Warren Roberts Blog

I am posting my blogs, written over a period of some nine years, I believe.  I am posting them in the order in which I wrote them, I say to anyone who might have gotten this far going through my blogs.

Diane Feinstein, chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, released  a summary of a committee report that investigated enhanced interrogation techniques, EIT , in a nicely bureaucratized and sanitized acronym that refers to what can properly be called torture. The debate is no longer over whether the CIA used torture when trying to extract information from those suspected of terrorism. Visuals that have been released make it painfully evident that torture was used to get information deemed essential to national security. The argument has shifted at least in part to whether the information wrung from prisoners was effective, with particular attention given to the capture and killing of Osama Bin Laden. I think it is important to frame the torture issue in the larger context of America’s response to the horrifying and sordid death of some 3,000 Americans on September 11, 2011, a day whose impact on America was not unlike that of December 7, 1941. We girded for war after ...

The dismissal of Michael Flynn as Donald Trump’s National Security Advisor last night raises some interesting questions, although the CNN report did not raise those that seem most important to me this morning.  What prompted Flynn’s dismissal was his claim that he did not discuss conversations with Russian officials with Vice President Mike Pence after the November election; this raised questions about Flynn and the Trump relationship with Russia during the election, although this wasn’t discussed in the CNN report that I saw this morning.   It is now clear that Flynn did discuss security issues with Russia; as National Security Advisor he would hardly have done so without the knowledge of President Trump, or so it would seem.  What does this say about American-Russian relations at the time of the November presidential election? When I got up on the morning of  November 11  my wife told me that Trump had been elected president, although Hillary...