Mark Hosenball

The British official inquiry team examining the origins and conduct of the Iraq War met with some relatively senior former officials of the George W. Bush administration on a weeklong visit earlier in May. But, as the Brits admitted today, none of the administration's heavy hitters would talk.

On Dennis Blair's last day in office as director of national intelligence, the Obama administration seems more stymied than ever in its efforts to replace him.

Apparently seeking to breathe new life into the bogged-down effort to close the terrorist-detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, national-security adviser Gen. James Jones sent a letter to Congress reaffirming the administration's desire to transfer detainees to a prison in Thomson, Ill.

Despite the recent huffing and puffing from Pyongyang, U.S. officials say they've seen little physical evidence that North Korea might actually be preparing to go to war.

A key Capitol Hill Republican says retired Air Force Lt. Gen. James Clapper, the Defense Department's top intelligence official, would be the wrong person to replace outgoing National Intelligence Director Dennis Blair. Rep. Pete Hoekstra, the panel's ranking minority member, tells Declassified that in his experience, Clapper is "not forthcoming, open, or transparent" in his dealings with congressional oversight committees.

Approximately 50 airline pilots and other cockpit crew members have been thrown out of a post-9/11 federal program that allowed them to carry loaded guns in flight, according to information provided to Declassified by a Homeland Security spokesperson.

By most accounts, National Intelligence Director Dennis Blair was blindsided last week when President Obama agreed to accept his resignation. According to one former senior U.S. official who recently talked to Blair about his tenure in the "Intelligence Czar" post, Blair spoke about his plan to stay in the job until the end of Obama's first presidential term.

"The evidence points overwhelmingly to the conclusion that [a] torpedo was fired by a North Korean submarine. There is no other plausible explanation," said the inquiry team, which included experts from United States, Australia, the United Kingdom, and Sweden.

Serving as director of national intelligence may be a mission impossible, but President Obama's effort to find a successor to the outgoing Dennis Blair may not be much easier.

update: Dennis Blair's resignation as Director of National Intelligence was announced shortly after the item below was posted. "It is with deep regret that I informed the President today that I will step down as Director of National Intelligence effective Friday, May 28th," Blair wrote in a statement, which can be read in full here.

During a two-day visit to Pakistan, White House National Security Adviser James Jones and CIA Director Leon Panetta gave senior Pakistani officials a "thorough debriefing" on what the U.S. government has learned about what is now believed to be a highly significant connection between the Pakistani Taliban movement, known as the TTP, and Faisal Shahzad, the Pakistani-American now under arrest for attempting to attack New York's Times Square, according to two Obama administration officials who...

At least 25 American citizens have faced serious terrorism offenses in the past 18 months, a pattern that has counterintelligence officials concerned.

The Senate Intelligence Committee is publicly criticizing the ultrasecret National Security Agency for fumbling intelligence that might have kept would-be airplane bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab from boarding the Christmas Day transatlantic flight he allegedly tried to blow up with a bomb hidden in his underpants.

Faisal Shahzad, the Pakistani-American charged with attempting to attack New York's Times Square on May 1 with a dud car bomb, is expected to meet with a lawyer for the first time since his arrest some time after an anticipated federal-court hearing in Manhattan late Tuesday.

Members of a British government inquiry tribunal assigned to investigate the conduct leading up to the Iraq War are visiting the U.S. this week to meet with Americans who they hope "have insights" into Britain's involvement in the conflict.

A special counterterrorism unit created by the Obama administration to replace the Bush administration's controversial CIA detention and interrogation program is playing only a limited role in the investigation of the attempted May 1 car bombing of New York's Times Square, according to four U.S. law-enforcement and intelligence officials who asked for anonymity when discussing sensitive information.

The French government is denying that a decision by its courts to release an accused Iranian technology smuggler wanted by the U.S. was linked to Iran's release of a French teaching assistant who had been held by Iranian authorities on suspicion of spying.

More than one presumed associate of Faisal Shahzad is cooperating with investigators in Pakistan, say two U.S. counterterrorism officials who asked for anonymity when discussing sensitive information.

Conservative Web sites have become transfixed by a journalistic red herring that implies, though it doesn't prove, that U.S. agencies had placed Faisal Shahzad on a terrorism "watchlist" before he attempted to plant a car bomb in Times Square earlier this month.

New York Police Department is building a closed-circuit TV surveillance system which it hopes will eventually be more sophisticated and effective than the closed-circuit TV (CCTV) system used by police in London and other British cities.

Armed with criminal search warrants, federal authorities led a series of raids in three Northeastern states on Thursday in an effort to uncover evidence as to how and where Faisal Shahzad got the financing to proceed with his unsuccessful attempt to detonate a car bomb in New York's Times Square on May 1.

Over the last few days, some congressional Republicans—led by Sen. Kit Bond, ranking member of the Senate intelligence committee—have been voicing increasingly harsh criticisms of how the Obama administration is handling intelligence related to Faisal Shahzad.

An intelligence analysis prepared by an interagency "fusion center" in California says that recent on-line postings by Al Qaeda's affiliate in Yemen and Saudi Arabia are "actively promoting" attacks against targets inside the U.S. The "official use only" bulletin, produced by the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center, a partnership of federal, state, and local agencies originally set up to deal with drug trafficking, is entitled "Al-Qa'ida in the Arabian Peninsula's Online Rhetoric...

When Faisal Shahzad set out from Connecticut for his Pakistani homeland late last year, he had no thought of planting a car bomb in Times Square. Instead, a top New York police intelligence analyst says, Shahzad's plan was to join the insurgents fighting U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan.

The FBI asked officials at the Homeland Security Department to limit the number of airlines which were given special emergency warning that the name of Times Square bombing suspect Faisal Shahzad had been added to the U.S.

Federal investigators are not just taking Faisal Shahzad's word for it that Pakistani Taliban elements were involved in his failed Times Square car-bombing attempt.

In the days since the failed Times Square bombing last Saturday night, New York has faced several additional brief, but fraught, alarms. Late Wednesday night, the city's RFK (formerly Triboro) Bridge was swarmed by police and shut down after a man ran away from a rental van which smelled of gasoline fumes.

Obama administration officials are touting what they say is the continuing cooperation of Times Square bombing suspect Faisal Shahzad as evidence that nonaggressive interrogation techniques and procedures that were used in his case can be at least as effective as more controversial—and violent—Bush administration counterterrorism tactics.

Accused Times Square bombing suspect Faisal Shahzad spent more than three hours at New York's JFK airport unwatched by authorities while he waited to board a plane out of the country because FBI surveillance of him "broke down," says an administration official familiar with the matter.

After it first surfaced on a newly created YouTube channel shortly after New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg's first press conference about the discovery of a car bomb in Times Square, U.S. counterterrorism officials dismissed as empty propaganda a Pakistani Taliban message in which Qari Hussain Mehsud, allegedly the group's chief, said he takes "fully responsibility for the recent attack in the USA." But experts inside the government acknowledge that a Pakistani Taliban connection to the failed...