It's always interesting to see what news organizations covering the same event choose to emphasize. Take, for example, the coverage of CIA Director Michael Hayden's speech yesterday on al Qaeda.

The New York Times ran with the headline "C.I.A. Chief Says Qaeda Is Extending Its Reach," above a Mark Mazzetti story focused on how al Qaeda is spreading its tentacles in North Africa, Somalia, and Yemen.

The Washington Post's Walter Pincus, writing under the headline "CIA Chief: Iraq Not Main Front," highlighted Hayden's view that al Qaeda no longer sees Iraq as the central front in the war on terrorism. Think Progress, the blog of the liberal Center for American Progress, jumped on it.

James Joyner, blogging the speech for the Atlantic Council, which hosted the event, was intrigued at Director Hayden's comment that, "today, virtually every major terrorist threat that my agency is aware of has threads back to the tribal areas [in Pakistan]."

Jason Ryan and Brian Ross of ABC News ran with the angle that Bin Laden is alive, but "appears to be largely isolated from the day-to-day operations" of al Qaeda, according to Hayden. The headline: "CIA Chief: Bin Laden Alive, Worried About 'Own Security'."

It sure would be nice if the CIA published a transcript on its Web site so that readers could evaluate all of these different points of emphasis in their proper context.

RIZWAN TABASSUM/AFP/Getty Images

Do we need another secret intelligence assessment to tell us that Pakistan is falling apart?

No.

If anything, that country's slow-motion collapse been reported to death over the past several months. Nonetheless, it's reassuring that the situation there is getting high-level attention in Washington.

Much has been made of Pakistan's troubles with terrorists and tribal militants, and there are lots of good ideas out there for how to address them. Less discussed? The country's economic meltdown.

As Fasih Ahmed reports for Newsweek, Pakistan's economy is in "free fall." The country's credit ratings are being slashed; creditors are making runs on banks; inflation is soaring; and capital is fleeing. If things continue to get worse, we may come to find that -- while the two issues are certainly related -- the global financial crisis did to Pakistan what the terrorists never could.

I have to wonder if John McCain and Barack Obama ever ask themselves if they really want the job they're campaigning so hard for. Because on the victor's first day in office, there won't be much popping of champagne corks.

From today's Washington Post:

An intelligence forecast being prepared for the next president on future global risks envisions a steady decline in U.S. dominance in the coming decades, as the world is reshaped by globalization, battered by climate change, and destabilized by regional upheavals over shortages of food, water and energy.

The report, previewed in a speech by Thomas Fingar, the U.S. intelligence community's top analyst, also concludes that the one key area of continued U.S. superiority -- military power -- will "be the least significant" asset in the increasingly competitive world of the future, because "nobody is going to attack us with massive conventional force." 

The remarks are based on the forthcoming report Global Trends 2025, prepared by the U.S. intelligence community to anticipate threats to America in the next few decades. Most of the predominant challenges identified aren't surprising: shrinking U.S. economic influence, weaker international institutions, energy insecurity and competition, and political and economic upheaval around the world due to climate change.

What is more interesting, perhaps, as the Post notes, is the absence of terrorism on that list. Fingar's remarks seem to ignore any threat from Pakistan, focusing instead on the perils of nuclear-armed Iran. That does seem to smack of the intel community taking its eye off the ball.

Great quote from Ephraim Halevy, the former head of Israel's Mossad intelligence agency:

Ahmadinejad is our greatest gift," Halevy told the Arab language television network Al-Hurra on Tuesday. "We couldn't carry out a better operation at the Mossad than to put a guy like Ahmadinejad in power in Iran."

Underscoring the point, the Iranian president wrote on his Web site Wednesday that Israel is a "germ of corruption" to be removed soon.

It's tough to catch al Qaeda personnel when intelligence on their top leaders is scarce, but it's even more difficult to run an effective counterterrorism program when your country's spies leave sensitive documents in public places. That's what happened today in England.

This mind-boggling security breach occurred when a passenger spotted an orange folder that had been left on a train, and upon discovering its contents, handed it to the BBC:

The two reports were assessments made by the government's Joint Intelligence Committee.

