Intelligence
June 10, 2013 — Scott Johnson
In a sidebar to the Washington Post’s profile of of NSA leakmeister Edward Snowden, Barton Gellman reports regarding Snowden: “I understand that I will be made to suffer for my actions, and that the return of this information to the public marks my end,” he wrote in early May, before we had our first direct contact. He warned that even journalists who pursued his story were at risk until they
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June 10, 2013 — Steven Hayward
Cast your mind back a ways to the 1980s and early 1990s, and you may recall that our thoughts about technology started undergoing a revision—namely, that far from offering increasingly powerful tools for government oppression and control, personal computers, cell phones, and all the rest of the emergent technologies were becoming means of our liberation as well as barriers to oppressive government. Certainly personal computers and new communication technology—or really
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June 10, 2013 — Scott Johnson
It turns out that the lunatic leftist Glenn Greenwald has relied on one source for his Guardian articles blowing the anti-terror surveillance programs conducted by the National Security Agency — one Edward Snowden. Snowden has an unusual background for a security expert with a top-secret clearance. He holds a high-school equivalency degree and expertise in digital security systems, leading to his most recent position as he describes it — a
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June 9, 2013 — Scott Johnson
If you’ve been queasy about the ongoing disclosures of anti-terror national security programs by lefty Glenn Greenwald in the Guardian (UK), as I have, I doubt the Guardian’s profile of Greenwald’s source — one Edward Snowden, a 29-year-old self-described former technical assistant for the CIA who says he has has worked at the NSA for the last four years as an employee of outside contractors including Booz Allen and Dell
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June 8, 2013 — Scott Johnson
Revelations over the past few days of the Obama administration’s national security surveillance measures have prompted a furious reaction on the left. The New York Times announced that with the revelations the administration had forfeited all credibility, then ratcheted back its condemnation to apply only to “this issue.” The Times isn’t getting off the Obama Express with a midterm to come and nearly four years to go, but the disillusionment
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May 16, 2013 — Scott Johnson
According to Eric Holder, Eric Holder is no more responsible for the investigation of the Associated Press than Barack Obama is for events in Benghazi according to Barack Obama. That was Holder’s theme in his testimony before the House Judiciary Committee, which I first read about yesterday in a post by Allahpundit at Hot Air. Looking around for a narrative account of Holder’s testimony this morning, I find the liberal
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April 5, 2013 — Scott Johnson
The Wall Street Journal published a book review by former Attorney General Michael Mukasey yesterday. Judge Mukasey (as I will refer to him here) is one great American. He was the trial judge in the case of the Blind Sheikh and a man who answered the call of duty by resigning from the bench to take the position of Attorney General for the last two years of the Bush administration.
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March 9, 2013 — Scott Johnson
The New York Times reports: Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, a son-in-law of Osama bin Laden who once served as a spokesman for Al Qaeda, pleaded not guilty at his arraignment on Friday morning in federal court in Manhattan, where he was charged with conspiring to kill Americans. Now you may be wondering what is going on here. “Mr. Abu Ghaith” as the Times refers to him, is charged with conspiracy to
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March 8, 2013 — Scott Johnson
John Brennan took the oath on his swearing in as DCIA today on a draft of the Constitution. The photo is below. Commentators on the photograph make something of the fact that the draft Brennan swore on lacked the Bill of Rights. Has anyone bothered to read the Federalist lately? Publius (Hamilton) in Federalist 84 makes the case that a bill of rights is unnecessary and perhaps even dangerous to
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March 7, 2013 — Scott Johnson
What’s wrong with Rand Paul’s filibuster of Brennan? The filibuster appears to be something of a pretxt for Senator Paul to raise the national security issue that troubles him. As I understand it (and I may be mistaken), the pretextual nature of the filibuster isn’t in dispute. The filibuster seems to me to distract from understanding the trouble with Brennan. The trouble with Brennan is his willful blindness to the
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March 2, 2013 — Scott Johnson
Tom Joscelyn writes: My latest in the Weekly Standard deals with Osama bin Laden’s files. The Obama administration, despite its supposed commitment to transparency, has released just 17 files and a handful of video clips from a corpus totaling “hundreds of thousands of documents and files.” Tom Donilon, Obama’s national security adviser, has said that the documents and files would fill a “small college library.” There are compelling reasons to
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February 23, 2013 — Scott Johnson
Andrew Klavan is the prolific author whose most recent book is A Killer in the Wind. In the panel on our culture this afternoon at the Horowitz Freedom Center West Coast Retreat, the discussion turned to Zero Dark Thirty in the question-and-answer period. Klavan pronounced the quote of the day in his comments: “I personally believe that waterboarding jihadis should be an Olympic sport.”
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February 21, 2013 — Scott Johnson
Daniel Henninger devotes his weekly Wall Street Journal column to the mind-boggling letter sent by Democratic Senators Feinstein and Levin along with their friend John McCain (Republican, I probably don’t need to remind you) to Sony Pictures protesting the film Zero Dark Thirty. “Zero Dark Thirty is factually inacurrate,” these solons write, “and we believe that you have an obligation to state that the role of torture in the hunt
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February 19, 2013 — Scott Johnson
The Wall Street Journal’s Weekend Interview feature this past Saturday sent Journal editorial board member Matthew Kaminkski in the direction of the author of the screenplay of Zero Dark Thirty, Mark Boal. While he has teamed up with director Katheryn Bigelow, Boal is also a reporter who has written for such reliably left-wing outlets as The Village Voice, Rolling Stone and Mother Jones. With his screenplay for the Zero Dark
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February 12, 2013 — Paul Mirengoff
Yesterday, I speculated that President Obama will use his state of the union speech primarily to prepare the battle field for upcoming fights pertaining to the budget. With the sequester looming and a debt-ceiling deadline not far behind, Obama will want to re-introduce tax increases into the debt reduction debate (it had occupied the prime spot in that debate until the end of 2012). In that way, he can shed
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February 7, 2013 — Paul Mirengoff
John Brennan, President Obama’s nominee for Director of the CIA, testified today before the Senate Intelligence Committee. He said of waterboarding that it is “reprehensible” and “never should’ve taken place in my view.” However, as Andrew Johnson at NRO points out, in a 2007 interview Brennan stated of enhanced interrogation techniques such as waterboarding: “There has been a lot of information that has come out from these interrogation procedures that
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February 2, 2013 — Scott Johnson
Former Bush speechwriter Marc Thiessen is an AEI fellow, a Washington Post columnist, and author of Courting Disaster: How the CIA Kept America Safe and How Obama Is Inviting the Next Attack. When it comes to the techniques used by the CIA to interrogate detainees in the aftermath of 9/11, Thiessen knows what he is talking about. Prompted by the controversy over Kathryn Bigelow’s film Zero Dark Thirty and its
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