White House to Ghostwrite Surge Report

Michael Hayden says it would have backfired then, and would now, too

(NEWSER) - George W. Bush's administration pondered an attack on Iran's nuclear facilities and ultimately rejected it, says former CIA and NSA chief Gen. Michael Hayden. He and others concluded that an attack on Iran's nuke factories "would guarantee that which we are trying to prevent—an Iran that will spare nothing to build a nuclear weapon and that would build it in secret," Hayden said, according to Foreign Policy . The same rationale holds true today, he warned: Go with diplomacy and back channels or risk pushing Tehran into speeding things up. More»

But detected deadly White House toxin turned out to be false alarm

(NEWSER) - Condoleezza Rice recounted the day that she, President Bush, and Dick Cheney believed they had been exposed to a lethal toxin by terrorists. Cheney suddenly appeared on a secure video conference screen just weeks after 9/11 while Rice and Bush were traveling in China for the APEC summit. He warned them that White House sensors had detected botulinum toxin, and "we all—those of us exposed—were going to die," Rice revealed in an ABC interview . "I remember everybody just sort of freezing, and the president saying, ‘What was that? What was that, Dick?’” recalled Rice, who was national security adviser at the time. “We were just a little unnerved." More»

A look back at the retiring defense secretary's career

(NEWSER) - With Robert Gates, who has served eight presidents over four decades, about to retire, the Washington Post looks back at how Gates operated in the Pentagon. He’s been “careful, conservative, and consensus-oriented,” writes Greg Jaffe, and he’s “earned a reputation as the most ruthlessly efficient defense secretary in decades.” So what can we learn from his tenure?

• Buy time. Defense Department reviews following troop surges in Iraq and Afghanistan gave Presidents Bush and Obama a sense of the military’s trajectory—and they bought time against critics calling for quick drawdowns.

By every metric, the cuts delivered less than promised

(NEWSER) - This week marks the 10th anniversary of the Bush tax cuts, and Annie Lowrey of Slate is looking for reasons to celebrate. Unfortunately, she can’t find any. They’re “a failure in every conceivable way,” she writes. In 2001, Bush promised the cuts would create jobs, generate wealth, and “starve the beast,” reducing the size of government. Even leaving aside the 2008 recession, they did none of those things. From 2003 to 2007, median wages actually fell. More»

Those 'lecturing' on deficit helped get us here in the first place: Paul Krugman

(NEWSER) - More and more people have been telling Paul Krugman that the budget deficit is the people’s fault: “Weak-minded politicians catered to the electorate’s foolishness.” But that viewpoint is not only “self-serving, it’s dead wrong,” writes Krugman in the New York Times . Instead, we can thank “policies championed by small groups of influential people—in many cases, the same people now lecturing the rest of us on the need to get serious.” They’re behind the deficit’s key factors: the Bush tax cuts, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and the Great Recession. More»