On May 13, 2004, as the world media were in full scrum over Abu Ghraib, an FBI agent who had spent time interviewing terrorism suspects at the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, fired off a gloomy e-mail to a colleague. Venting about what had happened in Iraq and expressing his fears that, despite […]
Jason Vest
Jason Vest is a Senior Correspondent for The American Prospect and a contributor to the Boston Phoenix and The Nation, specializing in intelligence and national security affairs. He also holds an Ochberg Fellowship with the University of Washington's Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma. Recognized by American Journalism Review in 2002 as an "Unsung Hero of Washington Journalism," Vest has previously done staff stints at the Washington Post, US News & World Report and Village Voice. He covered the Eritrea-Ethiopia border war (1999-2000), as a correspondent for The Scotsman, and was awarded a 1999 Fund For Investigative Journalism grant to examine both the war and media coverage.
Originally a reporter for alternative weeklies in Indiana, Vest has also written for The Atlantic Monthly, Columbia Journalism Review, Mother Jones, AlterNet and the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies, among others. His work for the Prospect in 2004 has been supported by grant awards from the Foundation for Constitutional Goverment and the Ettinger Foundation. His book on national security during the current Bush Administration will be published by Wiley & Sons in 2005.
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Checkpoints and Balances
As soon as news broke on March 4 about U.S. troops firing on reporter Giuliana Sgrena’s Baghdad airport-bound car and killing Italian intelligence officer Nicola Calipari in the process, the clash of accounts began almost immediately. The Americans put the blame squarely on the Italians for driving too fast and not heeding supposed warnings; Sgrena […]
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Mole Hunt
In May, Stephen Green was hard at work campaigning for a seat in Vermont’s House of Representatives when he got a phone call. The last person the 64-year-old former United Nations official, then preoccupied with health-care policy issues, expected to hear from was an FBI agent, who asked if he could come to Washington to […]
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Spy Versus Spy
On Thursday morning, feelings of anticipatory glee that had been rising all week at the CIA’s Langley, Virginia, headquarters briefly ebbed. This was not out of sorrow at George Tenet’s resignation announcement. Rather, it was about what Tenet’s departure might mean in terms of another long-awaited staffing change. A notice had been sent round earlier […]
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Ahmad Agonistes
There was a story making the rounds in foreign-policy circles last fall about an exchange between two of Ahmad Chalabi’s most prominent patrons and detractors — a juicy bit that rang true, but seemed hopelessly, tantalizingly just beyond the journalistic grasp. Ubiquitous as it had become in the halls of Foggy Bottom and the Pentagon, […]
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Trust Busted
Before we turn our attention to Tuesday’s reactionary and indicative-of-utter-ignorance comments made on Capitol Hill by Senator James Inhofe, let’s first revisit Sunday’s Washington Post. Under the headline “Dissension Grows In Senior Ranks On War Strategy; U.S. May Be Winning Battles in Iraq But Losing the War, Some Officers Say,” a number of career Army […]
Posted inDispatches
Waiting to Happen
When President George W. Bush asserted in his May 5 attempt to mollify the Arab and Muslim worlds that “what took place in [the Abu Ghraib] prison does not represent the America I know,” Judy Greene nearly spat out a spoonful of dinner in disbelief. A veteran prison-policy analyst with the group Justice Strategies, Greene […]
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Meanwhile, in Africa …
An interesting case study in the Bush administration’s penchant for forging bilateral alliances that are enabling some truly wretched regimes is Eritrea, a small Horn of Africa nation strategically located on the Red Sea, where some on the right would like to establish U.S. air and naval bases. Eritrea is a truly remarkable country: There’s […]
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Red State Army
In the context of the democratic primary, retired Gen. Wesley Clark’s campaign seems less like Sherman’s quick and decisive March to the Sea and more like Grant’s shaky, protracted offensive against Vicksburg. Initially some were heralding the general’s candidacy as the beginning of the end for an already-peaked former Gov. Howard Dean (D-Vt.) and an […]
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Plame Throwers
I can recall more than a few moments prior to George W. Bush’s presidency that, though seemingly trivial at the time, have since taken on a certain prophetic quality. One such moment came during a July 2000 conversation I had in a European capital with a senior U.S. diplomat of some standing. Like many veterans […]