President Barack Obama’s willingness to confront the lawlessness and the calumnies of the Bush administration makes him a worthy and obvious recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. The Nobel Prize has been given in the past to those who fight oppression and restore hope.
The neocon editorial writers at the Washington Post used the run-up to the Geneva meetings between the United States and Iran to marginalize the significance of the negotiations, to endorse a policy of confrontation against Iran, and even to support steps to bring down the regime in Tehran. Not even the apparent success of the talks led to any change in the Post’s editorial views.
Foreign intelligence agencies have been holding back their liaison activities and their cooperation with the CIA because of the crimes associated with secret prisons, torture and abuse, and extraordinary renditions. It is quite unbelievable that CIA leaders decided to compromise the governments and intelligence services of the European community by locating secret prisons and using logistical facilities within their borders. It is very unlikely that any member of the European Union will cooperate with such CIA activities in the future.
President Barack Obama’s plan to scrap a proposed anti-ballistic missile shield in East Europe has given the Washington Post a new hobby horse to ride. In an editorial titled “Missile Strike,” the opinion writers predictably excoriated President Obama’s decision to scrap the shield as a concession to Kremlin hardliners who “implausibly claimed to feel threatened” by U.S. interceptors and radars.
The prestigious Brookings Institution has joined the ranks of various government and public institutions to suggest reform steps for the Central Intelligence Agency and the intelligence community (IC). Unlike previous reform proposals, the Brookings study manages to overlook the serious systemic issues that face the world of intelligence analysis and to propose a full slate of boilerplate steps.
A recently declassified study on Soviet intentions during the Cold War identifies significant failures in U.S. intelligence analysis on Soviet military intentions and demonstrates the constant exaggeration of the Soviet threat.
The appointment of former Central Intelligence Agency director Michael Hayden to the Public Interest Declassification Board (PIDB) and former senator Warren Rudman to the CIA’s External Advisory Board (EAB) will ensure less openness in the intelligence community and more obduracy in the CIA.
President Barack Obama is currently facing the most two important decisions of his young presidency. On Wednesday, we will learn whether he has the intestinal fortitude to fight for real change in reforming the nation’s health care system.
And later this month, we will learn whether he will commit more young men and women to a [...]
David Broder, the senior op-ed writer at the Washington Post, has joined his colleagues (Fred Hiatt, David Ignatius, and Richard Cohen) in condemning Attorney General Eric Holder’s decision to name a special counsel to examine possible law-breaking by CIA interrogators. And like his colleagues, Broder has put forth a list of irrelevant reasons for turning [...]
President Barack Obama is permitting CIA Director Leon Panetta to weaken the Agency’s’s Office of Inspector General (OIG). The OIG has produced the only official and authoritative study of the abuses of the CIA detentions and interrogations program.
