Online Journal of Politics and Foreign Affairs
So it appears that Darrel Issa has requested that the FBI investigate that non-illegal, politics-as-usual act of offering Joe Sestak a job. Rep. Darrell Issa, the top Republican on the House Oversight Committee, Friday asked the FBI to begin a criminal investigation into efforts by the White House to convince Rep. Joe Sestak (D-Penn.) to [...]
The Obama Administration is releasing its long-awaited National Security Strategy today. Josh Rogin and others have a sneak preview. I’ll be doing more substantive commentary once I’ve had a chance to digest the whole 52-page document. In the meantime, I’ve compiled a roundup post at New Atlanticist titled “National Security Strategy Instant Reactions.” My main [...]
Breaking over the wires that Dennis Blair is stepping down as Director of National Intelligence after only 16 months on the job. AP’s Eileen Sullivan: Dennis Blair, President Obama’s national intelligence director, is resigning after a 16-month tenure marked by turf wars among the country’s spy agencies. Blair, a retired admiral, is the third director [...]
The headline “New U.S. Airport Security Measures To Use ‘Real-Time’ Intelligence” caused a chuckle when I saw it on the RFE/RL Twitter feed. Not to overly disparage the TSA’s screeners, intelligence agents they ain’t. But a description of the program makes it sound like a step in the right direction. The U.S. Department of Homeland [...]
The defection of a top Iranian nuclear scientist has confirmed what we already knew. An award-winning Iranian nuclear scientist, who disappeared last year under mysterious circumstances, has defected to the CIA and been resettled in the United States, according to people briefed on the operation by intelligence officials. The officials were said to have termed [...]
Remember that report from a few weeks back that President Obama was targeting American citizens accused of terrorism for assassination by U.S. intelligence and special operators? Well, it’s not quite true. Steve Aftergood: “The article referred incorrectly to the presence of U.S. citizens on a CIA list of people the agency seeks to kill or [...]
American special operators and intel types are teaming up with Yemeni forces to kill bad guys there, Dana Priest reports. But Glenn Greenwald is most interested in the third paragraph: As part of the operations, Obama approved a Dec. 24 strike against a compound where a U.S. citizen, Anwar al-Aulaqi, was thought to be meeting [...]
Kevin Drum takes a look at some recent reports and wonders if there was really enough intelligence to “connect the dots” and prevent the aborted Christmas bombing prior to the attempt. The Christmas bombing attempt might well turn out to be a serious intelligence failure. But the evidence so far suggests that the only red [...]
Former UN Ambassador John Bolton argues that we need to get the bureaucracy out of intelligence if we are to adequately assess the threats facing the country. Although the U.S. intelligence community (IC) has been stung by failures relating to the Christmas terrorist attack, these failures are symptomatic of far larger problems. In analyzing the [...]
Wired reports that studies show that “enhanced interrogation”, far from being a reliable source of information, can actually make someone less of an intelligence asset because the stress involved changes the biochemistry of the brain: “There is a vast literature on the effects of extreme stress on motivation, mood and memory, using both animals and [...]
Ali Soufan, a former FBI agent and an expert on al-Qaeda operations who has interrogated al-Qaeda members reviews the claims that the Bush Administration’s torture techniques were effective and finds them wanting: The inspector general’s report distinguishes between intelligence gained from regular interrogation and from the harsher methods, which culminate in waterboarding. While the former [...]
Via Patrick Appel, former FBI counterintelligence agent Asha Rangappa explains how the use of torture can undermine the United States’ ability to both obtain information and recruit double agents. A second and arguably more important goal of the FBI is to persuade some of these people, or “targets,” to change sides and share the information [...]
The Obama Justice Department has appointed a criminal prosecutor to look into alleged abuses of the CIA under the Bush administration. [Attorney General Eric] Holder has named longtime prosecutor John H. Durham, who has parachuted into crisis situations for both political parties over three decades, to open an early review of nearly a dozen cases [...]
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, [...]
The CIA has been lying to Congress about somethingoranother for years now, sources tell NYT. The director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Leon E. Panetta, has told the House Intelligence Committee in closed-door testimony that the C.I.A. concealed “significant actions” from Congress from 2001 until late last month, seven Democratic committee members said. In a [...]
James Gordon Meek has a very interesting two-part story on how FBI Special Agent George Piro successfully interrogated Saddam Hussein. Shockingly, it does not involve waterboarding, stress positions, sleep deprivation, nudity, or German shephards. The FBI prides itself on “rapport-based” interrogations that have a high success rate for yielding confessions from the likes of 1993 [...]
