North Korea has renewed its planning for the likely succession of leadership from the ailing Kim Jong Il to his youngest son Kim Cho’ng-un (or Kim Jong Un), according to a deeply researched assessment by the DNI Open Source Center (OSC). “Pyongyang last autumn reinvigorated a nuanced propaganda campaign that it apparently began eight years […]
“Government must operate through public laws and regulations” and not through “secret law,” a federal appellate court declared in a decision last month. When our government attempts to do otherwise, the court said, it is emulating “totalitarian regimes.” The new ruling (pdf) overturned the conviction of a defendant who had been found guilty of exporting […]
The transcripts of Nixon White House tape recordings that are published in the State Department’s official Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) series are merely “interpretations,” not official records, the State Department acknowledged in the latest FRUS volume that was released this month. As such, those transcripts are susceptible to revision and correction. “Readers […]
The latest volume of the Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) series, the official record of U.S. foreign policy, reflects events that took place from 1969 to 1972, or nearly forty years ago. This represents a continuing violation of a 1991 statute which requires the Secretary of State to publish FRUS “not more than […]
Deliveries of arms through the Defense Department’s Foreign Military Sales (FMS) Program decreased by nearly a billion dollars in fiscal year 2008, according to the most recent edition of the Annual Military Assistance Report. The report, which is often referred to as the “Section 655 Report” after the section in the Foreign Assistance Act that […]
Retirement of the W62 warhead will be completed in 2009. By Hans M. Kristensen The U.S. State Department has confirmed the estimate made by FAS on this blog in February that the United States had already reached the limit of 2,200 operationally deployed strategic nuclear warheads set by the 2002 Moscow Treaty. The confirmation occurred […]
Notwithstanding official proclamations of a new era of transparency, public access to declassified historical records continues to be obstructed by procedural potholes, limited resources for processing records, competing priorities and, sometimes, bad faith. At the Naval History and Heritage Command (NHHC), declassified files that used to be open to the public have been withdrawn indefinitely […]
The White House has threatened to veto the FY2010 intelligence bill if it amends the National Security Act to permit expanded notification of sensitive intelligence activities to more members of the intelligence committees, as the House Intelligence Committee proposed. However, based on the findings of a new report from the Congressional Research Service, the controversial […]
Other noteworthy new Congressional Research Service reports that have not previously been made available online include (both pdf): “Afghanistan: U.S. Foreign Assistance,” July 8, 2009. “Chemical Facility Security: Reauthorization, Policy Issues, and Options for Congress,” July 13, 2009.
Between September 2001 and February 2008, the Federal Bureau of Investigation initiated and closed the investigation of 85 reported leaks of classified intelligence information, “all of which concerned unauthorized disclosures of classified information to the media,” FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III told the Senate Intelligence Committee in a written response to questions (pdf) dated […]
by Alicia Godsberg There is cause for cautious optimism after Presidents Obama and Medvedev signed their START follow-on Joint Understanding in Moscow last Monday – the goal of completing a legally binding bilateral nuclear disarmament agreement with verification measures is preferable to letting START expire without an agreement or without one that keeps some sort […]
From the point of view of an al Qaida military leader, Western intelligence agents are now ubiquitous in the lands of Islam, and their operations have been extraordinarily effective. The Western spies are unfailingly lethal, leaving a trail of dead Islamist fighters behind them. Worst of all, they have managed to recruit innumerable Muslims to […]