Bush: Interrogations Were Legal

Hackers seek revenge for state's crackdown on immigrants

(NEWSER) - It's been another busy Friday for the hackers of Anonymous: They're claiming credit for taking down the CIA website (again) and for hacking into police and government websites in Alabama, reports CNN . The hackers say they stole the personal information of 46,000 people, with the city of Mobile a particular target, notes AP . Anonymous said it was taking revenge for Alabama's "racist legislation" on illegal immigrants . More»

Agency expects to maintain large stations there for years

(NEWSER) - US troops may be leaving Iraq and Afghanistan, but the CIA isn't. The agency's stations in the two countries may see staffing levels fall off a bit, but they'll remain its biggest overseas locations for years, officials tell the Washington Post . The Obama administration is counting on the spies, along with Special Operations forces, to protect US interests as troops depart. "I would say the agency will be the last to leave," says one CIA veteran. "We were the first to get there." More»

Ezra Klein crunches the numbers and comes up with a lower total than you think

(NEWSER) - Mitt Romney has taken to carrying around a debt clock, blaming President Obama for the ever-climbing number it shows. But the clock doesn't show how much Obama has actually added to that debt, so Ezra Klein set out to find out. "There are two answers," he writes in the Washington Post . The first, which is "simple and wrong" is $4.7 trillion. That's what you get when you subtract the debt when Obama took office (about $10.5 trillion) from the current debt (about $15.2 trillion). More»

Defense chief also calls for release of doctor who helped catch him

(NEWSER) - Defense chief Leon Panetta talks about the capture of Osama bin Laden with CBS' 60 Minutes in an interview airing tomorrow, and two main points are generating headlines:

• Pakistan knew? He suspects government authorities knew bin Laden was in Abbottabad, notes the Hill . "I personally have always felt that somebody must have had some sense of what was happening at this compound," he said. Why? Start with those 18-foot walls. "It was the largest compound in the area. So you would have thought that somebody would have asked the question, ‘What the hell's going on there?’” In fact, the US didn't tip off Pakistan about the raid because it feared word would get out to bin Laden, he added.

Michael Hayden says it would have backfired then, and would now, too

(NEWSER) - George W. Bush's administration pondered an attack on Iran's nuclear facilities and ultimately rejected it, says former CIA and NSA chief Gen. Michael Hayden. He and others concluded that an attack on Iran's nuke factories "would guarantee that which we are trying to prevent—an Iran that will spare nothing to build a nuclear weapon and that would build it in secret," Hayden said, according to Foreign Policy . The same rationale holds true today, he warned: Go with diplomacy and back channels or risk pushing Tehran into speeding things up. More»