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• The dirty secrets of the CIA’s War on Terror

  The dirty secrets of the CIA’s War on Terror

  In April 1975, Sen. Frank Church, D-Idaho, impaneled a special investigative committee to look into shocking accounts of CIA dirty tricks. The Church Committee ultimately published 14 reports over two years revealing a clandestine agency that was a law unto itself — plotting to assassinate heads of state (Castro, Diem, Lumumba, Trujillo), carrying out weird experiments with LSD, and suborning American journalists. As a result, President Gerald Ford issued an executive order banning the assassination of foreign leaders, the House and Senate established standing intelligence committees, and the United States set up the so-called FISA courts, which oversee request for surveillance warrants against suspected foreign agents.

• Recent leak cases and First Amendment battles

  Recent leak cases and First Amendment battles

  Government information leaks and collisions with the media date back decades and decades. Think back to the Pentagon Papers.

• Senators: Did CIA tell 'Zero Dark Thirty' filmmakers torture led to bin Laden?

  Senators: Did CIA tell 'Zero Dark Thirty' filmmakers torture led to bin Laden?

  The chairs of the Senate intelligence and armed services committees are looking into whether the CIA misled the makers of a movie about the hunt for Osama bin Laden by telling them that “coercive interrogation” of suspected terrorists produced intelligence that led to the al Qaida founder’s hideout in Pakistan.

• Senators use Brennan hearing to air decade of CIA controversies

  Senators use Brennan hearing to air decade of CIA controversies

  The confirmation hearing Thursday of John Brennan to be CIA director reopened scrutiny of a wide range of controversies that have dogged the country for more than a decade, ranging from the Obama administration’s embrace of targeted killings to the Bush administration’s use of enhanced interrogation techniques many equate with torture.

• Woman who ran secret prison bypassed as top spy

  Woman who ran secret prison bypassed as top spy

  One of the CIA's highest-ranking women, who once ran a CIA prison in Thailand where terror suspects were waterboarded, has been bypassed for the agency's top spy job.