National Security Agency officials listened to phone conversations between U.S. troops in Iraq and their loved ones, alleges a new book called The Shadow Factory by James Bamford.  The Washington Post's Joby Warrick reports that Bamford interviewed two former NSA officials who ...

That's a question being asked as the Pentagon and State Dept. scramble to revamp their approach to Afghanistan with a few weeks left in the Bush administration. The Washington Post's Karen DeYoung reports that both Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice have agreed for most ...

For a while there in August, Understanding Government was monitoring the heated dispute between U.S. military commanders and the Afghanistan government over the death toll of a U.S. air strike into Azizabad, Afghanistan. The U.S. military claimed that five civilians had died from the attack and 30 militants. But the ...

Of all the utterances George W. Bush made in his 2000 campaign for president none have been subsequently been disregarded quite the way "no more nation-building" has. The Bush administration might tell you 9/11 changed everything, but there is evidence people like Dick Cheney had a plan all along to ...

The Wall Street Journal's August Cole reports that a federal court overruled an Air Force contract that exclusively gives Boeing Co. the right to supply midair refueling tankers or "gas stations in the sky." The relatively small Alabama Aircraft Industries Inc. successfully ...

Any break in this Friday's newspaper from the inability to agree on a bailout of Wall Street is not likely to bear any better news: greenhouse gas emissions are building up in the atmosphere faster than predicted, ageless Sen. Ted Stevens started his corruption trial, and the Pakistan-Afghanistan border is ...

The New York Times' Will Bardenwerper has a critical assessment of U.S. military efforts to train more soldiers to speak "strategically important languages" like Arabic and Farsi. The Pentagon doesn't have a clear plan to increase these numbers, arguing, in part, that ...

The Environmental Protection Agency and its beleaguered administrator, Stephen Johnson, have managed to stay out of the news for about two months. So it was weirdly comforting to see the Washington Post's Lyndsey Layton write this morning about another environmental rule the Bush administration is flouting.

The Pentagon is refusing ...

Gen. David McKiernan, the top U.S. military commander in Afghanistan, said that the startling number of cIvilian deaths so far this year in Afghanistan-- 1,445-- can be attributed to the reliance of U.S. airstrikes. And the dependence on airstrikes, McKiernan argues, is because they are not enough U.S. and NATO ...

If you're looking for a break today from the grim Wall Street crisis, the Wall Street Journal's Michael Phillips has an interesting A1 feature:  there are still U.S. Army draft boards. In the only front-page piece that doesn't concern the crisis, Lehman reports that the ...