CIA

During his recent speech and accompanying question and answer session at the Council on Foreign Relations, CIA Director John Brennan made a seemingly rare public admission regarding the way the agency handles detentions and interrogations of terrorism suspects.  Brennan stated the CIA had overcome the recent termination of its enhanced interrogation program by returning to […]

Inscribed on the CIA’s original headquarters building in Langley is a passage from the gospel according to St. John: “And ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.” This unofficial Agency motto alludes to the truth and clarity that intelligence provides to decision-makers, similar to the “knowledge is power” mantra. But […]

Efforts to find a viable partner force to help America combat first the Assad regime, and later ISIS, have been underway for several years now. Unfortunately, most of those efforts have focused around the so-called Free Syrian Army. America jumped in the Syrian Civil War way too late in the game. By the time the […]

This is us, this is me, and this will soon be you. Each of you will research and report on one of the names in this book, and I am betting you that once you do, you will never forget them or why they are in here.

When Senator Dianne Feinstein took to the senate floor last year and accused the Central Intelligence Agency of spying on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI), the very committee charged with oversight of the CIA, it marked the beginning of a scandal that could have brought down the CIA like nothing the American public […]

On December 25th, 2014, peacekeepers, military contractors, and other civilians operating as part of the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) at the Halane Base Camp were celebrating Christmas when they came under attack by militants from al-Shabaab. Al-Shabaab militants dressed as Somali soldiers managed to infiltrate the African Union’s main base. Two of the […]

The blood is dry. The victims will be buried soon. The immediate terror has passed, but the deep-seated rage is just settling in and getting comfortable. We are familiar with this progression of emotion here in the United States, as are citizens of London, Madrid, Istanbul, Sydney, and countless other nations across the world. The […]

Five years ago this week, on December 30, 2009, Jordanian doctor Humam Khalil Abu Mulal al-Balawi carried out the single most successful direct attack on the American national security operatives responsible for targeting and killing al-Qa’ida members post-9/11, when he detonated his explosive vest within the wire of FOB Chapman—CIA’s Khowst Base—killing five CIA officers […]

When working within a target country or diaspora, dialect is often the difference between getting the right information and having to go back and get it right. Claiming to be from one place but using the dialect of another area will land you in a world of “this sucks.”

We’ve published three books that work as a surreal trilogy about the current events in the Middle East.  In Benghazi: The Definitive Report, Brandon and I wrote about how the Arab Spring migrated across the Middle East, eventually blowing up into the Libyan Civil War. While the Arab Spring had been a series of protest […]

According to my admittedly unscientific survey, 95% of the American public is unable to muster any outrageous outrage over water being poured on faces.

On December 9th, the U.S. Senate decided to declassify and release a detailed report on the findings of an investigation of the CIA’s “advanced interrogation techniques.” It was a report that went into detail about the interrogation techniques and treatments of detainees under CIA supervision in secret facilities. It goes on to describe the “atrocities” […]