Gabriel Schoenfeld is a writer and public policy commentator who was a prolific contributor to The Weekly Standard from 2006 to 2017. He wrote extensively about national security, intelligence leaks, press freedom, and the legal boundaries of classified information disclosure. Previously a senior editor at Commentary magazine, he is also the author of several books, including "Necessary Secrets: National Security, the Media, and the Rule of Law."
In a horrific war in which millions perished, the massacre at Malmedy does not figure large. In the history of fake news, however, it is a landmark deserving of recognition.
In a horrific war in which millions perished, the massacre at Malmedy does not figure large. In the history of fake news, however, it is a landmark deserving of recognition.
Journalists these days are regularly being beheaded. The two most recent cases were the work of the Islamic State, which this past summer, as shown to the world on slickly produced videos, dispatched freelancers Steven Sotloff and James Foley. Such atrocities at the hands of Islamic fanatics are…
In June 2013, Edward Snowden, a 29-year-old National Security Agency contract employee, surfaced in Hong Kong with the sensational announcement that he was the source of top-secret American intelligence documents already being published in the Guardian and the Washington Post. The information he…
In June 2013, Edward Snowden, a 29-year-old National Security Agency contract employee, surfaced in Hong Kong with the sensational announcement that he was the source of top-secret American intelligence documents already being published in the Guardian and the Washington Post. The information he…
With the election over, connoisseurs of Russian influence operations will want to redirect their attention to lower Manhattan, where the world chess championship is getting under way at the South Street Seaport.
The facts are by now widely known, if still not nailed down with precision. On Friday, July 22, on the eve of the Democratic National Convention, a massive trove of emails purloined from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) by hackers was posted on WikiLeaks, the online bulletin board for leaked…
Everything has a history and a pre-history, and that includes Donald Trump and his angry hordes. Trump is by no means the first American tycoon to stir up fears and resentments and attempt to ride a populist wave. One of his notable predecessors, mostly forgotten today, is Robert Welch.
Striking the right balance between justice and security remains the most neuralgic point in American politics. Campaigning for the White House in 2008, Barack Obama insisted that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney had gotten it badly wrong: They were trampling on civil liberties with torture,…
In Objective Troy the New York Times national security correspondent Scott Shane tells two intertwined stories. One recounts the life path of Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born imam killed in a CIA drone strike in Yemen in 2011. The second recounts Barack Obama’s troubled love affair with the drone…
On Syria:
Some 60 million people perished in World War II. Before the embers of that terrible conflagration could cool, a new conflict loomed. Joseph Stalin’s Russia was imposing a cruel dictatorship on the conquered peoples of Eastern Europe and threatening Western Europe by subversion and force of arms. By…
The revelation that Hillary Clinton used a private email address for most if not all of her official internal correspondence is raising all sorts of questions. According to widespread reporting, Mrs. Clinton turned over some 55,000 pages of emails to the State Department two months ago, long after…
What brought the decades-long Soviet-American confrontation to an end? Here, Ken Adelman stakes out an answer in his book’s subtitle: He maintains that the 1986 summit between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev was one of the critical turning points of the 20th century. Is he right? As director of…
After nearly four years of procedural delay, the trial of former CIA officer Jeffrey Sterling is set to open shortly. Sterling was indicted at the end of 2010 for leaking information about a top-secret CIA operation to James Risen of the New York Times in violation of the espionage statutes. It is…
Condemnation of Israel for its conduct of Operation Protective Edge in Gaza continues unabated. The chief accusation, heard time and again, is that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have either been cavalier about civilian casualties or are intentionally inflicting them. Israel and its defenders, for…
The F-22 Raptor is America’s fifth-generation, supersonic, super-maneuverable,air-superiority fighter, capable of engaging in electronic warfare, collecting signals intelligence, and launching fire--and--forget/-beyond--visual--range/-air--to--air missiles. The life story of Eddie Rickenbacker, the…
It was time for the CIA to lawyer up. In 1974, then-New York Times reporter Seymour Hersh broke a story exposing illegal covert actions conducted by the agency over a quarter of a century. Congressional investigations followed. The CIA emerged from the organizational ordeal wrapped in a dense web…
My review of former top CIA lawyer John Rizzo’s book Company Man appears in the current issue of this magazine. A friend in a high place who read the review pointed out to me that the book adds something significant to our understanding of the Valerie Plame, Scooter Libby, Richard Armitage, Judith…
What are we to make of Floyd Abrams?
