In February 2004, the Senate Select Intelligence Committee (SSCI) announced that it had unanimously agreed to expand its investigation of prewar Iraq intelligence from focus on intelligence community blunders and into the more controversial area of “whether intelligence was exaggerated or misused” by U.S. government officials. The committee’s ranking Democrat, Jay Rockefeller, struck the agreement […]
Laura Rozen
Laura Rozen is a Prospect senior correspondent and a national security correspondent for The Washington Monthly.
Posted inArticle
The Report They Forgot
In February 2004, the Senate Select Intelligence Committee (SSCI) announced that it had unanimously agreed to expand its investigation of prewar Iraq intelligence from focus on intelligence community blunders and into the more controversial area of “whether intelligence was exaggerated or misused” by U.S. government officials. The committee’s ranking Democrat, Jay Rockefeller, struck the agreement […]
Posted inArticle
Rendition’s Revenge
It’s no secret that some of the more dubious intelligence cited by the Bush administration to justify its invasion of Iraq ran through Italy. The most infamous case is that of the forged “uranium from Niger” memos that ultimately became a key basis for the administration’s mistaken claims that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear program. […]
Posted inArticle
Curt Weldon’s Deep Throat
Countdown to Terror, Representative Curt Weldon’s sensationalistic new book about his personal struggle to combat the Iranian terrorism threat despite the alleged resistance of the CIA, is based entirely on the Pennsylvania Republican’s freelance communications with a secret source he code-named “Ali.” Much of Weldon’s book, which will be released next week by Regnery Publishing, […]
Posted inDispatches
The Prince and the Dissident
As a former aide-de-camp to the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomenei and one of the founders of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, Mohsen Sazegara was once at the radical, sharply anti-American vanguard of that country’s Islamic revolution. Operating from Khomenei’s exile headquarters in Paris during the 1970s, the U.S.–educated student revolutionary was so close to the theocrats plotting to […]
Posted inFeatures
The Front
For Iranians in exile — and the Americans who become embroiled in their intrigues — Paris has long been the city of shadows. This is where the Ayatollah Khomenei awaited the ominous victory of his Islamic revolution; and where the deposed ministers and brutal spies from the late shah’s government washed up in the 1979 […]
Posted inFeatures
Cloak and Swagger
To Washington’s small and sometimes fractious community of Iran experts, it was becoming obvious: What to do about Iran and its fast-developing nuclear program was set to rival Iraq as the most pressing foreign-policy challenge for the person elected president in 2004. By the spring and early summer of this year, the city was awash […]
Posted inFeatures
Building a Better UN
If one had asked the leaders of the United Nations to choose a test case through which they could demonstrate the organization’s efficacy before the world, they would hardly have chosen Iraq. With a volatile security situation, too few peacekeeping troops, and a recent political history that has bitterly divided the members of the UN […]
Posted inArticle
Chalabi Smackdown
A year ago, U.S. forces airlifted Ahmed Chalabi and his band of freedom fighters into Iraq. Today, U.S. authorities raided his Baghdad house at gunpoint, seizing boxes of documents. What happened? Reuel Marc Gerecht, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a former Middle East specialist based in Turkey for the Central Intelligence […]
Posted inArticle
Ye of Little Feith
There was a time when Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith seemed to run a secret foreign policy from his office on the fourth floor of the Pentagon. As creator of the Office of Special Plans, Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith presided over a secretive intelligence unit that was briefed by Iraqi exile leader Ahmad Chalabi […]