Sabrina DeSousa, an alleged CIA agent charged with kidnapping in Italy, says that a Justice Department decision to pay her legal costs is much too little, much too late.

"Unbelievable!  The United States Department of Justice just 'approved' an attorney to defend me, a month after the trial ended, knowing full well that an attorney at this stage will make little or no difference to the outcome or verdict," DeSousa said via e-mail Friday.

You can imagine the conversation Tom Ridge had with his literary agent last year.

"Governor, I've just finished your manuscript. Wonderful -- all that fascinating stuff about how the government works -- or doesn't!"  (Laughs.)

"All those alphabet agencies - NSC, ODNI, NCTC - my God. How did you keep all of them straight?" (Chuckles.)

An Army civilian from a Fort Lewis, Wash., "force protection division" infiltrated a Seattle-area antiwar group posing as an anarchist who could steal classified information for the organization, according to little-noticed news reports.

A member of the antiwar group said documents obtained under a Freedom of Information Act request revealed that his friend and fellow activist "John Jacob" was actually military spy John Towery.

A Fort Lewis spokesman confirmed that Towery was employed on the base but would offer no additional information because he "performs sensitive law enforcement work with the installation law enforcement community." 

American and Israeli intelligence organizations, in cooperation with local security services, have scored notable recent successes against Hezbollah, the Lebanon-based terror organization, according to a new report.

Last September, when the military-media complex was all-atwitter with Bob Woodward's revelations of a revolution in counterterrorism methods, I found myself talking with a confidante of Gen. David Petraeus at an off-the-record cocktail hour.

Petraeus was then commander of coalition forces in Iraq, and was generally being credited with developing a breakthrough technology to find and track terrorist suspects that was so secret that Woodward couldn't reveal the details.

But according to my interlocutor, Petraeus, whom he had talked to hours earlier, gave complete credit for the counterterror revolution to Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the new U.S. commander in Afghanistan, for developing and running the program, which is still shrouded in mystery.

You'd think that the nation's number one domestic counterterrorism agency would have better things to do than yap at authors and publishers about using the bureau's official seal on their books.

But I.C. Smith, a retired senior FBI counterintelligence agent who wrote a very critical book about the bureau in 2004, just found out otherwise.

A few weeks ago an FBI lawyer instructed Smith that he had to remove the FBI seal from his Web site, including one on the jacket of his 2004 book, "INSIDE: A Top G Man Exposes Spies, Lies and Bureaucratic Bungling Inside the FBI."    

The G-lawyer also told Smith that the publisher of his book, Thomas Nelson, Inc., would also be instructed "that if the book is reprinted, the cover be redesigned to remove the FBI Seal."

A job ad for an advanced counterintelligence instructor at a Defense Department school has professionals in the field hopping mad.

Why? The ad, placed by a military subcontractor, says "No Education Required."

It "left me speechless," said John Lenczowski, founder and president of the Institute for World Politics (IWP), in a widely circulated e-mail to friends deploring the minimal requirement for an instructor at the Joint Counterintelligence Training Academy, in Elkridge, Md.

A story over the weekend pinpointing the location of Osama Bin Laden in Chitral, a remote, snow blanketed valley high up in Pakistan's side of the Hindu Kush, has triggered another round of speculation on the whereabouts of the fugitive terrorist chief.

The Italian prosecutor who has been trying two dozen CIA agents on kidnapping charges says he will continue the case, despite a high court decision Wednesday that excludes the use of wiretapped conversations among top Italian intelligence officials.

Armando Spataro, reached by telephone on a train between Rome and Milan, said,  "the trial will go on" despite the Constitutional Court's decision excluding transcripts in which intelligence officials discussed a CIA plan for the  "extraordinary rendition" of an al Qaeda suspect from a Milan street to an Egyptian prison in 2003.

Many CIA veterans and their friends in Congress are generally groaning over the choice of Leon Panetta over an "intelligence professional" to run the nation's premier spy agency.

