NSA domestic surveillance stories all show, the President and […]

In Washington today, all eyes are on the Blackwater hearings. But the relentless focus on potential atrocities committed by unaccountable, grotesquely overpaid private security firms in Iraq and Afghanistan obscures the larger issue for the United States. That is, mercenary forces simply should have no place in the national security structure of an American democracy. […]

If nothing else, Mitt Romney is a perpetual irony machine. Yesterday, Romney added to his legend by proclaiming that his three leading Democratic opponents - all U.S. Senators - lack his foreign policy experience. More ironic still, the one-term governor and international affairs neophyte leveled the charge while speaking in Midland, Texas, home of one […]

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales may have his announced his resignation, but his wrongdoing - and his words - live on. Alternately comically feeble and hilariously ham-handed, Gonzales' pathetic attempts to deceive, dissemble and literally forget his way out of the U.S. attorneys scandal, the NSA domestic surveillance imbroglio, the White House war on habeas corpus […]

Among the more tragi-comic aspects of the departure of Karl Rove is the media's renewed interest in the Bush Doctrine and its three tenets of no safe havens for terrorists, preventive war and democracy promotion. Last Monday, Rove claimed that the Bush Doctrine would live on and be the President's legacy. And this morning, the […]

Within hours of Newsweek's revelation that the FBI had raided the home of former DOJ official Thomas M. Tamm in connection with the 2005 NSA domestic surveillance leak, both ends of the blogosphere have begun a feverish search to learn more about man at the center of the story. On the left, Tamm is portrayed […]

Just one day after learning the FBI raided the home of former DOJ attorney Thomas M. Tamm in connection with the December 2005 leak of President Bush's illicit NSA domestic surveillance program, conservatives are beginning to clamor for action against another target: The New York Times. Writing in Commentary, editor Gabriel Schoenfeld is renewing his […]