Free Republic

To cut to the chase, a country that was serious about its national security would never put John Brennan in charge of its premier intelligence service. Of course, it is by no means clear that the United States is any longer a serious country in this regard. Serious countries do not fund, arm and “partner with” hostile regimes. They do not recruit enemy sympathizers to fill key governmental policy positions. They do not erect barriers impeding their intelligence services from understanding an enemy’s threat doctrine – in conscious indifference to Sun Tzu’s maxim that defending oneself requires knowing one’s enemies....

Via the Daily Caller, is he right? Before you say no, be advised that it sounds like Team Hopenchange is also starting to wonder: A day earlier, Bill Clinton suggested that Congress should temporarily extend the tax cuts, but later in the evening a spokesman for the former president walked back his comments.Mr. Clinton “doesn’t believe the tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans should be extended again,” a spokesman said. Mr. Clinton’s comments on tax policy, in an interview on CNBC, left the Obama re-election campaign “upset,” and the campaign quickly asked Mr. Clinton to “correct” his remarks, a person...

The man, who risked his life to get close to al-Qaeda’s master bomb-maker in the Yemen, is of Saudi origin but holds a British passport, sources told the Daily Telegraph. MI5 recruited the agent for an operation in which the CIA planned to target the bomb-maker with a missile from an unmanned drone.

The overblown thwarting of a reported plan to blow up some airliner sometime somewhere with a possible new type of super-sneaky al Qaeda bomb illustrates the perilous problems and confusing complexities of life in an open society. These kinds of clandestine ops are, hopefully, going on all the time in places we can't pronounce. We know about past failures. No one thought a boat headed straight for the moored USS Cole was particularly suspicious. Some Arabs learning to fly 747's but uninterested in learning to land them prompted no effective alarm bells. It's nice to know of these recent successful...

U.S. and Yemeni officials say the supposed would-be bomber at the heart of an al-Qaida airliner plot was actually an informant working for the CIA. The revelation, first reported by The Los Angeles Times, shows how the CIA was able to get its hands on a sophisticated underwear bomb well before an attack was set in motion. Officials say the informant was working for the CIA and Saudi Arabian intelligence when he was given the bomb. He then turned the device over to authorities. Officials say the informant is safely out of Yemen. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity...

The recent death in Afghanistan of seven American counterterrorist officers, one Jordanian intelligence operative, and one exploding al Qaeda double agent ought to give us cause to reflect on the real capabilities of the Central Intelligence Agency and al Qaeda. The report card isn't good. America's systemic intelligence problems were partially on display in the bombing at the CIA's Forward Operating Base Chapman in Khost province. Worse, al Qaeda showed skill that had been lacking in many of its operations. In response, President Barack Obama will likely be obliged to adopt counterterrorist methods that could make his administration as tough...

The suspected Jordanian double agent who killed eight people on a CIA base in Afghanistan was recruited by his country's intelligence agency after it threw him in jail to coerce him into helping them track down al-Qaida's No. 2 leader, counterterrorism officials in the Middle East said Tuesday. Three Middle Eastern counterterrorism officials said 32-year-old physician Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi was jailed for three days after he signed up for a humanitarian mission to the Gaza Strip with a Jordanian field hospital following Israel's offensive there. At that time, authorities were aware that al-Balawi had posted fiery writings on militant...

WASHINGTON: As names of the seven CIA operatives who died in the Taliban suicide bombing in Afghanistan last week trickle out into public domain espite official silence in Washington, there is another casualty from the episode - trust, never a reliable commodity in the first place in the espionage business. Intelligence circles are now slowly piecing together what really happened in Forward Operating Base Chapman near the Pakistan border last Wednesday when a Taliban suicide bomber detonated a suicide vest killing eight people, including an Afghan security director and an American perimeter security guard who had escorted him inside –...

The suicide bombing on a CIA base in Afghanistan last week was carried out by a Jordanian doctor who was an al-Qaida double agent, Western intelligence officials told NBC News. Initial reports said that the attack, which killed seven CIA officers, was carried out by a member of the Afghan National Army. According to Western intelligence officials, the perpetrator was Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, 36, an al-Qaida sympathizer from the town of Zarqa, which is also the hometown of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian militant Islamist responsible for several devastating attacks in Iraq. Al-Balawi was arrested by Jordanian intelligence more...

WASHINGTON – The "War on Terror" is losing the war of words. The catchphrase burned into the American lexicon hours after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, is fading away, slowly if not deliberately being replaced by a new administration bent on repairing the U.S. image among Muslim nations. Since taking office less than two weeks ago, President Barack Obama has talked broadly of the "enduring struggle against terrorism and extremism." Another time it was an "ongoing struggle." He has pledged to "go after" extremists and "win this fight." There even was an oblique reference to a "twilight struggle" as...

