In fact, the sharpest questions were directed not at Mr. McNerney, but at Paul J. McNulty, the deputy attorney general, who had negotiated the settlement.
The sharpest questions were by Representative John M. Spratt Jr. of South Carolina, the ranking Democrat on the panel, who said the Pentagon seemed to be building toward a cold-war-style conflict despite the collapse of the Soviet Union.
He challenged reporters with an unrehearsed, sharp question when he thought something was left unclear in their stories.
Would Arsène Wenger progress an 18-year-old Tony Adams today?" That sharp question filters back down to grassroots.
In the slums of Brazil or the war zones of Africa, the way the church works is a huge and sharp question, because so little else works.
Similar limits on cable and broadcasting companies have come under sharp question by a pair of rulings from a Federal appeals court in Washington.
And like all proper serials it gives the reader no emotional respite, ending with several razor-sharp question marks as the heavy wheels of fate groan into motion, and the murders and assassinations mount.
Justice Wells did not want to hear Mr. Hancock's lofty definition of democracy; he got right to business with a sharp question about when the hand recounts of ballots had to be finished before Florida jeopardized its electoral votes.
Now Mr Mohammed is to be tried in Guantánamo, by a military commission.As in the war on terrorism, so in the war on crime: the sharp question is how much risk a society is willing to absorb in order to preserve liberty.
