| June 29, 2008 | - The CIA expanded its covert operations in Iran.
| Source:
Reuters
|
| February 17, 2008 | - It was revealed that the U.S. Treasury Department met with Iran last month to discuss terrorist financing, and that the CIA wasted hundreds of millions of dollars on a failed counterterrorism plan involving fake companies overseas.
| Source 1:
New York Times
Source 2:
Los Angeles Times
|
| February 5, 2008 | - In testimony before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, CIA Director Michael Hayden confirmed that agency interrogators tortured three detainees, waterboarding each man sometime between 2002 and 2003. When asked during a House Judiciary Committee hearing whether, based on Hayden's disclosures, the Justice Department would now begin a criminal investigation, Attorney General Michael Mukasey said no, because “that would put in question not only that opinion, but also any other opinion from the Justice Department.” Mukasey also reversed a ban instituted by John Ashcroft that prevented DOJ Pride, a gay advocacy group, from using email, bulletin boards, and meeting rooms at the Justice Department.
| Source 1:
Washington Post
Source 2:
Talking Points Memo
Source 3:
Washington Post
|
| December 11, 2007 | - John Kiriakou, a former CIA officer who participated in the interrogation of an Al Qaeda
terrorist suspect who was waterboarded, conceded that waterboarding was torture but asserted that its use “probably saved lives.”
| Source:
Washington Post
|
| December 8, 2007 | - A new National Intelligence Estimate by all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies concluded that Iran ended its secret nuclear weapons program in 2003, in contrast to a 2005 report that claimed with “high confidence” that such a program was still active. Former CIA officials explained that at the time the earlier report was written the agency's Iran Task Force had been reduced from nearly a hundred analysts and officers to fewer than a dozen, and National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley, attempting to explain why the earlier report was not “so wrong,” reminded reporters that Iran is “very good at this business of keeping secrets.” “It is all right,” responded Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. “It is enough that you are confessing to your mistakes.” In Iowa,
Democratic candidates debated the Iranian nuclear threat as well as the safety of toys made in China. “My toys,” said Senator Christopher Dodd (D., Conn.), “are coming from Iowa.” At a dinner in Des Moines, a reporter summarized the Iranian nuclear report for Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, who hadn't heard the news. Huckabee, a Southern Baptist preacher, also recalled that he was still learning about the AIDS virus in 1992, when he proposed putting AIDS patients in quarantine.
| Source 1:
WP
Source 2:
White House
Source 3:
LAT
Source 4:
NYT
Source 5:
WP
Source 6:
LAT
Source 7:
Politico
Source 8:
AP via Yahoo
|
| December 7, 2007 | - It was revealed that the CIA destroyed at least two videotapes of harsh interrogations of suspected Al Qaeda operatives. CIA director Michael Hayden claimed that this was done to protect CIA employees from possible retaliation by militants, and that congressional oversight committees had been notified. Representative Rush Holt, a Democratic member of the House Intelligence Committee, recalled asking “many times” whether such tapes existed. "They said, 'What tapes?'”
| Source 1:
NYT
Source 2:
WP
Source 3:
NYT
Source 4:
LAT
Source 5:
NYT
|
| November 21, 2007 | - Former White House spokesman Scott McClellan released an excerpt of his forthcoming memoir. The passage states that he “unknowingly” lied when he denied that White House aides Karl Rove and I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby participated in the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame. McClellan vaguely confesses that “Rove, Libby, the vice president [Dick Cheney], the president's chief of staff [Andrew Card], and the President himself” were “involved” in his relaying “false information,” but he stops short of saying that Bush and Cheney knew they were telling him to lie.
| Source:
Slate
|
| October 13, 2007 | -
CIA Director General Michael V. Hayden ordered an internal investigation of the agency’s inspector general, John L. Helgerson, whose own investigations have harshly criticized the CIA’s methods of interrogation and its failure to prevent the attacks of September 11, 2001.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| August 21, 2007 | - The CIA's inspector general released a report recommending that former CIA director George Tenet and other senior officials be held accountable for failing to prepare for the threat of Al Qaeda before the September 11 attacks.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| August 15, 2007 | - The CIA was editing Wikipedia; one CIA entry concerned lyrics in a song from the television show “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” A CIA spokesperson responding to queries about the edits stated, “I cannot confirm that the traffic you cite came from agency computers. I'd like in any case to underscore a far larger and more significant point that no one should doubt or forget: The CIA has a vital mission in protecting the United States, and the focus of this agency is there, on that decisive work.”
