rendition

Looks like all the paperwork’s been filed. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) has set CIA Director-designee Leon Panetta’s confirmation hearing for Thursday at the unusual hour of 2:30 p.m., when everyone’s blood sugar will be crashing from lunch. Time to get clarity on whether there really are loopholes in President Obama’s recent executive orders for rendition, [...]

This story that ran Sunday in The Los Angeles Times, “Obama Preserves Rendition as Counter-Terrorism Tool”, has caused quite a stir.  Swirling ’round the blogosphere, it’s got all sorts of people in a tizzy that President Obama isn’t really ending torture and the Bush administration policy of “extraordinary rendition” of suspected terrorists to torturing countries.
But [...]

If you factor out the self-awareness, Michael Ledeen is to neoconservatism what Kathy Griffin is to fame. How a man who helped arrange arms sales to the Iranian government and who now has imaginary conversations in public with dead spies can be published for money might explain a great deal about the intellectual collapse of [...]

I think the Obama administration is not likely to cede that authority back to the Congress.
– Dick Cheney, Dec. 15, 2008
What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them.
– Barack Obama, Jan. 20, 2009
I was talking with a reporter friend last night about President Barack Obama’s executive orders on [...]

My friend Eli Lake reports for The Washington Times that Republicans on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence intend to question CIA director-designate Leon Panetta about whether he played any role in ordering terrorism suspects to be kidnapped extrajudicially and sent to other countries for questioning and probable torture while he was chief of staff [...]

I really hate writing posts about the media. It seems to me that complaining about the press is a distraction from engaging with the actual issues at hand. Yes, more often than not the press sucks, everyone knows it, the point is made, we factor it into our reasoning and now we can move on, [...]

Later this morning, President-elect Barack Obama is expected to make it official and announce that Adm. Dennis Blair (ret.) and former White House chief of staff Leon Panetta are his choices to lead the intelligence community. The friction between Panetta and Sen. Dianne Feinstein is over, and there hasn’t been any significant opposition to Blair [...]

Via Josh Marshall, Mark Mazzetti reports for The New York Times that Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s (D-Calif.) choice for CIA director, Steve Kappes, might remain deputy director as part of a plan to mollify the new chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee ahead of confirmation hearings for President-elect Barack Obama’s reported pick to head the agency, [...]

First Read reported that Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s (D-Calif.) choice for CIA director is current deputy director Steve Kappes. Kappes, unlike Leon Panetta, is a consummate intelligence professional. He played a key role in the nuclear disarmament of Libya, speaks Persian and Russian, and was purged by Porter Goss in 2004 for insufficient political loyalty to [...]

Liberal groups see a successful counterterrorism strategy doing more than ending torture, closing Guantanamo Bay, restricting CIA interrogation practices and curbing domestic spying. It must restore America’s moral stature in the world, and one way to do that is help resolve Arab-Israeli conflicts. The new administration seems receptive to the need for change.