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The story prompted a strong denial from Woodward, a demurral from Bradlee, an online chat at Poynter and a Daily Beast story by independent scholar Max Holland, who argues Woodward and Bernstein's book about the scandal, "All the President's Men," is "a fairly tale, albeit a compelling one." After hyping the story for a couple of days, Politico then dismissed it as "a storm in a Washington teacup."

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You have spent decades studying the inner workings of America’s intelligence system, and the past few years looking at newly released files from the FBI. What will we learn by reading your new history of the FBI, "Enemies"?

You will learn that the Bureau has served first and foremost as a secret intelligence service reporting to the president of the United States. In its first incarnation under J. Edgar Hoover, who ruled the Bureau for 48 years, the FBI was the president’s secret intelligence service. Today, 40 years after Hoover’s death, we still live in the shadow of his legacy. How do you run a secret intelligence agency in an open and democratic society? How do you balance national security and civil liberty? How can we be both safe and free? These are questions that Hoover struggled with, and that we struggle with still.

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The tediously unresolved case of the assassinated president never quite goes away as some would wish. Stephen King's new book, "November 22, 1963,"  is yet another imaginative retelling of a critical day in American history, a densely layered epic that appeals to the enduring impulse to understand how the president of the United States was gunned down in broad daylight, and why no one was ever brought to justice for the crime.

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The story in the earlier article was that our sprawling intelligence and national security apparatus was caught off-guard by social media-fueled uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa, and that they were going to take steps to be better prepared in the future.

DHS Undersecretary Caryn Wagner said the department was still trying to figure out how to use Twitter and Facebook information for law enforcement purposes. And they seem to be starting completely from scratch:

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These doubts about the CIA first emerged among a group of 9/11 victims' families whose struggle to force the government to investigate the causes of the attacks, we chronicled in our 2006 documentary film "Press for Truth." At that time, we thought we were done with the subject. But tantalizing information unearthed by the 9/11 Commission’s final report and spotted by the families (Chapter 6, footnote 44) raised a question too important to be put aside:

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The request, filed in federal court in Manhattan, is based on reporting by The Associated Press, which revealed a clandestine police unit that monitored all aspects of daily life in Muslim neighborhoods. Documents showed that plainclothes officers were being dispatched to eavesdrop inside businesses. Restaurants that serve Muslims were identified and photographed. Hundreds of mosques were investigated. Dozens were infiltrated.

Police also maintained a list of 28 countries that, along with "American Black Muslim," were labeled "ancestries of interest."

"Based on this evidence, there is reason to believe that the NYPD retains records of surveillance of public places that are not limited to information pertaining to 'potential unlawful activity or terrorism,'" lawyers told U.S. District Judge Charles Haight.

A spokesman for the New York Police Department didn't immediately respond to a message seeking comment.

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In a response late Monday to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by Judicial Watch, a conservative watchdog group seeking the imagery, Justice Department attorneys said the CIA has located 52 photographs and video recordings. But they argued the images of the deceased bin Laden are classified and are being withheld from the public to avoid inciting violence against Americans overseas and compromising secret systems and techniques used by the CIA and the military.

The Justice Department has asked the court to dismiss Judicial Watch's lawsuit because the records the group wants are "wholly exempt from disclosure," according to the filing.

Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, accused the Obama administration of making a "political decision" to keep the bin Laden imagery secret. "We shouldn't throw out our transparency laws because complying with them might offend terrorists," Fitton said in a statement. "The historical record of Osama bin Laden's death should be released to the American people as the law requires."

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The shooting Sunday evening is the most recent in a growing number of attacks this year by Afghans working with the country's international allies. Some assailants have turned out to be Taliban sleeper agents, while others have been motivated by personal grievances.

Gunfire was first heard sometime after 8 p.m. local time around the former Ariana Hotel, a building that ex-U.S. intelligence officials said is the CIA station in Kabul. The spy agency occupied the heavily secured building just blocks from the Afghan presidential palace in late 2001 after the U.S.-led invasion that toppled the Taliban.