| Source 1:
AP via Time
Source 2:
NewsCloud.com
Source 3:
BBC
|
| July 21, 2007 | -
Bush issued an order requiring the CIA to stop torturing its prisoners and to comply with the Geneva Conventions as the president interprets them, and also made clear that he would, by invoking executive privilege, refuse to allow the Justice Department to pursue any contempt charges that Congress might bring against his aides. “The next step,” said Representative Henry A. Waxman (D., Calif.), “would be just disbanding the Justice Department.”
| Source 1:
Voice of America
Source 2:
The Washington Post
Source 3:
The Boston Globe
|
| July 1, 2007 | - The CIA released documents known as the “Family Jewels,” detailing its surveillance of journalists, its opening of Jane Fonda’s mail, and its plans to kill Fidel Castro. The documents describe the unrealized assassination plot, which was reported in the 1960s, as “a sensitive mission requiring gangster-type action,” and say that the recruited gangsters preferred poisoning Castro with a pill to shooting him. Responding in his newspaper column, “Reflections of the Commander in Chief,” Castro called the United States a “killing machine” and reasserted that Lee Harvey Oswald was a CIA operative and that a second shooter must have assisted him in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| April 28, 2007 | - Former CIA Director George Tenet published a book accusing the Bush Administration of taking his phrase “slam dunk”—referring to intelligence that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction—out of context in order to justify a war that the president, the vice president, and the secretary of defense had resolved to wage before September 11, 2001. Tenet complained that the White House and the Pentagon made him their scapegoat when the Iraqi arsenal turned out to be imaginary. A group of former intelligence officers sent Tenet a letter calling him “the Alberto Gonzales of the intelligence community,” reminding him that he had often lied to the public at the administration's behest, and encouraging him to return his Medal of Freedom and donate half his royalties to wounded veterans and the families of dead soldiers.
| Source 1:
Washington Post
Source 2:
TPM
|
| March 15, 2007 | - At a military hearing in Guantánamo Bay Khalid Sheik Mohammed confessed to being the mastermind of the September 11 attacks; he also claimed to have been “responsible” for: the 1993 World Trade Center bombing; Richard Reid's attempted shoe bombing of an airplane; the bombing of a nightclub in Bali, Indonesia; and plots to assassinate several former presidents, including Jimmy Carter. “For sure,” he said, “I'm American enemies.” According to the released transcript, when asked whether his statement was the result of mistreatment by his interrogators, he said, “CIA peoples. Yes. At the beginning when they transferred me [REDACTED].”
| Source:
WP
|
| February 14, 2007 | - Former CIA Director George Tenet was working on a memoir.
| Source:
NYT
|
| January 31, 2007 | - A German court issued an arrest warrant for 13 CIA operatives involved in the abduction and torture of a German citizen.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| January 25, 2007 | - The perjury trial of former vice-presidential aide I. Scooter Libby began. Cathie Martin, former communications director for Vice President Dick Cheney, testified that the government often releases bad news late on Friday. “Fewer people pay attention to it,” she explained. CIA official Craig Schmall testified that Libby had met with Tom Cruise to discuss the treatment of Scientologists in Germany. Libby “was a little excited about it,” he recalled; Schmall said that he too had been excited.
| Source 1:
Washington Post
Source 2:
Washington Post
|
| January 5, 2007 | - Newly released FBI files revealed that the late Chief Justice William Rehnquist checked into a hospital for sedative dependency in 1981. During his rehabilitation, Rehnquist spoke of “a CIA plot against him” and tried to escape from the hospital clad in his pajamas.
| Source:
Washington Post
|
| November 8, 2006 | - Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld resigned, and to replace him President Bush nominated Robert Gates, a member of the Iraq Study Group and former head of the CIA, who was investigated in 1991 by the office of the independent counsel for his role in the Iran-contra scandal, and was suspected to have passed military intelligence to Saddam Hussein's
Iraq.
