Apparently the CIA has taken the rare step of acknowledging the sovereign rights of another country, as well as the existence of public opinion and blowback, by suspending drone attacks in Pakistan, according to the LA Times. They claim that the hiatus is in its sixth week.

After its FBI Director told Congress that the revisions to the defense authorization bill did not satisfy his concerns with the bill, the White House issued a statement of Administration policy saying that they would not veto the bill, despite an earlier threat.

In a press conference with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, President Obama calmly explained that his Administration asked Iran nicely for their drone back. “We’ve asked for it back. We’ll see how the Iranians respond,” Obama said. He added that the matter was classified, but the acknowledgement that someone wrote a note to the Iranian Lost & Found seeking one RQ-170 Sentinel stealth plane basically confirms the capture of the drone.

In 25 years, John le Carré or his son or some new spy thriller author will write a hell of a novel based on our undeclared war with Iran. If they’re taking notes now, the next plot point will come when the US government acknowledges that the unmanned drone now in Iran’s possession belonged to the CIA.

In July 2010, as Washington Post journalists Dana Priest and William Arkin were getting ready to publish the first article in their Top Secret America series, they got an unusual request from the office of the United States’ intelligence director: Please don’t publish a key part of your research.

We had one moment where this was subject to any debate at all, during the fight over the FISA amnesty legislation. But that was really about a small portion of the total data collection. Most of the surveillance remains a secret. Ron Wyden and Mark Udall tried to tease out a little more this summer, when they tried to get the intelligence community to admit to how they were misinterpreting the Patriot Act to allow for more data collection. But that never went anywhere. From NSA surveillance to national security letters to the AT&T room on Folsom Street in San Francisco, what bits and pieces we do know about point to a giant network Hoovering up every piece of information you let out into the world digitally.

The United States spies on China as it does on many nations of geostrategic significance – but thus far at least, the Chinese book publishing arena hasn’t yet produced anything as sizzling about its own world of spies and spymasters as David Wise has in his page-turner, Tiger Trap: America’ Secret Spy War with China.

John LeCarre – writing fiction – mastered the art of taking shadows of real world sophisticated spycraft and turning them into some of the best novels of the last generation. What David Wise has done is zero in on and reveal the stories of America’s real George Smiley’s – only problem is that most of them have none of the competence or the layers of complexly organized subterfuge that LeCarre’s principal character had.

In any case, given the way the government responds to FOIAs, we’ll probably learn more about this in 5 years or so.

A detainee in what Jeremy Scahill describes as “a secret prison buried in the basement of Somalia’s National Security Agency (NSA) headquarters, where prisoners suspected of being Shabab members or of having links to the group are held”–one with key US involvement–describes his internment this way.

“I have been here for one year, seven months. I have been interrogated so many times. Interrogated by Somali men and white men. Every day. New faces show up. They have nothing on me. I have never seen a lawyer, never seen an outsider. Only other prisoners, interrogators, guards. Here there is no court or tribunal.”

In spite of his concession that the banksters’ “massive corporate frauds … weaken the financial system and victimize investors, homeowners, and ultimately taxpayers,” Mueller seems to think that a hapless teenager framed by the FBI represents a bigger threat to our country than Goldman Sachs crashing our entire economy.