I can remember when I was National Security Adviser the intelligence community told us... they put out an intelligence report saying that Iran would never back off from attacks on shipping in the Gulf if we use force.

As a member of the House Select Committee on Intelligence I will be participating in several hearings on the startling revelations contained in the report.

Many intelligence reports in war are contradictory even more are false and most are uncertain.

In the aftermath of September 11 and as the 9/11 Commission report so aptly demonstrates it is clear that our intelligence system is not working the way that it should.

I don't think the intelligence reports are all that hot. Some days I get more out of the New York Times.

When we had to do book reports I would pick a book that no one read and just make it up and turn that in. I got praised for my imagination.

Imagination it turns out is a great deal like reporting in your own head. Here is a paradox of fiction-writing. You are crafting something from nothing which means in one sense that none of it is true. Yet in the writing and perhaps in the reading some of a character's actions or lines are truer than others.

I had been a reporter for 15 years when I set out to write my first novel. I knew how to research an article or profile a subject - skills that I assumed would be useless when it came to fiction. It was from my imagination that the characters in my story would emerge.

If the reporter has killed our imagination with his truth he threatens our life with his lies.

At the risk of appearing disingenuous I don't really think of myself as 'writing humor.' I'm simply reporting on the world I observe which is frequently hilarious.