The spy who came in from the boardroom
The Bush administration's choice last week of J. Michael McConnell to be director of national intelligence is a major blunder -- and not just because the man who will be overseeing 16 different spy...
View ArticleGeorge Tenet cashes in on Iraq
If you go by the book jacket of his new memoir, "At the Center of the Storm," George Tenet is enjoying the life of a retired government servant teaching at Georgetown University, where he was...
View ArticleThe corporate takeover of U.S. intelligence
More than five years into the global "war on terror," spying has become one of the fastest-growing private industries in the United States. The federal government relies more than ever on outsourcing...
View ArticleAmerica under surveillance
In the pre-dawn hours of Sept. 1, 2005, a U-2 surveillance aircraft known as the Dragon Lady lifted off the runway at Beale Air Force Base in California, the home of the U.S. Air Force 9th...
View ArticleHurricane recovery, Republican-style
As residents of Mississippi's Gulf Coast gather today to commemorate the second anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, they will recall a cataclysmic storm that spared no one, rich or poor, from its...
View ArticleBlacklisted by the Bush government
One day in March 2004, Soliman Hamd Al-Buthe, a former member of Saudi Arabia's national basketball team and a government official in the city of Riyadh, picked up his phone for an urgent call with two...
View ArticleFormer high-ranking Bush officials enjoy war profits
Richard L. Armitage, who served from 2001 to 2005 as Deputy Secretary of State, was a rarity in the Bush administration: an official who delighted in talking to the press. Reporters loved him for his...
View ArticleExposing Bush’s historic abuse of power
The last several years have brought a parade of dark revelations about the George W. Bush administration, from the manipulation of intelligence to torture to extrajudicial spying inside the United...
View ArticleNorth Korea: What’s really happening
We all know it’s a crisis. Every night this week, NBC, CBS and every other media outlet in the country have led their evening newscasts with increasingly grim news out of Korea.It’s gone like this. A...
View ArticleNBC terrorism analysts need more transparency
Compared to the near-hysterical reporting on Fox and the mistake-prone efforts at CNN, the handling of the Boston Marathon attack and investigation by NBC (and sister cable channel MSNBC) was...
View ArticleMeet the contractors analyzing your private data
Amid the torrent of stories about the shocking new revelations about the National Security Agency, few have bothered to ask a central question. Who’s actually doing the work of analyzing all the data,...
View ArticleTim Shorrock
Tim Shorrock is the author of Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing. You can follow his frequent postings on Twitter at @TimothyS
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