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this, of course, is not an accident. When a former president and vice-president openly back torture, and when the CIA has been engaging in a massive p.r. campaign to argue – against what we now know are incontrovertible facts from the CIA’s own records – that it saved thousands of lives, it will affect public opinion. There are always atavist and repellent sentiments in war time. The difference now is that a huge section of the elite endorses them.

We now know that the CIA contracted out the torture to two individuals without “specialized knowledge of al Qaeda, a background in counterterrorism or any relevant cultural or linguistic experience.” They had never interrogated anyone – yet they got a $181 million contract to run the program. They were sadists:

They had a pecuniary interest in the criminal enterprise. And they were making things up as they went along:

Why aren’t the defenders of torture horrified by this amateurism? Where are the Republican voices of outrage that a serious torture program was handed out to amateur contractors who had no idea what they were doing and no moral compass at all?

CIA sources were lying. KSM was waterboarded 183 times over a matter of weeks. And the waterboarding was not just 2 1/2 minutes of panic. It was full-fledged, endless, soul-breaking, body-destroying torture of a kind practiced in the past by totalitarian or authoritarian police states:

What this report proves – not asserts, but proves – is that the torture the US inflicted on prisoners was of an uncontrolled, nightmarish quality whose impact was so great that even the junior grunts on the night beat at Abu Ghraib knew what they were supposed to do.

In a civilized society, there really would be no debate over this. And before 9/11, there wasn’t. Ever since, this country has slid and then fallen out of the civilized world and out of the core American traditions of humanity and legal warfare. Krauthammer can be seen as emblematic of that slide – someone whose early abhorrence at torture and defense of it only in its mildest and rarest forms has slowly succumbed to a full-fledged defense of a program that violated every rule he said should be in place to protect us from the abyss. This is not surprising. When you start to torture, the sheer evil of what you are doing requires that you believe ever more in its value. You can never admit error, because it would mean you have committed crimes against humanity without even the defense of acquiring any useful intelligence. You are revealed as monsters – and you cannot accept that of yourself or of those you know. And so you insist – with ever-rising certainty – that the torture worked – even though that’s irrelevant as a matter of morality and of law, and even though your own internal documents prove that it didn’t.

And so you become the monster you were supposed to be fighting. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.

The Belgian counterterrorism official said indications of ISIS ordering attacks in Europe mark an apparent significant shift by the terrorist group. Before the air campaign against it, the official said, there was little indication ISIS leaders were directly plotting attacks in the West. Instead, the group prioritized its project to create an Islamic caliphate.

“We’ve been clear that counterterrorism operations remain a part of our mission in Afghanistan,” Rear Adm. John Kirby, the Pentagon press secretary, said on Thursday. “We’ve also been clear that we will conduct these operations in partnership with the Afghans to eliminate threats to our forces, our partners and our interests.”

“I suspect that Chérif Kouachi did engage AQAP members in Yemen, but that he was not fully brought into the organization,

The statement by the Qaeda branch in Yemen called the Kouachi brothers, who were shot to death by police on Friday, “two heroes of Islam.” But it referred to the actions of Amedy Coulibaly, who attacked a police officer the day of the assault on Charlie Hebdo and was shot to death by police after holding hostages in a kosher supermarket, as a coincidence and did not take responsibility for them.

This is the pattern that has produced terrorism in the Arab world. Repressive, secular regimes — backed by the West — become illegitimate. Over time they become more repressive to survive and the opposition becomes more extreme and violent. The space for compromise, pluralism and democracy vanishes. The insurgents and jihadists have mostly local grievances but, because Washington supports the dictator, their goals become increasingly anti-American.

Since we have learned little from this history, we are now repeating it. The Obama administration praises Egyptian President Abdel Fatah al-Sissi, who arguably rules in a more repressive manner than did Hosni Mubarak. Sissi’s regime has killed hundreds of protesters and jailed tens of thousands, mostly members of the political opposition, according to Human Rights Watch. It has censored the media and imprisoned journalists.

