Officials are looking at keeping the next Iraq assessment a “secret”: A new National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq is scheduled to be completed this month, according to U.S. intelligence officials. But leaders of the intelligence community have not decided whether to make its key judgments public, a step that caused an uproar when key judgments […]
In their defense, if you don’t have oversight then you can’t say you did any wrong: On Friday, the White House issued a new executive order effectively gutting the Intelligence Oversight Board (IOB), “created in 1976 in the wake of widespread abuses by U.S. intelligence agencies.” Under the order, many of the IOB’s investigative powers […]
According to director of national intelligence, Mike McConnell, it is so the telecom companies can survive: “It’s true that some of the authorities would carry over to the period they were established for one year. That would put us into the August, September time frame. However, that’s not the real issue. The issue is liability […]
Ok this is an interesting statement: The director of national intelligence said Tuesday he is concerned that al-Qaida in Iraq is shifting its focus to attacks elsewhere in the region. “They may deploy resources to mount attacks outside the country,” Mike McConnell told a Senate hearing, although he also said that fewer than 100 terrorists […]
That’s what the nation’s chief spook said: The nation’s intelligence chief says that waterboarding “would be torture” if used against him, or if someone under interrogation was taking water into his lungs. But Mike McConnell declined for legal reasons to say whether the technique categorically should be considered torture. So we now are a nation […]
And now we have an Attorney General who is in lockstep with the White House: In his second day on the job, Attorney General Michael Mukasey leaped into the political fray, telling a key Democratic senator he opposes his electronic surveillance plan and would recommend the president veto it if it is passed. In a […]
Glenn Greenwald has all the disguising details. I think most important is this part: Let’s just describe very factually and dispassionately what has happened here. Congress — led by Senators, such as Jay Rockefeller, who have received huge payments from the telecom industry, and by privatized intelligence pioneer Mike McConnell, former Chairman of the secretive […]