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Full Title: Accused Russian Hacker Yevgeniy Nikulin Claims The FBI Offered Him Cash, An Apartment, An U.S. Citizenship If He Confessed To Hacking Hillary's Emails On The Orders Of Donald Trump Accused Russian Hacker Yevgeniy Nikulin, a 29 year old Russian citizen currently held in the Czech Republic and wanted on extradition by both Russia and the United States in connection with separate hacking incidents, claims that the United Sates FBI visited him and offered him cash, an apartment, and U.S. citizenship if he confessed to hacking Hillary's emails on the orders of then candidate Donald Trump. (Note: When it...

Well, it's official now: John Kiriakou, the former CIA operative who affirmed claims that waterboarding quickly unloosed the tongues of hard-core terrorists, says he didn't know what he was talking about. Kiriakou, a 15-year veteran of the agency's intelligence analysis and operations directorates, electrified the hand-wringing national debate over torture in December 2007 when he told ABC's Brian Ross and Richard Esposito in a much ballyhooed, exclusive interview that senior al Qaeda commando Abu Zubaydah cracked after only one application of the face cloth and water.... Now comes John Kiriakou, again, with a wholly different story. On the next-to-last page...

Hillary Rodham Clinton’s email scandal didn’t stop the head of the CIA from using his own personal AOL account to stash work-related documents, according to a stoner high school student who claims to have hacked into them. CIA Director John Brennan’s private account held sensitive files — including his 47-page application for top-secret security clearance — until he recently learned that it had been infiltrated, the hacker told The Post. Other emails stored in Brennan’s non-government account contained the Social Security numbers and personal information of more than a dozen top American intelligence officials, as well as a government letter...

We've been deluged by requests to post favorite episodes of The Mark Steyn Show here at SteynOnline. So here's a first one - Mark's recent interview with the man who waterboarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed: James E Mitchell. In an extended conversation about his new book Enhanced Interrogation, Dr Mitchell talks about getting to know some of the world's most high-value terrorists

Following the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, psychologist and U.S. Air Force veteran Dr. James Mitchell was called back to national service. Along with a partner, Bruce Jessen, he was tasked with developing the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques, or EITs. Designed to elicit time-sensitive intelligence from hardened al Qaeda leaders, the EITs later became immersed in controversy. In 2014, Senate Democrats released a report accusing Mitchell of torturing suspects with EITs and producing no results. In his new book, Enhanced Interrogation, Mitchell offers his own testimony on the EITs. He argues that the techniques were critical in saving the lives...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – CIA Director John Brennan said on Wednesday he would resign if the next president ordered his agency to resume waterboarding suspected militants, an apparent reference to comments by Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump embracing the banned interrogation method.”I can say that as long as I’m director of CIA, irrespective of what the president says, I’m not going to be the director of CIA that gives that order. They’ll have to find another director,” said Brennan, who did not mention Trump by name. Brennan, who has been director since 2013, tacked his comment to the end of his...

Lots of good posts lately from the authors about the interrogation of Zubaydah, the latest being Word's post on the book The Terrorist Watch: Inside the Desperate Race to Stop the Next Attack by Ronald Kessler. To add a few more cents Tom Maguire at Just One Minute has noticed an interesting discrepancy in the tall tale coming from Ali Soufan, a former FBI agent, in which he says: It is inaccurate, however, to say that Abu Zubaydah had been uncooperative. Along with another F.B.I. agent, and with several C.I.A. officers present, I questioned him from March to June 2002,...

Presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton was questioned by the FBI for over three hours Saturday over her use of a private email server for official correspondence while secretary of state. The meeting -- characterized as "voluntary" because there was no subpoena -- lasted about three and a half hours according to reports, and was conducted at the FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C. Via Fox News: Clinton “is pleased to have had the opportunity to assist the Department of Justice in bringing this review to a conclusion” campaign spokesman Nick Merrill said in a statement. He also said Clinton, the presumptive...

British SAS troopers have successfully kidnapped three Islamic State (Isis) chiefs in daring lightning raids in Mosul, according to reports. The city is the largest in Iraq still under Isis (Daesh) control, but is facing increased pressure from the north, south and east by the Iraqi army, Kurdish Peshmerga forces and US-led Western airstrikes. British special forces, including the Special Air Service (SAS), have been operating in Iraq in conjunction with other western forces to help plot attacks on the militants, with snipers taking out high-level members of the terror group on several occasions.

CIA Director John Brennan told NBC News chief foreign correspondent Richard Engel that his agency will never again engage in harsh "enhanced interrogation" practices, including waterboarding, which critics have called torture, even if ordered to by a president in the future. "I will not agree to carry out some of these tactics and techniques I've heard bandied about because this institution needs to endure," Brennan said.

