Today's Headlines and Commentary
More than a dozen Afghan soldiers were arrested today after the Afghan Defense Ministry discovered 10 suicide vests and learned of a plot to attack the Ministry and buses with government employees. Matthew Rosenberg and Jawad Sukhanyar report at the New York Times.
Amnesty International yesterday urged EU countries to investigate their involvement in the CIA rendition program.
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More than a dozen Afghan soldiers were arrested today after the Afghan Defense Ministry discovered 10 suicide vests and learned of a plot to attack the Ministry and buses with government employees. Matthew Rosenberg and Jawad Sukhanyar report at the New York Times.
Amnesty International yesterday urged EU countries to investigate their involvement in the CIA rendition program. Read the AP story over at the Washington Post. Back in 2007, a Swiss politician alleged that 14 European governments either carried out rendition flights or permitted the CIA to run detention centers in their countries.
The AP tells us that CIA Director David Petraeus offered Pakistan concessions with regards to the agency's drone program back in January--including more advance notice and limits on who could be targeted. The offers were rejected by Pakistan's Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha, who heads up the country's spy agency. This report comes as President Obama is meeting with Pakistan's prime minister today.
Brookings nonresident senior fellow John Villasenor, and one of the panelists in next week's event on drones at Brookings, has this op-ed in the LA Times on what has now been dubbed (for better or worse) domestic "drone proliferation."
Public Radio International's The World has this article by William Troop, who also writes on drone proliferation.
Bloomberg News breaks the mostly unsurprising news that Staff Sgt. Robert Bales held a mid-level secret security clearance, which is more norm than exception among military personnel stationed in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Looks like more than two-thirds of those surveyed in a recent New York Times/CBS News poll are of the mind that the U.S. should not be at war with Afghanistan (up from 53 percent just four months ago).
Dina Temple-Raston has this report on NPR about the shift in focus for terrorist threat analysts from Al Qaeda to state-sponsored terrorists and other more traditional sources.
The Economist gives drone technology a "thumbs up," and reports on those MIT nerds we mentioned last week who are teaching drones to respond to hand gestures.
While the DOD confirmed that it has paid the families of the victims of Staff Sgt. Bales' massacre, Afghan officials have indicated that the payments were not intended to compensate the families for their loss. Also, on that elusive 17th death, Jeremy Herb at The Hill says that it was the result of "the investigation moving forward after the initial reporting by the Afghan government." This comes from General John Allen's remarks yesterday at the Pentagon; Gen. Allen also issued a warning that the rogue attacks from Afghan soldiers on NATO troops will continue.
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Raffaela Wakeman is a Senior Director at In-Q-Tel. She started her career at the Brookings Institution, where she spent five years conducting research on national security, election reform, and Congress. During this time she was also the Associate Editor of Lawfare. From there, Raffaela practiced law at the U.S. Department of Defense for four years, advising her clients on privacy and surveillance law, cybersecurity, and foreign liaison relationships. She departed DoD in 2019 to join the Majority Staff of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, where she oversaw the Intelligence Community’s science and technology portfolios, cybersecurity, and surveillance activities. She left HPSCI in May 2021 to join IQT.
Raffaela received her BS and MS in Political Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2009 and her law degree from Georgetown University Law Center in 2015, where she was recognized for her commitment to public service with the Joyce Chiang Memorial Award. While at the Department of Defense, she was the inaugural recipient of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s General Counsel Award for exhibiting the highest standards of leadership, professional conduct, and integrity.
