Epstein Secrets

d Dick Cheney." Her most recent book, Drift, documents how easy it has become for U.S. presidents to wage war without congressional consent. 28. Dennis Ross Having served under President Jimmy Carter and in every administration since (except George W. Bush's), Dennis Ross has played a bigger role in se

00 billion in military cuts set to take effect next year unless a new budget passes would be, in Levin's words, "a train wreck." (Defense Secretary Panetta has preferred the more apocalyptic "doomsday mechanism.") But while McCain has proposed protecting the defense budget by reducing federal spending

lpel, slicing and dicing Pentagon programs to save an estimated $490 billion over the next decade. As CIA director before his move to the Pentagon, Panetta oversaw the raid that killed bin Laden, handing Obama his signature foreign-policy achievement, and he jealously guarded his agency's turf against

ee top Obama Cabinet positions are held by Clinton veterans: Secretary of State Clinton, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta. It's only a slight exaggeration to say that the many staffing changes since 2010 have resulted in the Obama camp running the campaign while the C

With Iran reeling from sanctions, the proper environment now exists for diplomacy to work. The next few months will determine whether it succeeds. Dennis B. Ross, a former State Department and National Security Council official, was a special assistant to President Obama for the Middle East, Afghanistan and

as publicly stated that if Iran decided to do it, it could have the bomb within a year and the means to deliver it a year or two later. And perhaps Panetta is wrong — perhaps there is less time than he thinks. Or, as Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak put it earlier this month, those who advise Israel

t. The second noteworthy development last week helps explain why this kind of behavior occurs. It was an opinion article in the Washington Post by Dennis Ross and David Makovsky, of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), entitled, "The U.S. can meet Israel halfway on Iran." It laid out a s

a commitment not to use force, the Obama administration looks to have determined two months ago to go public. The first salvo was Defense Secretary Leon Panetta's assertion that Israel might well strike Iran between April and June of this year. Nothing like letting the target know when to expect the attack.