Congress has appropriated about $437 billion for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan through FY 2006, according to a newly updated report from the Congressional Research Service. See “The Cost of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Other Global War on Terror Operations Since 9/11” (pdf), updated September 22, 2006. Some other notable new CRS reports that have […]
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The U.S. Department of Justice said this week that it will seek to overturn a federal court ruling that required the National Reconnaissance Office to process a request from the Federation of American Scientists for release of NRO budget documents. In a July 24, 2006 decision (pdf), Judge Reggie B. Walton had ruled that the […]
Contrary to allegations by some military officers and members of Congress, the Top Secret Department of Defense intelligence analysis program known as ABLE DANGER “did not identify Mohammed Atta or any other of the 9/11 terrorists before the 9/11 attack,” a review by the Department of Defense Inspector General concluded (9.2 MB PDF). Rep. Curt […]
Some recent reports of the Congressional Research Service that have not been made readily available to the public include the following (all pdf). “Science and Technology Policy: Issues for the 109th Congress,” updated September 1, 2006. “Navy Ship Names: Background For Congress,” updated September 1, 2006. “Legal Developments in International Civil Aviation,” updated August 25, […]
A decision to trim a tree in the Korean demilitarized zone in 1976 escalated into a threat to use nuclear weapons. After a fatal skirmish between U.S. and North Korean border guards, U.S. forces in the region were placed on heightened alert (DEFCON 3) and nuclear forces were deployed to signal preparations for an attack […]
David T. Lykken, a psychologist who did pioneering research and public education on the limits and abuses of polygraph testing, died last week at age 78. With exceptional clarity he demonstrated that the polygraph is not a “lie detector” but simply a recorder of physiological responses to verbal stimuli. And, he explained, there is no […]
When the U.S. Army established a password-protected internet portal called Army Knowledge Online a few years ago, it swallowed up untold thousands of unclassified records that had previously been publicly available on the world wide web, and then ceased to be. One such item was the Military Intelligence Professional Bulletin (MIPB), a quarterly Army journal […]
Commercial vendors will happily sell you almost any Congressional Research Service report issued in the last decade, making CRS secrecy profitable for some but otherwise pointless. Yet Congress has stubbornly told the CRS not to make its reports directly available to the taxpaying public, who have already paid for them once. Some recent CRS reports […]
The Arms Sales Monitoring Project has obtained, via the Freedom of Information Act, a copy of the Defense Department’s contribution to the annual “Section 655” report* on U.S. arms transfers and military assistance. The report contains data on the five main U.S. security assistance programs: the Direct Commercial Sales Program (administered by the State Department), […]
Earlier this month, The Department of Homeland Security added two new sections to the Ready.gov website, one for people with disabilities and another for seniors. However, when you take a close look at them, you will notice that all they have done is shuffled the information they already had on the site onto two new […]
Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts (R-KS) has endorsed a proposal to task the Public Interest Declassification Board (PIDB) to review the recent Intelligence Committee reports on pre-war intelligence to determine if they were properly declassified. He acted in response to harsh criticism from Senate Democrats alleging that the Bush Administration had abused its classification […]