cia

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 [...]

Michael Cohen, with something between bewilderment and respect, calls Hamid Karzai a gangster. He means it in the slang sense of someone who doesn’t care what you think of him; will do dirt right in front of your eyes; and dare you to do something about it. And reading this New York Times piece about [...]

The Second Circuit Court of Appeals just dismissed a landmark lawsuit filed by a Canadian victim of “extraordinary rendition” against former U.S. officials, ruling that torture victims have no right to compensation from the U.S. government, even if U.S. officials were complicit in their treatment.
Maher Arar is a Canadian citizen who was seized in 2002 [...]

Adam Serwer at The American Prospect tears through a weekend dump of torture documents and finds something disturbing in an FBI inspector general’s report about a Guantanamo detainee, Mohammed al-Qahtani, who was tortured in 2003:
[W]e also learned about a proposal advanced by certain officials from the FBI and DoJ in late 2002 to change the [...]

Last month, on a conference call with reporters, Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair stated that the total budget for U.S. intelligence activities — an unsurprisingly murky total; and until recently a classified one — is $75 billion. As I later clarified, Blair meant the total for both military and non-military intelligence activities — as [...]

Nick Baumann at Mother Jones reminds us that the Obama administration promised earlier this month to do its best to review about 224 more documents that might be responsive to the American Civil Liberties Union’s Freedom of Information Act longstanding requests for documents relating to the torture, abuse and death of detainees in U.S. custody.
Somehow, [...]

I had no luck getting members of Congress to talk yesterday about the relationship between Ahmed Wali Karzai, brother of the Afghan president, and the CIA. But Jeff Stein, I belatedly see, got Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) to talk about the connection last week. Here’s how Rogers, the ranking Republican on a terrorism subcommittee, describes [...]

Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) vouched for Ahmed Wali Karzai in a speech on Monday, saying he was never shown any evidence that the brother of the Afghan president is a druglord when he asked the intelligence community to produce it. But the report that Karzai is in fact on the CIA payroll has caused Kerry [...]

As I’ve been writing since last night, the tale of the CIA’s payments to Ahmed Wali Karzai seems less like a story about corruption than it does a story about the insurgency. Gretchen Peters, author of a recent book about the drug trade in Afghanistan and its effects on the insurgency, helped me flesh that [...]