America's ricin kooks -- and, yes, there are enough of them to form a category -- are not the Hollywood picture of evil or even vaguely competent as domestic terrorists. The historical timeline reveals them as a gallery of weirdos, some of them dangerous in...

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Raise a toast to the Fraud Anniversary. For 99 percent of America it's been all downhill ever since, including me. The GWB administration and the mainstream media broke everything with the Iraq war....

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Four years ago this week, Russia and Georgia briefly went to war. The conflict has had lasting effects for Tbilisi, Moscow, and beyond. For Georgia, the conflict forced substantial rethinking of security strategy, foreign policy, and necessarily its approach to Abkhazia and South Ossetia. It...

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David Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest, his 1972 account of the policy-makers in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations and the nature of the Vietnam disaster, is a classic on the delusions of American power. Everything Halberstam described then is present today. Only conditions and...

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In the mainstream public discussion about cyberwar, bull---- walks, particularly here. And so it is not greatly surprising when an infamous old April Fool's joke about a computer virus alleged to have been used in Desert Storm shows up almost right on time for the...

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At Secrecy blog Steve Aftergood has posted the testimony of William McRaven, overall commander of global US Special Operations. Appearing before the Senate Armed Services committee recently, McRaven emitted statements that, with only a little translation, frankly and perfectly encapsulate the American strategy to globally...

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Ever since 9/11 the United States has been in a war with castor plants. It has done this by making people believe castor seeds are a deadly horror and putting in jail everyone stupid enough to pound them. The rest of the world has shrugged....

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Yesterday William Broad of the New York Times put Newt Gingrich's role as one of the chieftains of the Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy onto the front page of that high button newspaper. The piece was mildly critical but such things always give the story...

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Does the President of the United States have a doctrine for guiding foreign policy and national security? Yes, according to a recent report released by The Heritage Foundation. "Defining the Obama Doctrine, Its Pitfalls, and How to Avoid Them" distills the results of scanning the...

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The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, in terms of conventional military capability, is by far the best resourced and most sophisticated regional or multilateral organization in the world. Its 26 countries - which will become 28 following the Strasbourg-Kehl NATO summit later this week - together...

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