As a journalist, as well as a military veteran and former Iraq contractor, I try to keep abreast of the latest developments in America’s warfighting forces—public and private. Which is why I was unsurprised to find a new report this month by the DOD inspector general on KBR’s lazy Iraq contracting. But I was surprised when I found no [...]

America has spent more than $6 billion since 2002 in an effort to create an effective Afghan police force, buying weapons, building police academies, and hiring defense contractors to train the recruits—but the program has been a disaster. More than $322 million worth of invoices for police training were approved even though the funds were [...]

When the state-friendly Russian oil company Surgutneftegas held its annual shareholders meeting in the Siberian city of Surgut two years ago, the proceedings in the shabby auditorium started off as tightly scripted as a Politburo meeting. That is, until the moderator called for questions and Alexei Navalny took the stage. In front of some 300 [...]

Can someone shut these banking industry narcissists up? [..] The industry’s inability to see, much less admit, any culpability, and hence the need for root and branch reform, is pathological. The reaction of the bank chiefs, at least as depicted by Schwarzman, is utter denial. It’s as if someone who drove his car at 150 [...]

Democracy requires at least three parts: Important decisions are made in the open. The public and its representatives have an opportunity to debate and influence them. And those who make the big decisions are accountable to voters. But these principles are in retreat. The Troubled Assets Relief Program began with a virtual blank check from [...]

Commission member Douglas Holtz-Eakin put his finger on another problem with these impressive sounding numbers: “While mortgage fraud was important, it is the magnitude of the financial crisis that is central,” he said. Mortgage brokers did not have the capacity to collapse the global economy. It took major banks and securities firms with the ability [...]

What we don’t know will hurt us, and quite possibly on a more devastating scale than any Qaeda attack. Americans must be told the full story of how Wall Street gamed and inflated the housing bubble, made out like bandits, and then left millions of households in ruin. Without that reckoning, there will be no [...]

This is the 25th anniversary of the Bhopal gas disaster, an epic mess that started one night when a pesticide plant owned by the American chemical giant Union Carbide leaked a cloud of poisonous gas. Before the sun rose, almost 4,000 human beings capable of love and anguish sank to their knees and did not [...]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWBRyzPzKbY[/youtube] Talk by 27-year Veteran of the CIA, Ray McGovern, on “Why Accountability for Torture Is Crucial for Human Rights, Our Security and Our Souls” given November 12, 2009 at Kane Hall on the University of Washington campus in Seattle. Talk sponsored by Washington State Religious Campaign Against Torture.

Aid cannot generate enough market access or sufficient growth to tackle a country’s poverty on its own. Nor can it forge a compact between a citizen and her state. But the way that countries deliver foreign aid can strengthen or weaken that compact. At its best, aid strengthens public accountability, complements government revenues in providing [...]