The U.S. Embassy said an Afghan employee of the complex shot dead an American citizen and wounded another before being killed.

"The motivation for the attack is still under investigation," the embassy said in a statement.

Embassy spokesman Gavin Sundwall declined to comment on what the targeted annex was used for, citing security reasons. Sundwall said the Afghan employee was not authorized to carry a weapon, and it was not clear how the man was able to get a gun into the secured compound.

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The records from this lawsuit between two sub-contractors involved in the renditions will eventually be taught in an undergrad history course titled "America: Where It All Went Wrong." Detainees were transported by the same companies that fly billionaires on private jets to their resort vacations. (The CIA doesn't have an air force, so they relied on massive government contractor DynCorp, which... just rented some private planes.)

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Soufan has called many of the CIA's excisions from his own book "ridiculous," pointing out that some of the "classified" information is a matter of public record and appears in the 9/11 report and even in a memoir by former CIA director George Tenet. Carle had a similar experience; "The Interrogator" is laced with caustic footnotes explaining that redacted passages revealed the agency's incompetence, rather than sensitive information.

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The panicked superintendent dialed 911, sending police and the FBI rushing to the building near Rutgers University on the afternoon of June 2, 2009. What they found in that first-floor apartment, however, was not a terrorist hideout but a command center set up by a secret team of New York Police Department intelligence officers.

From that apartment, about an hour outside the department's jurisdiction, the NYPD had been staging undercover operations and conducting surveillance throughout New Jersey. Neither the FBI nor the local police had any idea.

Since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the NYPD has become one of the country's most aggressive domestic intelligence agencies. A months-long investigation by The Associated Press has revealed that the NYPD operates far outside its borders and targets ethnic communities in ways that would run afoul of civil liberties rules if practiced by the federal government. And it does so with unprecedented help from the CIA in a partnership that has blurred the bright line between foreign and domestic spying.

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Hidden from view, standing just outside the frame of that now-famous photograph was a career CIA analyst. In the hunt for the world's most-wanted terrorist, there may have been no one more important. His job for nearly a decade was finding the al-Qaida leader.

The analyst was the first to put in writing last summer that the CIA might have a legitimate lead on finding bin Laden. He oversaw the collection of clues that led the agency to a fortified compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. His was among the most confident voices telling Obama that bin Laden was probably behind those walls.

The CIA will not permit him to speak with reporters. But interviews with former and current U.S. intelligence officials reveal a story of quiet persistence and continuity that led to the greatest counterterrorism success in the history of the CIA. Nearly all the officials insisted on anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to reporters or because they did not want their names linked to the bin Laden operation.

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There's quite a lot Carle isn't allowed to say in "The Interrogator." Many lines and words on these pages have been masked with black bars to indicate what "the Agency" forbade him to publish. "I have written this book literally a dozen times over," the author notes in his afterword, explaining that he was willing to address "legitimate" CIA concerns when it came to revelations about its "sources and methods."

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• Writing in response to the deadly blasts on the London Underground in July 2005, Cole criticized "Bush and Blair's incompetently pursued war on terror." he wrote, "If Americans look closer... they will realize that Bush's incompetent crusade has made the world more dangerous, not less."
• Similarly, Cole skewered the Bush administration when newly elected Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari seemed to be developing close ties with Iran. "All the sorts of contracts and deals that U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney had imagined for Halliburton, and that the Pentagon neoconservatives had hoped for Israel, were heading instead due east," Cole noted at the time.
• Then in March 2006, as violence in Iraq was peaking, Cole wrote that "bloody events in Iraq have undermined American authority in that country and in the Middle East more generally."
• He was also fiercely critical of Bush's rhetoric on Iraq. When the president avoided describing the situation there as a "civil war," (a term the Iraqi prime minister employed), Cole emphasized how wrong Bush was.
• Similarly, Cole noted that Saddam Hussein's execution, decreed through what he described as "the bumbling of the U.S.-backed regime," was little more than an act of revenge that turned the dictator into a martyr.
• And Cole broadened his sights beyond Iraq. He wrote scathingly about Bush's approach to Israel and Palestine and was quick to point to the problems with how the then-President responded to Hamas' victory in legislative elections in Gaza in 2006. "How do you like your democracy now, Mr Bush?" Cole wrote.

