Analysis For Dummies
In China’s Great Cultural Revolution, landlords and other capitalist roaders were paraded through the streets wearing dunce caps. The 20,000 analysts in the U.S. intelligence community whose job it is...
View ArticleBeggars Can Be Choosers
Negotiations with North Korea about its nuclear-weapons program are lumbering on, with the United States playing the part of eager suitor and Pyongyang the part of the reluctant bride. This a bizarre...
View ArticleOral Transmission
Walter Pincus reports in the Washington Post on a new secrecy policy the Bush administration is introducing. It creates a protected category called “Controlled Unclassified Information” that replaces...
View ArticleWas This A False Positive?
STOCKHOLM, Sweden – Two people were arrested Wednesday after a worker was stopped at the entrance of a Swedish nuclear plant with a bag containing traces of an explosive which has been used in terror...
View ArticleWas This Appeasement?
My oldest daughter, deceptively argumentative under her charming exterior, is a student at Stuyvesant High School in New York. Yesterday she recounted to me an argument she was having at school about...
View ArticleJaw, Jaw
In the March issue of Commentary, Nathan Thrall wrote a splendid review of Treacherous Alliance by Trita Parsi, an absurdly over-praised book that purports to explain the “secret dealings of Israel,...
View ArticleAre We Secure?
According to the Department of Homeland Security’s color-coded “security advisory system,” the terrorist “threat level” is currently yellow. To meet the elevated danger, citizens are urged to “develop...
View ArticleLoose Nuclear Advisers
I have recently written here about Barack Obama’s nuclear adviser, Joseph Cirincione here on Connecting the Dots. Today I do so also in the Los Angeles Times under the title: The Failed Theology of...
View ArticleThe CIA’s Grand Champion
From 2002-05, Mark M. Lowenthal was an assistant director of the CIA and vice chairman of the National Intelligence Council. He has written one of the more useful books by an intelligence official:...
View ArticleIntelligence For Dummies
Personnel with foreign language skills are critical to the success of U.S. foreign policy. And they are especially valuable when they don’t speak or understand the languages of our adversaries. That is...
View ArticleMind of the Peanut
I couldn’t decide whether to call this Mind of the Peanut or the Devil is In the Details. Either way, here’s an interesting glimpse of the cranial gears of our worst ex-President: George C. Edwards...
View ArticleA Top Priority
Osama bin Laden is threatening to attack us with weapons of mass destruction. Iraq is hanging in the balance. Syria has a clandestine nuclear-weapons program. Lebanon is falling under the sway of...
View ArticleCrying Sheep
When you cry wolf once too often, you lose credibility. The same thing happens when you cry sheep. Is the CIA now crying sheep about al Qaeda? In an interview with the Washington Post, CIA Director...
View ArticleThe Fiasco in Iraq
The title speaks for itself: Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2003 to 2005. Tom Ricks, the military correspondent of the Washington Post wrote that book in 2006. Here we are two years...
View ArticleDebating Walter Pincus
I won’t be posting anything here until Friday because I am going down to Washington DC, there to engage in a debate with Walter Pincus of the Washington Post. Here’s the proposition that will be under...
View ArticleFry Them
The Washington Post reports today: More than 6 1/2 years after devastating suicide attacks against the United States launched the Bush administration’s fight against global terrorism, the alleged...
View ArticleLoose Lips Don’t Always Sink Ships
I’ve returned alive from my debate with Walter Pincus of the Washington Post. He is a genial fellow (as am I) and it was a friendly discussion. As I noted here on Tuesday, the proposition under...
View ArticleGone Fishing
Actually, I haven’t gone fishing. I am taking some time off to work on a book about secrecy and national security. I expect to return to this space later in the summer. If I catch any trout while...
View ArticleDarkness at the End of the Tunnel
Israel has just carried out a major aerial exercise, putting a hundred or so F-15s and F-16s into the skies over the eastern Mediterranean, evidently a rehearsal for a strike against Iran’s nuclear...
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