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Last month, Senator Dianne Feinstein and other Democrats on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released the executive summary of their final report investigating the CIA's controversial detention and interrogation program. As part of their study, the Democrats compiled twenty case studies, which were intended to address claims made by the CIA regarding the efficacy of its interrogations. One of those case studies focused on the identification and arrest of Ali Saleh Kahlah al Marri, who was freed from a US prison just days ago. Al Marri served as a "sleeper" operative for al Qaeda inside the US in 2001....

Central Intelligence Agency Director John Brennan consulted the White House before directing agency personnel to sift through a walled-off computer drive being used by the Senate Intelligence Committee to construct its investigation of the agency’s torture program, according to a recently released report by the CIA’s Office of the Inspector General. The Inspector General’s report, which was completed in July but only released by the agency on Wednesday, reveals that Brennan spoke with White House chief of staff Denis McDonough before ordering CIA employees to “use whatever means necessary” to determine how certain sensitive internal documents had wound up in...

Covertly taken photos of CIA interrogators that were shown by defense attorneys to al Qaeda inmates at the Guantanamo Bay prison represent a more serious security breach than the 2003 outing of CIA officer Valerie Plame, the agency's former general counsel said Wednesday. John Rizzo, who was the agency's top attorney until December, said in an interview that he initially requested the Justice Department and CIA investigation into the compromise of CIA interrogators' identities after photographs of the officers were found in the cell of one al Qaeda terrorist in Cuba. "Well I think this is far more serious than...

This image from the FBI website shows Anas al-Libi. Gunmen in a three-car convoy seizedNazih Abdul-Hamed al-Ruqai, known by his alias Anas al-Libi, an al-Qaeda leader connected to the1998 embassy bombings in eastern Africa and wanted by the U.S. for more than a decade outside hishouse Saturday in the Libyan capital, his relatives said. (AP Photo/FBI) In a time when the current administration appears to favor kills over capture as well as "catch and release", last Saturday Abu Anas al-Libi (Zawahiri's man in Libya) survived President Obama's kill list to be captured instead of droned upon: Since President Obama stepped...

Senate Democrats’ ‘torture report’ claims tactics played no role in finding al Qaeda leaderSenate Democrats’ argument that harsh CIA interrogations played no role in finding Osama bin Laden revolves in crucial ways around the life of Hassan Ghul. It was Ghul, an al Qaeda operative who moved between Pakistan and Iraq, who turned out to be the most informative biographer of Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti. It was al-Kuwaiti who eventually led the CIA to bin Laden’s home address in Abbottabad, Pakistan. To Democratic staffers who wrote the Dec. 9 Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report on the CIA’s detention and interrogation...

In congressional testimony on January 20, the nation’s top intelligence official, Dennis Blair, acknowledged that the U.S. government mishandled the interrogation of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian terrorist who tried to blow up a plane over Detroit on Christmas Day. Specifically, Blair was not happy that Abdulmutallab was charged as a common criminal and read his rights, rather than being questioned by the elite interrogation unit announced by President Obama as a replacement for the CIA teams used by the Bush administration. “I’d been a part of the deliberations which established this high-value interrogation unit [HIG],” Blair explained at a...

Friend -- It's easy to look at the attacks, smears, and lies being told about President Obama and his record and say, "Come on, that's ridiculous. No one could possibly believe that." Trust me: You and I learned the hard way eight years ago this August that in the new world we're living in -- one with 24-hour news cycles, the internet, blogs, the echo chamber, and now the new Citizens United-fueled Republican money machine -- even completely baseless attacks can stick if people don't call them out quickly enough. No matter how self-evidently false the attacks are, or how...

A federal judge declined Wednesday to find the CIA in contempt for destroying videotapes of Sept. 11 detainee interrogations, saying to do so would serve no beneficial purpose and the CIA had put in place new procedures to prevent such destruction from happening again. ACLU… "profoundly disappointed"

Shortly after Osama bin Laden met his demise at the hands of U.S. special forces, Michael Mukasey opined in the pages of the Wall Street Journal that harsh interrogation tactics had been key to identifying a courier, which, in turn, led to locating bin Laden’s compound. Such an assessment, from a highly respected former attorney general, was bound to be influential. Indeed, the CIA’s enhanced-interrogation program, used on a select few high-level al-Qaeda detainees following the 9/11 attacks, had figured prominently in Mukasey’s confirmation hearings. He had, at the behest of Congress, thoroughly reviewed the program upon taking the reins...

WASHINGTON - Officials say CIA interrogators in secret overseas prisons developed the first strands of information that ultimately led to the killing of Osama bin Laden. Current and former U.S. officials say that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, provided the nom de guerre of one of bin Laden's most trusted aides. The CIA got similar information from Mohammed's successor, Abu Faraj al-Libi. Both were subjected to harsh interrogation tactics inside CIA prisons in Poland and Romania. The news is sure to reignite debate over whether the now-closed interrogation and detention program was successful....