And it is not just the Obama administration. Intellectuals like Ayaan Hirsi Ali praise the general for wanting a moderate version of Islam. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) praises Sissi for his courage in calling out Islamists, contrasting him with President Obama. Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Tex.) compares the general to George Washington for his singular determination.

But it is hardly unusual for an Arab military dictator to want a moderate form of Islam. In fact, that was the norm.

The fact that Bush’s administration so botched its remedy — regime change and occupation of Iraq — should not blind us to the fact that it accurately diagnosed the problem. The Arab world provides no easy answers, trapped as it is between repressive dictators and illiberal democrats. But that does not mean that blindly supporting the autocrats is the right answer.

As we ally ever more closely with Yemen’s and Egypt’s dictators and engage in joint military actions with the absolute monarchy of Saudi Arabia, we should be wondering what is going on in the shadows, mosques and jails of these countries.

Problem number one: an overreliance on military force and other “kinetic options.”

That effort has sometimes achieved narrow tactical aims — ousting the Taliban in 2002, overthrowing Saddam in 2003, toppling Qaddafi and killing bin Laden in 2011 — but it has failed to solve the larger strategic problem and created conditions where extremism was likely to flourish rather than wither.

when historians a few decades from now look back on U.S. policy, they will no doubt regard this record as a massive, collective failure of the entire U.S. foreign policy establishment

the ability to blow things up and kill people does not translate into a workable set of governing institutions.

Like a cardiac surgeon who prescribes open-heart surgery for every malady from influenza to athlete’s foot, the United States now reaches for drones, Special Operations, or training missions not because they will cure the disease, but that is all we know how to do.

Second, U.S. officials have never seriously questioned the underlying set of policy commitments that have turned much of the Middle East against us, made the jihadi narrative seem appealing to some listeners, and made our friends in the region look like lackeys. U.S. officials from both parties have sometimes recognized that Israel’s occupation was a problem for the United States (as well as threat to Israel’s long-term future), and they have sometimes understood that many of our Middle East “partners” were less than fully reliable. Unfortunately, such moments of clarity never led any serious reconsideration of U.S. support for its various questionable clients.

The final reason for recurring failure is the tendency to rely on the same people, no matter what their past track records have been. We’ve seen a revolving door of (unsuccessful) Middle East peace negotiators who then spend their retirements giving advice on how future peace negotiations should be conducted

We’ve got a CIA director whose been centrally involved in U.S. counterterror policy since the early 1990s, and who continues to enjoy the president’s confidence despite a dodgy relationship with the truth and a conspicuous lack of policy success. We’ve got famous generals who were better at self-promotion than at winning wars, yet whose advice on what to do today is still eagerly sought. And of course we’ve got a large community of hawkish pundits offering up the same bellicose advice, with no acknowledgement of how disastrously their past recommendations have fared. The result is that U.S. policy continues to run on the same familiar tracks, and with more-or-less the same unhappy results.

It's rare for Obama to meet with his top military brass and homeland security experts outside the White House Situation Room;

Obama said the visit was part of an ongoing effort to "review and constantly strengthen" U.S. military plans against ISIS.

the group's land-grab was "contained" and that the U.S. homeland has "never been more protected."

. Obama delivered a rare primetime address to update the nation on his anti-ISIS strategy last Sunday, and on Thursday will receive a briefing at the National Counterterrorism Center, outside Washington, on the latest intelligence about holiday threats.

U.S. has also ramped up intelligence gathering in partnership with European allies, an effort that doesn't lend itself to grand displays of military strength that could help assuage fears in the U.S

The officials said that it was meant primarily as a re-examination of how the military positions itself for future counterterrorism missions, but that the growing concern about a metastasizing Islamic State threat has lent new urgency to the discussions.

The plan has met with some resistance from State Department officials concerned about a more permanent military presence across Africa and the Middle East, according to American officials familiar with the discussion.

Al Qaeda or other terrorist groups — including possible attacks against American embassies, like the assault on the diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, in 2012.

