The Wall Street Journal's Evan Perez and Siobhan Gorman report: The head of a new elite terrorism-interrogation program said Thursday that it will take several more months to establish teams that could question high-profile suspects. The teams are part of an overhaul of counterterrorism policy and have become an issue in ...

The Washington Post's Karen DeYoung does her usual thorough reporting in discerning if the post-Sept. 11 shake-up of the intelligence community is to blame for the attempted Christmas Day terrorist bombing of a plane. DeYoung scrutinizes the newly created National Counterterrorism Center, an agency designed to share the information culled by the 16 (name them!) intelligence agencies. Does NCTC have too much data? Should NCTC defer more to the CIA? Or should NCTC actually be strengthened? Reading the piece reminded me of the New York Times' David Leonhardt's article yesterday on the Federal Reserve.

The New York Times' William J. Broad has an interesting report about climate scientists utilizing CIA spy equipment to study climate change. The program was around during the Bill Clinton administration but shut down during the Bush administration. The jist seems to be that when CIA sensors are idling, ...

A great example of the connection between solid reporting and improvements in government can be found in the Washington Post's initial reporting on the alleged effort by Umar Abdulmutallab to incinerate himself aboard AA 253 in an attempt to kill hundreds, if not thousands, of people.  Three top Post reporters ...

The New York Times' James Risen and Mark Mazetti broke the news last night that the company formerly known as Blackwater actively participated in CIA raids against insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan. Blackwater also transported detainees for the CIA. This is despite the fact that that Blackwater's CIA contract stipulated that the private security contractor should only participate in defensive operations. And also that government contracting law and common sense dictate that private companies shouldn't be fighting wars. After the Jack Abramoff scandal in 2006, there was a lot of talk about the "revolving door" in Washington between lobbyists and lawmakers. It became a familiar narrative that members of Congress or former Congressional staffers would leave Capitol Hill and take a lucrative job in the private sector where they proceeded to influence their former Hill colleagues. What the history of Blackwater has demonstrated is the "revolving door" between the Pentagon, intelligence agencies and the coterie of private security contracting companies.

Good news! The New York Times' James Risen and Mark Mazetti report: Top executives at Blackwater Worldwide authorized secret payments of about $1 million to Iraqi officials that were intended to silence their criticism and buy their support after a September 2007 episode in which Blackwater security guards fatally shot 17 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad, according to former company officials. How could this possibly be good news?

The New York Times' Rachel Donadio reports on the decision of an Italian judge, Oscar Magi, to convict 23 Americans, including a CIA base chief, Robert Seldon Lady, in the rendition of Abu Omar. Omar is an Italian who was captured by Americans in 2003 and sent from Italy ...

Suspicions that most of us have had about the CIA under George W. Bush are confirmed by a recent study by the Brookings Institution.  It finds that analysts at the CIA were rewarded for having their reports included in the President's Daily Brief and that their findings were more likely ...

The Washington Post's Karen DeYoung and Walter Pincus report that the U.S. successfully weakened al-Qaeda, killing leaders of the terrorist networks as well as isolating members and preventing a big new wave of al-Qaeda recruits. A lot of this is due to spy work in Pakistan and Somalia. This is ...

The Washington Post's spy reporter Walter Pincus can't contain his excitement: The United States spent $75 billion over the past year to finance worldwide intelligence operations that employ 200,000 people, according to an unprecedented disclosure by the nation's top intelligence official. Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair disclosed the figures ...