Israel Defends Use of Force in Interrogation Published: May 8, 1997 GENEVA, May 7— Appearing before a skeptical panel of United Nations experts, Israeli officials today strenuously defended their nation's use of physical coercion in questioning detainees who might have information about terrorism. The hearing was by turns emotional and highly technical, and the Israeli officials for the first time provided a specific example in which they said a bombing had been averted with intelligence obtained through what Israel calls ''moderate physical pressure.''

If Republicans on Tuesday win the majority of seats in the House, that body's intelligence panel is likely to give fresh oversight of the Obama administration's prosecution review of the CIA's enhanced interrogation program. Rep. Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, the highest-ranking Republican on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, told The Washington Times last week that he would expect the next Republican chairman of the committee to hold hearings on how the threat of prosecutions has affected the CIA's morale. "I expect vigorous oversight of this administration now," Mr. Hoekstra said. "What has been the impact of [Attorney General...

Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi, whose real name was Ali Mohammed al-Fakheri, 46, took his own life in his prison cell, according to the Libyan newspaper Oea. Information gained from the interrogation of al-Libi was cited on several occasions by the Bush administration as justification for the war in Iraq. He told his CIA interrogators that al-Qaeda had sent two men to Iraq to seek training in chemical and biological weapons in December 2000. Classified documents added that the men did not return, so al-Libi did not know whether the training took place, and that, in any case, he was probably "intentionally...

In October Paula Broadwell told an audience that the CIA in Benghazi "had taken a couple of Libyan militia members prisoner" at its secret annex. The CIA flatly denied the claim, saying that the agency "has not had detention authority since January 2009, when Executive Order 13491 was issued. Any suggestion that the Agency is still in the detention business is uninformed and baseless." Marc Thiessen of the American Enterprise Institute points out that the denial is factually incorrect because while Obama ordered the closure of all CIA detention facilities (i.e. “Black Sites”), the order states that it "does not...

Terror expert and author Marc Thiessen told Bill O’Reilly tonight that Obama eliminated the enhanced interrogation tool from our counter-terrorism arsenal his second day in office. So the tool that got us the information that led us to Osama Bin Laden is no longer in use. The US has not cpatured and detained and tinterrogated a single high level detainee since Barack Obama moved into office.

Daily Beast: Umm Sayyaf, who is an Iraqi citizen, was captured by U.S. forces in Syria. She was interrogated in Iraq by an American unit that operates outside the traditional criminal justice system. But the decision on where to try her was based largely in deference to Iraqi law. And she will now be turned over not to the government of Iraq in Baghdad, but Iraq’s Kurdish regional government in Erbil, which is expected to “throw the book” at her, and perhaps do much more than that. But President Obama banned torture, make no mistake about it. Oh yes, and...

TORONTO — The American Psychological Association’s Council of Representatives voted overwhelmingly today to prohibit psychologists from participating in national security interrogations. The measure passed by a vote of 156-1, with seven abstentions and one recusal. The resolution states that psychologists "shall not conduct, supervise, be in the presence of, or otherwise assist any national security interrogations for any military or intelligence entities, including private contractors working on their behalf, nor advise on conditions of confinement insofar as these might facilitate such an interrogation." The new policy does allow for psychologist involvement in general policy consultation regarding humane interrogations. The prohibition...

Having spent the past six weeks rhetorically slashing at his Republican rivals, it makes perfect sense that Donald Trump would eventually run out of targets and find himself in a war with the party’s media arm: Fox News. At the GOP primary debate Thursday night in Cleveland, Trump’s onstage clashes with the Fox moderators, and his postdebate complaints about the network’s treatment of him, were among the most talked-about story lines to emerge from the Quicken Loans Arena. What makes the confrontation all the more dramatic was that Fox News chairman Roger Ailes has, until this point, been a...

@BretBaier: “We collectively stand by each one of the questions that was delivered on Thursday night, 100%."

Lawfare Blog: Following an American special forces raid on the compound of Islamic State operative Abu Sayyaf, U.S. interrogators, who are part of the High Value Detainee Interrogation Group, have flown to Iraq in order to question Umm Sayyaf, the wife of Abu Sayyaf, who was taken during the operation. Umm Sayyaf was allegedly involved in the workings of the Islamic State and could possibly have played a role in “the enslavement of women in Iraq and Syria.” U.S. interrogators plan to talk to Umm Sayyaf about U.S. hostages held by the militant group. However, according to the Washington Post,...