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“This is the way I think Putin operates, and operated even in St. Petersburg. Putin is not formally speaking Mafia…he was never “made,” using this American phrase. What he did was to make illegal activity legal, which is a far more useful thing. So he…because he was…in charge of all the registrations of foreigners coming into Russia, into St. Petersburg, and all of the export licenses going abroad, you didn’t have to run the risk of illegally exporting if Putin would sign the documents for you. He could open the border going and coming for money for goods for raw...

Once a Constitutional Republic famed for its pragmatism, the United States has lately become a country notorious for its inconstancy, no longer recognizing that actions have finite and foreseeable consequences. In this space, for example, I recently argued that the release of the “torture report” by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence came perilously close to the constitutional definition of treason by “giving Aid and Comfort” to America’s enemies. Admittedly, that was a tough assessment. But barely a week after the report’s release, the Huffington Post published an article linking those revelations with their most immediate effects on our allies....

As some lawmakers purport to be stunned over the new CIA “torture report” the fact is Congress knew for years that enhanced interrogation techniques were being used on terrorists and in fact dozens of members were repeatedly briefed on the subject, including former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Back in 2010 Judicial Watch obtained government documents—once marked “Top Secret”—that reveal between 2001 and 2007, the CIA briefed at least 68 members of Congress on its interrogation program. This included so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques.” The dates of all congressional briefings and, in some cases, the members of Congress in attendance as well...

Guess when you're as brilliant as Mike Barnicle, it's OK to ridicule others for their supposed lack of smarts. Today's Morning Joe was teasing an upcoming segment about a tough question that reporter Kasie Hunt had posed to Rick Perry. Mockingly trying to imagine the question, Barnicle offered "she asked him what day it was." View the video here.

"I don't know that the report that was released yesterday is that historically accurate. It reads like a prosecutorial screed rather than a historical document."- Michael Hayden, Former CIA Director from May 30, 2006- Feb 12, 2009 For the most part, the narrative that the CIA tortured, that methods were "brutal", that the program wasn't effective in obtaining intelligence, that it played no role in the finding and killing of OBL, that those involved are war criminals- all of that is pretty much cemented in the minds of a number of Americans who are only reading the headlines and buying...

Rolling Stone magazine has committed a series of astonishing journalistic blunders of late: Rolling Stone magazine has blown it again. First it outraged New Englanders by putting a photo of the accused Boston Marathon bomber on its July 2013 cover — after the horrific terror attack that killed three people and injured more than 260 — that made him appear like a sultry, tousled-hair rock star. But the single worst example of its blinding ineptitude was the UVA scandal: If that wasn’t reason enough to cancel one’s subscription, now Rolling Stone has backpedaled on its story about a woman allegedly...

FORT HUACHUCA — There are two sayings which today’s Army is striving to overcome. One is that past is prologue, or we’re always reliving over and over what has already happened. The other is when it comes to war, military leaders are always ready to fight the last one. But Maj. Gen. Robert P. Ashley said the new Army Operating Concept is “a very good job of laying out what the (future) operational environment is going to look like.” And while today’s world is already complicated, “it’s going to become more complex,” the commander of the Army Intelligence Center of...

As head of the Senate Intelligence Committee since 2009, Sen. Dianne Feinstein has spent hundreds of hours in secret briefings and seen thousands of pictures from battlefields in Syria, Iraq and Yemen. She keeps two images with her. One shows a little girl wearing a gingham dress, white tights and black Mary Janes — but the girl's head is gone. Another is of a teenage boy, duct tape over his mouth, eyes bulging out, being forced to hold two severed heads. "To me, it's what we are up against," Feinstein said in an interview. "It is a testament to pure...

Nine years as chaplain of an 800 bed state mental hospital taught me that one can be mentally ill and highly intelligent. Talking with the patients often was more interesting than talking with their psychiatrists. Mad men are not mindless. They just do not distinguish between delusion and fact. Chesterton summed this up by aphorism: “The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.” This explains why it is often hard to distinguish university faculties from mental wards, save for the latter being kept under...

