NYT | Turkish officials said Sunday that they had arrested nine people accused of carrying out twin bombings in this town near the Syrian border the day before, as the investigation moved at a clip that underscored the intense pressure on the government to contain the fallout from the attacks. Officials said the detainees were all Turkish citizens and asserted that the group had been backed by the intelligence services of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria.

NYT | For more than a decade, wads of American dollars packed into suitcases, backpacks and, on occasion, plastic shopping bags have been dropped off every month or so at the offices of Afghanistan’s president — courtesy of the Central Intelligence Agency. All told, tens of millions of dollars have flowed from the C.I.A. to the office of President Hamid Karzai, according to current and former advisers to the Afghan leader.

LiveLeak.com | In July of this year it became apparent through a flood of mainstream media reports that the National Security Agency (NSA) was “desperate to hire new hacking talent to protect the nation’s critical infrastructure” yet the NSA is notorious for its surveillance programs on American digital activity. David Petraeus, former director of the CIA, said at a summit for In-Q-Tel, that he was speculating on the “internet of things” and that “‘Transformational’ is an overused word, but I do believe it properly applies to these technologies . . . particularly to their effect on clandestine tradecraft.”

NJ | On its individual merits, the 30-month sentence imposed last month on former CIA officer John Kiriakou seems straightforward enough.The investigation followed Kiriakou’s open discussion of the CIA’s waterboarding of terrorist suspects, but led eventually to his admitted disclosure of the name of another CIA officer to a reporter, in clear violation of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act. Although the reporter never made public the officer’s identity, and Kiriakou claims to have believed the officer had retired, in fact the officer was, at the time of the disclosure, on active duty overseas. The national security risk in disclosing the identity is clear.

Rawstory | The Central Intelligence Agency was responsible for a bizarre episode of live censorship during Monday’s pretrial hearing for the five Guantanamo Bay prisoners accused of planning the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, according to a Miami Herald reporter. The incident occurred during a question about a motion to preserve whatever remains of the CIA black site prisons where the defendants say they were tortured. Observers watching the trial from behind a pane of glass had their audio feed cut for about three minutes, and others viewing the trial remotely also lost video.

WP | Former CIA officer John Kiriakou is sentenced to 30 months in prison for leaks A former CIA officer who was among the first to go public with details about the agency’s use of waterboarding and other interrogation techniques was sentenced to 2½ years in prison Friday for disclosing a covert operative’s name to a reporter. John Kiriakou, 48, of Arlington has portrayed himself as a whistleblower concerned about the use of the harsh tactics, but U.S. District Judge Leonie M. Brinkema emphatically rejected that idea in federal court in Alexandria.

Wired | In late October, the man ostensibly in charge of America’s 16 intelligence agencies decided to push out his most powerful subordinate. James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, had learned that CIA Director David Petraeus had an affair with his biographer — one that had attracted the scrutiny of the FBI. Clapper urged Petraeus to resign. That set off a chain of events leading to President Obama nominating his main counterterrorism and intelligence adviser, John Brennan, to replace Petraeus.

AntiWar.com | President Obama’s decision to nominate former Republican Senator Chuck Hagel and current counter-terrorism advisor John Brennan as Defense Secretary and CIA Director, respectively, reflects the administration’s intention to carry on penchant for secret wars over conventional ones.

Spiegel.de | For more than five years, Brandon Bryant worked in an oblong, windowless container about the size of a trailer, where the air-conditioning was kept at 17 degrees Celsius (63 degrees Fahrenheit) and, for security reasons, the door couldn't be opened. Bryant and his coworkers sat in front of 14 computer monitors and four keyboards. When Bryant pressed a button in New Mexico, someone died on the other side of the world.

Infowars | While the CIA is commonly understood to be an intelligence agency, we shouldn’t forget the important role it has played in carrying out clandestine operations that have benefited the financial elite. This accusation is substantiated by the CIA’s elitist origins, its well-documented connections to Wall Street, and its sordid history of carrying out assassinations, staging coups, and fomenting civil wars.

The Guardian | CIA agents tortured a German citizen, sodomising, shackling, and beating him, as Macedonian state police looked on, the European court of human rights said in a historic judgment released on Thursday. In a unanimous ruling, it also found Macedonia guilty of torturing, abusing, and secretly imprisoning Khaled el-Masri, a German of Lebanese origin allegedly linked to terrorist organisations.

Guardian | Sami al-Saadi, wife and four children were secretly flown from Hong Kong to Tripoli where he was tortured by Gaddafi police. Libyan dissident Sami al-Saadi with his daughter Khadija in Tripoli in October 2011, three months after his release from prison.Ministers have agree to pay more than £2m to the family of a prominent Libyan dissident abducted with the help of MI6 and secretly flown to Tripoli where he was tortured by the security police of the former dictator Muammar Gaddafi.

House.gov | Earlier this month we learned that the Obama Administration is significantly expanding the number of covert Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) agents overseas. From just a few hundred DIA agents overseas today, the administration intends to eventually deploy some 1,600 covert agents. The nature of their work will also shift, away from intelligence collection and more toward covert actions. This move signals a major change in how the administration intends to conduct military and paramilitary operations overseas. Unfortunately it is not a shift toward peace, but rather to an even more deadly and disturbing phase in the “war on terror.”

BusinessInsider.com | The Obama administration has decided to launch a covert operation to send heavy weapons to Syrian rebels, Christina Lamb of The Sunday Times of London reports. Diplomatic sources told the Sunday Times that the U.S. "bought weapons from the stockpiles of Libya's former dictator Muammar Gaddafi." The heavy arms include mortars, rocket propelled grenades, anti-tank missiles and the controversial anti-aircraft heat-seeking SA-7 missiles, which are integral to countering Bashar Al-Assad's bombing campaign.

France 24 |  Iran's border patrol police said it seized more than 11 tonnes of drugs, killing one smuggler, in the "biggest" bust since the 1979 Islamic revolution, media reported on Sunday. "The biggest drug load busted since the revolution, weighing 11 tonnes, has been seized in Jakigour area in Sistan-Baluchestan," bordering Pakistan, border police chief Brigadier General Hossein Zolfaqari said.