MetaFilter posts tagged with CIA and terror

Federal prosecutors to investigate abusive interrogation cases

grobstein — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 14:57:07 -0800

Big Newsfilter: US Attorney General Holder appoints a prosecutor to investigate abusive CIA interrogations in the War on Terror. Obama was reluctant to investigate Bush admin wrongdoing, and he still insists "he thinks that we should be looking forward, not backward" (per his deputy press secretary). But Holder managed to get the go-ahead. Previously.

Voices from the Black Sites

shoesfullofdust — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 16:38:59 -0800

Interrogation techniques used by the CIA on al-Qaeda suspects "constituted torture", according to a report by the International Red Cross.

CIA Secret Prisons Exposed

Postroad — Thu, 11 May 2006 10:30:59 -0800

CIA Secret Prisons Exposed The disappeared: Are they dead? Are they alive? Ask Congress. Ask the president.

Cherry-Picking on the Road to War

digaman — Fri, 10 Feb 2006 07:49:45 -0800

"It has become clear that official intelligence was not relied on in making even the most significant national security decisions, that intelligence was misused publicly to justify decisions already made, that damaging ill will developed between [Bush] policymakers and intelligence officers, and that the intelligence community's own work was politicized," writes former CIA official Paul Pillar, coordinator of U.S. intelligence on the Middle East until 2005, in an article soon to appear in Foreign Affairs, hardly a radical rag. More confirmation that Seymour Hersh was right about the administration "cherry-picking" intelligence to justify a foregone conclusion to go to war in Iraq.

Parsing Terror

digaman — Thu, 03 Nov 2005 07:36:09 -0800

Osama bin Laden, littérateur and new-media star. A thought-provoking analysis of bin Laden's adept use of Koranic language and the Internet by Bruce B. Lawrence, an Islamic scholar at Duke who edited a new anthology of bin Laden's public statements called Messages to the World. The Western media -- says the millionaire mass-murderer formerly trained as a useful ally by the CIA via Pakistan's ISI -- "implants fear and helplessness in the psyche of the people of Europe and the United States. It means that what the enemies of the United States cannot do, its media are doing!" Know thy enemy. [via Arts and Letters Daily.]

Gulags, American-Style

digaman — Wed, 02 Nov 2005 07:00:08 -0800

The administration's latest innovation in its effort to export democracy: Soviet-style gulags, a network of secret C.I.A. prisons known as "black sites." [From the Washington Post]. Meanwhile, SecDef Rumsfeld says no thanks to the idea of U.N. inspectors talking to detainees in Guantanamo Bay.

Jihad U

digaman — Sat, 02 Jul 2005 08:03:48 -0800

President Bush pledged in 2003 that "A free Iraq will not be a training ground for terrorists... A free Iraq will not destabilize the Middle East." This past January, the CIA's National Intelligence Council observed that Iraq had become "a training ground, a recruitment ground" for jihadists. Now the senior Marine commander in Iraq, Lt. Gen. James Conway -- in a statement that has not yet been picked up by the media -- acknowledges that the war is furnishing a new "a training ground" for foreign fighters trained in urban warfare who will export terror all over the world, saying, "But there's not much we can do about it at this point in time."

redhead — Fri, 14 Sep 2001 08:21:57 -0800

bin Laden has a mentor?