Day: August 22, 2007

The Pentagon said on Tuesday it would close a controversial database tracking suspicious activity around U.S. military bases that critics complained had been used to spy on peaceful antiwar activists.

Officials decided the TALON program would end on September 17 not in response to public criticism but because the amount and quality of information being gathered had declined, the Pentagon said.

Mistakes and missed opportunities by the Central Intelligence Agency failed to follow up on the growing threat of al Qaeda and left America open to attack on September 11, 2001, an investigation within the CIA concludes.

The damning report condemns former CIA director George Tenet for abandoning his own declared war on the terrorist organization and diverting agency resources away from the effort to prevent an attack on American soil.

The report lays much of the blame for American vulnerability to the attacks directly on Tenet.

A retired American general is admitting what President George W. Bush will not.

Southern Iraq is out of control and getting worse and there appears little the military can do about it.

As the war escalates and the White House continues to claim otherwise, the death toll mounts and the situation becomes more and more hopeless.

Yet Bush stubbornly sticks to his failed Iraq strategy and shows no sign of bending to the will of the American people or the face of reality.

Professors John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Stephen Walt of Harvard University are two very senior scholars who are currently taking very intense heat.

Next month, their book “The Israel Lobby” will be published. They argue that the United States is too closely allied with and too accommodating of Israel. Predictably, their viewpoint has generated very hostile criticism. Several organizations that had scheduled appearances by the authors have canceled under pressure, including at least one East Coast academic institution. That is regrettable.

The recent market meltdown had much less to do with bad subprime loans than advertised. It was caused more fundamentally by excesses at hedge and private equity funds. Those contraptions, invented by the sinfully wealthy barons of Wall Street, have lied to themselves and their investors about the efficacy of their schemes. Now they are quiet in their sins as bad home loans take the rap for a global meltdown that the U.S. housing market is not large enough to cause.