A picture is emerging of Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, the Jordanian double agent who murdered seven CIA agents and Blackwater contractors in Khost Province last week after convincing U.S. and Jordanian intelligence that he was key to penetrating al-Qaeda on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. He’s an Internet enthusiast, More…
Speaking of cybersecurity, Naval blogger Galrahn has a fascinating take on last week’s big Wall Street Journal story about insurgents in Iraq using an off-the-shelf $26 hack to intercept video feeds from U.S. unmanned aerial vehicles. It’s actually an opportunity, he explains:
From a cyber warfare perspective, the
Great reporting from Newsweek’s Mark Hosenball about the Obama administration’s debate over CIA (and maybe Joint Special Operations Command) drone strikes in Pakistan against senior al-Qaeda leadership:
One person standing in the way of expanded missile strikes: President Obama. Five administration officials tell NEWSWEEK that the president has sided
Another aspect of the Obama administration’s Afghanistan-Pakistan strategy that went unacknowledged over the past three days’ worth of congressional hearings is the role of unmanned missile-equipped drones used ostensibly on militants in Pakistan. Those drones, a highly sensitive intelligence program, never had any hope of being discussed in open More…
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 More…
In an interview with Pakistan’s Dawn-TV, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton laid out some goals for her trip this week to Pakistan. “I talk about people-to-people diplomacy,” she said, “because for me, being Secretary of State is not just going somewhere and sitting in a government office or More…
Andrew Exum of the Center for a New American Security, a critic of the CIA’s Predator drone program in the Pakistani tribal areas, writes:
I worry that the CIA is carrying out their own campaign in part because a) it’s been getting kicked around so much since 9/11 that
One more thing about the New America Foundation’s drone-strike report, which found that the drones have “only” killed Pakistani civilians one-third of the time. (We’re talking about “250 to 320″ civilians killed, according to the report.) One of the reasons the report exists is to push back against More…
The New America Foundation’s Peter Bergen and Katherine Tiedemann have a new report out tallying how many civilians have died in the Pakistani tribal areas thanks to the CIA’s drone strikes. Their conclusion: the strikes have killed, since 2006, between 750 and 1000 people; 20 of them have been More…
The Wall Street Journal has a wonderful story on the role of the CIA’s drones in harassing al-Qaeda in Pakistan, and it includes, at the bottom, this paragraph that explains why the efficacy of the drone strikes has reportedly increased:
At the same time, U.S. intelligence collection in Pakistan
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