United States' Central Intelligence Agency chief Leon Panetta on Thursday met Home Minister P Chidambaram and discussed various issues including terrorism and unrest in neighbouring Pakistan. During the meeting, the two sides expressed satisfaction on the close cooperation between India and the US in the aftermath of the terror strikes on Mumbai in November, official sources said. The two sides also looked for new ways to forge closer alliance between the two countries.
"Of course, from a more general perspective, the Indian weapon programme has produced sufficiently good weapons -- they did go 'bang' at Pokhran II -- to provide a nuclear deterrent that only insane fools or idiots would ignore."
Central Intelligence Agency chief Leon Panetta has said that the drone attacks against the Al Qaeda and the Taliban targets inside Pakistan would continue.
United States Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has all but confirmed the Central Intelligence Agency's assertions that certain elements in Pakistan are working with the Al Qaeda and undermining the United States-led war on terror. "I would say they're not our theoretical ally; they are our ally," she said, but acknowledged, "there are elements in Pakistan that one worries that there are connections to the militants in the region."
It was the American Central Intelligence Agency that made India and Pakistan share highly sensitive evidence after the deadly Mumbai terrorist attacks last November, says a report in the Washington Post.
The Central Intelligence Agency has confronted Pakistan with new evidence about ties between the country's spy service with some militant groups responsible for rising violence in Afghanistan, possibly including suicide bombing at the Indian Embassy in Kabul earlier this month.
Obama's detractors describe the new approach to counter-terrorism as the Jesuit approach. Will it succeed? Obama and Brennan want to give the new policy a try, writes security expert B Raman
Holding the Lashkar-e-Tayiba responsible for the terror attack on Mumbai last year, a British Parliamentary committee on Sunday said that several major terror attacks across the world, including in London, Madrid and Bali, had origins in the tribal areas of Pakistan. A report by the powerful Foreign Affairs Committee quoted a former Central Intelligence Agency chief as saying that the Pakistan-based LeT has reached a 'merge point' with the al-Qaeda.
Human rights organisations have been alleging that the Guantanamo Bay military prison, set up by Bush Administration in 2002, was being used to detain and question terror suspects with harsh interrogation measures. The prison camp currently holds about 245 inmates. The executive orders in this regard were signed by Obama at a White House ceremony during his meeting with the retired military officials on Thursday.
The suicide bomber, who killed as many as seven Central Intelligence Agency officials and injured six others last week in Afghanistan was a Jordanian informant, who lured the American spy agency into a trap in the name of providing them with actionable intelligence against top Al Qaeda leaders, media reports said.
US President-elect Barack Obama has named Leon Panetta, a former White House Chief of Staff, to head the Central Intelligence Agency and retired admiral Dennis Blair as the director of the National Intelligence.John Brenna, a former leader of the National Counter-terrorism Center, will be his Homeland Security Adviser and Deputy National Security Adviser for Counter-terrorism Serving, Obama announced.
United States President Barack Obama on Monday ordered a probe into allegations that the Bush administration resisted efforts to investigate a Central Intelligence Agency-backed Afghan warlord General Abdul Rashid Dostum over the massacre of hundreds of Taliban prisoners in 2001.
The Central Intelligence Agency Director Leon E Panetta on Thursday confirmed that seven of its officers died while six others were wounded in a suicide bombing in Afghanistan, the deadliest single attack on a United States intelligence agency.
The United States allowed Pakistan to manufacture and acquire nuclear weapons without informing the Congress, a non-profit corruption watchdog has said, quoting a whistleblower who was fired for objecting to the policy.
Riedel, who was also the erstwhile director for South Asia in the National Security Council during the Clinton Administration and most recently an adviser on foreign policy to the Obama campaign, said it's difficult to believe the Pakistani government's assertions that its intelligence service has no links to LeT. If there's anything that is a 64 million dollar question today," it is finding out the "extent of its ties to the Pakistani intelligence service."
The Bangladesh police has handed over top Lashkar operative of South India and self-styled commander of the terror outfit Thadiyantavida Naseer and his brother-in-law Shahbas to India, said sources in intelligence agencies.
Bruce Riedel, now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who is being talked about as likely to be tapped for a senior position in an Obama Administration that deals with South Asia, said while the LeT's continuing relationship with the Pakistani intelligence services, the ISI, is much debated and the Pakistani authorities deny any such relationship, "The fact is that the organisation has been tolerated in Pakistan despite the 2002 ban."
Tahawur Hussain Rana, who was arrested in the United States along with terror operative David Headley by the Federal Bureau of Investigation last month, had visited Kochi on November 16, last year, and had stayed in Taj Residency (now named Gateway) for a day.
Citigroup came under growing pressure to overhaul its board on Tuesday after it revealed that two long-serving directors survived a shareholder vote largely thanks to a balloting rule that is due to be scrapped.
