A long-awaited report from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence into the failed bombing attempt aboard Northwest Flight 253 by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab essentially finds that the nation’s premier center for terrorism intelligence didn’t do its job ahead of the Christmastime danger.
“Prior to 12/25,” reads the report, spearheaded by More…
The leak I got yesterday from Kandahar expressing skepticism that counterinsurgency can bring the nine-year war in Afghanistan to a successful conclusion has inspired another one. This time, a former CIA counterterrorism operative who has served on the ground in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq agreed to pass along a More…
Jeff Stein reports:
As we reported last night, DHS intelligence chiefs were expected to take some heat Wednesday morning at a House Homeland Security subcommittee hearing, chaired by Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.).
But the hearing had hardly opened before
The Pentagon just announced that late Friday, the Senate confirmed now-full-Gen. Keith Alexander to be the first commander of the U.S. military’s new effort at safeguarding its digital and information security infrastructure, known as U.S. Cyber Command or CYBERCOM. If that sounds like a vague mandate, it is, as More…
Descend for a moment, won’t you, into a bureaucratic labyrinth with me, in pursuit of constitutional rights and government transparency.
In April, anonymous administration officials claimed to reporters that they possessed the right to kill an American citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki, because of Awlaki’s apparent connections to al-Qaeda. There was More…
Yesterday we broke the story of how Philip Mudd, the well-respected FBI/CIA al-Qaeda and terrorism analyst, quietly retired from government service. Today the New America Foundation, a D.C. think-tank, announces that Mudd will be joining its team as “a senior research fellow specializing in the Middle East and counterterrorism.”
Another thing that Noah Shachtman got into during his interview Adm. Michael Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was the military’s newest command, U.S. Cyber Command, which will probably be helmed by Army Lt. Gen. Keith Alexander, the head of the National Security Agency. At his More…
Philip Mudd, one of the intelligence community’s leading al-Qaeda analysts, has quietly retired from the FBI, where he was associate executive director of the National Security Branch. Mudd confirmed in an email that he left “about six weeks ago,” but didn’t immediately respond to additional questions about his departure.
Mudd More…
Porter Goss, director of the CIA from 2004 to 2006, previously gave the impression he was dismayed when his operations chief, Jose Rodriguez, ordered the destruction of dozens of videotapes documenting the brutal interrogations of al-Qaeda detainees. Perhaps not so:
Shortly after the tapes were destroyed at the order
Both Eli Lake and Greg Miller report that President Obama personally asked Steve Kappes last year to remain the CIA’s deputy director. Kappes’ boss, Leon Panetta, announced yesterday that Kappes will be retiring next month. Under the Kappes Continuity — he ascended to deputy director in More…
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