Tara McKelvey

As the CIA inspector general’s 2004 report shows, the abuse of detainees was systematic and brutal and as exacting as a lawyer’s brief: “In 2004, when Daniel B. Levin, then the acting assistant attorney general in the counsel’s office, sent a letter to the C.I.A. reauthorizing waterboarding, he dictated the terms: no more than two […]

“Interrogators got results, could face charges.” That is a banner headline in today’s print edition of The Washington Times, and it neatly captures the conservative argument for President Bush‘s so-called enhanced interrogation program. In this version, the American officers who had waterboarded the terrorists were doing a nasty job, but somebody had to do it, […]

Admiral Mike Mullin, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said on Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press that, “I believe we’ve got to start to turn this thing around from a security standpoint in the next 12 to 18 months.” To that end, American commanders want more troops. Given that Afghanistan has 40,000 […]

For weeks, people in Washington had wondered what had shocked CIA director Leon Panetta so much that he decided to expose the exploits of a 2004 government program to assassinate high-level Al Qaeda members. As Mark Mazzetti reports in today’s New York Times, it was Blackwater USA that convinced him, since the private security contractors […]

As Eric Schmitt reports in today’s New York Times, FBI agents have been rushing after thousands of terrorism leads, ranging from a missing 55-gallon drum of radioactive material (it was later found on a loading dock) to threats to shopping malls. They are now key players in America’s counterterrorism effort, and the agents themselves do […]

Army officials have announced plans to train soldiers in a new form of psychological warfare, hoping to steel them against the emotional and mental fallout from war. The training is based partly on a body of “recent research suggesting that people can manage stress by thinking in terms of their psychological strengths,” according to The […]

President Obama reached out to members of the Veterans of Foreign Wars at their annual convention in Phoenix, telling them that their access to health care would be expanded and joking with them about “the ‘billions of dollars’ for a fleet of new presidential helicopters,” which he said, would allow him to “cook a meal […]

There are 130,000 men and women deployed in Iraq, down from the 160,000 troops who were there two years ago. By the end of the year, there will be 68,000 troops in Afghanistan. (Last year, there were about 34,000 in Afghanistan.) However, the number that’s changed most dramatically is the count of embedded reporters. In […]

As Adam mentioned earlier, two New York Times reporters revealed some new information today about the construction of secret prisons for detainees, one of the most controversial aspects of Bush‘s global war on terrorism. Back then, the U.S. was trying to eradicate terrorism in all parts of the globe. The strategy was misguided, to say […]

Chinese lawyer Xu Zhiyong, who is known for his work in defending migrant workers, has been detained by Chinese authorities, shaking up the country’s “nascent legal rights movement,” according to The New York Times. Lawyers who push for change in China have long put themselves at risk, but nevertheless the legal movement, despite its pitfalls, […]