Intelligence Archive

The political change heralded by the 2010-2011 wave of protests across the Middle East and North Africa known as the Arab Spring never reached Lebanon, but the small Mediterranean country of 4 million has been suffering from the repercussions of those momentous events ever since. To the north, fighters and goods are still being smuggled to embattled Syria. To the northeast, a war of attrition is underway with Islamist militants, who have already seized vast swathes of territory from northern Syria and Iraq. To the south, there is the ever-volatile border with Israel. Indeed, in all directions, Lebanon’s fate is […]

Editor’s note: World Politics Review partnered with the Global Dispatches podcast and its host, Mark Leon Goldberg, to present an interview with WPR columnist Steven Metz on the evolving U.S. strategy against the so-called Islamic State. Critics claim that U.S. President Barack Obama is not “aiming for decisive victory” against the so-called Islamic State (IS), but simply trying to contain the conflict and turn it over to his successor. This charge may be true, but the widespread assumption that it is an error says more about the condition of America’s discourse on global security than about the wisdom of Obama’s […]

Last week, the U.S. Congress passed the first major revisions to the National Security Agency’s surveillance capabilities since revelations by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden brought its domestic data-gathering operations to light in June 2013. Snowden, who has been indicted for leaking the classified information, quickly took to the opinion pages of The New York Times for a victory lap. Calling Congress’s actions “a historic victory for the rights of every citizen,” Snowden declared that the end to the bulk collection of phone records by the NSA “is only the latest product of a change in global awareness” about mass […]

An epidemic of hysteria swept through Washington earlier this week, and politicians from across the political spectrum were all showing symptoms. Not surprisingly, the subject was domestic surveillance and the National Security Agency (NSA), a topic for which over-the-top rhetoric has practically become derigueur in the two years since NSA contractor Edward Snowden absconded with digital reams of highly classified NSA materials and turned them over to reporters. On one side of this week’s histrionics were the usual threat-mongers, hand-wringers and scare merchants: Republican homeland security hawks like Sens. Mitch McConnell, Ted Cruz, John McCain and Lindsey Graham. With the […]

Since transitioning from authoritarianism to democracy, civilian governments in Argentina, Chile, Peru and Colombia have made great strides in curtailing the autonomy of the armed forces in terms of accountability for past abuses, budgeting, promotion and operations. But in all these countries, the military and intelligence services have retained a degree of autonomy over specific missions and their operations, referred to as “reserved domains” in the Latin American democracy transition literature of the 1990s. Recent events have demonstrated how far the region still has to go in improving transparency and civilian control over the intelligence services. Argentina has been rocked […]