Evidently, with a voice as influential as Cole's, calling the focal point of an administration's foreign policy "a colossal misadventure" makes waves; the White House and the CIA may not have taken heed of his writing, but -- if recent reports are to be believed -- it certainly caught their attention.

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From James Risen's Thursday morning Times piece:

Glenn L. Carle, a former Central Intelligence Agency officer who was a top counterterrorism official during the administration of President George W. Bush, said the White House at least twice asked intelligence officials to gather sensitive information on [Professor Cole]. ...

In an interview, Mr. Carle said his supervisor at the National Intelligence Council told him in 2005 that White House officials wanted “to get” Professor Cole, and made clear that he wanted Mr. Carle to collect information about him, an effort Mr. Carle rebuffed. Months later, Mr. Carle said, he confronted a C.I.A. official after learning of another attempt to collect information about Professor Cole. Mr. Carle said he contended at the time that such actions would have been unlawful.

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While Gates did not directly confirm the reports, he is telling senators that "most governments lie to each other," sometimes they arrest people, and sometimes they spy on us. He says it's the "real world we deal with."

Gates was responding to sharp questions from Vermont Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy during a Capitol Hill hearing.

Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, says the U.S. is struggling to rebuild its badly broken relationship with Pakistan.

A Western official in Pakistan has confirmed that five Pakistanis were arrested by Pakistan's top intelligence service.

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Why is this important? As we noted last week, U.S. military drone strikes are nothing new in Yemen; the shift to include CIA patrols alongside those of the military unmanned aircraft points to growing concern about the tumultuous region -- that al-Qaida operatives could gain purchase in the power vacuum as opposition groups continue deadly fights with government forces loyal to President Ali Abdullah Saleh's oppressive regime.

What is new here? The Obama administration's decision to deploy CIA-operated unmanned aircraft suggests a concern that military operations alone will not suffice now that the Yemeni government has shifted resources to fighting for its own survival as opposed to battling al-Qaida. And as the Washington Post notes, "the CIA may have greater latitude to carry out strikes if the political climate shifts in Yemen and cooperation with American forces is diminished or cut off."

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The Associated Press has learned that the name being reported is incorrect. Still, the publication of any alleged identity of the U.S. spy agency's top official in this country could be pushback from Pakistan's powerful military and intelligence establishment, which was humiliated over the surprise raid on its soil, and could further sour relations between Washington and Islamabad.

On Friday, the private TV channel ARY broadcast what it said was the current station chief's name. The Nation, a right-wing newspaper, picked up the story Saturday.

ARY's news director, Mazhar Abbas, said the television station's reporter gleaned the name from a source. He defended the broadcast, saying it was "based on fact," and denounced allegations that the name was leaked to the television channel by an official with a motive.

"The prime responsibility of the reporter is to give a story which is based on facts," he said. "Interpretation of the story is something else."

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Legitimate doubt has been cast on the official narrative of the raid ever since the Obama administration changed major details of what it claims happened. (A Pentagon official, for example, said Monday that bin Laden was firing a gun at U.S. forces from behind a human shield when he was killed. Now the White House says he was not armed and there was no human shield.)

The possibility that bin Laden was captured was raised in a report by an Arab news agency citing Pakistani officials describing an interview with bin Laden's young daughter, who was apparently at the compound:

The daughter has claimed that she watched as her father was captured alive and shot before being dragged to a US military helicopter, Arabic news network al-Arabiya quoted Pakistani officials as saying.

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