fbi

Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) might have postponed this week’s planned Senate Armed Services Committee briefing on the Fort Hood shooting after President Obama asked Congress to await the results of ongoing Army and FBI inquiries. But today the committee will go forward with a closed-door briefing on Fort Hood, held at the Russell office building [...]

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.

Following up on ABC’s report that U.S. intelligence knew Fort Hood shooting suspect Nidal Malik Hasan tried to contact al-Qaeda facilitators online, The New York Times reports the aftermath:
[T]he federal authorities dropped an inquiry into the matter after deciding that the messages from the psychiatrist, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, did not suggest any threat of [...]

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 [...]

The Justice Department released more documents — or, at least, less-redacted documents — late Friday to the American Civil Liberties Union as part of the government’s obligation in a pending Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.
These latest documents provide a glimpse of the early struggles between the FBI and the Pentagon over just how to conduct [...]

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 [...]

You thought Phil Mudd was done? Months ago, Mudd, the chief of the FBI’s national security branch and a respected longtime CIA official, was forced to withdraw his name as Janet Napolitano’s nominee for intelligence chief of the Department of Homeland Security. Mudd bowed out in June after some Congressional staffers muttered to the press [...]

The Leahy-Feinstein substitute bill I discussed in my piece this morning about the USA PATRIOT Act was just approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee 13-8, with only minor word changes.
Amendments proposed by Sen. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) that would have required that the target of a National Security Letter have some alleged connection to terrorism, and [...]

An amendment to the Patriot Act provision authorizing National Security Letters that would have required the letters to target only people with some connection to a foreign power or the activities of a foreign power, so as to ensure that the NSL is actually issued to investigate terrorism rather than, say, fishing expeditions, was just [...]