As images of the bombed United Nations headquarters in Baghdad appeared on television last week, my thoughts turned to a conversation I had with a very senior national-security official (a political appointee with no military experience, not a career bureaucrat) prior to the invasion of Iraq. He earnestly told me that after Saddam Hussein’s fall, […]
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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Mitch Daniels: Due Diligence?
In his 29 years as a maintenance worker for the Indianapolis Power and Light Company (IPALCO), James C. Gilmore had never been asked to do anything like it. But in late 2000 and early 2001, according to an affidavit filed with the U.S. District Court, Southern District of Indiana, he was ordered to remove “many […]
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Help from the Hill
As a rule, both the joint Chiefs of Staff and the Central Intelligence Agency’s leadership prefer that Congress stay out of their affairs. Indeed, an ideal Congress for many denizens of this realm would be one that simply holds open the cash spigots while Langley and the Pentagon set their own agendas. That makes it […]
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Why Warnings Fell on Deaf Ears:
What did the president know and when did he know it? Following revelations that the White House had reason to suspect an imminent al-Qaeda attack last year, even The New York Times has noted that the perennial post-Watergate question seems entirely appropriate. Nor should it be put exclusively to President Bush: In most countries, the […]
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Mountain Men:
Scott Shuger seems to consider actual research and reporting to be too much of a chore. His response to my American Prospect Online article on the United States Army’s military preparedness for mountain warfare merely defends the Pentagon’s spin. In this case, the spin is that the U.S. military is just fine as is, and […]
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Some Things To Consider About Afghanistan — From Those Who’ve Been There
From 1988 to 1992, freelance photographer Patrick O’Donnell was based in Peshawar, Pakistan, and often traveled deep into Afghanistan — frequently in the company of Australian journalist Anthony Davis, who remains a leading authority on Afghanistan, and photograher Robert Nickelsberg, who briefly returned to Afghanistan earlier this year. Another friend of O’Donnell’s, David Dienstag, spent […]
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Mountain Division:
In a recent Slate “Today’s Papers” column, Eric Umansky drew attention to a Wall Street Journal item reporting the impending arrival of 1700 British troops in Afghanistan at the U.S. military’s request. Quite rightly, Umansky was most interested not in what was included in the dispatch, but what wasn’t. “Given that the US presumably still […]
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Trouble at High Levels
Last fall I interviewed a number of current and former CIA officers who worked the Pakistan-Afghanistan border during the days of the mujahideen’s fight against the Soviets. I also spoke with current and former military officers with combat experience in Vietnam, the Gulf War, or the Balkans. The war in Afghanistan was in its earliest […]
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Costs a Bundle and Can’t Fly
For the past decade, numerous career military officers and defense analysts–whose politics run the gamut from left to right–have held that U.S. combat in the twenty-first century probably won’t mean grand, conventional battles with large standing armies. And September 11 suggests that these experts are right: Rather than a “rogue state” raining down ballistic missiles […]
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Speaking for the Dead:
It was early May when the Ethiopian kid was murdered. There’s no other word for it; isn’t it a homicide when a guy with a gun turns it on a helpless, frightened boy and takes his life? That’s the way I would have called it when I worked the police beat in Indiana. The Eritrean […]