It does not surprise me that the Commander of the Military District of Washington has decided to ignore PFC Bradley Manning's contrition, and his time served, and seek the secrecy leak equivalent of the death penalty.

The government has a lot of equities to protect in the case. Some are legitimate, others are not, and others are incidental to the case itself but essential to the functioning of a democracy with secrets.

Manning committed a crime by disclosing secrets. He saw himself as a revolutionary, a political critic who would spark debate about U.S. foreign policy. The Army should not have deployed him; he fell through the large but unavoidable holes that make up the service's mental health screening process. His 1,000-day imprisonment without trial was exceptional and unwarranted....  More»

Headline: World Doesn't End With Sequester; Democrats Pessimistic. 

So President Obama formally lopped off a part of the government on Friday. Watching the politicians on the Sunday shows, the anti-climax seems to have emboldened Republicans and genuinely spooked Democrats.

Democrats have long believed that the Republican ability to resist tax cuts stems from the lack of causality that people perceive between a government action and their own lives. Since the sequester did not shut down anything immediately, the causal chain is not being established. The sequester won't condition Americans to link the budget to their lives until they actually experience a long line at the airport, or until they know a relative who has been furloughed, or until they try to go to a national park that cannot open....  More»

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush has come out of his shell. He's speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference for the first time, and he's giving interviews that suggest he wants to be a participant in the debate about the future of the Republican Party. 

Bush is an ideal Republican presidential candidate. He has a national stature, an enviable record as governor, a solid temperament, and nothing significantly scandalous in his past. He is one of his party's best voices on immigration.

But he is a Bush. That's going to be a problem. It's not going to be an insurmountable problem, but the Republican base is definitely wary of the Bush brand and will not embrace him, no matter how hard he tacks to the right. The American people, of course, have two trillion-dollar wars in their Bush memory bank association....  More»

President Obama is partly to blame for Rand Paul's filibuster of CIA director-to-be John O. Brennan.

Here is why: Obama inherited a difficult and complex counter-terrorism strike policy from President Bush and amped it up by a factor of about four. He promised more transparency, and not just to the intelligence committees, but to the public. And had he not promised transparency, the urgent global reach of lethal U.S. counter-terrorism assets requires it as a matter of legitimacy. 

But absent an opaque speech from the attorney general, a cautious memorandum that left more questions than it answered (a memo that was strategically leaked way too late for it to mollify critics), and another Obama promise of more transparency, the national security establishment has wrapped itself in the familiar and comforting cloak of secrecy....  More»

I feel a little uncomfortable using The Week's platform to promote my new book, but at the same time, I'm kind of proud of what D.B. Grady and I turned out, and I've spent a lot of time this week giving some other publications a sneak peak at certain passages. This post rounds them all up. I won't do this again — I promise. In fact, tomorrow, I'll give you a preview of two other books by rival authors, both of which are guaranteed to make big headlines when they come out in April. 

First: the story of how U.S. Special Forces infiltrated the ISI and set up a spy network to parallel the CIA's.. right when Pakistan's tribal regions began to see a resurgence of al Qaeda activity. From the Atlantic:...  More»

In April, two of the best intelligence reporters on the planet will release long-awaited books, and if you're as fascinated by the debate about targeted killings, extra-legal warfare, what the military ought to do and what intelligence agencies ought to do, you'll want to read both of them.

The first, coming to bookstores on April 9, is Mark Mazzetti's The Way of The Knife: The CIA, A Secret Army, and the War at the Ends of the Earth. 

Mazzetti tracks the rivalry and close collaboration between the CIA's Special Activities Division, which turned into a terrorist assassination wing of the government, and the Joint Special Operations Command, the military's umbrella organization for its counter-terrorism forces. The CIA and JSOC operate under different laws, have different oversight regimes, and are subject to varying degrees of accountability...  More»

The first time I was invited to the Gridiron Club dinner in Washington, I protested against the tails. I don't wear tails. And I dreaded what I assumed would be a self-indulgent celebration of an age of bonhomie that got out of town the day Fanny Foxe jumped into the Tidal Basin. But the night was actually kind of fun. President Obama has twice addressed the Gridiron; there is also a designated Republican and Democratic speech-maker. They hire professional comedians and speechwriters to help them craft their remarks, so they tend to be pretty funny. To an outsider, though, they can be opaque. So, thanks to the White House transcription, I can provide some context for the president's light-hearted jibing at the press corps. Like most speeches of this kind, the structure of similar....  More»

A federal judge has blocked the implementation of New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg's ban on big-sized sugar drinks, limiting, for the moment, the reach of Mr. Bloomberg's concern for our intimate drinking habits. As a rule, I'm skeptical of interventions like these for two reasons. One: There is little evidence that they work, especially when they are touted as remedies for a complex multicausal problem like obesity. Generally, restricting access to sugary drinks in one place will simply move the offending behavior out of that place, and since sugar is rather addictive, kids will find somewhere else to make up for their deprivation. The second reason is that I don't feel comfortable being judged by the government for my food choices. Implicit in that feeling is a worry that poorer people would be disproportionately burdened by the new rules....  More»