Back in the mid-1990s a marine public-information officer took me into a secret watering hole at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, that served as a private clubhouse for snipers. There was, however, one key condition: Nothing I saw and heard there could be used in a piece I was then writing for the Washington Post Magazine. […]
I’m so pissed off after reading these books I can hardly type. But my ire begins with baseball—and the same is true for Andrew Bacevich, a retired Army colonel who lost a son in Iraq.
One dark night in South Vietnam in mid-1969, I stopped for a beer at the rickety shack that served as an officers’ club for the First Marine Division, based a few miles outside of Da Nang, on the central coast. I had just delivered an intelligence report warning of an enemy rocket attack on the city.
His name may not ring a bell, but John Kiriakou was the CIA guy who surfaced on television during the furor over waterboarding to declare that, sure, it was torture, but it worked like magic on Al Qaeda kingpin Abu Zubaydah. According to Kiriakou, a long-time veteran of the agency’s intelligence-analysis and operations directorates, Abu Zubaydah cracked after only one application of the face cloth and water. “From that day on, he answered every question,” Kiriakou told ABC-TV’s Brian Ross in an exclusive interview on December 10, 2007. “The threat information he provided disrupted a number of attacks, maybe dozens
Liberals tend to view the Patriot Act, which expanded the boundaries of permissible police and domestic intelligence activities, with a degree of hysteria. If they think the Bush era ushered in a police state, they would do well to read Andrew Meier’s The Lost Spy, which, in the course of unearthing one of the unlikelier sagas in the annals of US-Soviet espionage, is a masterful rendering of the government’s repression of left-wing political ferment during World War I. That era’s brutal crackdowns on dissent—combined with the onset of the Great Depression—would prompt thousands of Americans to embrace Soviet Russia as
When one dreams of an island paradise, Diego Garcia probably isn’t in the picture. Unless, of course, you’re from Diego Garcia, and your family members were among the nearly two thousand people forced off that and neighboring islands a thousand miles south of India between 1968 and 1973 so Americans could pave it and put up a military base. For the Chagossians, as they are called, Diego Garcia was paradise then, replete with azure waters, white sand beaches, swaying coconut trees, and hurricane-free tropical weather, not to mention decent homes and plentiful food. And then the inhabitants were gone. The