| Source 1:
GlobalSecurity.org
Source 2:
Mercury News
Source 3:
The New York Times
Source 4:
BBC News
Source 5:
Newsday
|
| October 17, 2006 | - President George W. Bush signed the Military Commissions Act, which suspends the right of habeas corpus for terrorism suspects and grants immunity to CIA interrogators and government officials, such as President Bush, for violations of the War Crimes Act.
| Source 1:
New York Times
Source 2:
Chicago Sun-Times
|
| September 8, 2006 | - A declassified CIA intelligence report concluded that prior to the Iraq war, Saddam Hussein “did not have a relationship, harbor, or even turn a blind eye toward,” Abu Musab al-Zarqawi or Al Qaeda.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| July 7, 2006 | -
President Bush denied that the closing of the CIA's
Bin Laden unit was significant. “We got a lot of assets looking for Osama bin Laden,” he said. “It's a matter of time, unless we stop looking.”
| Source:
Reuters
|
| June 20, 2006 | - There were discrepancies between the lie detection tests of U.S. security agencies. “The CIA doesn't respect the NSA's polygraph and the NSA doesn't respect the CIA's polygraph,” said Tara Wilk, a computer engineer with Defense Department clearance.
| Source:
Washington Post
|
| June 7, 2006 | - A report by the Council of Europe charged that European countries (including Germany,
Spain,
Sweden,
Greece, and Italy) served as a “global spider web” for the CIA's secret abduction and unlawful transfer of terrorism suspects to its network of torture camps around the world.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| May 19, 2006 | - While acknowledging that Khaled al-Masri "deserves a remedy" for allegedly being tortured by the CIA, a federal judge dismissed al-Masri's case because allowing it to proceed would expose government secrets.
| Source:
The Washington Post
|
| May 15, 2006 | - It was reported that the United States was analyzing phone call records of reporters from ABC News, the New York Times, and the Washington Post to determine the identities of CIA employees who leak information to the press. "It's time," a federal law enforcement official told a reporter for ABC News, "for you to get some new cell phones, quick."
| Source:
ABC News
|
| May 12, 2006 | - The FBI searched the home of former number-three CIA official Kyle "Dusty" Foggo; Foggo is under investigation for his relationship with defense contractors linked to the Randy "Duke" Cunningham bribery scandal.
| Source:
Bloomberg.com
|
| May 12, 2006 | - In Virginia a federal judge was considering whether the case brought by Khaled el-Masri against former CIA director George Tenet could proceed; el-Masri says he was abducted and beaten by the CIA, while the United States claims that allowing the case to move forward would expose state secrets and endanger the war on terrorism.
| Source:
The Washington Post
|
| May 5, 2006 | -
CIA Director Porter Goss resigned, as did Goss appointee Kyle "Dusty" Foggo, the executive director of the CIA; Foggo is under investigation for his relationship to two defense contractors who allegedly bribed former congressman Randy "Duke" Cunningham and Pentagon officials.
| Source 1:
AP via Breitbart.com
Source 2:
UPI
Source 3:
ABC News
|
| April 21, 2006 | - The CIA fired Mary McCarthy, a senior analyst, for leaking information about the CIA's network of secret prisons in Eastern Europe to a reporter from the Washington Post.
| Source:
CNN.com
|
| March 21, 2006 | - It was revealed that prior to the U.S. invasion, Iraqi foreign minister Naji Sabri had, for a fee, provided the United States with detailed assessments of Iraq's military capabilities. Sabri's assessments of Iraq's nuclear and biological weapons capabilities proved, in hindsight, to be far more reliable than the CIA estimates used to justify the invasion; the CIA had no comment on why the data was ignored.
| Source:
MSNBC via Commondreams
|
| February 12, 2006 | - Robert Grenier, director of the CIA counter-terrorism center, was fired for opposing "excessive" interrogation techniques like waterboarding. Grenier, said an intelligence official, was "not quite as aggressive as he might have been."