“It appears that waterboarding – a torture technique popularized by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney – has been picked up overseas.” - Andrew Sullivan Now, look, I’m opposed to torturing suspected terrorists. But the United States Government waterboarded a grand total of three of them during the Bush-Cheney tenure. So let’s not pretend it [...]
Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee Carl Levin claims that former Vice-President Dick Cheney is lying when he claims that classified CIA memos show that Bush Administration ordered torture/enhanced interrogation techniques produced actionable intelligence that saved American lives. Levin, speaking at the Foreign Policy Association’s annual dinner in Washington on Wednesday, said an investigation [...]
The video embedded below features arguments presented by Dick Cheney in favor of torture (or, if you prefer, “enhanced interrogation techniques”), which are ably demolished by Matthew Alexander, a former member of the United States Air Force who served as an Interrogator in Iraq. He was part of a task force charged with determining the [...]
Apparently, a lot of people who use Yahoo! are searching for “Rumsfeld bible quotes” today. This rather odd happenstance is apparently a function of a story that circulated earlier in the week about Rumsfeld putting bible verses on the cover sheets of “Worldwide Intelligence Updates” intended for President Bush. Apparently, the story is largely untrue.
One thing that’s also worth noting in the debate over the Bush Administration’s torture program is that while the Office of Legal Counsel did sign off on the techniques used (with memos so bad that the lawyers in question are soon to be under investigation for a breach of their professional duties), the fact remains [...]
In his speech on national security before the American Enterprise Institute today, Former Vice-President Dick Cheney made the rather surprising argument that debate over the treatment of detainees makes American look weak. And when they see the American government caught up in arguments about interrogations, or whether foreign terrorists have constitutional rights, they don’t stand [...]
“Well, conservative, conshmervative – even Karl Rove would pay good money to see Pelosi handcuffed to Dick Cheney.” – Kate McMillan responding to news that the then-Minority Whip and top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee was briefed on the use of “enhanced interogation techniques” in the fall of 2002 and “gave it her stamp [...]
Stephen Walt repeats the popular lament (and specifically Gareth Porter‘s) that the United States Government employs a ridiculously small number of Pashto speakers and that this negatively impacts us in Afghanstan. Pat Porter agrees but issues some important caveats: 1) Languages are extremely hard to develop at a sufficient level. Except for the most outrageously [...]
Manfred Nowak, the U.N.’s special rapporteur on torture, proclaimed yesterday that the United States must prosecute the lawyers who drew up the torture memos and that if we fail to do so it is the duty of other states to step in and bring charges. In my New Atlanticist piece, “UN: United States Must Prosecute [...]
“For those most committed to the ridiculous crusade for terrorist rights, ‘enhanced interrogation’ is not only immoral and illegal, it’s ineffective. That argument, like Khalid Sheik Mohamed, doesn’t hold water.” – Michael Goldfarb One wonders what John McCain, who suffered torture for five years as a guest of the North Vietnamese and whose campaign employed [...]
“Intelligence officials, angry that former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales had blocked an FBI investigation into Democratic Rep. Jane Harman’s interactions with a suspected Israeli agent, tipped off Nancy Pelosi, the House Democratic leader, that Harman had been picked up on a court-ordered National Security Agency wiretap targeting the agent,” CQ’s Jeff Stein reports. “In doing [...]
Kevin Drum observes, When the subject has anything to do with sex, the right in America is the party of moral absolutes. We know what’s right, we know what’s wrong, and even if there’s a price to pay we can’t shirk our responsibility to set a proper example and do the right thing. But when [...]
After several days of inflamed public debate following official confirmation that the United States government tortured suspected terrorists under specific authorization from the Bush administration, the inevitable pushback has begun. Several reports now suggest that these extreme interrogation techniques had the desired effect, yielding valuable intelligence that saved lives. The most interesting of these, alas, [...]
Marcy Wheeler picks an interesting factoid out of the “Bradford memo,” one of several documents detailing the interogation techniques used by the U.S. intelligence community released last week by the Obama administration: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times in March 2003 (his first month in custody) alone. As noted repeatedly on this site and [...]
The big story at memeorandum is a report by MinnPost‘s Eric Black, passed on by Raw Story‘s Muriel Kane, that Dick Cheney ran a super secret assassination ring out of his office. Not surprisingly, perhaps, most bloggers on the Right, such as Jules Crittenden and Dan Collins, think Hersh is crazy as a loon while [...]
