cia

The Spy Who Bilked Me: Meet Bush's War Profiteering Chief Bin Laden Hunter

Penn Bullock and Brandon K. Thorp · 05/19/11 03:32PM

You've probably never heard of Marty Martin. He spent most of his life as an anonymous CIA operative. But he very recently came out of the closet as the man Bush put in charge of finding Osama bin Laden in the aftermath of 9/11, and guess what? It turns out the man Bush put in charge of finding bin Laden is an extremely shady and allegedly corrupt war profiteer. Who would have thought?

New Obama Jobs! Panetta to Defense, Petraeus to CIA

Jim Newell · 04/27/11 10:55AM

Now that Barack Obama has released his long-form birth certificate, let's play What Other Evil News Is He Trying to Distract Us From? Maybe it's this: The AP reports that CIA Director and former Bill Clinton chief of staff Leon Panetta will take over for Defense Secretary Robert Gates this summer, while Afghanistan commander Gen. David Petraeus will replace Panetta at the CIA. Does the Obama administration want us talking about this?

How the CIA Secretly Fights Global Warming

Adrian Chen · 04/22/11 04:07PM

Happy Earth Day, everyone! The CIA wants you all to know that it is at the forefront of conservation by… shredding and burning documents. They sent out this official Earth Day press release highlighting its "sustainability and conservation initiatives":

CIA Declassifies Documents Created Almost a Century Ago

John Cook · 04/19/11 03:47PM

In a bid to show its transparency bona fides, the CIA has released six previously secret documents from World War I, thirty years before the Agency was created. They concern invisible ink. Which, until today, was a national secret.

What's a CIA For?

John Cook · 03/31/11 03:28PM

The Central Intelligence Agency is a fundamentally lawless organization that secretly influences events around the globe on behalf of the U.S. It turns out Obama has deployed its agents to Libya, and for some reason liberals are up in arms about it.

Obama Signed a Secret Order to Help Overthrow Qaddafi

Jim Newell · 03/30/11 04:50PM

Reuters reports that President Obama "signed a secret order authorizing covert U.S. government support for rebel forces seeking to oust Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi" within the last "two or three weeks." So there's your channel for arming the rebels.

Key Iraq War Source Admits He Made It All Up

Jim Newell · 02/15/11 05:41PM

Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi, an Iraqi defector under Saddam Hussein whose claims about the former dictator's mobile biological weapons programs were used heavily in the Bush Administration's public case for war, has an interesting story to tell everyone. The source, who, under the alias "Curveball" in intelligence reports, provided a foundation for Secretary of State Colin Powell's famous speech to the United Nations a month before the Iraq invasion, admits that he just made it up to get Hussein out of power.

At the CIA, Accidentally Kidnapping and Torturing an Innocent Guy Earns You a Promotion

John Cook · 02/09/11 01:09PM

The Associated Press' Adam Goldman and Matt Apuzzo have a breathtaking-but-sadly-unsurprising story detailing the CIA's habit of promoting the very people responsible for the Agency's most spectacular fuck-ups. The analyst responsible for illegally abducting, drugging, sodomizing, and beating a completely innocent man because she thought he was someone else? She's running the hunt for bin Laden now. The guy who let a prisoner freeze to death in Afghanistan? He oversees spying operations in the Middle East.

Nation's Archivists Rise Up Against the CIA

John Cook · 11/11/10 01:26PM

The Department of Justice was too scared to prosecute the CIA for deliberately destroying evidence that its employees illegally tortured terror detainees. But fear not: The National Archives and Records Administration is still on the case.