The insane emperor Caligula made his horse, Incitatus, a Roman consul. In 2008, the people of the United States elected Barack Obama and Joseph Biden. The Romans got the better of the two arrangements, because Caligula appointed the ENTIRE horse. Within 72 hours of his election, Barack Obama has already turned the nation's highest office and the leadership of the Free World into a carnival sideshow. Obama began his career as President-Elect by mocking former First Lady Nancy Reagan, whom he said held seances in the White House. It is an unspoken custom of the Presidency that one does not...

AN ALLEGED attempt to kill a former Russian spy who defected to Britain was being investigated by police last night. Oleg Gordievsky was admitted to a hospital in Guildford after falling ill in November last year. And yesterday he claimed he had been poisoned with the highly toxic metal thallium in a botched assassination attempt. Gordievsky, a KGB double agent who spied on Russia for British intelligence during the 1980s, claims he was targeted by a Russian assassin who visited him at his safe house in Surrey. The 69-year-old was unconscious for 34 hours after falling ill last year and...

An armed female member of Colombia's Farc rebel group hijacked a small plane to escape her "tortuous life" with the guerrillas, police have said... Carrying a rifle, machete, knife and 150 bullets, she forced the pilot to fly her to the city of Villavicencio. Upon arrival she surrendered her gun and said she wished to desert Farc. Colonel Pablo Gomez, head of police in the state of Meta, where the plane landed, told reporters her plan was clear... Police said the hijacker would not be charged with a crime and would be admitted to the government's rebel rehabilitation programme. Amnesty...

CIA analysis finds no Iranian nuclear weapons drive: report Sat Nov 18, 11:18 PM ET WASHINGTON (AFP) - A classifed draft CIA assessment has found no firm evidence of a secret drive by Iran to develop nuclear weapons, as alleged by the White House, a top US investigative reporter has said. Seymour Hersh, writing in an article for the November 27 issue of the magazine The New Yorker released in advance, reported on whether the administration of Republican President George W. Bush was more, or less, inclined to attack Iran after Democrats won control of Congress last week. A month...

Operation infiltration update UPDATE Submitted by staff on Sat, 11/04/2006 - 8:48pm. [UPDATE] We're fully staffed for phase II You can Sign up for the GOP 72 hour program here, and become a GOTV double agent. Before you do however, send me an email, and I'll give you your mission profile. Some field reports coming in indicate day 1 was a big success - more on that Monday

Meet Alberto Fernandez: State Dept. apologist for jihad Alberto Fernandez, director of public diplomacy in the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs at the US State Department, is al Jazeera's favorite pet tool. He has been praised as "sassy" and is a fixture on Arab TV. From a Newsweek profile published in August, which proclaimed him "the face of the United States in the Middle East:" On paper, at least, Fernandez's job is basically that of a high-powered booker, coordinating appearances of high-level State Department officials on Arab media. But in reality, he's the main act. According to his own...

National Review's Byron York sensibly asks: what are the next steps in the investigation into the intelligence community's leaking of classified information to the press, including the deeply sensitive detention arrangements for high-ranking al Qaeda captives (the so-called "black-site" prisons)? That disclosure profoundly harmed our nation's critical relationship with foreign intelligence services which have been assisting the war effort. In connection with the internal CIA end of that probe, one intelligence officer, Mary O. McCarthy, has been terminated for unauthorized contacts with members of the media, including the Washington Post's Dana Priest. It was Priest who reported the black-sites story...

LOS ANGELES – The government ended its crippled spy case against a woman once accused of being a Chinese double agent, accepting her guilty pleas to lesser charges of making a false statement to the FBI and filing a false tax return. Katrina Leung, 51, admitted Friday she lied to the FBI about her intimate relationship with her FBI handler, James J. Smith, and that she failed to include all her income on her tax returns for the year 2000. Leung, who already spent three months in jail and 18 months in home detention, agreed to be immediately sentenced. The...

Israeli Soldier Is Killed as Palestinian Agent Sets Trap By GREG MYRE Published: December 7, 2004 ERUSALEM, Dec. 7 - An Israeli soldier was killed and four were wounded today when a Palestinian double agent lured the troops into a booby-trapped chicken coop in Gaza City, the Hamas movement said.In the fighting that followed, Israeli forces killed four Palestinian militants in the bloodiest single clash since the Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat died near four weeks ago, Hamas said. The Israeli military declined to comment on the Hamas statement. Fighting in the Gaza Strip had become less frequent recently as Israelis...

WASHINGTON - Intelligence shortcomings, as we see, have a thousand fathers; secret intelligence triumphs are orphans. Here is the unremarked story of "the Farewell dossier": how a CIA campaign of computer sabotage resulting in a huge explosion in Siberia -- all engineered by a mild-mannered economist named Gus Weiss -- helped us win the Cold War. Weiss worked down the hall from me in the Nixon administration. In early 1974, he wrote a report on Soviet advances in technology through purchasing and copying that led the beleaguered president -- detente notwithstanding -- to place restrictions on the export of computers...