President Obama is rushing to implement the six-month interim agreement with the Islamic Republic of Iran that went into effect last week. Together with five other world powers, he is now working to negotiate a long-term agreement aimed at keeping Iran from developing a nuclear bomb. He regards his…
A stream of national security leaks has lately turned into a tsunami, plunging the country into the most intense controversy over the publication of government secrets since the 1971 Pentagon Papers case. As we wade through the issues raised by the illicitly disclosed information now flowing out of…
Is naval power back? Early in June, Russia announced that it would be permanently stationing an armada of ships in the Mediterranean, restoring a deployment that came to an end with the dissolution of the Soviet Union. This muscle-flexing is part of Russia’s effort to bolster the government of…
With the detonation of a North Korean nuclear device on Monday, Secretary of State John Kerry has been grappling with his first crisis.
In THE WEEKLY STANDARD and on this blog, we’ve taken note of the ongoing Justice Department investigation involving the disclosure of classified information by James Risen in his 2006 book, State of War. The case finally seems to have resulted in an indictment of a former CIA officer:
As America’s premier First Amendment lawyer, Floyd Abrams is a force to be reckoned with. The force is on display at full power in today’s Wall Street Journal, where he takes up the subject of WikiLeaks and offers a very dim view of the activities of Julian Assange. Among other things, Mr. Abrams…
President Obama was woken up shortly before 4 a.m. by his national security adviser, Tom Donilon, and told of the North Korean artillery barrage that has killed two South Korean soldiers and injured civilians.
“Portions of this article were deleted by the Israeli Military Censor.” So begins a fascinating article, “Spies Like Us,” by Yossi Melman and Dan Raviv in Tablet. It goes into considerable detail into the U.S.-Israeli intelligence relationship over recent decades. The story is one of friendship and…
How does Chinese espionage work? One illustrative case is recounted in court documents leading up to the guilty plea last week of 28-year-old Glenn Duffie Shriver of Detroit, Michigan.
Should we bomb Iran to keep it from getting nuclear weapons? A new study by Eytan Gilboa shows that there has been a pronounced shift in public opinion toward an affirmative answer. It reports that “poll results indicate much more public determination to stop Iran than has been evidenced in…
WikiLeaks has posted a massive collection of classified documents pertaining to the war in Iraq on the web. As it did with a previous leak of documents concerning Afghanistan, it provided them in advance to the New York Times, the Guardian, and Der Spiegel. The Pentagon has strongly condemned the…
The leak wars continue. The Obama administration is prosecuting more leakers of classified information than all previous presidents combined. NBC investigative reporter Michael Isikoff asks a key question occasioned by the publication of Obama’s Wars, Bob Woodward’s latest book:
Are we moving toward zero nuclear weapons? Zero is the declared objective of the Obama administration. But it is realistic enough to recognize, as the president did in Prague, that achieving it might take a long time: “I'm not naive. This goal will not be reached quickly–perhaps not in my lifetime.…
We are six years out from one of the most far-reaching reforms of U.S. intelligence in its history. In 2004, Congress passed legislation that created the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) to oversee and coordinate the sprawling collection of agencies that act as our nation’s…
Eyes have been focused on the succession underway in North Korea, where Kim Jong Un, Kim Jong Il’s pudgy third son, appears to be being groomed for power.
One of the well-known effects of alcohol is that it reduces inhibitions. China’s top-ranking UN diplomat, Sha Zukang, experimented with the substance at a banquet at a UN retreat in the Austrian ski resort of Alpbach. Addressing one of his American colleagues during a rambling toast, the truth…
A great speech about the Middle East “peace process” that cuts to the essentials:
The United States has been engaged in anti-submarine exercises with South Korea to demonstrate resolve in the aftermath of the sinking of a South Korean vessel, the Cheonan, by the North Koreans. The USS George Washington, a nuclear-powered super-carrier, was set to take part in the second phase of…
Are sanctions on Iran working? Clearly, what the U.S. and the European Union have done so far is having an effect. Iran’s ability to import gasoline is sharply down, causing pain on the Iranian streets that might in turn cause pain to the clerical regime.
“U.S. Assures Israel That Iran Threat Is Not Imminent” was the headline in the New York Times last Thursday. The article reported that U.S. officials were telling Jerusalem not to worry. It “would take roughly a year — and perhaps longer — for Iran to complete what one senior official called a…
In a dangerous world, what is the best way to keep the peace? Deterrence is the name of the game. But what exactly is it?
Jeffrey Goldberg’s cover article in the Atlantic about the prospect of an Israeli strike on Iran has provoked fierce debate. One key issue is the likely timing of Israeli action, if it is to occur at all. Goldberg reports a consensus among the officials he interviewed that “there is a better than…
Rasmussen has a new poll out showing that the Obama administration nuclear policies are strikingly at odds with public opinion.
