We should stop thinking of Snowden, to the extent that we ever were, as a hero. We should stop thinking of him as a whistleblower.
In 1999 and 2000, when I was a young editorial writer at the 'Post', the 'Post' won the public service medal two years running.
Good intelligence analysis, after all, is all about discrimination between what's important and what's not.
National security is not just things that go boom. It is not just terrorists and foreign adversaries.
It is possible for great nations to rot from within.
Reasonable people can disagree about the authorities the NSA should have, when it's appropriate for the CIA to use drone strikes, and how assertive U.S. foreign policy and intelligence should be.
It's hardly a news flash that a secret, clandestine intelligence agency might resist giving out information about its operations when not not legally required to do so.
Sometimes, the intelligence community does legal collection against a legitimate foreign intelligence target and that target interacts with U.S. persons, against whom our people thus end up collecting information as a collateral matter.
I have fiercely criticized both the Bush administration's counterterrorism policies and the Obama administration's - and fiercely defended both as well.
Government lawyers, like private ones, face the problem routinely of aiding in the defense and development of positions in whose correctness they don't believe.
The concept of war is not the construct that will govern - psychologically, politically, and legally - our continuing response to Al Qaeda.
I'm a rationalist and a skeptic, someone who safely separates faith from reason.
Drosnin's 'The Bible Code' would hardly be worth mentioning were it not such a smash hit.
In any long string of letters, one can find countless anomalies that will seem like convincing proofs of hidden meaning to the mind that wants to believe that the text is somehow special. Numerological tricks, for example, can demonstrate that William Shakespeare wrote the 'King James Bible.'
It might seem perverse for honestly religious people to group their faiths with those of the sadists and megalomaniacs who run most cults, but a growing number are doing just that.
It used to be that what was going to be written on my tombstone was 'Benjamin Wittes, former 'Washington Post' editorial writer,' or 'Benjamin Wittes, who wasn't even a lawyer.' Now it's just, like, 'Benjamin Wittes, who's a friend of Jim Comey's.'
There's all kinds of crazy right-wing conspiracies about me.
Once upon a time, science, philosophy, and theology were disciplines largely undifferentiated from one another, and proving the existence of God was a fairly commonplace intellectual exercise. But as the scientific method became increasingly refined, particularly through the nineteenth century, science and religion grew apart.
The quickest way to detect a cult is to sniff for doublethink. The cult seeks control over its membership not by providing a coherent theological system but by providing the opposite: an unstable theology infinitely malleable to the needs of the cult's top echelon and uninterpretable at all times to anyone below that level.
I was much less offended than others were by the CIA's interrogations in the years after September 11.
