[This article first appeared in The New Republic, October 30, 2019] The elimination of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi amid the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Syria is exposing an enduring and underappreciated reality of the Middle East: the Islamic State has always had a special relationship with Turkish National Intelligence Office, known by its...
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70 IGs Blow the Whistle on Barr’s Justice Department
This October 22 letter from 70 inspectors general in the federal government is an extraordinary rebuke of the Office of Legal Counsel in the Justice Department of Attorney General Bill Barr. By trying to block the White House whistleblower’s complaint from going to Congress, the OLC wrongly interpreted the law and weakened the whistleblower process....
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Snowden’s Memoir Is Out; His Archive Is Out of Sight
Edward Snowden, by his own account, grew up as a “shape-shifter.” His father worked for the Coast Guard, his mother for the Maryland state courts. But his parents’ appearances in Snowden’s new memoir, Permanent Record, are fleeting and superficial. The more enduring influences on his life—his sociocultural parental units, as it were—were the civil service...
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Is Israel Targeting Iran’s Top General For Assassination?
That’s the question circulating both in Arab and Israeli media. Israel’s Mossad is the world’s foremost practitioner of assassination. General Qasem Soleimani is commander of the Qods Force, the special operations command of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). Israel is worried about Iran’s growing influence in the Middle East. Soleimani is Iran’s most effective...
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While Impeachment Talk Grows, Trump Is Gaining Control of U.S. Intelligence
This is what White House control of the U.S. intelligence apparatus looks like: the acting director of national intelligence, Adm. Joseph Maguire, quashed the finding of his inspector general that a still-unnamed whistleblower had made serious allegations about President Trump that urgently need to be addressed by Congress. Its preview of how the president will...