A top Al Qaeda leader allegedly responsible for the deaths of as many as seven Central Intelligence Agency agents in a suicide bombing last December has been reportedly killed in a drone attack, media reports said. Several US media outlets reported that Hussein al-Yemini, the man said to be responsible for the CIA bombing, was apparently killed in a drone attack in Miran Shah area of Pakistan on March 8.
Security has been stepped up across Kerala's coastal belt from Cherthala to Kochi this afternoon following reports of a group of suspected LTTE cadre landing in a boat at Thyckal Beach in the district today.
One could assess without fear of contradiction that the New Delhi visit of Panetta, who is still to find his feet as an intelligence chief, would have had a much larger political objective for Obama. Firstly, to reassure Indian leaders that Clinton's first visit to China does not mean the downgrading of the US relations with India.
The job was assigned to Blackwater, now known as Xe Services, the company whose operations in Iraq had come under intense scrutiny. CIA earlier hired it for its secret (now abandoned) programme to eliminate top Al Qaeda leaders.
Shamsi airfield, in the Baluchistan region in southern Pakistan, has become the new ground zero in the United States war against the Taliban and Al Qaeda.The Times, London, reports that the Central Intelligence Agency is covertly using the Shamsi airfield, located just 30 miles from the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, to launch Predator strikes on Taliban and Al Qaeda bases on the Pakistani side of the border with Afghanistan -- a fact repeatedly denied by US and Pak
A peeved Pakistan feels that the dozen unarmed RQ7 drones the United States has offered it do not meet its 'strategic requirement' and is hoping for a 'better deal' in the form of missile-capable Shadow 600 Unmanned Aerial Vehicles to hit militant hideouts, a media report said in Islamabad on Monday.
Investigative journalist Wayne Madsen reported that according to intelligence sources, Ibrahim is a CIA asset, both as a veteran of the mujahedeen war and in a continuing connection with his casino and drug trade operations in Kathmandu.
India has conveyed its concerns to the top security and intelligence officials of the United States, the United Kingdom and Russia over the possible implications of Pakistan's links with the Taliban and various terrorist groups operating in Afghanistan for regional security and stability, people familiar with the development said.
The meetings were held by members of the National Security Council's Principals Committee, which at that time included Vice President Richard Cheney, former National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell, apart from CIA director George Tenet and Attorney General John Ashcroft. The principals not only discussed the tactics, but also approved them, reports ABCNews.com
Security of President Pratibha Devisingh Patil, who arrived in Pune on Friday on a four-day visit, has been beefed up following an E-mail threat. The President was provided a new bullet-proof vehicle, official sources said, adding that the vehicle was requisitioned from Mumbai.
Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari secretly met the director of America's Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Michael Hayden on his recent US visit, a media report said on Monday.
Central intelligence agencies have picked up intercepts that militants groups such as the Lashkar-e-Tayiba have come up with a new plan to target cities in the south of India.
The Centre on Wednesday made it clear that it has no input suggesting that Pakistan's intelligence agency Inter Services Intelligence had contacted victims of riots in Muzaffarnagar in Uttar Pradesh.
The report said the crucial meeting involved Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence, CIA director General Michael V Hayden, new army chief General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, and Lieutenant General Nadeem Taj, the chief of Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence.
The CIA director described Pakistan's role in the war on terror, saying "The United States has not had a better partner in the war on terrorism than the Pakistanis. The turmoil of the past few weeks has only deepened that cooperation," he said, adding the two countries now had 'even more clearly mutual and common interests'.
The British-controlled Indian ocean island of Diego Garcia might have served as a secret prison for America's Central Intelligence Agency, a media report said on Friday.
Premier Yousuf Raza Gilani was handed a "charge-sheet" by Central Intelligence Agency chief Michael V Hayden on Pakistani intelligence agencies' links to militant activities and was told to rein in the ISI during their meeting in Washington.
Upbeat over their two major successful attacks against the police on Andhra-Orissa border in less than one month, in which more than 50 policemen were killed, the Maoist rebels are now gearing up to target the police stations to loot the arms. This warning has been issued by the central intelligence agency -- the Intelligence Bureau -- in its report assessing the overall situation of the Naxalite problem in the country.
At the fag end of his presidency, George W Bush has acknowledged his disappointment at the CIA giving him wrong information about the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, on the premise of which America invaded that country.
Uttar Pradesh was alerted about the possibility of terrorist attacks in public places, Minister of State for Home Sri Prakash Jaiswal said on Sunday.
Stating that the Al Qaida was able to establish an unprecedented safe haven along the Pakistan-Afghan border in the past 18 months, the Central Intelligence Agency chief has warned that the situation there presented a clear danger to the two nations, as also to the United States. General Micheal Hayden termed the 2006 peace deal between Pakistan government and the pro-Taliban tribals in North Waziristan as absolutely disastrous.