| Source:
Times Online
|
| February 10, 2006 | - Paul Pillar, the CIA's former national intelligence officer for the Middle East, published an article claiming that the Bush Administration had "cherry-picked" intelligence to justify the war in Iraq. "Intelligence was misused publicly," he wrote, "to justify decisions already made."
| Source:
Democracy Now!
|
| December 5, 2005 | - Facing criticism over the United States' network of secret prisons in Europe, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice pointed out that intelligence gathered from terrorism suspects has helped prevent attacks in not only the United States but Europe as well. Rice also asserted that the United States does not transport detainees from one country to another for the purpose of torture.
| Source:
AP
|
| November 29, 2005 | - A CIA official revealed that the agency's annual budget, which is classified, is $44 billion.
| Source:
International Herald Tribune
|
| November 9, 2005 | - The C.I.A. asked the Justice Department to open an investigation to find out who leaked information about a network of secret U.S.-run torture centers (known as “black sites”) to the Washington Post. When asked about the prisons, President George W. Bush said, “We do not torture.” U.S. National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley later clarified Bush's statement, suggesting that there were some cases in which torture is appropriate.
| Source 1:
The New York Times
Source 2:
AP
Source 3:
News24.com
|
| November 5, 2005 | - Vice President Dick Cheney was pressuring Republican senators to grant the CIA an exemption from a proposed ban on torturing terrorism suspects. Lawrence Wilkerson, who served as chief of staff for former Secretary of State Colin Powell, suggested that Cheney was ultimately responsible for the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison and elsewhere. “There was a visible audit trail,” he said, “from the vice president's office through the secretary of defense down to the commanders in the field.”
| Source:
The Seattle Times
|
| November 2, 2005 | - It was reported that the CIA had set up a secret system of prisons, called “black sites,” around the world. Originally intended solely for Al Qaeda leaders, the prisons now detain a number of people whose link to terrorism is less certain. “It's just a horrible burden,” said an intelligence official.
| Source:
The Washington Post
|
| October 14, 2005 | - A CIA manager known only as “Jose” was named to oversee the entire U.S. spy community.
| Source:
AP
|
| October 6, 2005 | - The CIA announced that it would not punish any of its employees for intelligence failures leading up to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
| Source:
LA Times
|
| June 27, 2005 | - Italy ordered the arrest of thirteen people linked to the CIA on charges of kidnapping a terror suspect.
| Source:
IHT
|
| May 31, 2005 | - The CIA was running its own fleet of twenty-six airplanes, owned by seven shell companies.
| Source:
The New York Times
|
| May 21, 2005 | - The CIA was granted the power to secretly interrogate Irish citizens in Ireland.
| Source:
IrishExaminer.com
|
| May 4, 2005 | - It was revealed that soon after September 11, 2001, the CIA sent a team of agents to Afghanistan with orders to “capture Bin Laden, kill him, and bring his head back in a box.”
| Source:
BBC News
|
| April 1, 2005 | - A new report on American intelligence failures concluded that the Bush Administration's evidence of biological weapons in Iraq was almost entirely derived from reports made by an Iraqi defector code-named “Curveball,” who was described by those who knew him as “crazy” and “a congenital liar.”
| Source:
LA Times
|
| February 17, 2005 | -
CIA Director Porter J. Goss claimed that the war in Iraq is making it easier for terrorist organizations to find new recruits.
| Source:
Washington Post
|
| December 28, 2004 | - and Jami Miscik became the CIA's sixth high-level official to resign since Porter Goss took over the agency in September.
| Source:
ABC News
|
| December 10, 2004 | - Congress voted to overhaul the country's intelligence structure, enacting some of the recommendations of the September 11 commission. The bill creates the job of director of national intelligence to oversee the CIA and 14 other spy agencies, requires more border guards, and forces cooperation among federal, state, local, and private organizations.
| Source:
CNN
|
| November 14, 2004 | - The White House ordered the CIA to purge all agents who were disloyal to the president.
| Source:
Newsday
|
| October 15, 2004 | - Karl Rove testified before a grand jury investigating the exposure of Valerie Plame as a covert CIA officer.
