cia

Despite Hasan’s reported contacts with an al-Qaeda-connected cleric in Yemen, the U.S. Army’s Criminal Investigation Division and FBI will handle the probe.

Marc Ambinder has a seriously detailed curtain-raiser on a turf war that’s roiled the intelligence community for months. Dennis Blair, the director of national intelligence, and Leon Panetta, the director of the CIA, have clashed over who controls the top U.S. intelligence officer in various foreign countries. But Ambinder goes way deeper to provide a [...]

Praising an Italian court’s recent ruling that CIA agents broke the law in an extraordinary rendition case, The New York Times today highlights a growing phenomenon that hasn’t received sufficient attention: European courts appear more willing than their American counterparts to enforce the laws protecting basic human and civil rights.

Check out Rachel Maddow going hard on Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-Mich.) for publicly revealing that the U.S. intelligence community is intercepting the communications of al-Qaeda-sympathetic cleric Anwar Aulaqi, a former U.S. preacher now in Yemen whom Fort Hood murder suspect Nidal Malik Hasan apparently contacted before the shooting.

It may not be the 9/11 Commission, and may not have the force of, say, John Durham’s Justice Department inquiry into prospective CIA illegality in the Bush administration’s so-called ‘enhanced interrogation program.’ But a panel helmed by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), chairwoman of the Senate Select Intelligence Committee, has gone through sheafs of documents and [...]

At this point, following investigators’ lead, it’s probably fair to conclude that the Fort Hood shooting suspect was motivated by religious extremism:
U.S. intelligence agencies were aware months ago that Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan was attempting to make contact with people associated with al Qaeda, two American officials briefed on classified material in the case [...]

As former Vice President Dick Cheney and some Republican lawmakers continue to debate whether torture works and was a legitimate interrogation technique during the Bush administration, it’s almost jaw-dropping to read some of the memos that were written by the real experts on interrogation techniques in the U.S. government, warning the Defense Department all the [...]

Sabrina deSouza is one of the 23 U.S. officials convicted in Italy for the illegal CIA rendition of an Egyptian terrorist suspect named Abu Omar. She concedes the United States “broke the law” in ordering and carrying out the rendition, and says, “we are paying for the mistakes right now, whoever authorized and approved this.”
Wow, [...]

Breaking news from Reuters:
An Italian judge sentenced 23 former CIA agents to up to eight years in prison on Wednesday for the abduction of a Muslim cleric in a landmark ruling against the “rendition” flights used by the former U.S. government.
The Americans were tried in absentia for the 2003 kidnapping, in a case that garnered [...]

I wrote today about the problems inherent with ad-hoc relationships between civilians and military officers during wartime, but I confess I didn’t think about another, more problematic ad-hoc arrangement — the dangers of treating global manhunts like a deadly game of pick-up basketball. I swear to God I’m serious.
Noah Shachtman at Danger Room has come [...]