One, on Iraq's security forces, was commissioned by the Ministry of Defence. According to the BBC's security correspondent, Frank Gardner, it included a top-secret and in some places 'damning' assessment of Iraq's security forces,

The other document, reportedly entitled 'Al-Qaeda Vulnerabilities', was commissioned jointly by the Foreign Office and the Home Office.

Just seven pages long but classified as 'UK Top Secret,' this latest intelligence assessment on al-Qaeda is so sensitive that every document is numbered and marked 'for UK/US/Canadian and Australian eyes only,' according to our correspondent."

Sound familiar? Several weeks ago, Canadian Minister of Foreign Affairs Maxime Bernier resigned after it was discovered that he left classified NATO documents at an ex-girlfriend's house.

I have to give the edge to Bernier here. At least he might have been trying to impress his female company with his top-secret documents.

NATALIA KOLESNIKOVA/AFP/Getty Images

Tonight, thousands of British fans will pack Moscow's Luzhniki Stadium for the finals of the Champions League soccer tournament. This year, the finals are an all-British affair played between Manchester United and Chelsea. But the most interesting drama may be in the stands.

Andrei Lugovoi, Scotland Yard's prime suspect in the London murder of ex-FSB agent Alexander Litvinenko in 2006, has also scored tickets to the game and will be watching from the VIP section. Not only has Russia refused to extradite Lugovoi for trial in the UK, he was elected to parliament last December. Lugovoi's status has been a major sore spot for British-Russian relations and his presence at the game should be a humiliating reminder of Britain's powerlessness in the case.

The Guardian's Luke Harding also has a great interview with Lugovoi today in which the ex-KGB man denies involvement in Litvinenko's poisoning but doesn't seem all that broken up about it.

CIA Director Michael Hayden gave a smart talk earlier this week about where the world is headed and what role the United States will play in it (video). With the world population set to grow about 34 percent by mid-century, the agency will be especially attentive to demographic transitions in countries that can't sustain higher populations, he said. But Hayden also had a message for China:

China is a competitor—certainly in the economic realm, and, increasingly, on the geopolitical stage. But China is not an inevitable enemy. There are good policy choices available to both Washington and Beijing that can keep us on the largely peaceful, constructive path we've been on for almost 40 years now.

On a very hopeful note, Hayden also said Americans have to start putting themselves in others' shoes:

[A] greater number of actors will have influence on the world stage in this century. And that presents one overriding challenge to those of us responsible for our nation's security: We must do a better job of understanding cultures, histories, religions, and traditions that are not our own. We must broaden our understanding, and guard against viewing the world exclusively through an American prism. We must not rely exclusively on an American—or even more broadly, Western—lens in assessing foreign challenges and helping policymakers decide how to respond.

PAUL J. RICHARDS/AFP/Getty Images

A piece in the USA Today this week highlights the use of open-source information in the U.S. intelligence community. As more information is available on the Web, it is becoming an increasingly important piece of the intel pie -- even making the President's morning briefing. There's a clash since some in the intelligence community feel that the classified sources are the most reliable, but others argue you can learn about your enemy by what he or she says in sources available for all to read. Robert David Steele, ex-CIA and Marine officer, advocates a flip-flop of spending in favor of open-source over more hush-hush sources:

I'm not a librarian saying open sources are cool and we can do this...I'm a very good former spy saying open sources are cool and we can do this."

Though it's always a battle to tell fact from fiction online, it's sure easier than getting access to classified material. Given that 19,000 FBI personnel are still waiting for desktop Internet access, it seems reasonable to devote some more resources to this type of intelligence.

In his piece "The Next Generation of Terror" for the current issue of FP, Marc Sageman describes the new reality of "leaderless jihad," in which extremist ideology and terrorist tactics spread through online social networks rather than hierarchical organizations. In light of this, it's encouraging to see some intelligence professionals shifting their focus to the dangers in plain view.

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French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel attend the first formal working session on the second day of the NATO summit at the Parliament Palace in Bucharest on April 3, 2008. NATO leaders begin negotiations in earnest over Afghanistan after the opening day of their three-day summit saw a successful French offer of more troops, but a public disagreement over the alliance's enlargement.

The U.S. intelligence community has taken a beating in some quarters for its National Intelligence Estimate (pdf) on Iran's nuclear program, which was released to the public last December. CFR.org recently got a hold of Thomas Fingar, chairman of the National Intelligence Council, the body that produced the NIE in question.