After the 2008-2009 war in Gaza, Amnesty International (AI) and Human Rights Watch (HRW) issued reports documenting Israeli “war crimes.” Amnesty’s was titled “22 Days of Death and Destruction.” Human Rights Watch issued three under the titles: “Rain of Fire: Israel’s Unlawful Use of White…
Here is Assistant Secretary of State Rose Gottemoeller, speaking at a U.S. Strategic Command conference last week, making the case for Senate ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty:
WikiLeaks is now promising to release the remaining 15,000 classified Afghan war documents it has in its possession. The Pentagon is asserting that grave harm will result. Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell is calling the prospective publication the "height of irresponsibility."
Here is Secretary of State Hillary Clinton yesterday making the case for Senate ratification of the new START agreement with Moscow:
A central theme of Barack Obama’s national security policy is that nuclear-armed states should reduce their reliance on such terrible weapons. If the United States and the other nuclear states set an example and take progressive steps toward the ultimate goal of zero nuclear weapons, others will…
Back in April reports surfaced that Syria was shipping long-range Scud missiles to Hezbollah in neighboring Lebanon.Lebanon’s prime minister, Sa’ad Hariri, denied the presence of the weapons on Lebanese territory. Israel issued warnings. UNIFIL, the UN peacekeeping force in southern Lebanon, denied…
Should the press publish the names of American officials who have interrogated captured al Qaeda operatives? That question came sharply to the fore in 2008, when the New York Times went ahead, against strenuous CIA objections, and disclosed the identity of a CIA officer who interrogated Khalid…
The University of Chicago is a great school. And academic freedom is a great principle. But should there ever be limits on who can teach what?
The Washington Post reports today on the posthumous rehabilitation of Air Force General John D. Lavelle. In 1972, Lavelle was forced to retire with a reduced rank in disgrace for conducting unauthorized bombing missions in North Vietnam, and then covering it up.
The story has been buried by the Western press, but Patrick Clawson of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy brings it out in an important policy paper.
Israeli military intelligence is often thought to be the best in the world. Given the neighborhood Israel lives in, it needs to be. Nonetheless, at key junctures in its history, it made critical failures. It can ill afford one now.
Since last year, Hezbollah has been rounding up Lebanese who are believed to be spying for the state of Israel. Just yesterday, a senior official at a Lebanese telecommunications firm was arrested, making it the fourth this year. The arrest is part of broader campaign that has led to some 50…
Bill Keller, executive editor of the New York Times, on WikiLeaks:
“Breaking a Promise on Surveillance,” is the headline of a New York Times editorial this morning. At issue is an Obama administration proposal to allow the FBI to obtain lists of anyone’s email correspondents and web browsing history by issuing a National Security Letter without going to…
As the whole world knows by now, several weeks ago, the New York Times was given a trove of some 92,000 classified documents about the war in Afghanistan by Julian Assange, the shadowy head of WikiLeaks. In exchange for advance access, it promised to hold them until July 25, the day it published a…
Sanctions on Iran are beginning to bite, but does it matter?
Could WikiLeaks and its organizer, the shadowy Australian Julian Assange, be prosecuted for publishing classified information? As a practical matter, the idea is a non-starter. Since Assange lives abroad, prosecutors would find it difficult to gain jurisdiction. And if he were charged in…
Is the leak of 92,000 classified documents pertaining to the war in Afghanistan now published by WikiLeaks and reprinted by the New York Times and some European publications a catastrophe? An affirmative answer is certainly suggested by a White House statement that says the document dump “could put…
What is combat in Afghanistan like? For those of us who have not been embedded as reporters, but want to know what our soldiers in this difficult war are up against, there is now Restrepo, a documentary film by Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger. The subtitle of the film is “One Platoon, One…
Back in 2009, Admiral Dennis Blair, director of National Intelligence, picked the former ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Charles “Chas” Freeman, to run the National Intelligence Council, the top analysis group inside the U.S. intelligence world. Freeman was compelled to withdraw from consideration…
Lt. General James R. Clapper, Jr., the president’s nominee for director of National Intelligence, is taking a hard line on information security, but only where it counts.
