Good explanation by @TomRtweets on CIA-NSA dispute over how much the lack of sigint in the pool of available evidence should discount confidence in the CIA's assessment that Russia offered bounties in Afghanistan. Dovetails w/ NYT reporting since 2020. washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/inside…
The facts - CIA analysts reached this assessment based on other types of evidence we have detailed, the Trump WH handled it strangely and then lied about whether he was briefed, and the NSA had lower confidence its based on concerns about sigint gap - are unchanged since 2020. /2
That the CIA (& NCTC) has moderate confidence in its assessment, meaning they think it is credibly sourced and plausible, and NSA (& DIA) has low confidence, w/ greater concerns over lack of sigint, is not new. It is the intelligence community status quo reported last summer. /3
Thus, the Biden NSC saying the IC has low to moderate confidence in the assessment, explaining its decision to do a diplomatic action but to stop short of sanctions, was not a walk back. It was a restatement of the same disagreement over the imperfect available evidence./4
These facts, in all their complexity, will not be of interest to partisans who are pushing the narrative that the Biden NSC statement means that this was an evidence-free "hoax" as Trump claimed. They are pursuing their own agendas. /end
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Guantanamo's crumbling, super-secret Camp 7 is kaput, Southcom announces. (The high-value ex-CIA detainees it housed, including 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Muhammed, have been transferred to Camp 5.)/1 southcom.mil/News/PressRele…
This article in December, a joint effort by @carolrosenberg, @EricSchmittNYT and myself, first put forward the chatter that closing Camp 7 and consolidating the detainee population in the 5/6 space was in the works. /2 nytimes.com/2020/12/15/us/…
In honor of Camp 7's departure from current-events relevance, let me one last time post this link to what satellite imagery and rare fragments of discussion in declassified documents etc revealed about its nature. /end charliesavage.com/what-google-ea…
In an already gratuitous tangent calling for overturning a key 1st Amendment precedent that protects the free press, 85-year-old Laurence Silberman seems to have lost the filter that counsels most judges against displaying a nakedly partisan demeanor. cadc.uscourts.gov/internet/opini…
Silberman was Nixon and Ford admin official. He was a friend of Dick Cheney, who as WH chief of staff in 1975 wanted to make him the top WH domestic policy official, while Kissinger thought he should lead the CIA. (See Takeover p 49.) In 1985, Reagan made him into a judge. /2
In 1988, Silberman tried to give victory to the Reaganites' novel theories of executive power maximalism by writing an opinion striking down the independent counsel law and proclaiming the Unitary Executive Theory to be true. The Supreme Court disagreed, overruling him 7-1. /3
Thanks to @apcbapcb for the shoutout, in his review of @nicholsonbaker8's Baseless in @nybooks, to a point I made in my review in @thenation. But I would like to clarify something about this, for the sake of others out there who are frustrated by unsuccessful FOIA requests. /1
Baker's years of requests to liberate more information about Korean War-era bioweapons from the National Archives were largely unsuccessful. His original plan to prove what happened morphed into a book that is partly about FOIA's shortcomings. /2
In the section of my review in which I focused on his critique of the Freedom of Information Act, I pointed out a puzzling failure of imagination: Baker never filed a FOIA lawsuit. That's very often necessary to make FOIA work./3
I missed that DOJ has posted the individual certificates listing what offenses Trump pardoned for each person listed in his January 19 master clemency warrant, which had names but didn't spell out the covered crimes. justice.gov/pardon/page/fi…
Here's Steve Bannon's, for example.
Here's Elliot Broidy, a Trump fund-raiser who admitted to a role in a covert campaign to influence the administration on behalf of Chinese and Malaysian interests.
Here's Ken Kurson, a former Giuliani speechwriter and former editor of a newspaper Jared Kushner owned, who had been charged with cyberstalking nytimes.com/2020/10/23/nyr…
I took a deeper look at the Biden WH not restoring the ABA's traditional role of pre-nomination vetting and de facto vetoing of potential judges, which the WP scooped the other day in a story about the Biden team getting geared up to make nominations. nytimes.com/2021/02/05/us/…
The ABA's pre-nomination vetting dated back to the Eisenhower administration. Its peer review system had long been a serious constraint on which lawyers politicians could transform into life-tenured judges. /2
But both parties, when in power, have chafed at that constraint. When Republicans' preferred nominees got dinged as not qualified based on temperament/ethics/competence, the GOP insisted it was instead because the ABA harbored ideological bias against conservatives./3
The National Security Agency has just released an important set of rules and procedures for electronic surveillance by the DOD (of which NSA is a part)./1 int.nyt.com/data/documentt…
It is a big-deal doc but it also appears to be more a housekeeping update of the previous one rather something that makes major substantive changes, unless I’m missing something, so my current plan is to tweet for specialists rather than write a NYT article for general readers./2
These procedures govern, at a 30,000-foot level, DOD/NSA surveillance that is authorized by Executive Order 12333 because it uses techniques that fall outside the sort of national-security wiretapping that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) regulates. /3