Archivo etiqueta «Servicios secretos»
By David Ignatius (THE WASHINGTON POST, 07/05/06):
CIA employees were sitting at their computers Friday afternoon when they saw a message advising them to toggle to the agency’s in-house television channel. On their screens they saw CIA Director Porter Goss abruptly announcing his resignation. In at least one office at the agency, and I suspect many more, there were quiet cheers. The Goss years have not been happy ones at the CIA.
Goss was dumped by a president who doesn’t like to fire anyone. That was a sign of how badly off track things had gotten at the CIA. Goss … Seguir leyendo
By Iain Hollignshead. See also ‘After the rock, a much harder place‘ (THE GUARDIAN, 06/05/06):
Last week, the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) took the unprecedented step of advertising a variety of positions in the Times and the Economist. The world’s second oldest profession had finally caught up with the oldest and proffered its services to anyone who was interested. Cynics with a shorter-term memory wondered whether they should also have advertised for replacement rock-makers.
The strange saga of the Moscow rock erupted on January 22 when Russian state television broadcast footage it claimed showed British agents retrieving … Seguir leyendo
By Mark Feldstein, director of the journalism program at George Washington University, was an investigative correspondent for CNN in Washington. His book “Poisoning the Press: Richard Nixon, Jack Anderson and the Rise of Washington’s Scandal Culture” will be published next year (THE WASHINGTON POST, 29/04/06):
In an earlier life I spent 20 years as an investigative reporter, getting subpoenaed and sued in the United States, and censored and physically harassed in other parts of the globe. But when I switched careers to academia, I thought such scrapes would come to an end. I was wrong.
On March 3 two … Seguir leyendo
By Ben Macintyre (THE TIMES, 28/04/06):
ONE DAY, towards the end of my final year at university, I was tapped on the shoulder by a friendly don and asked if I, ahem, would like to meet an acquaintance of his, nudge, who was linked to the Foreign Office, wink, but outside the normal channels, if I knew what he meant. I most certainly did. For months, I had been assiduously cultivating the air of a potential spook by looking even more furtive than usual. I had read every word of John le Carré. I had even bought a faintly sinister … Seguir leyendo
By David S. Broder (THE WASHINGTON POST, 27/04/06):
Two events in the past week have thrown the spotlight on the troubled relationship between the Bush administration and the news media, raising questions that are worrisome on both sides of the divide.
The resignation of Scott McClellan as the White House press secretary was followed within days by the announcement that a senior Central Intelligence Agency employee, later identified as Mary McCarthy, had been fired for improper contacts with reporters.
Neither incident is entirely clear in its origins. McClellan said he asked to be relieved, but his stepping down was part … Seguir leyendo
By David Ignatius (THE WASHINGTON POST, 21/04/06):
For the U.S. intelligence community, the warning lights are blinking red. A reorganization that was supposed to bring greater coordination has instead produced a layering of responsibilities and bureaucratic confusion. A demoralized CIA that needed professional management is chafing under a Republican former congressman who has proved to be the most political and ineffective director in the agency’s history.
Look at the organizational chart of the new Office of the Director of National Intelligence and you wonder if America has become a Third World country with a rival intelligence agency for each patch … Seguir leyendo
By Kevin Toolis, the author of Rebel Hearts: Journeys within the IRA Soul (THE TIMES, 06/04/06):
VENGEANCE. Pure vengeance. That is the only reason why Denis Donaldson was so brutally murdered. From the moment Donaldson confessed last December that he had been a British intelligence agent for the past 20 years, Donaldson was a dead man walking. His end in a squalid remote cottage in Co Donegal was a death foretold. Indeed Donaldson must have wondered why his one-time comrades had waited so long since December to kill him.
There is no greater crime in republican eyes than to … Seguir leyendo
By John A. Kringen, the director of intelligence at the Central Intelligence Agency (THE WASHINGTON POST, 03/04/06):
Nearly one year ago, President Bush’s commission on weapons of mass destruction released its report identifying shortcomings in the intelligence community. Many of the commission’s judgments dealt with analysis, the discipline I lead at the CIA. The primary criticism was that our analysts were “too wedded to their assumptions” and that our tradecraft — the way we analyze a subject and communicate our findings — needed strengthening.
