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.
Pictures of Osama bin Laden's dead body will not be released, United States President Barack Obama said on Wednesday, according to CBS news. Obama said in an interview that he would not release the post-mortem images of bin Laden taken to prove his death, the news outlet said in a statement.
The United States has sought to play down a former Dutch Prime Minister's revelation that his country did not prosecute Pakistani nuclear scientist A Q Khan for stealing atomic secrets in 1979 at the instance of CIA.
Pakistani officials were kept deliberately out of loop by the United States in its operation to get Osama bin Laden as it feared they might "alert" the targets and "jeopardise" the mission, Central Intelligence Agency Director Leon Panetta said on Tuesday.
After bin Laden's reported death near Islamabad, rediff.com revisits B Raman's June 2010 analysis
Central Intelligence Agency chief Leon Panetta has said that the drone attacks against the Al Qaeda and the Taliban targets inside Pakistan would continue.
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.
Pakistani-American terrorist David Headley's plea bargain, under which he confessed to plotting the Mumbai terror attacks, throws light on close links between the Al Qaeda and the Lashkar-e-Tayiba, according to former Central Intelligence Agency expert Bruce Riedel.Headley's story showed in clear contours the close relationship between Al Qaeda and the Pakistani militant group LeT, Riedel, who led the review of the Obama administration's Af-Pak strategy,said.
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.
Pakistan's fundamentalist Jamaat-e-Islami party has announced it will provide financial aid of Rs 3 lakh to the families of the three men killed in an incident involving suspected Central Intelligence Agency contractor Raymond Davis. This is in a bid to forestall reported efforts by Saudi Arabia to arrange a "blood money" deal to settle the matter.
In a setback to the United States' efforts to seek early release of its national Raymond Davis, who was arrested for double murder, a Pakistani court on Thursday rejected his claim that he has diplomatic immunity and said it would go ahead with his trial. During the last hearing of the case, 37-year-old Davis, a suspected Central Intelligence Agency contractor, had filed an application in which he insisted that he had immunity.
American official Raymond Davis, arrested for double murder, had "close links" with Taliban and was "instrumental" in recruiting youths for it, the media in Pakistan claimed on Tuesday, close on the heels of reports in the United States that he was a Central Intelligence Agency agent tracking movements of terror groups like the Lashkar-e-Tayiba.
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."
CIA Director Leon E Panetta said: "The bottom line here is that the war on terrorism is not just about Al Qaeda. It is a series of terrorist groups that are basically confronting us and it is the kinds of changes that we see in their methods of approaching the United States that I think represents the very important threat that we have to pay attention to."
Erstwhile Central Intelligence Agency veteran Bruce Riedel, who was the co-chair of the first Af-Pak (Afghanistan-Pakistan Strategic Review) of the Obama administration, had said that the US Af-Pak policy has got in only half right, because while you can't deal with Afghanistan without dealing with Pakistan, by the same token you can't deal with Pakistan without dealing with India -- meaning you've got to address Islamabad's paranoia over New Delhi.
United States President Barack Obama must focus on Pakistan, which is home to more terrorist groups than any other country, for success in the war against terrorism. "This year, President Obama must focus like a laser on Pakistan. He has already promised to travel to the country in 2011," said former CIA official Bruce Riedel. "And he will need to signal our determination to (subtly) help broker a rapprochement between India and Pakistan, with the aid of key players," he said
America's Central Intelligence Agency on Thursday strongly refuted reports that Pakistani-origin US national David Coleman Headley, charged with criminal conspiring in the 26/11 terror attacks, was its agent at any point of time.
Headley's trial thus promises to be fascinating and important. If it is established that Headley was working for Headley all along, it will establish the Mumbai terror attacks as being a joint Lashkay-Al Qaeda operation, says Riedel. This, if true, is bad news for American counter-terrorism ops given the Lashkar's global network of supporters the Pakistani diaspora
Rediff.com's Vicky Nanjappa speaks to Author Anuj Dhar about his latest book on Subhash Chandra Bose and uncovers some of the CIA's long-lost records, along the way.
The United States on Wednesday expressed its serious concern over corruption in Afghanistan, but said right now it is focused entirely on the November 7 run-off to presidential elections.
The CIA has come in for criticism for giving false information to strengthen the US case for invading Iraq.
David Petraeus, considered to be one of the best war-time generals and who till recently was commander of US-led North Atlantic Treaty Organisation forces in Afghanistan, was on Tuesday sworn in as the chief of the Central Intelligence Agency.
The CIA's Counter Terrorist Centre never developed a plan to deal with the possibility that terrorists might use airplanes as weapons, despite growing evidence during the 1990s.
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.
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
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.
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.
Delhi Police on Monday arrested one of National Investigation Agency's (NIA) most wanted terrorists Mohammad Shahnawaz Alam and his two associates who were part of an Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI)-sponsored module 'disguised' as an Islamic State (IS) module and seized incriminating material, including those suspected to be used in an improvised explosive device (IED) fabrication, officials said.
The Central Intelligence Agency has not allowed the death of Osama bin Laden to slow down its hunt for high-value targets of Al Qaeda and its affiliates in the Pashtun tribal belt of Pakistan.
Afridi had ran a fake vaccination drive in Abbottabad city to help CIA agents track the former Al Qaeda chief, who was later killed by US Navy Seals in a controversial raid on May 2, 2011.
A United States lawmaker, who was given the rare opportunity by the Central Intelligence Agency to view the death photos of Osama bin Laden, has said the pictures were "pretty gruesome" and there was no doubt that the Al Qaeda chief was dead.
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.
Now that it has been revealed that Osama was hiding in Pakistan, the presence of other key Taliban and Al Qaeda operatives in that nation doesn't seem such a far-fetched possibility
Uttar Pradesh was alerted about the possibility of terrorist attacks in public places, Minister of State for Home Sri Prakash Jaiswal said on Sunday.
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
In what could come as a setback to American efforts to seek early release of arrested Central Intelligence Agency contractor Raymond Davis, a Pakistani court on Monday declined to rule on his diplomatic status and moved the matter to a lower court which is already conducting his trial on murder charges. 36-year-old Davis was arrested in Lahore on January 27 after he shot and killed two armed men he claimed were trying to rob him.
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.
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.
The CIA did not target him once as the UAE royal family was with him at that time, the agency's director, George Tenet, told the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks on the US.