The name of the CIA’s spy chief in Pakistan is … still a secret, according to the United States government. The agent fled Pakistan last week after he was named in a lawsuit which accused him of killing civilians with drone strikes. The lawsuit was filed by the family of some people apparently killed...
Journalist Nir Rosen didn’t just embed with U.S. forces while covering the Iraq war, the former bouncer turned foreign correspondent used his fluency in Arabic to spend time also with Shiite and Sunni insurgents. His new book, Aftermath: Following the Bloodshed of America’s Wars in the Muslim World, focuses heavily on the war in...
With the State Department and Pentagon’s dirty laundry airing on WikiLeaks, it’s fair to ask if there are any winners in the scandal over leaked secret documents. Yes say intelligence insiders: The CIA and their intelligence brethren like the Defense Intelligence Agency.
Washington moved into damage-control mode this week, as news organizations published explosive excerpts from a trove of 251,287 stolen State Department cables published by the website WikiLeaks.
The human body has a barometer to tell the brain when it has consumed too much alcohol. After one too many, speech is slurred, the head aches, and the body becomes drowsy and gets wobbly on its feet.
Amid the deluge of radical Islamic literature, few works are as influential to would-be terrorists as a booklet called “Constants on the Path of Jihad.” Written in Arabic by a Saudi al Qaeda adherent, the booklet is the subject of a series of wildly popular video lectures in English by Anwar al-Awlaki, the radical...
In 1974, Ruben Flores-Villar was born to unmarried parents in Tijuana, Mexico. When he was 2 months old, his grandmother and 16-year-old American father brought him to San Diego, where he grew up. His mother, a Mexican citizen, took no part in his upbringing.
In 2003, CIA agents grabbed radical cleric Abu Omar off the streets of Milan and sent him to Egypt, where he says he was tortured. The government called such abductions “extraordinary renditions.” In 2009, an Italian court convicted in absentia 21 CIA agents and a U.S. Air Force officer on kidnapping charges related to...
When he was the commander of coalition forces in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus made co-option and integration of “reconcilable” enemies, particularly Sunni forces, a central component of his counterinsurgency strategy in 2007. Making peace with those willing to make peace was a hallmark of efforts at national reconciliation between the Baghdad government and the...
An internal review of the events leading up to the suicide attack against a CIA base in a remote part of Afghanistan last year has revealed a string of security and communications lapses in the weeks before the incident, which took the lives of seven agency employees. The bomber, Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, was...