We did not try to hide from the criticism or make excuses. Our assessment of … Seguir leyendo
Por Rafael Argullol es escritor y filósofo (EL PAÍS, 16/03/06):
El pasado 25 de enero el senador suizo Dick Marty, al que el Consejo de Europa había encargado investigar las supuestas actividades ilícitas de la CIA en nuestro continente, declaró que consideraba probados los secuestros de sospechosos de terrorismo. Según sus palabras, al menos un centenar de vuelos habían efectuado escala en aeropuertos europeos con rumbo a Guantánamo, Irak y Afganistán. Asimismo, de acuerdo con Marty, resultaba evidente que se había procedido a una “subcontratación de la tortura” consistente en trasladar detenidos a países donde la aplicación de la violencia … Seguir leyendo
By Porter Goss, director of the Central Intelligence Agency (THE NEW YORK TIMES, 10/02/06):
AT the Central Intelligence Agency, we are more than holding our own in the global war on terrorism, but we are at risk of losing a key battle: the battle to protect our classified information.
Judge Laurence Silberman, a chairman of President Bush’s commission on weapons of mass destruction, said he was “stunned” by the damage done to our critical intelligence assets by leaked information. The commission reported last March that in monetary terms, unauthorized disclosures have cost America hundreds of millions of dollars; in … Seguir leyendo
By Magnus Linklater (THE TIMES, 25/01/06):
WHAT A BRILLIANT idea, our men in Moscow must have thought, to have an electronic dead letter drop hidden in a hollowed-out stone. No more hassle about letters left at midnight in some incriminating tree or fishing around for those tiresome microdots. It’s a pity, of course, that the technology let them down, but then it always does, doesn’t it? Having to kick the stone to make it work, then pick it up and take it back to the lab for tests,rather undermined the hands-off approach. I can just hear the familiar comment that … Seguir leyendo
By Melanie W. Sisson, an intelligence analyst at FBI headquarters from December 2003 to May 2005 (THE WASHINGTON POST, 31/12/05):
Why is the FBI having so much trouble keeping its intelligence analysts — the kind of people who are vitally important to its post-Sept. 11 mission?
The problem was laid out at a congressional hearing a few months ago by the Justice Department’s inspector general, Glenn A. Fine. He noted that the FBI is suffering a high rate of attrition among its most recently hired and most highly educated analysts, and he concluded that the bureau needs to stop … Seguir leyendo
By Jeffrey H. Smith, a former general counsel of the CIA (THE WASHINGTON POST, 09/11/05):
Americans do not join the CIA to commit torture. Yet that could be the result if a proposal advanced by Vice President Cheney becomes law.
When the abuses by U.S. servicemen and intelligence officers at Abu Ghraib surfaced last year, there was understandable outrage in this country and abroad. Internal investigations and congressional hearings revealed several causes of the abuse. One of the most important was confusion in the military and intelligence agencies as to what rules governed interrogations. A root cause of the … Seguir leyendo
Milt Bearden worked in the C.I.A.’s Directorate of Operations for three decades until 1994 (THE NEW YORK TIMES, 04/11/05):
Today the Supreme Court justices are expected to debate whether they will hear a case involving a Yemeni named Salim Ahmed Hamdan, who is accused of being Osama bin Laden’s driver. A federal appeals court found that Mr. Hamdan, who was captured in Afghanistan in 2001 and is being held at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, was not entitled to the protections of the Geneva Conventions; he has appealed to the high court.
If the court does not choose to review the … Seguir leyendo
Por Jorge Volpi, escritor mexicano (EL PAIS, 22/02/05):
En 1967, Anthony Perkins había concluido sus atropellados estudios de administración de empresas en la Universidad de Boston y acababa de casarse con su novia de toda la vida cuando, a instancias de un pariente de ella, fue invitado a realizar algunas pruebas en la Agencia Nacional de Seguridad (NSA), acaso el menos conocido de los variados cuerpos de inteligencia que existían entonces en Estados Unidos. Aunque al parecer obtuvo buenos resultados y satisfizo los requisitos impuestos por sus entrevistadores, al final Perkins prefirió incorporarse durante dos años al Cuerpo de … Seguir leyendo