Bush administration lawyer John Yoo's latest screed in thePhiladelphia Inquirer relies on...

Opponents of accountability for intelligence excesses, such as former officials and media commentators, speaking out against Attorney General Eric Holder’s recently announced inquiry into CIA’s torture and detention program, complain that scrutiny hurts CIA morale.  Such a stance...

The announcement that a new interagency intelligence unit, the High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group, or HIG, will take charge of terrorist detention and interrogation is a further sign of CIA’s diminishing stock in the US intelligence community, despite claims...

Chuck Hagel, former Republican Senator from Nebraska, Vietnam veteran, and short-lister for various Obama national security cabinet posts, is soon to be named as co-chairman of the President's Intelligence Advisory Board, according to Al Kamen of the Washington Post. Hagel, known for his independent views and national security...

The Los Angeles Times reported last Sunday that Attorney General Holder will soon appoint a special prosecutor to investigate individuals alleged to have participated in the worst excesses of CIA torture, but not the policy makers and senior intelligence officials responsible for torture and detention policies. Holder's strategy appears...

Obama's top national security and counterterrorism adviser, John Brennan, outlined the Obama administration's counterterrorism strategy in a speech to a packed house at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC. The strategy calls for orienting all resources of U.S. foreign policy to address the social, economic, and...

CIA Director Leon Panetta wants the world to know: he is on a mission to promote the agenda of top-level intelligence chiefs and former members of the Bush administration chickenhawk-ocracy who fear accountability for their policies, which not only diminished American honor but increasingly appear to have been riddled with...

Secretary of State Hilary Clinton is pressing the UK to protect US detention and torture secrets, but British courts may have the last word as two major torture cases move ahead.

The Telegraph reports that Secretary of State Clinton told UK Foreign Secretary David Milliband that Washington intended to...

In the wake of revelations that CIA had failed to disclose to Congress a planned terrorist assassination program for seven years, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Reyes announced Friday that his committee has launched a formal investigation into CIA's failure to disclose its activities to Congress. Congressional Republicans, who in the...

The Obama national security team talks a big game about not dwelling on past national security misdeeds, but the persistence of so many Bush-era spy programs and spy bureaucrats guarantees that Obama's national security policy will stay fixed on the past.

Over the past week, a triple-whammy of developing national...

After eight years of acquiescence to the executive branch on intelligence matters, Congress is finally getting around to questioning the intelligence community's trend of secret outsourcing. Legislators are going to find a mess of wrongdoing and incompetence.

The Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2010 recently made headlines after...

Seven years after 9/11, and CIA efforts against Al Qaeda appear to be narrowed down to exactly two major focus areas.

One is CIA's campaign of assassination by flying killer robots in the remote hills of Afghanistan and Pakistan that has unfortunate byproduct of killing lots...

The Department of Defense has failed to report intelligence operations and covert actions conducted by special operations forces and DoD intelligence units to the House and Senate intelligence committees, according to the House report on the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2010. (Tip o' the hat to Federation...

Even after the murder of a physician and the attack at the Holocaust museum by individuals with strong ties to violent ultrarightist movements -- and as new reports of violence linked to ultra right-wing groups emerge -- Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano still thinks that an April...

Pending bills could strengthen judicial branch review of Federal "state secret" claims and legislative branch oversight of intelligence activities.

The House of Representatives version of the State Secrets Protection Act has been approved by House Subcommittee on Constitution Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, and is currently...

Senior intelligence community hacks like Michael Hayden and his peers are responsible for scuttling senior CIA analyst Phil Mudd's nomination to the senior DHS intelligence post.

Ex CIA chief Michael Hayden's opinion piece in the Washington Post on Friday, 19 June 2009, decried how "today's atmosphere"...

Over the past few weeks, Leon Panetta has emerged as an obstacle to real reform and accountability at the CIA. Rather than exerting strong leadership, Panetta is toeing the line on CIA's pet parochial concerns, such as protecting CIA officers and contractors from investigative scrutiny and insisting on suppression of...

A 9/11 Commission report on intelligence sharing -- declassified this week -- concluded "there was no legal reason why the [9/11 terrorist] information could not have been shared."

Different parts of the US Government -- CIA, NSA, FBI, State Department -- had important clues about the...

The latest Washington espionage arrest replays the same old story of a senior intelligence official getting away with decades of spying against the US. Will US security officials ever fix their broken spy catching system?

A weekend ago, the Washington Post reported that the FBI had...

Some old intelligence scandals and foul-ups seem to keep turning back up to take a toll on government employees here in Washington.

Take metro Washington resident Sabrina DeSousa, for example, whose case Jeff Stein of Congressional Quarterly reported several weeks ago. Italian authorities charged DeSousa with participating in the...