Good David Ignatius column on What James Clapper’s Nomination Means:
The DNI flap has been fascinating in what it shows about Obama’s approach to intelligence. He wants facts, not commentary; he mistrusts aides such as Blair who let their personal opinions show, and he correspondingly values low-key colleagues such
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the chairwoman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, just issued a statement practically begging the Obama administration to work with her to restructure the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the five-year-old bureaucratic anomaly seated atop the country’s 16 intelligence agencies. “I have long More…
It’s so dry it borders on passive-aggressive. “Immediately following the attempted attack, Director Blair initiated reviews to identify [intelligence community]-wide shortcomings and potential solutions,” reads a statement from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Dennis Blair, responding to this afternoon’s declassified Senate report on systemic intelligence failures More…
A long-awaited report from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence into the failed bombing attempt aboard Northwest Flight 253 by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab essentially finds that the nation’s premier center for terrorism intelligence didn’t do its job ahead of the Christmastime danger.
“Prior to 12/25,” reads the report, spearheaded by More…
Sen. Kit Bond (R-Mo.) seemed pretty animated on Monday afternoon when he spoke to a bunch of us reporters after receiving an intelligence briefing on would-be Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad. He lit into Attorney General Eric Holder for what he characterized as a public misrepresentation of the relationship More…
There’s a dispute inside the Obama administration about who should have the authority to appoint and direct the chief intelligence officer at oversees outposts. Should it be CIA Director Leon Panetta, since the job is traditionally a CIA responsibility? Or should it be Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair, who More…
Remember when Condoleezza Rice, perhaps the most disastrously inept national security adviser in history, snapped at a Stanford student that the United States hadn’t tortured anyone and that because the president said “enhanced interrogations” were legal they were, in fact, legal? It didn’t work on the Stanford kid. So More…
On Tuesday, we broke the story of an undisclosed Office of Legal Counsel memo from 2007 about what interrogation techniques were and weren’t legal for the CIA to use on detainees. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence narrative timeline of the Bush administration’s legal and policy approval for abusive More…
The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, after consultation with Attorney General Eric Holder, just issued a declassified narrative of how the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel came to approve the CIA’s enhanced interrogation program. You can read the report at the committee’s Website, but I want to focus More…
To follow up on my post last week about how the Bush administration Office of Legal Counsel lawyers who drafted the recently released torture memos could have concluded that the bizarre techniques we’ve all read about do not “shock the conscience,” I thought I’d look up the Supreme More…
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