Senate Select Committee on Intelligence

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 runs the intelligence community overall?
Blair [...]

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 Rice is now testing the line [...]

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 interrogations confirmed our story publicly the [...]

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 on one brief aspect of it:
In [...]

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 Court case that the May 30, 2005 [...]

I hate to say it, but, I told you so…
Just the other day, when I was writing about the case of Jewel v. NSA (and responding to the Columbia Journalism Review’s criticism that no one was covering this important case about warrantless wiretapping), I remarked that while everyone’s been up in arms about the Obama [...]

As TWI’s lightning-fast national security reporter Spencer Ackerman just wrote, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence just formally announced what we’ve known and been reporting on for weeks now: it will review the CIA’s detention and interrogation program during the Bush years.
That’s welcome news for all of us who’ve been eager to learn more about [...]

One quick thing that isn’t Bob Gates-related.  Yesterday, congressional Democratic sources said that they didn’t consider it an act of bad faith that CIA Director-designate Leon Panetta didn’t finish his paperwork for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Now I’m hearing from White House sources that Panetta’s paperwork is done. The delay — much as [...]

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat who’s about to take the reins as chairwoman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, doesn’t appear to be too happy with Leon Panetta’s prospective appointment to head the CIA. Here’s what her office just sent me:
“I was not informed about the selection of Leon Panetta to be the [...]