At a Senate confirmation hearing for his new gig atop the CIA, David Petraeus was asked Thursday if he supported President Obama’s drawdown timetable for Afghanistan. Mark Benjamin parses the thicket of words and argues that Petraeus’ windiness says everything you need to know about the decorated general’s opinion.
I am sitting here watching Congressman Peter King lie through his teeth on CNN about the role of torture in the capture and death of Osama bin Laden. King is insisting that the initial information about the Bin Laden couriers came from “enhanced” interrogation of Khalid Sheik Mohammed and Abu Faraj al-Libbi. The New York [...]
A former head of counterterrorism at the CIA, who was investigated last year by the Justice Department for the destruction of videos showing senior al-Qaeda officials being interrogated, says the harsh questioning of terrorism suspects produced the information that eventually led to Osama bin Laden’s death. Jose Rodriguez ran the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center from 2002 [...]
In his first interview since commanding the mission to kill Osama bin Laden, CIA chief Leon Panetta tells TIME that U.S. officials feared that Pakistan could have undermined the operation by leaking word to its targets. Long before Panetta ordered Vice Admiral William McRaven, head of the Joint Special Forces Command, to undertake the mission [...]
As the news of Osama bin Laden’s death moves from exhilarating novelty to accepted reality, one group in the U.S. government will emerge as key to the win: the Central Intelligence Agency. From the earliest identification of a Bin Laden courier, the pursuit of leads, the assessment of evidence and the execution of the raid [...]
It was never going to be easy for Obama to watch Robert Gates walk out of the Pentagon and back into private life. Over two and a half years, Gates has provided impenetrable political air cover for a series of extremely difficult national security decisions, from the surge in Afghanistan to repeal of Don’t Ask, [...]
Reuters Mark Hosenball reported Wednesday that President Obama has authorized secret CIA support for Libyan rebels fighting Muammar Gaddafi. The New York Times went further, saying “The Central Intelligence Agency has inserted clandestine operatives into Libya to gather intelligence for military airstrikes and make contacts with rebels battling Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s forces, according to American [...]
It seems to me that while acres of forest have been sacrificed to detailing the Undiebomber follies, the other terrorist attack during Christmas week–the suicide bomber who took out much of a CIA station at Forward Operating Base Chapman on the Af/Pak border–was a far more significant event. Turns out he was a double agent, [...]
Eight CIA officers killed by a suicide bomber wearing an Afghan army uniform near Khost? Stunning. The CIA operators, especially those operating in the border areas, are usually, well, covert. This is an amazing breach of security…and the real concern is this one: The use of an official army uniform could mean any one of [...]
The Central Intelligence Agency recently agreed to pay $3 million to a former Drug Enforcement Agency official, Richard Horn, whose home was wiretapped in Rangoon, Burma, under apparently illegal conditions. That’s one thing–a squabble in a distant country over turf between the CIA and the DEA that led one official to bug another official. But [...]