Conservatives are fond of denigrating Barack Obama as a foreign policy wimp, a president determined to demonstrate American weakness around the world, one begging for dialogue with dictators, and apologizing for past American sins, real and imagined. Even if overdrawn, there has been justification…
In the aftermath of the 2006 Israel-Lebanon war, the UN inserted a peacekeeping force of 11,000 troops from 31 nations. According to the UN resolution authorizing the mission, its purpose was to block the flow of weapons to Hezbollah and keep Hezbollah from operating south of the Litani River, near…
The first installment of the Washington Post blockbuster, “Top Secret America,” by Dana Priest and William Arkin, two years in the making, is finally out today. It paints a surprisingly unsurprising picture of duplication and triplication in the intelligence world.
“Appeasement” became a dirty word only after the 1930s. Paul Kennedy, a professor of history at Yale University, has long been interested in resurrecting its honorable side, and he takes another crack at the task in the latest issue of the National Interest.
If Israel and its neighbors are ever to arrive at a stable and genuine peace, Palestinian incitement of hatred –and its predilection for murderous acts – must cease. It is an elementary proposition, and one to which the Palestinian Authority has unambiguously agreed. The Oslo Accords are clear: The…
A fascinating nugget comes from an unnamed senior U.S. official in a story today by ABC’s Jake Tapper. Citing U.S. intelligence, the official states that "Al Qaeda recruits have said that al Qaeda is racist against black members from West Africa because they are only used in lower level operations."
It was only a few short years ago when the war in Iraq was perceived as a lost cause and an unmitigated disaster. Tides of pessimism washed over our body politic, well reflected in books like Thomas Ricks’s Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2003-2005.
“Strong Russian Remarks on Iran Please Washington” is the headline of a Reuters report on Russian President Dmitry Medevev’s latest assessment of Iran’s nuclear program.
Here is Benjamin Netanyahu on Fox News with Chris Wallace:
The 9/11 Commission castigated the CIA for neglecting to collect and analyze intelligence about terrorist financing. It noted that “information about terrorist money helps us to understand [al-Qaeda] networks, search them out, and disrupt their operations.” In response, the Bush administration…
The Palestinian-Israeli “peace process” is about to enter a parlous phase. However much the fraying American-Israeli relationship has been publicly patched up by Benjamin Netanyahu’s talks in the White House with Barack Obama, the fact remains that in the weeks and months ahead, Israel will be…
Private First Class Bradley Manning, arrested in May and transferred from Iraq to a detention center in Kuwait, has now been formally charged with passing a classified video to Wikileaks.org, and also with providing the shadowy website with more than 50 classified State Department cables. According…
Michael Hayden was CIA director from 2006 to 2009. No one was waterboarded under his watch. But General Hayden has vigorously defended the CIA’s role in interrogating al Qaeda prisoners. Here is an excerpt form a fascinating interview with Hayden, just published by the CIA’s house organ, Studies in…
The Obama administration’s policy of engagement with Syria has yielded yet more rewards.
What explains the timing of the bust of the Russian spy ring just four days after Barack Obama's "cheeseburger summit" with Dmitry Medvedev?
Oops. Someone in the Russian intelligence service, the SVR, has pushed the wrong reset button, sending us back to the spy wars of the 1950s. The two FBI complaints made public yesterday, available here, contain the details of what might be the most bizarre espionage case in all of Russian/Soviet…
Commenting on North Korea’s attack and sinking of the Cheonan with 46 South Korean sailors killed, President Obama said this past weekend at the G-20 summit in Toronto that “our main focus right now is in the U.N. Security Council making sure that there is a crystal-clear acknowledgement that North…
Iran, moving steadily forward on its march toward nuclear status, has once again brazenly defied the International Atomic Energy Agency, barring two of its inspectors from touring its sites. How will the West respond?
“Nuclear deterrence during the Cold War contemplated an automated response to attack by the Soviet Union, and similar automated responses to cyber attack are now being debated. Computer network attacks happen at the speed of light, so future threats require an equally rapid and perhaps automatic…
Diane Feinstein, freshly back from a trip to Asia, was pressing the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Michael Mullen, yesterday about the need for engagement with China: “I think that the most important thing we can do right now is establish some military-to-military contact," she said…
Eric Holder has been a disastrous attorney general. “Classic 101 Boobery” was how one Democratic operative memorably called his decision, now on hold, to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in a civilian court in lower Manhattan. Other blunders have piled up and the White House has been repeatedly…
“A senior Korean military commander has been arrested on suspicion of leaking the South’s military defense plans to Kim Jong Il’s regime,” reports The Australian. “The major general, identified only as Kim, arrested by military authorities yesterday, faces charges of supplying confidential…
We may soon have before our eyes the mother of all leaks. “The State Department and American embassies around the world,” reports the Daily Beast, “are bracing for what officials fear could be the massive, unauthorized release of secret diplomatic cables in which U.S. diplomats harshly evaluate…
Let us give Barack Obama credit, on those all too rare occasions, when credit is due. The sacking of Dennis Blair is one of his finer moves in national security. It stands in stark contrast to one of George W. Bush’s most consequential lapses.