| Source:
Associated Press
|
| August 26, 2004 | - Two government reports, one civilian and one military, were issued on the Abu Ghraib torture scandal. The Army reported that military intelligence officers and civilian contractors were deeply involved in the abuse; the civilian report went to great lengths to avoid the logical conclusion that the Bush White House had created the conditions (legal, operational, and military) that directly led to the Abu Ghraib horrors. Both reports found that many of the techniques employed at Abu Ghraib originated in CIA torture chambers in Afghanistan.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| August 23, 2004 | - Senator Pat Roberts, the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, proposed eliminating the CIA, removing the National Security Agency from the Pentagon's control, and creating three new spy agencies governed by a national intelligence director.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| July 11, 2004 | - Senator Trent Lott was outraged by the CIA's "totally ridiculous, uncalled for, and counterproductive" redactions of the report and called for an independent commission to oversee the classification of government information.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| July 10, 2004 | - The Senate Intelligence Committee released a scathing report on the CIA's unfounded, unjustified, and unreasonable claims about Iraq's purported weapons of mass destruction; the report was oddly silent, however, about the Bush Administration's well-documented and apparently successful campaign to intimidate the CIA into coming up with justifications for the President's fraudulent case for the invasion.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| June 18, 2004 | - A civilian contractor from North Carolina who worked for the CIA was indicted for beating a detainee to death in Afghanistan.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| June 16, 2004 | - The CIA classified most of a Senate Intelligence Committee report on the agency's failures and mistakes leading up to the invasion of Iraq.
| Source:
Reuters
|
| June 9, 2004 | - Former CIA officials said that the new prime minister of Iraq, Iyad Allawi, was involved with a CIA-funded terrorist group in Iraq in the early 1990s; the group apparently carried out a bombing campaign, blowing up a movie theater and possibly a school bus.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| June 5, 2004 | - Vice President Dick Cheney was interviewed by prosecutors investigating the illegal disclosure of a covert CIA agent's identity.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| June 4, 2004 | - George Tenet resigned as director of the Central Intelligence Agency; he claimed that he was quitting for personal reasons, though there was no shortage of professional ones. Much speculation followed concerning who would be next.
| Source:
Washington Post
|
| May 29, 2004 | - Iyad Alawi, a doctor who has long been on the CIA payroll, was chosen to be the new Iraqi prime minister when "limited sovereignty" is handed over to an interim "caretaker" government on June 30.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| May 14, 2004 | - New documents emerged about the CIA's friendly relationship with a number of former Nazis after World War II.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| April 15, 2004 | -
George Tenet, the director of central intelligence, told the 9/11 commission that he received a briefing in August 2001 entitled "Islamic
Extremist Learns to Fly" but failed to act on the information.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| April 9, 2004 | - National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice testified publicly and under oath before the commission investigating September 11; Rice acknowledged that President Bush had received a classified CIA briefing on August 6, 2001, entitled "Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States," though she characterized the report as "historical information based on old reporting." She also acknowledged that the report mentioned the existence of Al Qaeda sleeper cells in the United States but "there was no recommendation that we do something about this." Rice also admitted that Richard Clarke, whose book on the Bush Administration's antiterrorism failures prompted her public testimony, sent her a memo in January 2001 in which he mentioned sleeper cells. Again, Rice said, "there was no mention or recommendation of anything that needs to be done about them." Rice said that she couldn't remember whether she had ever mentioned the existence of the sleeper cells to the president prior to August 6.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| April 8, 2004 | - A Russian scientist was sentenced to 15 years for selling unclassified material to a British company that Russian authorities claim was a CIA front.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| March 29, 2004 | - Condoleezza Rice did appear publicly on 60 Minutes and confirmed Clarke's claim, originally denied by the White House, that on September 12, 2001, President Bush ordered Clarke to focus on possible Iraqi involvement in the 9/11 attacks, which the CIA had already concluded were carried out by Al Qaeda.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| March 10, 2004 | -
CIA director George Tenet revealed that he has privately corrected Dick Cheney several times after the vice president publicly "misconstrued" intelligence.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| February 18, 2004 | - "Heads should roll," said Richard Perle, of the Defense Policy Board, "not in a punitive or vindictive way. But when you discover you have an organization that doesn't get it right time after time, you change the organization, including the people . . . . I would start with the head."
