There’s no reason why Porter Goss, the embattled director of the CIA, can’t declassify and make public the agency’s internal investigation of its less-than-stellar counterterrorism accomplishments before September 11. And there’s no reason why Goss can’t reprimand any current or former CIA officers, including former Director George Tenet, if they deserve it. (Whether they in […]
Robert Dreyfuss
Robert Dreyfuss is a senior correspondent for The American Prospect. He is the author of Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam. He can be reached through his website.
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Frist Things First
Bill Frist — senator, majority leader, and would-be president — has a far bigger scandal lurking in the wings than whether or not he illegally sold stock in his family’s health-care company, Hospital Corp. of America (HCA). It’s one that goes back to the very start of his political career in the early 1990s. Investigative […]
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Constitutional Crisis
President Bush, whose tattered Iraq policy finally came utterly unglued this week, now faces two unpalatable — and politically deadly — futures in Iraq. With the most recent polls showing approval ratings for Bush at 36 percent and dropping, the news from Iraq reads like a continuing obituary for his presidency, and the signs from […]
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How To Get Out Of Iraq
There is a light at the end of the tunnel. It isn’t the crisis-ridden process of creating an Iraqi constitution, holding a referendum, and then elections (again) in Iraq; down that bumpy path lies a future of continued insurrection and the likely breakup of Iraq, with beleaguered U.S. forces vainly trying to suppress the insurgency […]
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Phoenix Rising
With the 2004 electoral clock ticking amid growing public concern about U.S. casualties and chaos in Iraq, the Bush administration’s hawks are upping the ante militarily. To those familiar with the CIA’s Phoenix assassination program in Vietnam, Latin America’s death squads or Israel’s official policy of targeted murders of Palestinian activists, the results are likely […]
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Humpty Dumpty in Baghdad
The Pentagon is rumbling into Baghdad completely unprepared to fashion a viable new Iraqi government, seemingly obsessed with installing the discredited and corrupt Ahmed Chalabi, leader of the Iraqi National Congress (INC), as the country’s leader. The task force assigned the job of putting Humpty Dumpty together again after the shooting stops is woefully ill-equipped […]
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Just the Beginning
For months Americans have been told that the United States is going to war against Iraq in order to disarm Saddam Hussein, remove him from power, eliminate Iraq’s alleged stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, and prevent Baghdad from blackmailing its neighbors or aiding terrorist groups. But the Bush administration’s hawks, especially the neoconservatives who […]
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Persian Gulf—or Tonkin Gulf?
In a pair of editorials after the 1991 Gulf War, one of them titled “Don’t Shoot Down Iraqi Aircraft,” The New York Times called the plan to create vast “no-fly zones” (NFZs) in Iraq “legally untenable and politically unwise.” The editorials, based on a careful reading of United Nations resolutions, were explicit: “The [cease-fire] accord […]
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The Pentagon Muzzles the CIA
Even as it prepares for war against Iraq, the Pentagon is already engaged on a second front: its war against the Central Intelligence Agency. The Pentagon is bringing relentless pressure to bear on the agency to produce intelligence reports more supportive of war with Iraq, according to former CIA officials. Key officials of the Department […]
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Tinker, Banker, NeoCon, Spy
If T.E. Lawrence (“of Arabia”) had been a 21st-century neoconservative operative instead of a British imperial spy, he’d be Ahmed Chalabi’s best friend. Chalabi, the London-based leader of the Iraqi National Congress (INC), is front man for the latest incarnation of a long-time neoconservative strategy to redraw the map of the oil-rich Middle East, put […]