'Google-like' System to Link US Intelligence Agencies

(NEWSER) - The Obama administration is working on plans to create a team of interrogation experts drawn from different agencies, insiders tell the Wall Street Journal. The unit would take the job of debriefing "high-value" terror suspects away from the CIA, the sources say, and would be tasked with creating new, noncoercive interrogation methods based on science and psychology. More»

Includes immunity for phone companies

(NEWSER) - Senate Democrats and Republicans have brokered a deal on legislation regarding the White House domestic spying and wiretapping program—including a highly controversial grant of immunity to telecommunication companies that co-operated with warrantless wiretaps. The deal marks a victory for the White House because Democrats had to kill a House bill imposing tougher restrictions on government wiretapping, reports the Washington Post. More»

Despite leak warnings, CIA, Pentagon and White House rolled out the red carpet

(NEWSER) - The White House, CIA, and Pentagon all gave special access to Hurt Locker director Kathryn Bigelow to help with her movie about Osama bin Laden's death, according to documents obtained by the conservative Judicial Watch . In one interview , Undersecretary of Defense Mike Vickers tells Bigelow that top admirals can't talk because it would set "a bad example if it gets out," but that she could interview a SEAL Team 6 operator, who would "give you everything you … would get from Adm Olson or Adm McRaven." More»

Bureau could have accessed calls in Afghanistan pre-2001: UK court

(NEWSER) - The FBI missed a big chance to gain intel—compliments of a tapped phone network in Afghanistan—before 9/11 because it was busy fighting with the CIA, according to testimony heard yesterday in Britain's House of Commons. Stay with us on this one: As the Guardian reports, the revelation was made because the UK government wants to hold court cases related to national security in secret. And the official arguing that such a thing should not be permitted in the UK cited a US case as an example. David Davis, the former shadow home secretary, said that the FBI was presented with an incredible opportunity in 1998: to listen in on every single Taliban phone call. More»

Secrecy reigns over deadly program

(NEWSER) - The CIA has ramped up its drone strikes under President Obama, killing somewhere between 1,350 and 2,250 people in Pakistan alone over the past three years. Yet the US has identified virtually none of those victims, nor provided any legal rationale for their killings, the Washington Post observes, and that’s got civil liberties experts and the international community on edge. When one State Department legal adviser sought to lay out the legal basis in a speech to put allies at ease, “the immediate reaction was you can’t talk about our covert programs,” one official says. More»