WASHINGTON (AFP) - A former Iraqi general, Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, is reported to be coordinating attacks in Iraq by foreign fighters and Iraqi regime loyalists, a US defense official said. "There are reports that the al-Douri is coordinating the attacks," said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. The reports in military channels fingering al-Douri as the coordinator of the attacks probably came from the recent capture in Mosul of a former secretary of al-Douri and two senior members of Ansar al-Islam who were close to the general, the official said. Number six on the US list of 55...

DEBKAfile remains temporarily on hold, due to the chief editor's sudden illness. Service is due to be resumed early December, 2014. Please accept our apologies for this interruption and assurance that DEBKA will be up and running again after this delay.

President Obama this week committed professional suicide. Let me explain. There is a theory in politics that once a leader has fired 50 or more people from his or her administration, he or she is finished. The reason being that by creating so many enemies ‘outside the tent’, the tent itself becomes too deluged with poisonous bile to avoid sinking into a quagmire of back-stabbing ignominy. Obama went a lot further than firing 50 people. He managed to single-handedly alienate 200,000 employees in the American intelligence agencies by going on 60 Minutes and ruthlessly chucking them all under a bus...

Yesterday, we said that President Obama was either reckless or incompetent.  He either didn't pay attention at the briefing or kept the country in the dark about ISIS.Today, I'm leaning toward the irresponsible, or a major dereliction of duty that we have not seen in U.S. history. According to a U.K. newspaper,  President Obama was told about ISIS back in 2012, or before the presidential campaign: President Barack Obama's intelligence briefings have provided him with specific information since before he won re-election in 2012 about the growing threat of the terror group now known alternatively as ISIS and ISIL, an administration insider told MailOnline...

Joseph Miller is the pen name for a ranking Department of Defense official with a background in U.S. special operations and combat experience in Iraq and Afghanistan. He has worked in strategic planning. President Barack Obama has taken a lot of flack since his Sunday night “60 Minutes” interview, in which he blamed the intelligence community for his failure to tackle the threat posed by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. And that is right and proper. Because not only was his excuse of blaming us a lie, but when questioned on his lie, White House press secretary Josh...

President Obama’s 60 Minutes interview, taped last Friday and aired Sunday, is turning out to be a disaster for him, and may even be a tipping point of sorts. There are six dimensions to the disaster.1.  By blaming the intelligence community for his failure to act on the ISIS threat, he ensured that a series of damaging leaks will be coming, and they are already starting. The UK Daily Mail, always far less constrained than the American media when it comes to revealing information damaging to the American progressive establishment, quotes “an administration insider,” summarized in its own bullet points:...

We mention President Obama’s narcissism not as an exercise in name-calling but because it continues to be relevant to how he conducts himself in office, and it’s not pretty. This undeniable character trait was on full display in his interview with Steve Kroft of “60 Minutes,” in the sense that he simply cannot entertain the possibility, much less — infinitely less — admit the possibility that he has made a mistake or exercised poor judgment. If anything remotely positive happens on his watch, he presumes to take full credit for it — way more than the normal opportunistic politician. With...

With his foreign policy approval ratings at a historic low, Barack Obama meets furious reaction after blaming US intelligence agencies for failing to predict rise of Isil in Syria

In a "60 Minutes" interview Sunday night, President Barack Obama placed blame squarely at the foot of the US intelligence community for the rise of the Islamic State, the extremist group also known as ISIS. Citing comments from Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, Obama said the intelligence community had "underestimated what had been taking place in Syria," referring to the rise of ISIS militants in the country's northeast. But American spies, experts, and journalists who have been watching the progress of ISIS, the extremist offshoot of Al Qaeda, immediately pushed back against the president's assessment. "Either the president doesn’t...

Cooperation between Germany's foreign intelligence service, the BND, and America's NSA is deeper than previously believed. German agents appear to have crossed into constitutionally questionable territory.

What is the enduring lesson of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, when the Bush administration overestimated and, in some cases, exaggerated the threat posed by Saddam Hussein? Some say it's to be skeptical of government officials who are making the case for war. I say the legacy should be skepticism toward government officials, period—all of them. Their hidden agendas can shade the case for peace as well as war, which might explain why there's no consensus among so-called experts about the threat posed today by ISIS. On a scale of zero to panic, Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint...