President-Elect Joe Biden is looking for a CIA director. In CounterPunch.org, former CIA officer Mel Goodman runs down where past directors have gone wrong–and what Biden could do right. The directors who were agency professionals were a particularly motley group. [Gina] Haspel is best known for her leading role in the CIA’s sadistic torture and...
Tag: Joe Biden
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Ex-CIA Biden Adviser Avril Haines, Scrubbed Palantir from Her Resume
Avril Haines, a former deputy CIA director who is now advising presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden, has scrubbed her resume. Haines once listed herself as a consultant to Palantir, a data mining firm Not any more. Haines’s biography on the Brookings site was captured by the Wayback Machine, which archives websites, on May 9. At that...
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In Deep: The History Behind Trump’s War on the Intelligence Community
(This story first appeared in Counterpunch.) “There is no ‘deep state’—not in the conspiratorial way that Donald Trump uses the term,” writes David Rohde, a Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent, in his new book, In Deep: The FBI, the CIA and the Truth about America’s “Deep State.” “In dozens of interviews, no current or former government officials...
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emptywheel: NSA Is Probably Withholding Burisma Details
Marcy Wheeler, aka emptywheel, is among the most knowledgeable of intel watchers. She has this to say about Rep. Adam Schiff’s complaint that the National Security Agency has not been entirely forthcoming with records relevant to President Trump’s impeachment trial. It’s all about Burisma, the Ukrainian firm that hired Hunter Biden to serve on its...
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Impeachment Frenzy Sets Trump Against the CIA
The long-impending constitutional crisis has arrived, courtesy of a CIA whistleblower. If his or her complaint was conceived as a covert political action operation, it could not have been more effective. The nine-page letter did what Robert Mueller’s 448-page opus did not: jump-start the impeachment process. The day after Trump acknowledged he spoke with the...
