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Juanita Castro, sister of Cuban rulers Fidel and Raúl Castro, cooperated with the CIA in the 1960s -- a time when the U.S. agency was plotting to assassinate Fidel and overthrow his revolution -- according to an exclusive Univisión-Noticias 23 report
Is the Central Intelligence Agency covering up some dark secret about the assassination of John F. Kennedy? Probably not. But you would not know it from the C.I.A.’s behavior. For six years, the agency has fought in federal court to keep secret hundr
Congress is set to allow the Pentagon to keep new pictures of foreign detainees abused by their U.S. captors from the public, a move intended to end a legal fight over the photographs' release that has reached the Supreme Court. Federal courts hav
A House intelligence committee meeting was abruptly terminated when Justice Department officials refused to be sworn in before briefing the lawmakers. They were to brief the committee on the 2001 shootdown of a plane over Peru that was carrying Ameri
The United States spent $75 billion over the past year to finance worldwide intelligence operations that employ 200,000 people, according to an unprecedented disclosure by the nation's top intelligence official.
Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair told reporters that although combating extremism, issuing warnings, countering weapons proliferation and supporting military operations overseas remain major priorities, the 16 agencies that make up t
A CIA whistle-blower complained in 2001 that the agency broken US laws by failing to pursue allegations that Peruvian spy master Vladimiro Montesinos trafficked in drugs and laundered money. The CIA classified the complaint as "Secret.''
From 2003 to 2006, the Bush administration quietly tried to relax the
draft language of a treaty meant to bar and punish "enforced
disappearances" so that those overseeing the CIA's secret prison system
would not be criminally prosecuted under its provisions, according to
former officials and hundreds of pages of documents recently
declassified by the State Department.
In a highly unusual legal step, a federal judge has ordered the
government to grant an attorney a security clearance so he can
represent a disgruntled former narcotics officer in a lawsuit against a
former CIA officer.
A military judge says defense lawyers for an alleged Sept. 11 plotter held at Guantánamo don't need to inspect secret CIA overseas prisons to determine whether the accused al Qaeda terrorist is competent to stand trial.
Judge Stephen Henley, an Army colonel, ruled Monday that the so-called black sites have likely changed enough since 2006 that an inspection would be of no use to Ramzi Bin al Shibh's Pentagon-appointed defense lawyers.
It's not that this is big news. It's just that these "change agent" CIA people keep popping up all over the place.
As the session begins, the detainee stands naked, except for a hood
covering his head. Guards shackle his arms and legs, then slip a small
collar around his neck to be used later as a handle for slamming
the detainee's head against a wall.
[because you can't] Enforcing the law is an important function of government. But the government has broader responsibilities. 6 reasons prosecutions [of CIA lawbreakers] are not in the nation's best interests:
The US Justice Department’s ethics office has recommended reopening
nearly a dozen prisoner-abuse cases, potentially exposing CIA employees
and contractors to prosecution for their treatment of terrorism suspects.
Amid reports that Panetta had threatened to quit just 7 months after taking over at the spy agency, other insiders say senior White House staff members are discussing a possible shake-up of top national security officials.
"You can expect a larger than normal turnover in the next year," a senior adviser to Obama on intelligence matters told ABCNews.com.
"Of all the outside-the mainstream notions I've posited on this blog, the one that annoys the most people is my suggestion that the CIA recruited young Barack Obama during his days at Occidental College."
The tactics -- which one official described as a threatened
execution -- were used on Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, according to the
CIA's inspector general's report on the agency's interrogation program.
Nashiri, who was captured in November 2002 and held for four years in
one of the CIA's "black site" prisons, ultimately became one of three
al-Qaeda chieftains subjected to a form of simulated drowning known as
waterboarding.
Blackwater has assumed a role in Washington’s most important counterterrorism program: the use of remotely piloted drones to kill Al Qaeda’s leaders. Carried out at hidden bases in Pakistan and Afghanistan, where the company’s contractors assemble and load Hellfire missiles and 500-pound laser-guided bombs on remotely piloted Predator aircraft.
