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I attended a panel session at the Heritage Foundation yesterday featuring Paul Lettow, author of Ronald Reagan and His Quest to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, published in hardcover last year and now out in paperback. Paul is a recent graduate of Princeton who earned a Ph.D. at Oxford and a J.D. at Harvard. Several years ago, he worked for me as a research assistant — a classic case of hiring someone who's smarter than you. His book is an expanded version of his Ph.D. thesis, but it doesn't read like one. Paul interviewed almost all the living veterans of the Reagan...

Everyone alive and still breathing on this planet knows that the Democrats, via the Church Committee, castrated the CIA and got rid of most of their human intelligence assets (humint). We know also, from the 9/11 Commission hearings, that the Clinton Administration, through the person of Jamie Gorelick, erected the wall between the CIA, the FBI and the military so that they could not share intelligence about prospective terrorist acts. No American is responsible for 9/11; the Islamic terrorists are the only ones responsible, but these failures of intelligence (especially the Able Danger warnings and the missing WMD’s) fall right...

Only on a panel sponsored by the Campaign for America's Future.Boston"ARE YOU ALL READY TO TAKE BACK AMERICA?" Robert Borosage, the co-director of Campaign for America's Future, asked on Wednesday, standing in front of an enthusiastic crowd at the Royal Sonesta Hotel in Cambridge. And the crowd sure was ready. They hooted and hollared. They roared and screamed. They nodded their heads vigorously. The day before, Michael Moore had stopped by. On Wednesday, Reps. Dennis Kucinich and Barbara Lee, former senator Gary Hart, and Ambassador Joe Wilson took the stage.The occasion was a debate on the Iraq war, which may...

Watching the Democrat congressional leadership demagogueing September 11 and blaming President Bush for lack of attention to intelligence information prior to the attack should remind us of who was responsible for preventing our intelligence agencies from doing their job. Before September 11, our government received three significant pieces of intelligence. On July 10, the FBI's Phoenix, Ariz., office warned headquarters that large numbers of Middle Eastern students were attending flight schools and might be a future terrorist threat. It was suggested that the FBI get their names and check them out. On August 6, the CIA briefed the President and...

From S. Stephen Powell, Covert Cadre: Inside the Institute for Policy Studies, 1987, 65-66: Organizing Committee for a Fifth Estate, and CounterspyPhilip Agee and Victor Marchetti, along with members of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, launched the journal CounterSpy, under the aegis of the Organizing Committee for a Fifth Estate (OC-5). OC-5 stated that its purpose was to develop an "alternative intelligence community. . .with the flexibility of employing both revolutionary and reformist methods. In an early CounterSpy article, "Exposing the CIA", Agree spelled out the OC-5 program: "The most effective and important systematic efforts to combat the CIA...

Has the US intelligence community become too reliant on satellites versus human intelligence—spies? It seems as if a majority of America’s bigfoot political commentators have decided that the WMD intelligence failure in Iraq is due to a lack of human intelligence caused by an over-reliance on technology. This “spies good/satellites bad” way of thinking is just as misguided as the “spies bad/satellites good” conclusions of the mid-1970s (repeated to a lesser extent in the 1990s.) Gathering and interpreting technological intelligence and human intelligence are entirely different disciplines, and trying to compare them is like trying to compare the study of...

Hey folks, I need some help. I'm writing a paper for my journalism ethics class (I know, oxymoron) about the Dark Alliance series from about 6 years ago (Contras/Crack/CIA story). I need some info on the Frank Church Committee from the mid-70's that basically striped the CIA of much of its power. But, from what I can tell, there hasn't been much written on it specifically and all you can find on the web is conspiracy web-sites, which are no good to me. If anyone knows of some good sources of info, I would appreciate it.