Not to brag (OK, I'm bragging) but I am invited to the Playboy Mansion on May 22 to attend the Hugh Hefner First Amendment Awards. It is as good a place as any to hang out while one of this year's award winners, Colonel Morris Davis, waits (and waits...)...

Seven Years, Untold Dollars to Silence One Man

Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com

What do words mean in a post-9/11 world? Apart from the now clichéd Orwellian twists that turn brutal torture into mere enhanced interrogation, the devil is in the details. Robert MacLean is a former air...

We were once the American Dream, and now we're just what happened to it. That's the phrase that informs my research into a new book I'm working on, The People on the Bus: A Story of the #99Percent. I'm trying to trace the decline of the American Middle Class...

There are ghosts in Washington that few will talk about, roaming the halls of the Pentagon, inside the State Department and the CIA, and at the White House, moaning "Vietnam, Vietnam." Nick Turse, in his new book Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam, awakens...

Why the Invasion of Iraq Was the Single Worst Foreign Policy Decision in American History

Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com

I was there. And “there” was nowhere. And nowhere was the place to be if you wanted to see the signs of end times for the American...

Though I spent 24 years working for the State Department as a Consular Officer, charged in part with the issuance and (very rarely) revocation of U.S. passports, there is still room to learn something new: The Government of the United States can, and apparently does, take away passports from American...

In his State of the Union Address, the president said that the federal minimum wage should be raised to nine dollars an hour. He said also that a person holding down a full-time job should not have to live in poverty in a country like America. I could not...

Kids and music go together beautifully. Free from pretensions, children play from their hearts. Put that beauty into an international setting -- in this case, young people from war-torn Afghanistan coming to the U.S. to perform traditional songs at the Kennedy Center and Carnegie Hall -- and it becomes something...

Why Zero Dark Thirty Won’t Settle the Torture Question or Purge Torture From the American System

Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com

If you look backward you see a nightmare. If you look forward you become the nightmare.

There’s one particular nightmare that Americans need to face: in...

"Who the hell are you?"

"Why Barack, I'm the Ghost of Presidential Legacies Past."

"What are you doing here? It's not even Thanksgiving. I thought you guys visited on Christmas Eve, anyway. It starts earlier every year, doesn't it?"

"You're confusing me with other spirits, Barack. I...

I'm really sorry, but I did not vote for a candidate for president. Whatever bad comes of this election, I guess you can blame it on me. But I don't think I'm alone.

I couldn't vote for Romney. He is a guy who made money destroying America. He started a...

Don’t Ask and Don’t Tell

Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com

We had a debate club back in high school. Two teams would meet in the auditorium, and Mr. Garrity would tell us the topic, something 1970s-ish like “Resolved: Women Should Get Equal...

It wasn't just a movie.

It was less than a year ago that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was videotaped gleefully laughing at the brutal death of then-Libyan leader Gaddafi. "We came, we saw, he died!" giggled the Secretary of State like a drunk school girl on the sidelines...

Torture and the Myth of Never Again

Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com

Here is what military briefers like to call BLUF, the Bottom Line Up Front: no one except John Kiriakou is being held accountable for America’s torture policy. And John Kiriakou didn’t torture anyone, he just...

A new Government Accountability Office (GAO) report shows that more than one fourth of all U.S. State Department Foreign Service positions are either unfilled or are filled with below-grade employees. What should be staggering news pointing out a crisis in government is in fact barely worth a media mention,...

A Guide to Disaster at Home and Abroad

Cross-posted with TomDispatch.Com

Some images remain like scars on my memory. One of the last things I saw in Iraq, where I spent a year with the Department of State helping squander some of the $44 billion...

There was a lot of thanking of veterans this past Memorial Day weekend, and that is not altogether out of place. June 14 was the U.S. Army's 237th birthday, and another round of thanks is in order. We ask a lot from the people in the military, and...

How Obama’s Targeted Killings, Leaks, and the Everything-Is-Classified State Have Fused

Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com.

White is black and down is up. Leaks that favor the president are shoveled out regardless of national security, while national security is twisted to pummel leaks that do not...

As other parts of the federal government begin to examine their own practices toward social media and publication review, the State Department stands alone in clinging to a 19th century model emphasizing lack of transparency and message control. That State seeks this modus in a largely unclassified world and while...

(For those joining our story already in progress, here's the Twitter-length summary: I've worked for the State Department as a Foreign Service Officer for some 24 years. I spent a year in Iraq, wrote a book critical of the State Department's waste and mismanagement in Iraq, blogged about it and...