Fingar says they would have framed the NIE differently had they known it was going to be made public:

There's been talk that the Iran NIE was narrowly written, excluding the civilian capabilities, excluding ballistic missile testing or capabilities, and I wonder if you can respond to those claims. And to follow, do you think it was poorly written? Would you have done it differently if you could?

No, we dealt at length with the centrifuge enrichment, and dealt with the missile program. It was not a narrowly crafted [document] — people are reacting to a two-and-a-half-page summary of a 140-page document with almost 1,500 source notes. And believe it or not, you can't fit the whole book on the book jacket. Was it badly written? The [still classified] estimate itself is very well written. The key judgments, knowing what we do now about the way in which they were spun, perceived, used by folks when released — if we thought for a minute they would be released, which we didn't, we would have framed them somewhat differently. The judgments would be the same. But we would have framed them somewhat differently that says: “Dear readers [not] following this: You can't have a bomb unless you have fissile material, [and] the Iranians continue to develop fissile material. A weapon is not much good if you can't deliver it—they have a missile-development program. But you don't have a bomb unless you can produce a device and weaponize it. That's what's stopped."

Read the whole thing.

The Shin Bet, Israel's internal security agency, launched a blog yesterday in continued efforts to shed some of its secrecy and boost recruitment among high-tech professionals. Reviews are mixed at best so far, as people feel the content is a little mundane. Since 2006, the Shin Bet has stepped up public ad campaigns to attract talent from the private sector. According to the Associated Press, "the bloggers work on the technological side of the Shin Bet's operations rather than in the field." I think the public is saying they want to hear from some real field officers, not the techies. After all, would you rather read a blog by James Bond or Q?

Photo: FSB

From Shostakovich to Solzhenitsyn, Russian artists have always had good reason to be wary of the secret police. But the KGB's successor organization, the Federal Security Service (FSB), is looking to change that. The FSB has launched an annual competition to find the best artistic portrayals of its work. Categories include film, television, acting, music, and literature. According to the BBC, "the FSB wants to change the perception that artists and secret policemen are not always comfortable companions."

The 2007 awards were held on December 17 and from the photos on the FSB website, it seems a great time was had by all. Sculptor Vadim Kirilov took top honors in the visual arts for a piece depicting an FSB agent rescuing a child from the Beslan school siege. The prize for music went to singer-songwriter Alexander Rosenbaum who, incidentally, is also a State Duma member from Putin's United Russia party. The complete list of winners is here. (In Russian)

The Russian state security apparatus's previous significant contribution to the arts was the gigantic and intimidating statue of Soviet secret police founder Feliks Dzerzhinsky that once dominated Lubyanka square in front of KGB headquarters. The statue was pulled down with great drama by a crane in 1991, but can still be seen along with dozens of discarded Lenins at Moscow's Park of the Arts.

One of last night's Academy Award winners was Taxi to the Dark Side, which took home the Oscar for best documentary. It's a gripping film that centers on the fate of Dilawar, an Afghan man who was wrongly swept into the U.S. detention system and beaten to death accidentally by stressed-out, undertrained prison guards.

FP recently spoke with former FBI Special Agent Jack Cloonan, one of the experts interviewed for the film, about his own experience interrogating real al Qaeda detainees. You don't have to use force to make a terrorist break down and cry, Cloonan says -- just brains. Check out how to do it here.

Photo: US Navy via Getty Images

For the first time ever, the United States will use a ship-based missile to take out a satellite. In the next day or two, the world will witness a modified weapons capability that will have significant policy implications. But it's the "how" story behind the scenes that has Russia sweating.

The spy satellite malfunctioned hours after reaching orbit in December 2006. When re-entry became imminent beginning in January of this year, the U.S. Navy got busy computer coding. The Navy can now outfit a standard missile (SM-3) that was designed for intercepting other missiles with a new brain that gives it the ability to target spacecraft. In this instance, the missiles will come from an Aegis cruiser, but ground-based missiles like the ones the United States wants to put in Poland can be larger and have farther range. 

