The Washington Post sits down with the CIA director, who has lots of great things to say about how the CIA is disrupting al-Qaeda:
Panetta credited an increasingly aggressive campaign against al-Qaeda and its Taliban allies, including more frequent strikes and better coordination with Pakistan. He called it “the most
This is Michael D. Furlong, a strategic planner for the Joint Information Operations Warfare Command based in Texas. According to a baroque story in today’s New York Times, Furlong is under criminal investigation for diverting money from a program that hired contractors to gather information about Afghanistan and Pakistan More…
A few years ago, a pal of mine named Malcolm Nance testified to a congressional panel about how he was waterboarded. Nance used to instruct Naval Special Forces in how to resist torture, and part of their instruction was, inevitably, to undergo it themselves. Since the CIA’s contract psychologists essentially More…
It took, oh, a couple hours for conservative outrage — that CIA officials would face criminal charges for the criminal act of torture — to successfully derail Rep. Silvestre Reyes’ (D-Texas) Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Interrogations Prohibition Act. The measure is now stripped out of the 2010 intelligence More…
Marcy Wheeler conducts an invaluable close reading of the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility report, released on Friday, and finds that the SERE psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen whom CIA contracted in 2001 to advise them on how to interrogate al-Qaeda detainees recommended a horrific technique:
The
Still no confirmation of The Christian Science Monitor’s major story about the Pakistanis arresting half of the Taliban’s senior leadership. But The New York Times has a great piece this morning about the restored closeness of the CIA and its Pakistani counterpart, the Inter-Services Intelligence agency. That close-but-uneasy More…
As a postscript to yesterday’s fact-check of Marc Thiessen, a former Bush White House speechwriter and torture proponent, notice how Thiessen, appearing on “Morning Joe,” wrapped himself in the mantle of CIA professionalism when challenged on the efficacy of torture. But according to a former colleague in the White More…
A great piece in The Washington Post gives real reason to believe that the apparently-torrid pace of arrests in Pakistan of Afghan Taliban leaders is the result of a real strategic shift by Pakistani leadership that cultivated and then tolerated the Taliban for years. The arrest of More…
The Christian Science Monitor carries an interview with an anonymous and recently retired senior Pakistani intelligence official, who tells us to expect more arrests like that of top Taliban leader Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar:
[T]he emerging relationship
Check out what Defense Secretary Robert Gates had to say about the passing of Rep. Charlie Wilson, Gates’ partner during the anti-Soviet Afghanistan jihad. Note how quickly this statement becomes a pledge of administration policy intent:
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