"It's Official: Tunisia Now Freer than the US" (Cole)

Tunisian Prime Minister Béji Caïd Essebsi announced on Monday the dissolution of the country’s secret police arm. This step toward democracy is the most important taken by any Arab country for decades.

Arguably, Tunisians are now freer than Americans. The US government thinks our private emails are actually public. The FBI and NSA routinely read our email and they and other branches of the US government issue security letters in the place of warrants allowing them to tap phones and monitor whom we call, and even to call up our library records and conduct searches of our homes without telling us about it. Millions of telephone records were turned over to George W. Bush by our weaselly telecom companies. Courts allow government agents to sneak onto our property and put GPS tracking devices under our automobiles without so much as a warrant or even probable cause. Mr. Obama thinks this way of proceeding is a dandy idea.

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The Punishment for Torture? Former US Intelligence Officials Take a Caribbean Cruise (Shephard)

About 30 minutes into an interview on an outdoor deck aboard the “spy cruise,” the issue of Osama bin Laden arises.

“What can you do with him?” asks Porter Goss, the former head of the CIA, as he settles back in a padded lounge chair.

“Are we going to sit him on a deckchair and ask him to cooperate? Or are we going to put him in a place where he can’t leave?”

Goss’s point is this: Now that the Obama administration has outlawed harsh interrogation techniques such as waterboarding, shut the CIA covert “black sites” around the world and frowned upon renditions, what are the options open to America’s intelligence service?

He insists the CIA “enhanced” methods worked.

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