Dexter Filkins’ story reporting that a top, corrupt, Hamid Karzai aide is on the CIA payroll is not, by itself, all that interesting. Mohammed Zia Salehi, the chief of administration for the National Security Council, appears to have been on the payroll for many years, according to officials in Kabul and Washington. It is unclear [...]

Aafia Siddiqui has been at the center of one of the many mysteries flowing from the Bush and Obama administrations’ conduct of  intelligence operations. A Pakistani native and former MIT scientist, background on Siddiqui can be found several places, including a Seminal diary by ondelette here. The stories of Siddiqui’s disappearance and  her recent trial [...]

In a follow-up on its story on Gul Rahman’s death in the Salt Pit in November 2002, AP reports that Rahman may have rescued Hamid Karzai from imprisonment by Afghan intelligence in 1994. After Soviet forces withdrew in 1989, Afghanistan descended into civil war as the Islamic groups that ousted the Soviets fought each other [...]