Intelligence

President Barack Obama has tapped Ploughshares Fund board member Chuck Hagel to co-chair  the President's Intelligence Advisory Board. Historically, the intelligence panel has conducted investigations into intelligence breaches and failures, including on possible civil liberties violations, while also offering advice on how intelligence agencies could be improved and consolidated. Read more >>

Steven Aftergood of the Ploughshares-funded Federation of American Scientists analyzes recently disclosed comments by the Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair (pictured here) to the Senate Intelligence Committee, including the observation that while Iran has made significant progress in uranium enrichment technology, it is unlikely that Iran will have the technical capability to produce HEU [highly enriched uranium] before 2013, and that “Iran is covertly supplying arms to Afghan insurgent Read more >>

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) talked with House Intelligence Committee members about changes in the congressional briefing process that would broaden the number of members who get information and give them more latitude to challenge policies they oppose. Pelosi said there are too many restrictions on what members can do with the information from briefings. Read more >>

The Justice Department has disclosed four Bush-era Office of Legal Council opinions on interrogation and torture that Steve Aftergood of the Ploughshares-funded Federation of American Scientists says “is likely to have significant political and perhaps legal consequences.”  President Obama announced that withholding the documents, which describe techniques that were already publically-known, would only deny facts.  Aftergood Read more >>