| Source:
Christian Science Monitor
|
| February 8, 2004 | - President George W. Bush, apparently worried that John Kerry was beating him in recent opinion polls, appeared on a Sunday morning talk show. Bush defended his decision to conquer
Iraq, and although he admitted that his stated reason for invading was false, he also suggested that weapons of mass destruction might still be found. The president said that he had total confidence in the CIA but suggested that he had been misled by incorrect intelligence. "Saddam Hussein was dangerous with weapons. Saddam Hussein was dangerous with the ability to make weapons," Bush said. "I believe it is essential that when we see a threat, we deal with those threats before they become imminent. It's too late if they become imminent."
| Source:
Reuters
|
| January 26, 2004 | - Kay made it clear that the United Nations weapons-inspection process had succeeded in disarming Iraq and said the Iraqis had been reduced to experimenting with ricin, a primitive but deadly poison easily made from fermented castor beans; Kay also said that the CIA had completely misread the situation in Iraq, largely because the agency had no on-the-ground spies after the U.N. inspectors were removed.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| January 20, 2004 | - It was reported that American intelligence officials have compiled a list of five million potential terrorists worldwide.
| Source:
Toronto Sun
|
| January 1, 2004 | - It was reported that the CIA is planning to set up a new secret police force in Iraq, modeled after the Phoenix program of the Vietnam War, that will ensure the United States retains control over the country after official sovereignty passes to a native government. The secret plan, of which Dick Cheney was the purported secret author, will cost $3 billion and will be funded from the CIA's secret budget.
| Source:
London Telegraph
|
| December 30, 2003 | - Attorney General John Ashcroft recused himself from the Justice Department investigation of the White House's
exposure of an undercover CIA agent, and a special counsel was named to oversee the inquiry.
| Source:
UPI
|
| December 18, 2003 | - American officials said that the CIA might not be able to use its usual interrogation techniques on Saddam Hussein, because Hussein, unlike many Al Qaeda operatives, will probably stand trial for his crimes.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| October 28, 2003 | - The CIA celebrated the 40th anniversary of its Directorate of Science and Technology by exhibiting such devices as a mechanical dragonfly listening device and a 24-inch-long artificial catfish; the exhibit was not open to the public.
| Source:
Reuters
|
| September 28, 2003 | - At the request of the CIA, the Justice Department began investigating charges that the White House leaked the name of undercover CIA agent Valerie Plame to the press in retaliation for remarks by her husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, challenging President Bush's
claim that Iraq tried to buy yellowcake uranium in Africa. An unnamed administration official told the Washington Post that two White House officials had revealed the agent's identity to at least six journalists. "Clearly," the official said, "it was meant purely and simply for revenge." The White House denied that Karl Rove was responsible for the leak, which was a violation of the Intelligence Protection Act and carries penalties of up to 10 years in prison and $50,000 in fines.
| Source:
Washington Post
|
| July 17, 2003 | -
CIA director George Tenet testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee and again took responsibility for President Bush's false claim that Iraq tried to buy uranium from Niger, but he admitted that he didn't know the claim, which he successfully removed from at least one of the president's previous speeches, would be included in the State of the Union address.
Tenet said that his staff should have told him about it.
| Source:
Washington Post
|
| July 17, 2003 | - It later emerged that the White House and the CIA had negotiated over the line, which "the CIA knew to be incredible." The White House, one senator said, wanted to know "how far you could go and be close to the truth."
| Source:
Associated Press
|
| June 5, 2003 | - Douglas Feith, an undersecretary at the
Pentagon, denied what he called the "urban legends" that the Pentagon
lied about Iraq's purported weapons of mass destruction or that intelligence
analysts were pressured to come up with slanted reports. "I can't
rule out what other people may have perceived," he said. "Who knows what people perceive? I know of
nobody who pressured anybody."
| Source 1:
Minneapolis Star Tribune
Source 2:
Toronto Star
|
| May 2, 2003 | - The Bush Administration proposed giving the Central Intelligence Agency and the Pentagon the power to issue "administrative subpoenas" for personal and financial information on American citizens without court approval.
