michael hayden

Somehow it took former NSA and CIA Director Michael Hayden over two weeks to respond to the report from five government inspectors general on warrantless surveillance, and this, in The New York Times, is what he’s got:
The reflexive judgments to the contrary seem hasty at best. Although the inspectors general report notes that the compartmented [...]

It was supposed to be a magical day: the day when, in response to an agreement reached in a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union, the Obama administration will declassify an important document in the history of its predecessor’s apparatus of torture. I refer to the 2004 inquest undertaken by ex-CIA Inspector General [...]

Congratulations, Leon Panetta. When you decided, unexpectedly, to become President Obama’s CIA director, did you anticipate spending one of your first major addresses defusing an escalation in congressional-CIA acrimony? His message to a Los Angeles foreign policy group yesterday became the second part of his response to Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who last week accused [...]

Greg Sargent makes a great point about the torture memos:
What was actually revealed in yesterday’s memos was the nature of the Bush administration’s efforts to legalize and justify the “harsh interrogation techniques” that we mostly knew about already. And it’s not terribly difficult to imagine why some folks would want those legal efforts kept under [...]

Music fan and CIA Director Mike Hayden released this statement to the agency in the wake of President Obama’s interrogations/detentions cataclysm:

President Obama issued an Executive Order today setting out new instructions for the detention, rendition and interrogation of captured terrorists. The legal and policy landscape under which the Agency has conducted itself in the global [...]