Sidney Blumenthal is a former assistant and senior adviser to President Clinton. He is the author of the The Clinton Wars (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003), and other books, including The Permanent Campaign and The Rise of the Counter-Establishment. He is a columnist for the Guardian, Salon.com and OpenDemocracy.net , and a former staff writer for the Washington Post, the New Yorker and the New Republic. He is currently senior fellow at the New York University Centre on Law and Security.