Reykjavik Transit

President Obama is expected to sign executive orders that would allow its officers abroad to temporarily detain terrorism suspects and transfer them to other agencies, but would no longer allow the agency to carry out long-term detentions. They could also allow Mr. Obama to reinstate the C.I.A.’s detention and interrogation operations in the future, by presidential order, as some have argued would be appropriate if Osama bin Laden or another top-level leader of Al Qaeda were captured. The White House might be open to allowing the use of methods other the 19 techniques allowed for the military.

Labels: black site, CIA, cia flights, craig obama, extraordinary rendition, John le Carré, prison

What Bush and Cheney did was different less in kind than in degree—creating a vast program of renditions and secret prisons, as well as aggressively pursuing "targeted killings" of "high-value targets." Congressional leaders were informed, but some said that the briefings were cryptic. National security is an unavoidably murky world. But it doesn't have to be quite so dark as Cheney et al. made it, loosing the dogs of war from some "undisclosed location." So much of the anger against the Bush administration could have been avoided if Bush had gone to Congress in the first place. Obama’s Cheney Dilemma By Stuart Taylor Jr. and Evan Thomas

Evan Thomas claimed that when Americans are "under threat, we sort of make this pact" with the government allowing it to "[g]o off and be secret and do dirty things" without "tell[ing] us about it." wmv

Labels: black site, CIA, detainees, Evan Thomas, flight, Obama, Panetta, prison, rendition