AUTHOR ARCHIVES
Government, S&P target credibility
August 8, 2011 The Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve have already revealed what their strategy toward Standard & Poor's will be now that the agency has stripped the U.S. government of its AAA rating: to destroy S&P's credibility. They can make a pretty good case. It's not just that S&P revealed its...
Analysis: Defining down war
July 1, 2011 Each day for the last three months, NATO has issued a classified order dividing the ongoing air war in Libya-uhh, let's call it "mission"-into offensive and defensive operations. The latter category is America's job, and it is huge. It includes Suppression of Enemy Air Defenses, which consists mainly of U.S....
Washington loses patience with counterinsurgency in Afghanistan
June 24, 2011 John Nagl is the kind of guy who brings to mind F. Scott Fitzgerald's wicked line in The Great Gatsby about people who succeed at such an early age that "everything afterward savors of anticlimax." A star at West Point and a Rhodes scholar, the native Nebraskan was only 37...
Bin Laden journal addresses future attacks, possible targets
May 11, 2011 A personal journal taken from Osama bin Laden's compound contains handwritten notes that are believed to be the terror chieftain's thoughts about future operations and possible targets, along with "musings on al Qaeda," a U.S. official said on Wednesday. The official, part of a U.S. national security team reviewing the...
GOP senator has questions on bin Laden raid
May 5, 2011 The ranking Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Georgia's Saxby Chambliss, on Thursday questioned the Obama administration's account of the Osama bin Laden raid, saying that CIA Director Leon Panetta gave him details on Sunday night that differed from what the president's counterterrorism advisor, John Brennan, offered to reporters Monday...
David Petraeus will face challenges at helm of CIA
April 28, 2011 For a former liberal Democrat who opposed the Iraq surge, Leon Panetta didn't do too badly as director of the CIA. He led some of the most aggressive counterterrorism operations in the history of the spy agency, including an unprecedented escalation of drone strikes in Pakistan and elsewhere. Under Panetta's...
Slippery-slope syndrome: With the CIA ‘finding,’ how deep is the U.S. wading into Libya’s civil war?
March 31, 2011 It's an old question, but we've been through enough of these interventions now -- from Vietnam to Kosovo to Afghanistan -- to insist on asking it once again: Is the United States on a slippery slope in Libya, one that will lead to American military involvement on the ground? The...