Attorney General John Ashcroft revealed that the Justice Department used secret warrants 1,228 times last year.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| March 25, 2003 | -
CIA analysts continued to complain to reporters that the Bush Administration was distorting intelligence reports on Iraq to bolster its war policy; analysts were particularly embarrassed when President Bush publicly claimed that Iraq tried to buy uranium from Niger.
| |
| February 4, 2003 | -
Bush also unveiled a $15 billion program to fight AIDS around the world, particularly in Africa, and he announced the creation of a Terrorist Threat Integration Center, which will merge different units of the CIA and the FBI.
| |
| February 4, 2003 | -
CIA analysts continued to maintain that there is no evidence of Iraqi aid to terrorists, and officials at the FBI also said they were baffled by the president's claims: “We've been looking into this hard for more than a year,” said one anonymous source, “and you know what, we just don't think it's there.” Hans Blix, the head of the United Nations chemical and biological inspections team, rebutted many of the president's reasons for attacking Iraq; Blix said that there was no evidence that Iraq was hiding illegal weapons or weapons scientists in neighboring countries, that there was no credible evidence of Iraqi intelligence agents posing as scientists, and that there was no evidence of Iraqi ties to Al Qaeda. “There are other states where there appear to be stronger links,” he said.
| |
| November 12, 2002 | -
The CIA, using a Predator drone, assassinated an Al Qaeda leader and several of his companions in Yemen; it turned out that one of the men was an American citizen.
| |
| October 29, 2002 | -
The CIA is enemy territory as far as they're concerned.”
| |
| October 22, 2002 | -
It was reported that the CIA has begun covert operations in Kurdish Iraq, and American officials acknowledged that the CIA had put the wrong man's face on its wanted poster for Mullah Muhammad Omar, the former head of the Taliban.
| |
| October 15, 2002 | -
Current and former intelligence officials in the CIA, the FBI, and the energy department complained that President Bush's case against Iraq was largely false: “Basically, cooked information is working its way into high-level pronouncements,” said Vincent Cannistraro, the former head of counter-intelligence at the CIA.
| |
| October 15, 2002 | -
“And there's a lot of unhappiness about it in intelligence, especially among analysts at the CIA.” The Iraqi government gave reporters a tour of Al Furat, an old industrial site that President Bush claims is being used to develop nuclear weapons.
| |
| September 24, 2002 | -
The Bush Administration finally agreed to support an independent investigation into the intelligence failures leading up to September 11 after a congressional investigation continued to turn up embarrassing details such as the 1998 warning, ignored by the CIA, that terrorists wanted to fly planes into the World Trade Center.
| |
| December 11, 2001 | -
Afghan refugees, particularly children, were dying in great numbers; Uzbekistan finally agreed to allow humanitarian aid to cross its border at the “Friendship Bridge.” The CIA asked Pakistan for help in finding Osama bin Laden, whose mother told a Saudi newspaper that she was disappointed in her son.
| |
| November 6, 2001 | - After the CIA's “threat matrix” showed a “big and credible” threat, Attorney General John Ashcroft warned Americans that a new attack could be imminent.
| |
| November 6, 2001 | - Official sources revealed that the CIA's
New York
counterterrorism office was destroyed in the attack on the World Trade Center.
| |
| September 25, 2001 | - Newly released CIA documents revealed that the agency once trained cats to operate as spies equipped with listening devices. The first such spy cat was run over by a taxi.
| |
| September 11, 2001 | -
Osama bin Laden, the famous CIA-trained terrorist, quickly became the prime suspect as federal authorities identified the hijackers, many of whom had been in the United States for years, learning to fly big jets in Florida.
| |
| January 23, 2001 | -
President Clinton pardoned 140 criminals, including Patty Hearst, a revolutionary; his brother Roger, who had a fondness for cocaine; and former CIA director John Deutch, who found it difficult to leave classified information in the George Bush Center for Intelligence.
| |
| September 19, 2000 | - There were reports that former CIA director John Deutch, who was recently accused of downloading classified CIA material (including information about covert operations) to his personal, unsecured computer, also violated security rules by downloading classified material when he worked at the Pentagon.
| |
