This Thursday in Wilmington, N.C., officials from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the government agency responsible for overseeing the country’s nuclear energy activities, are slated to present a report laying out the environmental impacts of a proposed uranium enrichment facility, a key step in approving the facility’s license. While NRC More…
Question of the day: Can guards for your company kill Afghan civilians, set up shell companies to win contracts, siphon off weapons intended for the Afghan police while using the names of cartoon characters to sign for them, and still win additional multi-million-dollar contracts to guard U.S. 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…
GUANTANAMO BAY — A brief detour from my Guantanamo coverage, as a State Department official, speaking only on background, confirmed something else I’ve been working on. The private security company formerly known as Blackwater and now known as Xe Services, will be allowed to bid on the next generation of More…
Jeremy Scahill, journalism’s most dogged investigator of the privatized military, reports that the State Department’s Worldwide Personal Protective Services contract is up for bid. Why’s that important? Because the contract — now apparently re-dubbed the Worldwide Protective Services program — is the lucrative mechanism whereby the State Department hires More…
The Los Angeles Times follows up on Attorney General Eric Holder’s moment of consensus Wednesday with Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) on creating new indefinite detention rules for a post-Guantanamo effort against al-Qaeda. It’s a consequence of the Obama administration’s decision not only to close Guantanamo but to renounce More…
More than halfway through a coy interview with Josh Rogin about whether or not Afghan President Hamid Karzai really walked back his inflammatory Thursday speech in a Friday phone call with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley has this to say about Karzai’s subsequent More…
Last time, it was the lascivious behavior of ArmorGroup — the private security firm handling the U.S. Embassy in Kabul — that attracted headlines. Those revelations led to disclosures of how contractors knowingly hired guards with poor English skills to save money — something the State Department knew More…
An obscure Army contracting office with ties to the private security firm Blackwater has formally lost control of a lucrative contract to train Afghan police, the Pentagon and U.S. military officials in Afghanistan confirmed to TWI.
[Security1] The office, known as the Counter-Narcoterrorism Technology Program Office or CNTPO, came under More…
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