"The message is, 'I don't want to hear anything out of the CIA. Make it go away. No scandals. Keep it quiet,'" a former senior CIA manager told Laura Rozen for her new  Foreign Policy.com blog.

"They put over there a guy who is a political loyalist, who will keep everything nice and quiet, but who won't know a good piece of intelligence from a shi**y piece of intelligence, and wouldn't know a good intelligence officer" from a bad one."

Lamented another former top CIA officer, one who was hoping to get Obama's nod: "So much for a professional at the top."

"I find the choice of Leon Panetta to head the CIA a curious one," another former spy told Wired's Noah Shachtman at the Danger Room. 
 

"On the one hand, if you are looking to pick a nation's top spook, it is generally a good idea to pick someone with more than a cursory exposure to the intelligence business. It is also more than a little annoying that we can't seem to find a CIA chief that hasn't spent all of their adult life playing politics."

Speaking of which, my CQ colleague Tim Starks drew frosty responses about Panetta from Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., the incoming chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and the man she is replacing, John D. "Jay" Rockefeller IV of West Virginia.

 "I was not informed about the selection of Leon Panetta to be the CIA director. I know nothing about this, other than what I've read," she said in a written statement in response to a query from Starks. "My position has consistently been that I believe the agency is best-served by having an intelligence professional in charge at this time."

Likewise, Rockefeller was worried that Panetta "has no intelligence experience," an aide told Starks,  "because he has believed this has always been a position that should be outside of the political realm."

Panetta's limited intelligence experience demands that his deputy "be an insider and must have strong internal management skills," a senior retired operative told me.

I, too, was one of those who thought the president-elect should find someone who knows their way around the Langley labyrinths well enough to fend off self-serving bureaucrats and whip that place into shape, especially by getting rid of mid-level managers who are routinely described to me as unimaginative and overcautious.

But the public, and by extension, Obama, obviously doesn't share as high a regard for "intelligence professionals" as we inside-the-Beltwayers.  

Indeed, to many people, "intelligence" and "professional" hardly belong in the same sentence after the surprise attacks of 9/11, the Iraq WMD fiasco, the continuing success of Osama Bin Laden in eluding capture, and, of course, the false confessions of top bin Laden lieutenants under torture.

The infamous "Curveball" episode, in which CIA bosses took the word of a lone informant they never even talked to as the main basis for declaring Saddam Hussein had biological weapons, showed the agency's standards of accuracy "were lower than a tabloid newspaper's," in the words of one disgusted CIA operations veteran.    

Among Washington's big hitters, moreover, running the CIA was no longer considered a plum, I was told, since the creation of the National Intelligence Directorate displaced the agency as the President's daily briefer and primus inter pares in the spy community.

People who might've jumped at the chance to run it in the past now saw it as second seat in the violin section, some longtime intelligence observers were telling me.

"I wish I could say that I disagree, but I can't. It's spot on," said one top former intelligence agency head, reflecting a sentiment I heard from others.

"Everybody wants to run the whole show, especially since it gives them 'player' status in Washington, and the opportunity to hobnob with the President. Never mind that the [intelligence] community they preside over is broken, long overdue for an overhaul, and mainly turns out crap."

But if the "intelligence professionals" take a deep breath, they may find that Obama's choice is the best thing that could happen to the CIA, at least in one regard: the former White House budget director, chief of staff, congressman, onetime Republican (a Nixon appointee) and longtime Washington power broker is hardly likely to play second fiddle to a mere general or admiral occupying the DNI's chair.

One way to look at the not-yet-announced appointment is that Obama is putting his own man at the top of a very sensitive agency, one that could make or break his presidency, in the same way that JFK installed his brother Bobby at the Justice Department.

Adm. Dennis Blair, the all but officially announced DNI nominee, is not likely to miss that.

