John Brennan Sworn in on Constitution Without a Bill of Rights
It is a symbolic thing, but the White House got the symbolism wrong. Especially after the whole Rand Paul thing.
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Daniel Klaidman of The Daily Beast reports that the White House will soon take the power to launch lethal drone strikes away from the CIA and make the program the exclusive domain of the Defense Department.
It is a symbolic thing, but the White House got the symbolism wrong. Especially after the whole Rand Paul thing.
While Rand Paul used a filibuster to draw attention to Obama's drone program, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz saw an opportunity to draw attention to their 2016 brands. This is most obvious in their choice of strange pop-culture references.
A summary of the best reads found behind the paywall of The New York Times.
It's easy to make fun of Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul riffing on drones and other stuff for hours on the Senate floor on Wednesday, but it's also something to celebrate.
Rand Paul spent Wednesday doing something you don't see often enough in Washington — he made an honest-to-goodness, non-stop filibuster speech on the floor of the U.S. Senate, all-out and Mr. Smith-style. And he had a lot to say about drones.
A strange thing happened on Tuesday. Just a few hours after an airline pilot spotted an unidentified "drone" hovering a few miles from JFK airport, Attorney General Eric Holder announced that drones strikes on United States soil were not out of the question.
The Senate Intelligence Committee voted in favor of John Brennan's nomination to be CIA director, 12-3, after it was announced that the committee finally got more access to the White House's legal memos about drone attacks.
Now that Chuck Hagel's confirmation has gone off without a hitch (for the most part), it's John Brennan's turn to take the spotlight, and it look like those drone memos will be a real roadblock.
As the Obama Administration maneuvers to secure John Brennan's appointment to CIA director, they are reportedly offering to give Republicans new information about the attack on Benghazi, in the hopes that Senators will back off on demanding more information about its drone program.
The CIA says it is "out of the detention business," as John Brennan, Obama's pick to head the agency, recently put it. But the CIA's prisons left some unfinished business.
After the scuttled nomination of Susan Rice and rumblings about stopping Chuck Hagel's, it looks as though a Senator may actually pull out their one big "check and balance" gun and put a hold on an Obama nominee.
Michael Crowley on Congress' drone anxieties, Michael Hastings on waking up to drone realities, Jonathan Last on immigration filling the population gap, Ruy Teixeira on the population non-problem, and Jason Dorrier on job-stealing robots.
In the week before John Brennan's confirmation hearing, the conversation about the nominee to be CIA director was almost entirely about drones. The hearing itself mostly wasn't.
Early into the John Brennan's confirmation hearing to be CIA director, his most difficult to believe statement is his claim, "I never believed it's better to kill a terrorist than to detain them." The Obama administration's drone program has, since 2008, incinerated not-even-high-ranking Al Qaeda members in thousands of drone strikes.
President Obama's top counterterrorism advisor faced the Senate Intelligence Committee today.
Drones will no doubt be the central issue of contention at John Brennan's confirmation hearing on Thursday to become Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, but whatever happened to torture?
By now, everybody realizes that the military — and what would be John Brennan's CIA — has a bunch of unmanned aerial vehicles that it uses to kill people, and it's sort of shady. But how far does the Obama administration — and, more importantly, administrations to come — plan to take this idea of drone warfare?
The CIA drone program sure feels like a war, and if you look at the reach of the targeted killing — now that everyone seems to be looking at the reach of the targeted killing — well, it's nearly worldwide. Here's a map to catch you up before Brennan's hearing.
In a week that has already seen the Obama administration's targeted killing program rise from clandestine legalise to coffee-table conversation, many unanswered question still remain: How much else does Brennan know? How much does the Senate? And how much will his confirmation hearing divulge by week's end?
Everyone is anxious about the "white paper" that finally begins to detail the Obama administration's opinons on targeted assassination, but what seems to have even more people worried on the morning after — and less than 48 hours from John Brennan's confirmation hearing — is what's missing from that argument.
Human-rights advocates were floored on Monday night when NBC News published the details of a Justice Department memo detailing the protocol for sending drones after United States citizens.
Antonio Villaraigosa on immigration reform, George Packer on Southern Republicans, Jennifer Welsh on France's intervention in Mali, Chris Cillizza on the Senate losing its lions, and Gary Younge on Obama's Iraq amnesia.
Tim Weiner on John Brennan, Jonathan Chait on elusive centrist debt solutions, J. Michael Cole on Japan-China hostilities, David Hirst on a possible Kurdish state, and Leonid Bershidsky on Gerard Depardieu taking Russia.
A 25-year veteran of the agency, the New Jersey native began his career at Langley in a manner you don't often hear about all that often: answering an ad in the newspaper.
As President Obama nominates John Brennan to lead the CIA, the future of the controversial program they've worked so closely on swings into uncertainty: What happens now, and what details might we learn about America's secret war?
President Obama will reportedly nominate John Brennan, the nation's current head of counterterrorism operations, to replace David Petraeus as the new director of the Central Intelligence Agency.
Over the White House's denials that any of its people let slip classified information about an operative inside this month's would-be underwear bomb plot, two Republican congressmen have asked the FBI to investigate the White House for the alleged leak.
On Sunday, Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein said whoever leaked the underwear bomber story must be prosecuted. Does that include White House officials?
The Associated Press gets credit for actually breaking the recent "underwear bomber" news, but the information that the plot was an inside job by an intelligence operative actually appears to have come accidentally from a White House attempt at damage control.
Photos have emerged from the Yemeni president's meeting with America's counterterrorism chief
On Twitter, analysts urge the administration to get its facts straight
Bin Laden was not, in fact, armed, Jay Carney says
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