Strange subhead in the Washington Post today -- "Obama Silent Amid Conflicting Advice" about whether to replace the nation's top intelligence officials.  What is he supposed to do, shout to the highest mountaintop about how he wants to get rid of Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell and CIA ...

The Washington Post's Peter Finn reports that Barack Obama will make it an early priority to close the Guantanamo Bay detention camp. But he doesn't know what to do with the 250 detainees.

One solution proposed by Human Rights Watch that Obama is receptive to ...

It's not easy for a presidential administration to be singled out as an unusually dark one for the CIA -- given its past of shock experiments, assassination plots, Iran-Contra, etc. etc. But for the authorization of torture, warrantless wiretapping and failure to bring down Al Qaeda, the Bush administration Central ...

The New York Times' David Johnston reports that Kyle D. Foggo, executive director of the CIA from 2004-06, pleaded guilty yesterday to arranging government contracts for his friend Brent R. Wilkes. This is not the first time that Wilkes, a San Diego contractor, has made ...

Yikes. Ron Suskind's new book "The Way of the World" says that in Sep. 2003 CIA officials forged a letter to make it look like Mohamed Atta, the lead 9/11 hijacker, was trained in Iraq. To give the letter legitimacy, White House officials had  Tahir Jalil Habbush, Iraq's former top ...

Yesterday I blogged about the Bush administration's re-write of executive order 12333, which governs how the executive branch's 16 intelligence agencies work together. The re-write, announced yesterday, gives broad policy-making power to the Director of National Intelligence, a post created only four years ago. Apparently nobody bothered to ask Congress ...

President Bush will unveil an executive order today that re-maps the intelligence gathering bureaucracy. The Washington Post's Joby Warrick reports that the change is mostly to give more power to the Director of National Intelligence, a position just created in 2005. The DNI will not only oversee all 16 ...

The Washington Post's Joby Warrick reports that in 2002 the Justice Dept. told CIA interrogators they could torture terrrorist suspects as long as they had an "honest belief" they weren't torturing terrorist suspects. In an inventive piece of legal reasoning, CIA officials were made immune from accusations of torture ...

The Washington Post's Walter Pincus reports that a pending CIA budget would give billions to something called the Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative. Mike McConnell, director of the CIA, has previously noted that it's not enough to respond to foreign and domestic cyber intruders ...

CIA Director Michael Hayden is trying to improve the agency's image, but seems reluctant to shed old agency habits and preferences, Joby Warrick writes in the Washington Post.  Hayden has resisted reforms ...