Free Republic

You should know, dear reader, we are not among those who despised ADM Jeremy "Mike" Boorda. In fact, we did and always will admire this fine man, who went all the way from Seaman to Chief of Naval Operations. No one has done it before, and it's very likely no one else will accomplish such a feat in the future. ADM Boorda deserves our respect and remembrance as a great leader who deeply cared about his sailors and country. On this, the 16th anniversary of his mysterious death, we should mourn his loss, but also demand the Pentagon come clean...

Brig. Gen. Terryl Schwalier was stunned when he read the account of the June 25, 1996 Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia that appeared in my recent book, Countdown to Crisis: the Coming Nuclear Showdown with Iran. I was writing many years after the fact, drawing on sources from inside Iranian intelligence but also on published U.S. government reports. It was those U.S. reports that prompted General Schwalier to contact me a few months ago. “You paint a picture of significant government awareness that “Iran was up to something” in the months prior to the Khobar Towers attack,” he wrote...

As Saddam Hussein pressed the United Nations oil-for-food relief program for more money that he used to buy banned weapons, an unwitting ally may have been the American driver. Almost until the eve of the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, American oil companies were among the largest purchasers of Iraqi crude oil. The role that the companies, including ExxonMobil and ChevronTexaco, played in the oil-for-food program is now coming under greater scrutiny in the wake of a report by the chief arms inspector for the Central Intelligence Agency that disclosed how extensively Mr. Hussein was abusing profits from the...