"Iran is not expected to be capable of producing nuclear weapons for at least a year, maybe more, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said on Tuesday,” reports Reuters, covering him from aboard a U.S. military aircraft en route to South America:
Is false advertising always bad? That certainly is not the case with the Obama administration’s Nuclear Posture Review (NPR), which is being billed by the White House as the greatest shift in American doctrine since Dr. Strangelove devised a doomsday machine. The truth of the matter is that there…
Iran is pressing forward with its nuclear program. The Obama administration is dithering. Bent upon getting a Security Council resolution rather than assembling a coalition of the willing, the White House and American policy is being held hostage by Russia and most of all by China. Here’s an…
One of Barack Obama’s more significant unfulfilled campaign promises is getting the Senate to ratify the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. Last year, speaking in Prague, he announced a determination to press ahead, declaring that
Back in November 2007, the National Intelligence Council (NIC) released a declassified summary of an authoritative National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) declaring with “high confidence” that four years earlier "Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program.” Buried in a footnote was the fact that the…
On March 26, President Obama announced that the United States had reached a new strategic arms agreement with Russia. He explained that the new nuclear-arms treaty strengthens “our global efforts to stop the spread of these weapons, and to ensure that other nations meet their own responsibilities.”
From the White House:
Pressing for a world without nuclear weapons, the State Department has been flacking the president’s upcoming Nuclear Security Summit, scheduled for April 12–13: "President Obama has invited over 40 nations to participate, representing a diverse set of regions and various levels of nuclear…
Charles Pellegrino is the author of The Last Train From Hiroshima, published in January by Henry Holt. It tells tales about a hitherto unknown accident with the first atomic bomb that caused casualties and reduced the yield of the explosion. It is based in part upon the recollections of one Joseph…
Like cancer, ideas can metastasize. In 2007, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt--the former a professor at the University of Chicago, the latter at Harvard--came out with The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy. A "situation [that] has no equal in American history" had arisen, they wrote in the…
Israel has just carried out a major aerial exercise, putting a hundred or so F-15s and F-16s into the skies over the eastern Mediterranean, evidently a rehearsal for a strike against Iran's nuclear facilities. The move follows the statement earlier this month by Shaul Mofaz, Israel's deputy prime…
Freedom for the Thought That We Hate
How do we explain the bizarre recent National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran, which stated in its opening sentence that the ayatollahs had halted their nuclear weapons program in 2003, even as, tucked away in a footnote, the same document noted that the most critical component of such a…
Investigations of national-security leaks in Washington are not all that rare. But until Judith Miller of the New York Times was sent to jail for 85 days by a special prosecutor digging into the Valerie Plame imbroglio, investigations of such leaks in which journalists are subpoenaed were about as…
THE INTERROGATION TECHNIQUES used by the Bush administration in the war on terror, says the editorial page of the New York Times, have "dishonored" our history. Have we, the paper asks while wagging its finger, become "a nation that tortures human beings and then concocts legal sophistries to…
Drip, drip, drip--secrets are leaking out of our government at the pace of Chinese water torture. In the most recent case, bureaucrats somewhere in the U.S. intelligence apparatus indirectly disclosed the existence of a unique operation, privately run, that was tapping into al Qaeda's web servers…
Who is to blame for the intelligence disaster of September 11? The sixth anniversary of the attacks is upon us, and the finger-pointing continues unabated. Last month the CIA reluctantly made public a summary of a 2005 report prepared by its Office of Inspector General (OIG) undertaken to determine…
Torturing al Qaeda suspects is impermissible in all circumstances, an army of lawyers and moralists are telling us, even if it would stop a nuclear bomb ticking down to zero, hidden in New York City or Fort Knox. But if inflicting pain during an interrogation is always against law and morality,…
"DISGRACEFUL" is what President Bush called the New York Times for compromising the sources and methods by which the United States has been tracking al Qaeda finances. The House of Representatives followed suit, condemning disclosures like those made by our leading newspaper for impairing "the…
CAN JOURNALISTS REALLY BE PROSECUTED for publishing national security secrets? In the wake of a series of New York Times stories revealing highly sensitive counterterrorism programs, that question is increasingly the talk of newsrooms across the country, and especially one newsroom located on West…