Intelligence

Bob Woodward’s recent piece in the Washington Post argues that the debacle of the Iraq-WMD case should have made the Bush administration more circumspect about intelligence—and that everyone understood this lesson except the vice president. He offers the Syrian nuclear reactor destroyed by the Israelis in September of 2007 as an example.

Jonah Goldberg wrote a column about the recent attacks on Rick Perry, arguing that identity politics on the right are "intensely wearying" and "conservatism needs to spend less time defending candidates for who they are, and more time supporting candidates for what they intend to do." Of course, this is very difficult to do so long as the media is "equat[ing] funny accents with stupidity, and they automatically assume someone who went to Texas A&M must be dumber than someone who went to Yale."

Today's New York Times has a blockbuster story about how the cellphone of Bin Laden's courier, which was seized in the raid that killed the terrorist mastermind, contained "contacts to a militant group that is a longtime asset of Pakistan’s intelligence agency." That group is Harakat ul Mujahedin or HUM.

The AP reports that the Navy SEALs' raid on Osama bin Laden's hideout in Abbottabad, Pakistan has resulted in a "trove" of actionable intelligence:

In May 2010, in the aftermath of the attempted bombing of Times Square by a jihadist with ties to the Pakistani Taliban, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave an interview to 60 Minutes and made a startling claim about the government in Pakistan.

A lot of parties inside the American government, from President Obama on down, will rightly claim credit for the demise of Osama bin Laden. But one party, in particular, deserves mention because its members have been repeatedly demonized in the press: the Joint Task Force Guantanamo (JTF-GTMO). 

The Los Angeles Times reports:

Judicial Watch, a conservative foundation that seeks to improve government transparency, has obtained two important Guantanamo-related documents from the Department of Defense via a Freedom of Information Act request. One of the documents is a draft presentation dated February 4, 2004. Reading through it, one cannot help but be struck by how different the presentation’s narrative is from so much of the public discourse.

In THE WEEKLY STANDARD and on this blog, we’ve taken note of the ongoing Justice Department investigation involving the disclosure of classified information by James Risen in his 2006 book, State of War. The case finally seems to have resulted in an indictment of a former CIA officer:

Little did Director of National Intelligence James Clapper know that when he and two of his Obama administration colleagues sat down to discuss the terror threat with ABC’s Diane Sawyer earlier this month that his appearance would be the source of controversy.