Free Republic

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...

These words come with more news about the passing of General Wayne Downing, one of America’s finest. This rare man was highly respected by the best of the best. I had the honor of talking several times with General Downing in Iraq earlier this year. He was still leading the way, providing his seasoned analysis on the air with NBC’s Brian Williams. At the time, I wrote of meeting General Downing in a dispatch entitled “Ernie is Dead”:

by Mark Finkelstein April 15, 2006 Different day, different Today show anchor, different attitude. As we documented here yesterday, when Katie Couric hosted a segment on the matter of the retired generals calling for Donald Rumsfeld's ouster, she chose as her guest one of the generals calling for Rumsfeld's head. Her most notable contributions to the discussion were to invite her guest to take a shot at Pres. Bush as long as he was at it, and to ask why he didn't come out sooner with his criticism so he could have 'shaped public opinion far earlier.' This morning it...

by Mark Finkelstein March 6, 2006 Give Katie Couric a Best Supporting Actress in the MSM production of "Doom & Gloom: the Iraq Story." Interviewing NBC military analyst Gen. Wayne Downing on this morning's Today Show, Couric was skeptical that Iraqi forces would ever be able to defend the country, saw a "vicious cycle" there, and darkly surmised that civil war was only "a matter of time." Couric noted reports that U.S. and British troops will pull out of Iraq by the spring of 2007, then stated: "The U.S. military denies those reports saying there is no time-table and U.S....

General Wayne Downing served in a variety of command assignments in infantry, armored, special operations, and joint units, culminating in his appointment as the Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. Special Operations Command. He served two combat tours in Vietnam as a junior infantry officer. As a general officer, Wayne Downing commanded the special operations of all services during the 1989 invasion of Panama and commanded a joint special operations task force operating deep behind the Iraqi lines during Operation DESERT STORM. Following retirement, General Wayne Downing was appointed by the President to assess the 1996 terrorist attack on the U.S....