Features

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 […]

Exactly as intended, Porter Goss has hit the Central Intelligence Agency like a wrecking ball. The former Florida congressman, who had an undistinguished career as a CIA operations officer in the 1960s, came to the agency in September 2004 after serving seven years as chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. With his […]

The liberal hawks now say the idea of the war wasn’t bad, just its execution. This saves face — and serves a more dangerous function.

From the archives: Before he was John McCain’s spiritual adviser, Rod Parsley rose to power via his controversial “Word of Faith” doctrine and his support for Ohio’s gay marriage ban.

Is Hurricane Katrina a transformative political moment? Is this finally the time when Americans appraise the failure of the Bush administration — that is, the failure of modern conservatism — and say, “Enough”? Can liberals seize the opportunity those failures represent to make a case for a different society, in which repeated warnings about the […]

Driving on the four-lane highway past the cushy American-style Tel Aviv suburb of Ra’anana to the Jewish settlement of Ariel, there’s a clear drop in the countryside from green trees to brown, rocky hilltops. This is the “Green Line,” the 1967 border. There are no checkpoints to mark contested land because the road was built […]

On a Saturday in January 2003, as the Iraq War approached, the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment convened a meeting in a nondescript building in Arlington, Virginia, with three dozen of Washington’s top conservative policy intellectuals. Using an information-gathering technique dating back to the Eisenhower administration, the office asked four groups to study the long-term […]

In August, on the 70th anniversary of the signing of the Social Security Act, the White House released a three-sentence presidential statement. “For 70 years,” it read, “Social Security has been a vital program and helped millions of America’s seniors in retirement. The Social Security system is sound for today’s seniors, but there is a […]

Rick Larsen is a third-term Democratic representative from Lake Stevens in Washington state. A balding former publicist for the Washington State Dental Association, Larsen, 40, is a proud member of the New Democrat Coalition. His district, Washington’s 2nd, runs north from the Seattle suburbs to the Canadian border. It is, on balance, fairly liberal — […]

It was over cantaloupe and cottage cheese that the Lord told Pat Robertson to build a university. The year was 1975, and the minister, then 45, was running so late for a meeting that he decided to head to a nearby coffee shop, get his “famous” snack, and wait the meeting out. It was at […]