Dick Cheney says something, Politico uncritically reports it, Obama administration officials wearily refute it. So goes the ritual. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that John Brennan said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that the former vice president is either “willfully mischaracterizing this president’s position” or is “ignorant of the facts” when 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…
On October 30, the Justice Department for the first time applied its new “state secrets” policy to a case charging the government with breaking the law. Open government advocates hoping for a significant change in the government’s stance toward secrecy in national security cases were sorely disappointed. Attorney General Eric More…
As Marcy Wheeler and Glenn Greenwald both pointed out over the weekend, Eric Holder on Friday once again declared that a case charging government lawbreaking must be dismissed because to let it continue would reveal important “state secrets.” That’s despite the fact that Attorney General More…
That’s one of the questions coming up in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit being argued today by the Center for Constitutional Rights on behalf of 23 lawyers who believe they may have been wiretapped without a warrant by the National Security Agency during the Bush administration. But More…
Throughout the Bush administration, Bush officials — including the president, as you can see here – consistently said that “this government does not torture people.” The Bush administration also promised that it doesn’t send prisoners to be tortured elsewhere.
The Obama administration is now saying the same thing. More…
Writing about the role Deputy National Security Adviser John Brennan played in the Bush counterterror surveillance program, Marcy Wheeler, blogging for Glenn Greenwald at Salon today, argues that as NSA adviser, rather than CIA director (a position Brennan was nominated for, but Glenn helped torpedo the nomination by More…
Marc Ambinder follows up on my question to John Brennan, President Obama’s chief counterterrorism aide, about what role Brennan played in domestic surveillance during the Bush administration. From 2003 to 2005, recall, Brennan ran two organizations — the Terrorist Threat Integration Center and then the National Counterterrorism Center — More…
1. Any ballpark estimate — any number at all, really — of how many Americans had their communications intercepted by the NSA through the “President’s Surveillance Program.” The fact that this is missing from an inspectors general report is a glaring oversight.
2. The error rate in collecting terrorism communications. More…
The Bush administration called its warrantless surveillance efforts “very, very important to protect the national security of this country,” in the words of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales in 2005. Today’s inspectors general report on the President’s Surveillance Program doesn’t really substantiate that assessment. “[M]ost PSP leads were determined More…
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