CIA

Why the new torture debate still does not make sense

World War II Marine Corps interrogator Maj. Sherwood F. Moran. Moran’s counterpart at the German Luftwaffe, Hans Sharff.

These are two names you probably won’t hear from the Liz Cheneys of the world who have seized on the death of Osama bin Laden as vindication of Bush-era torture. The argument goes that torture produced scrap of …

SEAL team members tell all to a select few following raid

Cruising the azure waters of the Arabian Sea with the Navy’s Carl Vinson Strike Group in the hours immediately following the daring raid in Pakistan, the SEAL team member who put a bullet through Osama bin Laden’s left eye had some explaining to do. In fact, while they won’t be able to tell their own families much, all of the SEAL …

Thirty years after Iran, the art of the counter-terror assault

Highly trained, modern counter-terrorism units like the Navy SEAL team that killed Osama bin Laden grew out of the ashes of a charred RH-53D helicopter that lay resting in the Iranian desert after the disastrous 1980 attempt to free American hostages in Tehran. Navy SEAL Team Six, now called the Naval Special Warfare Development Group, …

Panetta’s Challenge

When the President announced his new national security team last week most of the attention focused on David Petraeus at CIA and the problem of winding down the war in Afghanistan. Leon Panetta’s nomination as Secretary of Defense went almost unnoticed, by comparison.

But Panetta has the bigger challenge: how to manage a build down in …

Meet The New Boss. Same As The Old Boss.


I remember when Harold Brown was Jimmy Carter’s defense secretary. Heck, I remember when Bob McNamara was JFK’s defense secretary, so let me rephrase that: I covered Harold Brown as Jimmy Carter’s defense secretary.

There’s been a flurry of reports over the last couple of days about how the shift of Leon …

The Predator Feud Drones On

A peek inside the tensions between Islamabad and Washington over the CIA’s use of armed Predator drones over Pakistan to take out Taliban operatives in safe havens along the Af-Pak frontier, from Time’s Omar Waraich in the Pakistani capital.

Mata Hari, Call Your Office!

Moving at the speed of sludge, the CIA this week declared it has finally declassified its oldest still-secret documents it has: spy documents from World War I. One outlines the chemicals and techniques necessary for developing certain types of secret writing ink and a method for opening sealed letters without detection. Another …

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