Speculation on Obama's Intelligence Team | Newsweek Scope

Eric Holder: The After-Action Report
7/17/2009 12:00:00 AM
Earlier this week, NEWSWEEK's Daniel Klaidman broke the news that Attorney General Eric Holder is leaning toward appointing a special prosecutor to investigate Bush-era interrogations. We received a great deal of feedback and have sorted it into six key follow-up questions. Below are Dan's answers:
The Case Of The Disappearing Nominee
Mark Hosenball 6/5/2009 12:00:00 AM
Officials at the White House and in the intelligence community are baffled and disquieted by the sudden withdrawal of the Obama administration's nominee for the top intelligence job at the Department of Homeland Security.
To Disclose Or Not To Disclose: A Fight Inside The CIA
Mark Hosenball 5/30/2009 12:00:00 AM
The honeymoon between CIA director Leon Panetta and veterans of the agency's undercover division—the National Clandestine Service—may be coming to an end. The dispute concerns how much access congressional investigators should be given to ultraclassified CIA "operational traffic" regarding the agency's post-9/11 use of "enhanced interrogation" techniques on suspected terrorists, some of which President Obama and many others have called torture. "Operational traffic" refers to cables from the field to CIA headquarters, and they go well beyond the intelligence reports routinely provided to Congress, chronicling in exacting, minute-by-minute detail who did what to whom, and how detainees responded to particular questions and techniques. Panetta favors greater disclosure. But three current and former officials close to the clandestine division worry that his decision could damage morale and make spies risk-averse.
The Speaker Is in the House
5/16/2009 12:00:00 AM
Nancy Pelosi is a bit like Britain's Margaret Thatcher in reverse. Mrs. T. was tough and steely in her public role as prime minister, but womanly, flirtatious, even gossipy, in private. (One of her cabinet members once told me he harbored erotic thoughts about Maggie as she walked past him, trailing a "whiff of Chanel.") In Pelosi's case, it's the other way around.
Our Tacit Approval of Torture
Jacob Weisberg 5/1/2009 12:00:00 AM
The use of torture on suspected terrorists after 9/11 has already earned a place in American history's hall of shame, alongside the Alien and Sedition Acts, Japanese internment during WWII and the excesses of the McCarthy era. Even liberal societies seem to experience these authoritarian spasms from time to time. It is the aftermath of such episodes—what happens when a country comes to its senses—that reveals the most about a nation's character.
JUSTICE
The Lawyer and The Caterpillar
Michael Isikoff 4/18/2009 12:00:00 AM
In the real world of a democracy facing the threat of terrorism, torture is a much more complicated business. After 9/11 the CIA was under relentless pressure to break terror suspects in time to head off a second attack. In March 2002, the CIA captured Abu Zubaydah, believed then to be a high-level Qaeda mastermind. Abu Zubaydah apparently feared insects. Someone at the CIA came up with the idea—right out of "1984," it would seem—of putting him in a small, dark box and letting an insect crawl on him. But since this was America, and not Orwell's fantasy police state, the CIA first had to get permission from a lawyer at the Department of Justice. Parsing statutes against torture, the lawyer (Jay Bybee, then chief of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel) ruled that Abu Zubaydah's interrogators could not tell the suspect that the insect was venomous because, under the law, prisoners could not be threatened with imminent death. However, Abu Zubaydah could be placed in a "confinement box" with a harmless insect as long as he was told nothing about it. The CIA had proposed using a caterpillar.