The Compass

The Soviet War Scare of 1983: Declassified

The Week — Thu, 16 May 2013 19:02:00 -0400

Able Archer 83 was a NATO nuclear command post exercise that the Russians almost mistook for the real thing — a U.S. first strike. And when President Reagan learned about this, it stuck on his conscience. It may have been a turning point in the Cold War. About the same time as Able Archer, Reagan received his first briefing of the nuclear war plans, and was told that a winnable nuclear war would cost at least 60 million lives. And he watched, along with millions of Americans, a made-for-TV movie about the horrific aftermath of a nuclear apocalypse.

Today, Nate Jones at the National Security...

A guide to D.C. for the terminologically impaired

The Week — Thu, 16 May 2013 07:41:00 -0400

By ABC's definition a scandal is a television show that outdoes itself from week-to-week, and must involve at least one duplicitous betrayal and monumental, earth-shattering cover-up per week, if not per act.

I think actual Washington suffers from Scandal envy.

On television, Fitz has an affair with his long-time image-maker, the White House chief of staff murders someone, and the mole is... well, I won't spoil it. (Actually, the real scandal in the show is how the chief of staff's boyfriend got his White House correspondent's job in the first place, but I'm just vamping).

In reality,...

What would you do?

The Week — Wed, 15 May 2013 21:53:00 -0400

I've given this little puzzle to a bunch of people, and I've gotten all types of responses.

So:

You wake up one morning, roll over, and slide the snooze lever on your phone. You take a glance, you see the numbers "2721" in the tail end of a text alert from your credit card company.

You'll check it later.

Listening to NPR, or Howard Stern, or a local am radio show, you hear one of the jocks or hosts mention a "27 to 1" scoring spree by the San Antonio Spurs during last night's play-off game.

When you sit down to pour your cereal, your eyes hover over the nutrition label. The cereal has...

The myths of leak investigations

The Week — Wed, 15 May 2013 12:04:00 -0400

As a journalist, I don't think, a priori, that criminal leak investigations are bad for democracy. I recognize that the government has an obligation to pursue and prosecute employees who illegally disclose classified information. I have an obligation to protect my sources. To be sure, seeking reporters' phone logs is a significant use of executive power. It ought only be used when, as the Justice Department's own guidelines suggest, all other mechanisms to discover the source of a leak have been exhausted.

But what bothers me about the recent spate of leak investigations initiated...

Why is the FBI pursuing this leak so aggressively?

The Week — Tue, 14 May 2013 20:38:00 -0400

My first reaction to the AP's disclosure that the Justice Department had subpoenaed two months worth of telephone call records (that is, for a certain number, the identity of the person called, and the duration of the call, as recorded by the telephone company) for 20 personal and professional phone lines leased by both reporters and editors, was one of sympathy for my journalistic kin.

Since May 2012, the Justice Department has been investigating the unauthorized disclosure of classified information that led to an Associated Press article about a failed bomb plot that ended with the U.S...

An impeachment limerick

The Week — Tue, 14 May 2013 20:10:00 -0400

Consider the mighty Repubs

beating Obama with clubs.

but talk of "impeachment"

a grand over-reach-ment

will keep them the party of scrubs.

A rule of media thermodynamics: For every conservative over-action, there is an equally breathless and ideologically opposite counter-action. If conservatives have become geese that continually lay malformed eggs, progressives are the type to continually sample it and then critique the recipe, even if the point is simply for them to eat something disgusting.

That means that the idea of impeachment has to be actually entertained, which...

Beware the Benghazi diction wars

The Week — Mon, 13 May 2013 12:56:00 -0400

President Obama's forceful response to the Benghazi hearings in Congress this morning is accurate. There is no there there. The hearings are a "sideshow." A circus.

And it is. It is also, at its core, a debate about diction. And debates about diction by definition can never be won. Nothing Obama says, short of: "I am an evil person who deserves to be impeached" is going to placate those who use language games to exploit the partisan kulturkampf.