The Justice Department recently questioned military defense attorneys
at Guantanamo Bay about whether photographs of CIA personnel, including
covert officers, were unlawfully provided to detainees charged with
organizing the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
Lawyers were apparently
attempting to identify CIA officers and contractors involved in the
agency's interrogation of al-Qaeda suspects in facilities outside the
United States, where the agency employed harsh techniques.
Ray McGovern: My Take
CIA operative Gary Schroen said Cofer Black sent him to Afghanistan with orders to "Capture bin Laden, kill him, and bring his head back in a box on dry ice." As for other al Qaeda leaders, Black reportedly said, "I want their heads up on pikes."
Schroen had been stunned that, for the first time in 30 years of service, he had received orders to kill targets rather than to capture them. Black would not confirm the exact words of the order to Schroen, but did not dispute Schroen’s account.
A federal district judge ruled the CIA repeatedly misled him in asserting that state secrets were involved in a 15-year-old lawsuit involving allegedly illegal wiretapping. Lamberth questioned the credibility of current CIA Director Leon Panetta, saying that Panetta's testimony in the case contained significant discrepancies, and rejected an Obama administration request that the case continue to be kept secret. He released hundreds of previously secret filings.
An airstrike that Afghan officials allege killed at least 4 civilians is the first test of a new U.S. directive that American troops let Taliban fighters flee if civilian lives are at risk.
U.S. officials said it wasn't at all clear that the civilians had been killed in an airstrike in southern Afghanistan, saying the casualties appear to have been victims of small arms fires.
CBS claims to have Documents that shed light on the mindset and criminal past of the lead suspect in the grisly murder of a Florida couple who made full use of the Foster and Adoptive parent incentives.
[For the CIA info] Here is Congressman Larry McDonald [shortly before his murder], close colleague of Ron Paul, on CNN’s Crossfire
with conservative Pat Buchanan and liberal Tom Braden discussing the
John Birch Society in 1983. McDonald was chairman of the organization,
succeeding Robert Welch, who is heatedly discussed at the beginning of
the video. This program was aired 4months before
McDonald was killed by the Soviets’ murderous attack on the South
Korean airliner KAL007.
A CIA supervisor involved in the "enhanced interrogation" program
bragged to other CIA employees about using fire ants while during
questioning of a top terror suspect, according to several sources
formerly with the Agency. The official claimed to other Agency
employees, the sources say, to have put the stinging ants on a
detainee's head to help break him.
Seems Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair and CIA Director Leon Panetta haven't been seeing eye to eye of late on a number of minor matters -- such as who's in charge of the intelligence community.
The latest nasty dispute,
Under language approved last week in the fiscal 2010 Intelligence
Authorization Act, the House panel proposed doing away with provisions
that allowed a president to limit disclosure of sensitive intelligence
activities to the "Gang of Eight," the term used to identify the House
speaker and minority leader, Senate majority and minority leaders, and
the chairmen and ranking minority members of the House and Senate
intelligence panels.
The Obama administration has proposed the creation of an intelligence
officer training program in colleges and universities that would
function much like the Reserve Officers' Training Corps run by the
military services. The idea is to create a stream "of first- and
second-generation Americans, who already have critical language and
cultural knowledge, and prepare them for careers in the intelligence
agencies," according to a description sent to Congress by Director of
National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair.
Several current and former agents within the National Security Agency (NSA), speaking on condition of anonymity, have told the New York Times that the spy agency likely monitors millions of e-mail communications and telephone calls made by Americans. The new revelations follow the disclosure in April that the NSA’s monitoring of domestic e-mail traffic broke the law in 2008 and 2009.
The CIA is adopting Web 2.0 tools such as blogs and collaborative wikis, but not without a struggle in an agency with an ingrained culture of secrecy, CIA officers said Friday.
"We're still kind of in this early adoptive stage," said Sean Dennehy, a CIA analyst and self-described "evangelist" for Intellipedia, the US intelligence community's version of the popular user-curated online encyclopedia Wikipedia.
"There's a lot of cultural issues we have to encounter with bringing this kind of open source ethos into the intelligence community," Dennehy said during a panel discussion organized by the Washington office of Internet giant Google.
The Central Intelligence Agency analyst recalled Mahatma Gandhi's quote: "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."
"We've been ignored,
