Conferees Agree on Way to Keep the F-22 Alive

[Jeffrey St. Clair]

I like Tim Weiner. His book, Blank Check, is one of the best on the Pentagon
budget scandals of the 80s and is particularly good--perhaps the best (other
than ours in Whiteout, of course) on the Afghanistan war. His reporting at
the Times has been less adventuresome than his stories at the Philly
Inquirer--but the Times is bullshit, anyway, and you don't have to live in
Oregon to get the "ironic distance" necessary to see that. The only way Jeff
Gerth gets to write his stories is because his prose is so opaque nobody can
understand what the hell he's talking about.  Admittedly, Weiner was
particularly soft on the CIA and harsh on Gary Webb during the latest
Contra/coke fiasco. Still he's a good reporter and, I think, an honest one.
His wife Kate works at the National Security Archives and has unearthed much
of the buried bloody history of Guatemala and the CIA's ties to the
butchery.

Jeff St. Clair