Harry B. "Skip" Brandon, a former deputy head of counterintelligence at the FBI, compared Obama's selection of Panetta to Jimmy Carter's appointment of federal judge William H. Webster to run a troubled FBI in 1978. Nine years later, President Ronald Reagan turned to Webster to take over an even more troubled CIA, which was caught up in the so-called Iran-Contra, arms-for-hostages scandal.

"He could bring a bipartisan credibility to the CIA," Brandon said of Panetta, "and calm the troubled waters there." He could also be "an honest broker on Capitol Hill," Brandon said.

And as more than one close observer put it, "No one's saying Leon who?"

By all accounts, moreover, Panetta was a strong manager and effective chief of staff in the Clinton White House, "an honest, straight shooter," in the words of one Obama booster who asked not to be named.

And from his stints as OMB director, and before that, chairmanship of the House Budget Committee, "he knows the entire scope of the intelligence budget," this person added. As chief of staff, he also sat in on the President's daily intelligence brief.

More recently, Panetta was a member of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group, which  recommended a timetable with U.S. troop withdrawals.

But it's not likely he'll get a free pass in his confirmation hearings.

As I wrote earlier today, Panetta's nomination is likely to give Republicans fresh ammunition to reopen questions about the Clinton administration's counterterrorism record, which Republican critics maintain was lackluster at best after the first terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, in 1993.

Panetta was budget director and later chief of staff during the first Clinton term.

Considering the Republicans had the White House when the 9/11 hijackers came calling, of course -- and by most accounts sloughed off warnings headlined "Bin Laden determined to strike in US" -- there's only so far they can take that line of attack.

But if only one thing is clear from the Panetta nomination, it's this: President Obama intends to make a clear break with the intelligence policies and personnel of the Bush administration.

"Having served in Congress in the wake of Watergate and the domestic surveillance abuses that surfaced during the 1970s, Mr. Panetta understands how a democratic government should operate," said Rep. Rush Holt, D-N.J., a member of the House Intelligence Committee and chair of its oversight Panel since 2007.

"We need the CIA to collect reliable, actionable intelligence in ways that respect American values and honor the Constitution," Holt added.

"Mr. Panetta's background and reputation indicate he would serve the intelligence community, the President, and the country well." 

President-elect Obama's selection of former congressman and White House official Leon E. Panetta to run the CIA is likely to give Republicans fresh ammunition to reopen questions about the Clinton administration's counterterrorism policies.

Critics have long maintained that Clinton was uninterested in intelligence issues and slow to come to grips with the threat of Islamist terrorism, even after the first attack on the World Trade Center, in 1993.

Panetta was budget director and later chief of staff during the first Clinton term.

In an interview three months after the 9/11 attacks, Panetta said that senior Clinton aides viewed terrorism as just one of many pressing global problems.

"Clinton was aware of the threat and sometimes he would mention it," Panetta told the New York Times. But the "big issues" in the president's first term, he said, were "Russia, Eastern bloc, Middle East peace, human rights, rogue nations and then terrorism."

"When it came to terrorism, Clinton administration officials continued the policy of their predecessors, who had viewed it primarily as a crime to be solved and prosecuted by law enforcement agencies," the Times said.

Information gathered through grand jury investigations by the Justice Department after the 1993 bombing pointed to overseas, but the information was not shared with the CIA because of the "wall" that existed then between intelligence and law enforcement operations.

As for Afghanistan, the CIA virtually abandoned the region in 1989 after defeating the Red Army, and the Clinton administration (and Congress) did nothing to reverse that policy, leaving the spy agency with few sources to follow the emergence of al Qaeda.

Another Clinton aide back then, George Stephanopoulos, said he believed the 1993 attack did not gain more attention because, in the end, it "wasn't a successful bombing."

"It wasn't the kind of thing where you walked into a staff meeting and people asked, what are we doing today in the war against terrorism?" he added.

It wasn't until a truck bomb tore into the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995, killing 168 people, that plans to reorganize the government's counterterrorism efforts were revived, Panetta said.

