The Gates Inheritance

If you can take the time, please read Roger Morris' concise history of Robert Gates and the coincident history of American Intelligence during the Cold War and since. Tom Englehardt at TomDispatch describes it so:

The Gates Inheritance will be posted in three parts this week and, long as it is, it's actually a marvel of compression, packing into a relatively modest space an epic history of mayhem none of us should avoid -- a grim history that led to September 11th, 2001 and now leads us into an unknown, increasingly perilous future. Think of it as a necessary reckoning with disaster -- and consider this but a second major installment in the rogue's gallery of Washington portraits Morris will continue to produce periodically for this site.

Part 1, and Part 2. Grimly fascinating.


[via Swedish Meatballs Confidential]