Pat Lang has Chas Freeman’s scathing letter announcing his withdrawal as a candidate for NIC chair, including this brilliant assessment of the state of affairs of the political appointment process: As those who know me are well aware, I have greatly enjoyed life since retiring from government. Nothing was further from my mind than a [...]
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, [...]
The blogosphere is abuzz over an issue of semantics. The top Bush administration official in charge of deciding whether to bring Guantanamo Bay detainees to trial has concluded that the U.S. military tortured a Saudi national who allegedly planned to participate in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, interrogating him with techniques that included sustained isolation, [...]
A story on the front page of today’s NYT reports on the killing of two very senior al Qaeda officials in Pakistan. In my New Atlanticist piece “Marriot Bombing Planner Killed in CIA Strike,” I argue that it actually matters this time.
John Cole is furious [UPDATE: merely "disgusted"] at Dianne Feinstein and other Democrats critical of the nomination of Leon Panetta as CIA director, saying it proves that the party are “unparalleled masters at fratricide.” Way to go, team. Feinstein, who had no problem voting yea for Porter Goss, George Tenet, and Michael Hayden, as well [...]
When I saw the news yesterday afternoon that Leon Panetta was Barack Obama’s pick to head the CIA, I decided to hold off on posting and go play with my baby instead. My initial reaction was much the same as to the news that Hillary Clinton was going to be the next Secretary of State [...]
With respect to the generally humorous tone with which the blogosphere, yours truly included, greeted the news that the CIA is giving Viagra to Afghan chieftains in hopes of softening them up psychologically by temporarily doing the converse physically, Kathy Kattenburg is concerned that 1) the wives of the chieftain in question may not be [...]
The CIA has figured out a way to use sex as an interrogation tool in a way that’s likely to elicit chuckles rather than horror. WaPo’s Joby Warrick begins with a story about giving an Afghan chieftain for Viagra tablets. The enticement worked. The officer, who described the encounter, returned four days later to an [...]
Bernard Finel, to say the least a fan of neither the Bush Administration nor the Iraq War, throws cold water on the Bush Lied, People Died meme that refuses to die: I’d like to urge folks to think through what standards should be applied to inherently ambiguous information. Here is what we knew in 2002: [...]
Thomas Fingar, the chair of the National Intelligence Council, spoke to the Atlantic Council last night on the release of “Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World.” He and his team project nearly two decades into the future in order to “stimulate strategic thinking” among U.S. policymakers during this period of transition between presidential administrations. This [...]
One truism that I’ve noted over the years is that any event that I experience in person will invariably be reported in the press quite differently. That proved true again last night as I began absorbing media accounts of CIA Director Michael Hayden’s “State of al Qaeda Today” address to the Atlantic Council. It seemed [...]
CIA Director Michael Hayden told the Atlantic Council this afternoon that al Qaeda’s safe haven in Pakistan’s ungoverned tribal areas have provided a “sanctuary” that has “allowed it to recover some capacity lost when expelled from Afghanistan” nearly seven years ago. It has developed a “close, co-dependent relationship with Pashtun extremist and separatist groups” through [...]
Citing Eric Rauchway, Matthew Yglesias notes three other September 24′s in which campaigns were not suspended: — September 24, 1864: The nation is literally at risk of collapse, mengaged in a large-scale civil war: Yet the campaign for the presidency was “now being prosecuted with the utmost vigor,” as one could read in the New [...]
Amy Zegart points out a really strange statement made by CIA Director Michael Hayden in a speech yesterday. As eventful as the world may be right now, the development that is likely to have the most far-reaching consequences will be a domestic one — the election of a new American president. From the standpoint of [...]
Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency helped plan and provided logistical support for last month’s bombing of the Indian embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan according to U.S. intelligence reports leaked to the press by various “officials.” Mark Mazzetti and Eric Schmitt report for the NYT that, The conclusion was based on intercepted communications between Pakistani intelligence officers and [...]
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 [...]
Shaun Mullen wonders “Why Are Right-of-Center Bloggers So Silent On Torture?” He searched high and low and could find no right-of-center bloggers who made any mention at all, for example, of yesterday’s NYT story “China Inspired Interrogations at Guantánamo.” I’d note that Andrew Sullivan wrote roughly 600 posts on the subject yesterday, including this one, [...]
David Addington, chief of staff to Vice President Cheney, was testifying under subpoena yesterday to the House Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties. He took great delight in being a complete jackass, as Dana Milbank details. Could the president ever be justified in breaking the law? “I’m not going to answer a [...]