If Oklahoma City could be hit, a terrorist attack could "happen at the White House,"  Panetta said.

Two months after the bombing, the Times reported, "Mr. Clinton ordered the government to intensify the fight against terrorism. The order did not give agencies involved in the fight more money, nor did it end the bureaucratic turf battles among them."

Three years later, Clinton responded to the 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa with cruise missile strikes on Sudan and Afghanistan, moves that drew caustic comments from Republican presidential aspirant George W. Bush   during the 2000 campaign.

Panetta was appointed chief of staff to Clinton in 1994, and served in that position until 1997.

In 1996 he was handed the duty of informing then-CIA Director John M. Deutch that his appointment would not be renewed in the second administration.

He was a Democratic congressman from California's 17th district from 1977 to 1993.

Panetta was also a member of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group, which recommended a timetable for the withdrawal of U.S. troops.

He is firmly on the record against the use of torture to interrogate terrorist suspects.

"We cannot and we must not use torture under any circumstances. We are better than that," Panetta wrote in The Washington Monthly last spring.

The increasingly bold attacks on NATO supplies in Pakistan should be cause for serious worry, U.S. counterterrorism operatives are saying.

The attacks mean that Islamic extremist fighters in the region are adopting the tactics that their fathers and uncles employed more than a quarter century ago -- with CIA backing - to drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan.

The objective: to choke off supplies to occupying troops on the ground.

"The bad guys understand our operations and what our lifelines are all about," said an analyst with counterterror experience in the region.

The curtains are coming down on a lingering, virtually meaningless Senate debate on "several apparently doomed amendments" to electronic surveillance legislation, my CQ colleague Tim Starks reports, with final votes scheduled for tomorrow,

Passage of the legislation overhauling the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act without amendments that would make telecommunication companies legally liable for their participation in the adminstration's warrantless monitoring of phone calls and emails is all but certain.

"Currently it looks like they'll finish up tomorrow afternoon," Starks just told me by e-mail from the Senate press gallery, where he's he's following debate.

 And Sen. Barack Obama is expected to vote for it, he says.

I'm thinking it'll get about 75 votes, maybe more. Cloture on the motion to proceed (aka a vote against filibustering, in essence) got 80, with 15 "no" votes, but that may have been a reflection more of people wanting to get on with it. The five who didn't vote on cloture include Obama, who said he's on board with the bill, and he's now expected to attend the vote tomorrow. The earlier Senate bill that was slightly more Republican-friendly got 68 votes in February, so this will get more than that, at least.

Obama's vote has created some very unhappy campers on the left, Starks notes.

His positional shifts on this matter -- he was adamant in his opposition this version of the FISA bill once upon a time -- have driven some on the left absolutely bonkers.  Last I checked last week, a group of his supporters opposed to immunity was the biggest group in the www.my.barackobama.com house, his very own website.

Bush administration officials have signaled their opposition to all three amendments pending to the bill, Stark writes.

Each would modify or cut out a provision of the bill that would effectively wipe out lawsuits against companies being sued for assisting President Bush's warrantless surveillance program.

"I do believe at this point in time to give this retroactive immunity kind of makes a mockery of the fact that we're supposed to be a government of laws, not people," said Sen. Barbara Boxer , D-Calif.

The leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee, however, argued against the amendments.

"Private companies who cooperated with the government in good faith, as the facts before the congressional intelligence committees demonstrate they did, should not be held accountable for the president's bad policy decisions," said Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV , D-W.Va.

Liberals, meanwhile, announced the formation of Accountability Now, http://www.actblue.com/page/accountabilitynow, whose goal will be to defeat members of congress who voted for the bill.

Salon blogger Glenn Greenwald writes that the fight against telecom immunity is not over, and that members of Congress who opposed it will be targeted in the elections.

