After weeks of delays, the U.S. Senate confirmed John Brennan as the next head of the Central Intelligence Agency on Thursday morning. Many lawmakers blocked Brennan’s nomination, as Republicans fought for access to classified documents related to the attack on U.S. diplomats in Libya last September, but Brennan was ultimately approved by a 63 - 34 vote. source
The Obama administration is nearing completion of a detailed counterterrorism manual that is designed to establish clear rules for targeted-killing operations but leaves open a major exemption for the CIA’s campaign of drone strikes in Pakistan, U.S. officials said.
The carve-out would allow the CIA to continue pounding al-Qaeda and Taliban targets for a year or more before the agency is forced to comply with more stringent rules spelled out in a classified document that officials have described as a counterterrorism “playbook.”
Maybe it’s just us, but creating a rulebook which fails to address the incredibly low accountability of a program that many believe should be held to the highest standards (if continued at all) seems kind of pointless. Thoughts?
» Whaddya mean you don’t want to talk? A great example of this is the case of Umar Patek, the main suspect in a 2002 nightclub bombing in Indonesia that killed 202 people. Seven of those people were Americans — and Patek himself possesses a wealth of knowledge about groups linked to al-Qaeda in Southeast Asia. But the CIA has taken a hands-off approach to Patek. They haven’t even bothered to interrogate him. That’s the key thing here — while the CIA certainly has a bunch of detainees from the Bush era that they don’t know what to do with, they’re not actively trying to pick up any new ones, it seems.
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