The campaigns of Barack Obama and John McCain are engaging in an angry exchange today over Obama’s remarks to Jake Tapper yesterday in which he talked about the role of law enforcement in combating terrorism.
In the interview, Obama said, "[I]t is my firm belief that we can track terrorists, we can crack Read More
Eliot Spitzer is announcing this morning that Richard Clarke, the former White House national coordinator for security and counter-terrorism, is endorsing his plan to allow illegal immigrants to obtain New York driver’s licenses.
“In the interim, states should act to register immigrants, legal and illegal, who use our roadways as New York is doing now,” Read More
How to Win Hearts and Minds
The Battle of Algiers DVD costs $49.95, and given the brilliance of the film and the wealth of the DVD’s extras, one might say that’s cheap. Italian director Gillo Pontecorvo’s masterful 1965 movie, a documentary-like reimagining of the 1956 conflict between France’s 10th Paratroops Division and the Algerian liberation Read More
When Bill Frist replaced the disgraced Trent Lott as the Senate majority leader last year, it seemed obvious that he possessed scant qualifications for the post. He had served only a single term in the Senate, without any great distinction. He had never even voted before he decided to run for the Senate, backed by Read More
Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror , by Richard A. Clarke. Free Press, 304 pages, $27.
If you’re reading these words, you could probably use a hobby.
What’s left to say, after all, about Richard Clarke’s book? Anyone not living in a cave the last few weeks knows the headlines (Condi Read More
Condoleezza Rice has told everyone willing to listen that she wishes for nothing more than the opportunity to testify in public before the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States. (The President’s national security adviser didn’t say whether she was eager to subject herself to the penalties of perjury, as the co-chairmen of Read More
It’s spring, and your diarist finds himself in a mood that is not so much bewitched as bothered, and bewildered.
I turn on the TV set and see the would-be Palestinian suicide bomber-all of 16 years old-shirtless and frightened, cowering in his underpants outside an Israeli checkpoint on the West Bank. His face is Read More
George W. Bush has been accused, in the words of his former anti-terrorism czar, of doing “a terrible job” of fighting terrorism-distracted by what Richard Clarke called a misadventure in Iraq and a feckless defense of the homeland. But Mr. Bush has done a fine task of fighting Mr. Clarke himself, the pistol-packing, media-savvy, double-breasted Read More
On the afternoon of Monday, March 29, the man who convinced Richard Clarke to set pen to paper walked into a dark restaurant on the Upper East Side. “It has kind of a Mafia feel,” Len Sherman said cheerily as he took off his sunglasses and settled into a quiet booth.
Tanned, tieless and laid-back Read More
Within days after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the White House public-relations office began to shroud those events behind personality propaganda, heroic mythology and even religious mysticism. Over the years to come-and until now, perhaps-stirring words and images would serve not only to repackage George W. Bush, but also to obscure the plain Read More