The irony: Obama is not blameless. He just deserves blame for stuff the Republicans are ignoring, like: What was the administration's long...

Why outrage is dead

The Week — Thu, 09 May 2013 23:30:00 -0400

Republicans want to know where the outrage is hiding.

Why aren't Americans angrier about the (a) cover-up (b) conspiracy (c) lunacy (d) evil-ness of how the Obama administration responded to the events in Libya?

Aside from blaming the media for a failure to cover the loose ends, which is a charge that belies any actual analysis of news coverage, many partisan conservatives have settled on the explanation that there is no outrage anymore. This argument's intellectual pedigree is an extension of William Bennett's book-length essay, The Death of Outrage, which was published after Bill Clinton's...

Yes, there is a Benghazi conspiracy

The Week — Wed, 08 May 2013 16:44:00 -0400

Consider me as confused as Terrence Jeffries. The voluble conservative gadfly let it slip on Sean Hannity's radio program today that he really doesn't know what possible motivation the Obama administration would have for altering talking points about the Benghazi terrorist attack, or in forcing Hillary Clinton to go along with a conspiracy to somehow cover up something having to do with the death of four American diplomats and intelligence officers.

A few seconds earlier, Jeffries had described a statement that went out from the U.S. embassy in Egypt attempting to calm passions amid the firefight...

The skinny on Christie's surgery

The Week — Tue, 07 May 2013 16:59:00 -0400

In an ideal world, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie would have had to address publicly his body size in one context and one context only: Does it present or complicate any health issues that would reduce his ability to handle the stresses of the presidency? Though obesity's medical characteristics can be treated, the cluster of symptoms put him at a much higher risk for a cardiac event or a stroke; it also doesn't help the body process extraordinary stresses well. He's acknowledged that he was living on borrowed time. His weight was an issue, and he owned it.

Unfortunately, aside from his personal...

Did the CIA shadow-edit Zero Dark Thirty?

The Week — Tue, 07 May 2013 13:00:00 -0400

Before he became a screenwriter, Mark Boal was a journalist. When journalists work on a a complicated story involving national security, it is not uncommon for them to give the CIA or another agency a full briefing about the story beforehand, both to ensure the accuracy of certain assertions, or to test them, giving the subject of the piece a chance to push back against interpretations that are incorrect, to, of course, provide last-minute spin to make themselves look favorable, but often, to clarify complicated issues and add nuance.

As a writer, I've done this with several stories. When...

The 5 funniest comic podcasters

The Week — Tue, 07 May 2013 02:31:00 -0400

Marc Maron's comedy career flamed out, and he revived it by being himself: Doing what he knew how to do, which was to record himself talking with his friends, many of whom happened to be much more successful comedians, and then posting it to the web. For about 385 episodes, he's held forth on neuroses and resentments — his, that of his guests (often fellow comics), and on feuds, and feelings, and therapy. It's now one of the most listened-to podcasts in existence, and Maron has a new book and a TV show to show for his hard work.

The podcast may be archaic, but the format is producing some...

5 things I didn't know about urban wildfires

The Week — Mon, 06 May 2013 23:25:00 -0400

Fighting fires is simple but not easy. Yes, you put the wet stuff on the red stuff, and then the rest will take care of itself. The fires that matter out here in Los Angeles aren't confined to houses or empty lots. They're sparked, seemingly at random, grow almost exponentially, and are fiendishly hot little devils to contain and extinguish. In some ways, given the availability of oxygen and brush, it's almost miraculous that urban wildfires don't do nearly the amount of damage that they could.

Here are some things I didn't know about how complex the fires out here are.

