Cheney Ordered CIA Concealment
An amusing headline from NYT: "Cheney Is Linked to Concealment of C.I.A. Project." I mean, obviously, Cheney is going to be linked. He's everyone's favorite evil mastermind. The Central Intelligence Agency withheld information about a secret counterterrorism program from Congress for eight years on direct orders from former Vice President Dick Cheney, the agency’s director, Leon E. Panetta, has told ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on July 12, 2009 08:20
Air Force Publishes Phone Book!
Steven Aftergood notes that, "The United States Air Force has published a detailed organizational chart of its headquarters (pdf) including the names and telephone numbers of key personnel" and points out that this seemingly uninteresting fact "represents a departure from the post-9/11 Pentagon practice of withholding the names and phone numbers of Pentagon officials from publication in the Department of ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on March 20, 2009 10:00
Obama Invokes State Secrets Privilege
Meet the new boss -- same as the old boss: In a closely watched case involving rendition and torture, a lawyer for the Obama administration seemed to surprise a panel of federal appeals judges on Monday by pressing ahead with an argument for preserving state secrets originally developed by the Bush administration. In the case, Binyam Mohamed, an Ethiopian native, and four ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on February 10, 2009 08:03
War Powers Consultation Act
Former Secretaries of State James Baker and Warren Christopher take to the op-ed pages of the NYT to call for a new War Powers Act. A bipartisan group that we led, the National War Powers Commission, has unanimously concluded after a year of study that the law purporting to govern the decision to engage in war — the 1973 War Powers ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on July 8, 2008 07:21
Supreme Court as a Voting Issue
Dahlia Lithwick takes to the pages of FireDogLake to explain why, in her view, liberals are much less excited about the Supreme Court than conservatives: My own impression, having covered the past two presidential elections is that most liberals simply don’t vote with the composition of the Supreme Court in mind at all, or that it ranks somewhere in their top ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on July 7, 2008 16:00
FBI Building Not Secure
The FBI headquarters complex has a wee problem: “The Hoover Building does not meet the Interagency Security Committee’s criteria for a secure Federal facility capable of handling intelligence and other sensitive information,” the Senate Appropriations Committee observed in a new report on the 2009 Commerce, Justice and State Appropriations bill. “The Committee finds these conditions unacceptable and directs the Government Accountability Office ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on July 7, 2008 12:40
Military Interrogators Urged to Destroy Evidence
Lt. Cmdr. William Kuebler, who is serving as the defense attorney for Canadian citizen Omar Khadr's war crimes trial (previously discussed on OTB here) has divulged that the Pentagon has been urging interrogators in Guantanamo Bay to destroy all of their notes regarding their interrogation of detainees.The Pentagon urged interrogators at Guantanamo Bay to destroy handwritten notes in case they ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on June 10, 2008 10:09
Controlled Unclassified Information
Steven Aftergood has an interesting look at a proposal from Jane Harmon to formalize the concept of “controlled unclassified information” (CUI) that the White House rolled out on a trial balloon basis last month. Aftergood is dubious of the so-called “The Improving Public Access to Documents Act" and I mostly defer to him on this matter. [I]t is ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on June 9, 2008 14:57
U.S. Intelligence Agencies Rethink Classification Policy
The United States government is thinking about coming up with a coherent system for dealing with classified information. Steven Aftergood has details. U.S. intelligence agencies have embarked upon a process to develop a uniform classification policy and a single classification guide that could be used by the entire U.S. intelligence community, according to a newly obtained report (pdf) from the ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on April 10, 2008 12:38
Drudge Breaks Media Silence on Prince’s Mission
At 12:20 Eastern yesterday, I got a CNN Breaking News alert that read, in its entirety, "Britain's Prince Harry has been serving on the front line in Afghanistan, CNN confirms." I found it mildly interesting, in that his superiors had previously decided the security risk in sending him to Iraq was too high, but didn't have anything significant to ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on February 29, 2008 06:47
The More Things Change…
America's greatest journalist, Radley Balko, has an excellent piece on why a Clinton II Presidency would differ very little from the Bush II Presidency.For seven years, the left has been up in arms about President Bush's aggressive foreign policy, his secrecy, his partisanship, and his expansive claims on executive power. It's odd, then, that they're prepared to nominate Hillary Clinton ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on October 23, 2007 00:52
Federal Judge Overturns Patriot Act Gag Rule
Judge Victor Marrero has again struck down a portion of the USA Patriot Act. A federal judge struck down a key part of the USA Patriot Act on Thursday in a ruling that defended the need for judicial oversight of laws and bashed Congress for passing a law that makes possible "far-reaching invasions of liberty." U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on September 7, 2007 08:50
Gonzales Target of Perjury Probe
As the sorry spectacle of the investigation into the firing of a dozen U.S. Attorneys for political purposes has unfolded, it's been rather clear that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has been both an incompetent administrator of his Department and a really bad liar, doing a lousy job of covering up something that almost surely didn't need to be covered up. ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on July 26, 2007 09:07
Just Say ‘No’ to Nation Building
Jim Henley, responding to a Brian Doherty piece commemorating the 100th anniversary of Robert Heinlein's birth and the "rough-hewn anti-government but pro-defense message" of his work, observes that, "The problem with the H-G fusion of militarism and limited government is that the former always ends up eating the latter." That's likely right, in that even the most noble wars are incredibly ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on July 10, 2007 12:17
White House Says Classification Order Doesn’t Apply to Bush or Cheney Staff
The White House says that the president's and vice president's staff was always intended to be exempt from a presidential order describing the handling of classified documents, Josh Meyer reports. The White House said Friday that, like Vice President Dick Cheney's office, President Bush's office is not allowing an independent federal watchdog to oversee its handling of classified national security information. ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on June 23, 2007 06:27
