I finally saw Zero Dark Thirty the other day, and all the top-secret/administration giving up classified debate aside, I found it pretty slow.  Including the culminating hit at the end.  I wasn't on target, but if they moved in real life like the molasses actors did on screen, Osama bin Laden would have been in India before they reached the third floor.  The movie did, however, remind me of a paper I'd written a long time ago.  I haven't blogged in awhile because I'm buried in security work [...]

Today is the publication date of General Stanley McChrystal’s book MY SHARE OF THE TASK.  I’m looking forward to reading it, but have already seen press reports stating he barely discusses the Rolling Stone article that brought about the end of his career.  He simply assumes responsibility for the entire affair, as I would absolutely expect.  When the article first appeared and the whirlwind began – over two years ago, right before the publication of ONE ROUGH MAN – I wrote a blog about it.  I never posted [...]

It’s been a couple of years since I blogged about the damage Wikileaks has done, and the founder is back in the news.  Julian Assange has holed up in the Ecuadorian Embassy in the United Kingdom, after fleeing from authorities who wanted to extradite him to Sweden for alleged sex crimes.  And yet, his entire existence still revolves, remarkably, around some fanciful plot that the United States is trying to get him, with Assange himself spending his last moment in the sun denouncing the US “Witch Hunt”. What “witch [...]

Today marks the fortieth anniversary of the Watergate break-in, and I find it strangely symbolic given the ongoing debate about the current spate of leaks plaguing this administration.  Watergate was the breaking point for any restraint in the press; the end of responsible journalism where writers weighed the ramifications of a story before publishing it.  Prior to Watergate, American journalists felt they had an obligation both to their newspaper and to their country.  Now, it’s a free-for-all, the only obligation being to make as much of a news [...]

On Mother’s Day I read two news stories that really got me thinking about what drives our foreign policy.  Twin car bombs were detonated in Damascus killing fifty-five people.  This set off a worldwide media frenzy about how fragile the current truce is and how the UN better get on the ball.  On the same day, a bus was found in Mexico with the bodies of upwards of seventy people butchered, their heads, hands and feet cut off.  The gruesome discovery was just a blip in the news cycle.  [...]

I was eight years old when Watergate broke, and I literally grew up immersed in the belief that the government was always out to cover something up, and the press was the white knight out to expose these transgressions.  After seeing the press shenanigans for the last ten years, I think a readjustment is in order.  I’m not saying give the government a pass – the inoculation took, and I don’t trust them as far as I can throw them.  I’m saying it’s time to shine that same [...]