1. Their frequency...

The best anti-Obama book I've read

The Week — Mon, 06 May 2013 22:30:00 -0400

President Obama has single-handedly kept thousands of American workers in their jobs by spawning dozens of best-selling books about how awful he is. He can ignore almost all of them, and so can you, if your goal is to learn something new about the Obama presidency. But every once in a while, a book comes along that it would be foolish for Obama, or anyone else, to disregard. Vali Nasr's The Dispensable Nation: American Foreign Policy in Retreat, is the most trenchant criticism of the Obama administration I've yet read. Nasr was an adviser to diplomat Richard Holbooke before the latter died of a...

Why Israel bombed Syria

The Week — Sun, 05 May 2013 01:55:00 -0400

Israel was twice able to attack targets inside Syria in the middle of an incredibly dangerous civil war where chemical weapons have been used, and no one seeks to blame them for the conflict. I find that remarkable. Nothing would unite Syria like a common enemy, and yet even when the common enemy invades their country, it makes more international headlines than in Syria itself.

As a geopolitical affair, the Syrian civil war has almost nothing to do with Israel. It's a conflagration whose embers seem to blow by the neighboring country. Depending on the level of abstraction you'd like, it...

Did the Israelis use nuclear blackmail against the U.S.?

The Week — Fri, 03 May 2013 02:00:00 -0400

In 1973, when Egypt and Syria invaded Israel by surprise, did Israel respond in part by artificially heightening its level of nuclear alert in order to force the U.S. to help it end the conflict more quickly?

In other words, did Israel use nuclear blackmail against the U.S.? That's long been the claim by some historians and investigative reporters like Sy Hersh.

The question has relevance for our conflicts with North Korea and Iran today. How will both countries use the perception of their nuclear forces to correct or instigate policy responses by the United States? Could Israel prompt...

The vicious cycle of arms sales

The Week — Thu, 02 May 2013 15:40:00 -0400

The proliferation paradox bothers me. It always has. I am supposed to know that security assistance and diplomacy are too complex to reduce to a simple BuzzFeed-like listicle, and yet, my brain keeps coming back to this sequence of events:

1. The U.S. helps a country by covertly sending arms, or by covertly coordinating arms shipments from others.

2. Those arms are either used for the purposes intended and then are discarded, stolen, or recovered by people who use them for different purposes. Whatever tracking, tagging and location mechanisms (tiny IED chips?) the U.S. uses to keep track on the...

Help hold the government accountable

The Week — Thu, 02 May 2013 14:45:00 -0400

I consider myself a connoisseur of the covert. Figuring out how the Deep State's pipes all fit together has become sort of a life's work. The government doesn't make it easy, but like in art and literature, a presence is often implied by absence. And LinkedIn. You can find an enormous amount of interesting information on LinkedIn and on government jobs sites. An example: Out at the NSA's Ft. Gordon, Ga., center, there's a big new project codenamed VALDOSTA.

VALDOSTA is a classified national-level geo-location/targeting endeavor designed to help find, track, tag, and locate targets...

Obama can't talk his way out of a box

The Week — Wed, 01 May 2013 23:34:00 -0400

In 2010, I wrote about a presidential leadership typology created by political scientist George C. Edwards. He proposed that presidents always intended to think strategically but the successful ones wound up being good at improvising, handling swerves, and being opportunistic. He calls these presidents "facilitators." Now, no one is going to run for president promising to facilitate this or that, or to make things up as she goes along, or to exploit moments of crises (political, domestic, international, economic.) And Edwards is concerned largely with the legislative arena. But his way of thinking...

Who was who in the hunt for bin Laden

The Week — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 14:30:00 -0400

With the great new HBO documentary about the search by CIA analysts and officers for Osama bin Laden about to premiere, I thought it might be useful to put together a small cheat sheet for those keeping score. In a short period of time, a lot of the major actors in this historical narrative have either been outed by the press or chose to disclose information about themselves. Six months ago, America speculated about the inspiration for Mark Boal and Katherine Bigelow's main character in Zero Dark Thirty.

At the time, I assumed that "she" would never be identified, and that she had always been...