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 [...]

The Syrian regime, like Libya a year ago, continues its slow slog to utter demise.  Unlike Libya, though, we haven’t seen a bandwagon of countries jumping on board the Jihad to get rid of the region’s latest despot in trouble.   Considering the death toll in Syria is now around 8,000, I find this peculiar, but not particularly troubling.  As I’ve stated in previous blogs, I thought the whole Libyan intervention was short-sighted to begin with because eliminating a bad regime is only half the solution.  Ensuring something better comes [...]

This didn’t get much play in the press, but it’s really big news.  There appears to be a crack in the Axis of Evil love triangle between Iran, Syria, and Hamas.  Last Friday, at a grand mosque in Cairo, Egypt, Hamas denounced Assad and overtly supported the opposition forces against him.  I was a little stunned on a variety levels.   Iran and Syria have funded Hamas from its creation.  They’re its sugar daddies, and Iran is definitely on the Assad bandwagon.  Hamas has now made a conscious effort [...]

Last Sunday on 60 Minutes the Secretary of Defense, Leon Panetta, said if the U.S. gathered intelligence that Iran was building a nuclear weapon, it would be a red-line, and all options were on the table, including military. On the surface, I find the statement a little ludicrous.  Even the United Nations International Atomic Energy Agency says Iran is developing nuclear weapons technology. The administration’s official line is that they “aren’t convinced” Iran has decided to make a weapon, and that maybe they’re simply building the components for [...]

The Obama National Security Team announced a dramatic shift in strategy for our military capability yesterday, and after all the bluster about “reorganizing for 21stcentury threats”, I couldn’t help but be struck by how everything said pointed back in time, not forward.  The center-piece of the strategy is cutting down the size of our Army.  Making it “leaner and more agile”.  No longer will we be structured for “legacy tasks” of stability and support operations or nation-building.  Nope, it’s all about “responding quickly and effectively to a variety of [...]

When we lost a drone to Iran the other day, I thought, “Wow.  Someone is in trouble.”  What I didn’t think was, “Wow.  It’s the end of the world.  Now Iran has our most top-secret information.”  I wouldn’t even blog about this, because it’s really a non-issue, but then a drone crashed in the Seychelles islands doing work over Somalia, and the next thing you hear is that OUR ENTIRE DRONE INFRASTRUCTURE IS IN DANGER.  Really?  Come on.  Drones are made for one thing:  Disposable intelligence. Yes, we [...]