(T)he campaign we have been conducting is intended to be only the first step -- not the last -- in taking a stand against the endless erosion of core constitutional protections and the rapidly expanding Lawless Surveillance State. We have created a new organization, Accountability Now, to conduct the ongoing battle to target and remove from power those who enable these abuses; to force these issues into our political discourse; and to prevent the Washington Establishment from continuing to trample on basic constitutional protections with impunity.

Present and former FBI officials say there's nothing really new coming in the bureau's domestic counterterrorism program, despite headlines this week about new "ethnic profiling" measures in the works.

"The Justice Department is considering letting the FBI investigate Americans without any evidence of wrongdoing, relying instead on a terrorist profile that could single out Muslims, Arabs or other racial and ethnic groups," the Associated Press reported in an exclusive story.

The FBI already takes into account a person's national origins, particularly if he or she is a native Pakistani, Iranian, or other nationality of high interest to U.S. intelligence, when opening preliminary investigations into potential terrorist conspiracies, the officials say.

And as the A.P. itself reported,  among the factors that spur an FBI investigation is travel to regions of the world known for terrorist activity, access to weapons or military training, along with the person's race or ethnicity.

But national origin alone is not enough to trigger an investigation, officials say.

For awhile in the South San Francisco-San Jose area, which have large numbers of Iranian exiles, the FBI did run a pilot program sifting through grocery store sales records in search of "ethnic food" purchasing patterns, sources told me last year.

But the FBI denied it was trying to follow a "falafel trail" to potential terrorists.  

However, because the FBI's aggressive new "domain management" program, in which bureau field offices are expected to gather intelligence about immigrant groups of interest in their territory, has left investigators unsure of their limits, the Justice Department is working on guidlines to codify existing practices.

This does not amount to a new "ethnic profiling" program, officials insisted.

The American Civil Liberties Union was not convinced.

"This country should not abandon the presumption of innocence," said Caroline Fredrickson, Director of the ACLU's Washington Legislative Office. "If the FBI is allowed to investigate based on racial or ethnic characteristics, it will make everyone of a certain color or creed a suspect. That stands our traditional presumption of innocent until proven guilty on its head," she said.

Harry B. "Skip" Brandon, a former deputy assistant  director of the FBI for counterintelligence, said the headlines about racial profiling may be overblown.

"It does not seem unreasonable for a preliminary look at someone if you combine some of the factors above," Brandon told me. 

While it does not include everyone, and there are certainly exceptions, it seems to me that the majority of those involved in acts of terrorism here or abroad have traveled to "regions of the world known for terrorist activity,"   for training and some have had weapons or military training and the vast majority have been of a certain ethnicity.  

 Of course people always make the argument, what about (Timothy) McVeigh etc.? And there is no question that terrorists are not limited by race or ethnicity. But anyone with any sense at all has to look at the big picture and see what fits a majority.  From a practical standpoint, you can't look at everyone so you have to go where your facts and experience tell you a prospective operative or terrorist have a common background -- and that can include race and ethnicity. 
 

In the battle for public opinion on torture, Joe Navarro doesn't stand a chance against Jack Bauer.

The hero of the Fox action series "24," now entering its seventh season, seems to have cast a spell over the country -- including high level Pentagon, CIA and White House officials who continue to insist that torture works, despite all evidence to the contrary.

People, it's fiction!

Joe Navarro, on the other hand, is the real deal, an FBI counterterrorism veteran who's gone mano-a-mano in prison cells with many a bad guy.

"There are a lot of people that think that torture and pushing people around and just being nasty gets the work done," Navarro said during an almost completely ignored seminar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies last week

"I assure you, I have never had anybody confess to me who said, well, I decided to confess to you because you treated me like crap. It just doesn't happen that way."

Another tough hombre on the panel, Ken Robinson, who spent 20 years in black ops with the Army Rangers, Special Forces, CIA and NSA, said bluntly: "It doesn't work."

Why do so many people think it does?