Theresa Hitchens, director of the space security program at the Center for Defense Information, noted the comments of General James E. Cartwright, Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who said in a press conference that it took the Navy three weeks to reconfigure the new targeting software. The implication? Hitchens told me:

If [the United States] wanted to develop that type of software (that could be downloaded into the missiles that would be placed in Poland), we could in a very short period of time. So I understand why the Russians might be pretty nervous about this."

A little software change, in other words, could end up posing a big threat to strategic spacecraft in the future. General Cartwright insisted this new capability will be executed on a "one-time reversible basis." But there's no way the U.S. military would throw away the keys to a new generation of missiles. The Russians would probably prefer that this Pandora's box not be opened, but once it is, all space-faring countries are going to have a new threat to worry about.

Two weeks ago, I wrote about a U.S. spy satellite that had gone haywire and might need to be shot down. I noted how diplomatically sensitive it would be for the United States to do so after telling China that anti-satellite tests are a big no-no. Some commentators downplayed the possibility that the United States would really shoot the satellite down, but now comes word that it's gonna happen: The U.S. military will use its missile-defense system to blow the errant satellite to smithereens.

Mind you, a missile-defense system is not supposed to be a dual-use satellite killer. U.S. officials have pledged compliance with space and weapons treaties by giving other countries advance notice before shooting off space missiles. They also insist the move is necessary to prevent contamination from toxic substances and is not a showcase of U.S. weapons capability. Still, in the wake of the Chinese satellite missile hoopla, it smacks of "Anything you can do, I can do better."

What's more, shooting the satellite down could create orbital debris, which was a major point of criticism after the Chinese experiment. U.S. officials insist the Chinese test was different in nature as it was higher in altitude and the resulting debris poses a much longer-term threat. They estimate the mess from the U.S. operation will fall to the Earth within a few weeks, whereas debris from the Chinese test will be a danger for decades.

Meanwhile, Russia and China formally proposed a treaty banning space weapons this week, a move swiftly opposed by the White House. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov argues that space weaponization would cause a "chain reaction" and would start another "arms race."  Too late, Sergei -- the weaponization of space has already begun.

A U.S. spy satellite has gone rogue and will likely come crashing down to the surface sometime in the next month or two. That's bad news, as the satellite is roughly the size of a school bus and may contain hazardous material. (The largest historical instance of "uncontrolled entry" was Skylab, which crashed and burned in 1979 in the Indian Ocean and the western Australian outback. Luckily, nobody was hurt.)

The satellite's fall to Earth presents an interesting dilemma for the U.S. administration. Let gravity take its course, and there's a chance innocent people could get hurt. Shoot it down, and the Bush administration might get into diplomatic trouble with China and create an unintended international precedent. Remember when, after China's anti-satellite missile test last January, the United States was harshly critical of the Chinese government? If the United States is now forced to shoot its own satellite down, it may only reinforce the impression abroad that America just does whatever it wants in space, but looks askance at strategic space activities by other countries. Beijing may leap at the chance to accuse Washington of promoting a double standard.

This is exactly why it's time to push for an international treaty banning space weapons, opponents of the weaponization of the final frontier might argue. I don't want space missiles from other countries pointed at my house any more than the next guy, but I do wonder if a space arms race isn't the more likely outcome. The capabilities space affords corporations and governments are just too powerful to leave unprotected, unfortunately, and the Chinese probably see "Star Wars" as one area where they can catch up with the United States.

JOHN D MCHUGH/AFP/Getty Images

Canadian troops may have finally stopped handing off detainees to the Afghan authorities. That policy—always suspect from a human rights perspective—was the product of twin realities. First, NATO states such as Canada hated the optics of handing detainees to the Americans, what with Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo still on people's minds. Second, the Canadians, British, and Dutch troops fighting in southern Afghanistan had no desire to get into the detention business themselves.

The solution? Shuffle off detainees to the Afghans and pretend that the treatment they're getting is better than they'd get with the Americans. The policy protects delicate European sensibilities but does little to safeguard prisoners or to help NATO get good intelligence on Taliban activities (though I have been told by people in the know that captured Taliban fighters occasionally "fall off" NATO trucks and end up in American hands).

