Laura Rozen

President Bush’s decision to create an independent commission to investigate what went wrong with U.S. intelligence on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction (or lack thereof) is literally too little, too late, according to intelligence and proliferation experts. The commission was handpicked by White House officials and vetted by the vice president, whose alleged mishandling and […]

Let’s face it. “Unresolved ambiguity” is not a phrase that rolls easily off the tongues of Dick Cheney or George W. Bush. So when chief Iraq weapons inspector David Kay told the news media this week that Saddam Hussein apparently had no weapons of mass destruction when the United States invaded Iraq last spring, and […]

Robert Baer is the kind of contact every journalist wishes he or she could trade notes with over a beer, a gifted storyteller with a wealth of war stories from his 21 years as a CIA case officer in places such as Beirut, Sudan, northern Iraq and Central Asia. After his resignation in 1997, he […]

For several weeks, one emerging aspect of the situation in Iraq has puzzled me: Why does the Pentagon — longtime disparager of post-conflict nation building — seem to want so desperately to control postwar Iraq? Unlike in Kosovo or Afghanistan, where the Pentagon’s tough guys resisted playing occupier, the U.S. military in Iraq seems to […]

Police states don’t just fade away. Their remnants persist — through deeply intertwined networks of secret police, paramilitary units and criminal groups that have enriched themselves while serving as pillars of support to tyrants. No one knew this more than Zoran Djindjic, the pro-reform Serbian prime minister who was assassinated on Wednesday. And no one […]

When President Bush proposed the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) last year, one of four key tasks he said the new department would fulfill would be streamlined counterterrorism intelligence analysis. The new department “will review intelligence and law-enforcement information from all agencies of government and produce a single daily picture of threats against our homeland,” […]

FBI agents investigating last fall’s anthrax attacks searched the Frederick, Maryland, apartment of Steven J. Hatfill, a former U.S. government bio-defense scientist, this past Tuesday. Hatfill is not a suspect in the anthrax case, the FBI says. Rather, law-enforcement officials have told The Associated Press that Hatfill consented to the search in order to clear […]