Guantanamo Detainees Said Plotting Sun Jan 27, 9:08 AM ET By TONY WINTON, Associated Press Writer GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba (AP) - Military guards at a detention camp at Guantanamo Bay say they have noticed a command structure emerging among the terrorist suspects being held there, camp leaders said Saturday. The leaders seem to surface during prayer sessions. Photos AP Photo Slideshows AP Photo Camp X-Ray, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba Of the evolving leadership structure, Brig. Gen. Mike Lehnert said, "We have indications that many have received training, and that they are observing actions such as security procedures." Lehnert, a ...

Strong concerns that terrorist teams in Europe have selected their targets, completed their surveillance, eluded capture and are now ready to strike at airports and tourist attractions have prompted the State Department to ready a highly unusual travel advisory for Europe, multiple law enforcement and intelligence sources tell ABC News. According to ABC News sources, the terror plotters have moved through the surveillance stage, checked back in with al Qaeda in Pakistan, and have received the go-ahead to strike.

WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama's second choice for transportation security chief has withdrawn from consideration because of questions over his background as a defense contractor. Retired Army Maj. Gen. Robert Harding took himself out of the running Friday night as head of the Transportation Security Administration, another setback for Obama after his first choice withdrew in January. Harding said the distractions caused by his work as a defense contractor would not be good for the administration or the Homeland Security Department. The TSA is part of that department. Harding has extensive intelligence experience that Obama hoped to tap in shoring...

Republicans stopped a provision that establishes criminal penalties for CIA officers that use cruel, inhuman or degrading interrogation methods from making it into the Intelligence bill passed Friday — but the leading Republican on the House intelligence committee said that provision is hardly dead. “This is not the last time we’ll see the McDermott stuff,” Rep. Pete Hoekstra told The Daily Caller of the legislation authored by Democratic Rep. Jim McDermott. “It will come back. They will find every way that they can to make it law.” Hoekstra said the House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Intelligence chairman Rep. Silvestre Reyes,...

Bush administration lawyers did not violate legal ethics rules when they wrote memos authorizing harsh interrogations for terrorism detainees, the Justice Department said Friday, releasing the long-awaited results of its investigation into the memos. The report focuses on three men who worked at Justice under President Bush: John Yoo, Jay Bybee and Steven Bradbury. All three worked in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, crafting the standards for interrogating high-value terrorism detainees.

For weeks, the right has heckled Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. for his plans to try the alleged 9/11 conspirators in New York City and his handling of the Christmas bombing plot suspect. Now the left is going to be upset: an upcoming Justice Department report from its ethics-watchdog unit, the Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR), clears the Bush administration lawyers who authored the “torture” memos of professional-misconduct allegations. While the probe is sharply critical of the legal reasoning used to justify waterboarding and other “enhanced” interrogation techniques, NEWSWEEK has learned that a senior Justice official who did the final...

The more we learn about his 'interrogation,' the worse White House policy looks. The attempted Christmas Day destruction over Detroit of Northwest Flight 253 by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab is fading from public memory as a fortunate near-miss. This incident should not fade from view. As more information emerges, the picture it paints about the antiterror mindset of the current U.S. government is—there is no other word—scary. Last week in these columns, we discussed Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair's Congressional testimony on the Abdulmutallab case. This was Mr. Blair's famous "duh" remark about the government's failure to invoke the new...

NEW YORK — A judge cited national security concerns in ruling Wednesday that the CIA does not have to release hundreds of documents related to the destruction of videotapes of Sept. 11 detainee interrogations that used harsh methods. U.S. District Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein said he believed he had an obligation to let the CIA director decide what should be released when it pertains to methods used to make uncooperative detainees divulge information. "The need to keep confidential just how the CIA and other government agencies obtained their information is manifest, and that has to do with the identities of...

Soon the anniversary of 9/11 will be upon us. We live in a real world inhabited by some evil, violent people, not a theoretical world inhabited by academics and paper-shufflers. Those who insist that we obey the Marquess of Queensbury rules, while our enemies obey no rules at all, may have good intentions. But in fact, they are doing their best to doom our civilization to destruction, and our people to terrible suffering. Still, if you believe it was “criminal” to “torture” suspected terrorists with sleep deprivation, emotional stress, or − in only three cases − waterboarding, you might consider...

At 7 p.m. on Aug. 20, 2003, in a cell used for interrogations at Forward Operating Base Gunner outside Taji, Iraq, an Army lieutenant colonel, sitting in on a session, took out his 9mm pistol, placed it on his thigh so it pointed at an Iraqi detainee, and said he would kill the prisoner if he did not provide information filling out what an informant had said was a planned attack on the officer and his unit. Lt. Col. Allen B. West, a battalion commander, told Army investigators the next month that the Iraqi, a police officer from a nearby...