The issue of prisoners in Afghanistan has always struck me as a nettlesome problem that could easily become an important opportunity. My suggestion? Create a jointly run NATO/Afghan detention center in Kandahar or some other locale in southern Afghanistan. Use the detention center to simultaneously train Afghan police and interrogators (which we're doing anyway) and to hash out a common NATO policy on detention that can ease suspicions within the alliance while producing at least some actionable intelligence.

Thus far, American obstinacy and European fecklessness have scuppered common sense solutions. It's well past time to work together.

It might not surprise you to learn that Big Brother looms large in places like China and Russia. But Britain and the United States are near the bottom of the heap too. According to a new study of 47 countries by Privacy International, a human-rights watchdog based in London, those four countries fall in the bottom tier of countries where government surveillance is used extensively. Other locales in the bottom group, labeled "endemic surveillance societies," are Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan, and Thailand. The only place where Privacy International considers there to be "adequate safeguards against abuse" is Greece. And the only country where the surveillance situation is improving for citizens is Slovenia.

Granted, the vast majority of Africa is not included in the study, and much of Latin America is overlooked too. Nevertheless, countries where you'd think civil liberties would be the most protected don't do so well. Australia, France, and most of Scandinavia fall in the category where there is a "systemic failure to uphold safeguards." Interestingly, places that were once part of the Soviet bloc perform relatively well. Estonia, Germany, Hungary, Romania, and Slovenia are cited for having "some safeguards but weakened protection." Where does your country fit in? Click here to find out.

Sen. John Ensign (R-NV) thinks the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran ain't right. "We just see politics injected into this," his spokesman, Tory Mazzola, says. "When it comes to national security we really need to remove politics." The way Ensign plans to "remove politics" is by—wait for it—creating a panel of politicians, House and Senate members, to rewrite the intelligence community's work. Only in Congress, friends, only in Congress.

It's always struck me as funny that people get all worked up over the NIEs in the first place. As anyone with even a cursory knowledge of the intelligence community will tell you, they are notoriously flawed. Remember the U.S.-Soviet "missile gap"? That was a bunch of nonsense cooked up in an NIE in 1958. The Iranian revolution of 1978? An NIE predicted it wouldn't happen. Then, of course, there's the now infamous NIE 2002-16HC, which made it sound as though Saddam Hussein was weeks away from having nukes.

NIEs are guesses, plain and simple. Just ask the Bush Administration. Even they agree that Ensign's plan is silly. "The President respects sixteen of the intelligence agencies got together to produce the National Intellligence Estimate. I don’t believe that there's any need to have an additional one," White House Spokeswoman Dana Perino told John Gizzi of the ultra-conservative rag Human Events.

Exactly. What is conveening a panel of politicians going to accomplish? The de-politization of the process? Um, right. I'm all for Congressional oversight. Too bad, for instance, that Ensign and his colleagues weren't equally worked up over the 2002 NIE on Iraq, or we might not be in the mess we're in now. But Ensign's plan to waste a bunch of Congress's time and money politicizing the latest NIE will accomplish nothing. I'm nominating this as the dumbest Congressional idea of 2007.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad didn't have a very good day today. First, Hassan Rowhani, a cleric who heads an influential Iranian think tank and is the former chief of the country's Supreme National Security Council had this to say about the Iranian president's big talk over Iran's increasing influence in the Middle East and the conclusions of the NIE:

To discuss this, we should see the proof of power.

The fact that we cannot open a letter of credit, is this power?

The fact that an Iranian student cannot study abroad in (his or her) chosen field, is that power?

The fact that the economic risks have grown, is that power?

The fact that banking activities have been restricted, is that power?"

Also today, popular former President Mohammad Khatami piled on with this gem before a packed hall of more than 1,000 students at Tehran University, where he delivered remarks on Ahmadinejad's anti-poverty strategy:

It is not right to reduce justice to economic justice. Such a justice spreads poverty and empties the purses of the people who should be used to make the country more powerful and more rich. We need to fight for economic justice but what is more important is the right of people to decide their own fate. These are the reforms that the people want."

The new conventional wisdom in Washington is that the NIE was a boost to Ahmadinejad. But these kinds of attacks on Ahmadinejad are likely to increase in the run up to the March 14 parliamentary elections. And they're an important reminder that, despite his blusterings, Ahmadinejad is anything but an all-powerful leader who reigns without dissent.