The Washington Independent

Posts Tagged rendition

Panetta Confirmation Set For Thursday

By | 02.03.09 | 8:17 am

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 More…

Did Obama Really Create a Loophole for Rendition?

By | 02.02.09 | 5:30 pm

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 More…

Iran-Contra Figure Can’t Follow Straightforward Blog Post on Rendition

By | 02.02.09 | 4:09 pm

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 More…

What to Look For As the Obama Detention/Interrogation Review Process Proceeds

By | 01.23.09 | 10:50 am

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 More…

Panetta and … Extraordinary Rendition?

By | 01.15.09 | 8:32 am

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 More…

What If Newsweek Editors Were Waterboarded?

By | 01.12.09 | 9:37 am

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 More…

Steve Kappes to Stay as CIA’s No. 2?

By | 01.07.09 | 6:42 am

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 More…

Do We Really Have To Call Steve Kappes A Torturer?

By | 01.06.09 | 11:50 am

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 More…

Recasting the War on Terrorism

By | 11.20.08 | 6:10 am

Buoyed by high expectations for the first year of Barack Obama’s administration, an informal coalition of progressive national-security and civil-liberties experts are urging the president-elect to redefine the war on terrorism.

Eight years of the Bush administration’s approach to counterterrorism have yielded two open-ended and bloody wars; a massively expanded More…