Those were heady days in the US stock market. I would wake up by 5 am and watch CNBC before the stock market opened for trading at 6:30 am Pacific time. It was no different on the morning of September 11, 2001. Little did I know that catastrophic things were about to happen that would change the...
It’s July 2020 and I’ve just turned 76, which, as far as I’m concerned, officially makes me an old man. So, put up with my aging, wandering brain here, since (I swear) I wasn’t going to start this piece with Donald Trump, no matter his latest wild claims or bizarre statements, increasingly...
Ever since that fatal morning in 2001, the families of victims of the 9/11 terrorist attacks have been seeking to understand the level of complicity of the Saudi government in the funding, logistics and execution of the attacks. While the identities of two Saudis, whose names were redacted in the...
In the 21st century, insurgent movements, now largely religious or terror-based or both, offer a grim new version of containment to the last superpower. Think of it as the all-American version of the human comedy: a great power that eternally knows what the world needs and offers copious advice...
Maliki's war cry over fighting al-Qaeda is a clear subversion of the truth. As violence in Fallujah escalates to near-unprecedented levels, the entire narrative of the fighting seems to evade a number of key points. Namely, this fighting was not precipitated by the capture of Sunni strongholds by...
Western security services need to be on guard to handle a new terrorist threat from Syria. With numerous foreign fighters converging in Syria over the last couple of years, the following question needs to be asked: What happens to the face of terrorism once the foreign fighters return...
Is the US willing to accept the moral consequences of a society that institutionalizes torture? In Zero Dark Thirty, enhanced interrogation techniques — so-called torture-lite of the kind practiced at Guantanamo Bay and various CIA black sites — are shown being used to extract...
There is little appetite within Obama's camp to feed the military-industrial cabal. Even before I had gone to war for the first time, it had been visceral among us. In our smoke filled cellars, cradling our Kerouac, we would rail ''MFs up against the wall" at the mere thought...