“You can’t just leave this on cruise control,”

“hubs” — including expanding existing bases in Djibouti and Afghanistan — and smaller “spokes,” or more basic installations, in countries that could include Niger and Cameroon, where the United States now carries out unarmed surveillance drone missions, or will soon.

The military already has much of the basing in place to carry out an expansion. Over the past dozen years, the Pentagon has turned what was once a decrepit French Foreign Legion base in Djibouti, in the Horn of Africa, into a sprawling headquarters housing 2,000 American troops for military operations in East Africa and Yemen.

“Because we cannot predict the future, these regional nodes — from Morón, Spain, to Jalalabad, Afghanistan — will provide forward presence to respond to a range of crises, terrorist and other kinds,”

He said that the Islamic State’s inclusion of Boko Haram and other militant groups into its fold was part of a “global dynamic.”

“completely subsumed” into the Islamic State.

They are flying the Islamic State flag, he said, “in an attempt to elevate their cause.”

“What could possibly be the argument for allowing a terrorist suspect to buy a semiautomatic weapon?” Mr. Obama said. “This is a matter of national security.”

“Seems to me that the greatest importance of this is to get the ball rolling so more people follow, and ideally the federal government,” Mr. Webster said. “I suspect more states will do this.”

own a gun.

Connecticut has passed some of the strictest gun laws in the country, including measures enacted after the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, when a gunman killed 20 schoolchildren and six staff members before killing himself.

The National Rifle Association “does not want terrorists or dangerous people to have access to weapons,” said Jennifer Baker, a spokeswoman for the organization’s lobbying arm. “But this is a constitutional issue,” she said, adding that mere suspicion should not be enough to take away the righ

The no-fly list is a subset of the watch list.

Correction: December 10, 2015 An earlier version of this article, using information from state officials, erroneously attributed a distinction to the proposed measure in Connecticut. It would not be the first such law in the nation; at least one other state has such a ban.

“These are everyday Americans that have nothing to do with terrorism,” Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, a Republican candidate for president, told CNN. “They wind up on the no-fly list, there’s no due process or any way to get your name removed from it in a timely fashion, and now they’re having their Second Amendment rights being impeded upon.”

Abe Mashal, a former Marine and a Muslim of mixed Palestinian-Italian background who lives in the Chicago area, was on the no-fly list until last year, for reasons he said were still a mystery to him.

“Never had any trouble with that,” he said of the gun purchase.

Since 2004, there have been 2,233 people who, like Mr. Mashal, landed on the government’s no-fly list because of terrorism suspicions and applied to buy a gun, according to a recent review of F.B.I. data by the Government Accountability Office.

But only rarely are legal reasons found to prohibit the sale, according to federal auditors. Since the F.B.I. began tracking the data, only 190 gun sales to people on the list — or 8.5 percent of all the attempted sales — have been blocked for other reasons, including mental illness or criminal convictions, auditors found.

But Democrats say increased fears of domestic terrorism stoked by the recent gun attacks in San Bernardino and in Paris are reason enough to stop people on a watch list from being able to buy a gun.

Mr. Malloy has lobbied federal lawmakers on the issue. “I have previously written to Congress on this matter,” he said. “But inaction is not an option. So here in Connecticut, we are acting.

The federal government’s terrorism watch list is a database maintained by the Terrorist Screening Center, an arm of the Federal Bureau of Investigation

“Like all Americans, I have been horrified by the recent terrorist attacks in San Bernardino and Paris,” Mr. Malloy, a Democrat, told reporters. “This should be a wake-up call to all of us. This is a moment to seize in America, and today I’m here to say that we in Connecticut are seizing it.”

With his decision, Mr. Malloy has stepped into a fiery debate that has stretched from the Oval Office to the contest to become its next occupant: Should being a terrorism suspect prohibit a person from buying firearms? At the moment, it does not.

With the mass shooting in California last week focusing attention on terrorism and guns, Gov. Dannel P. Malloy of Connecticut announced on Thursday that he intended to sign an executive order barring people on federal terrorism watch lists from buying firearms in the state.

President Obama has moved it to the front of his continuing push for stricter gun restrictions. “Congress should act to make sure no one on a no-fly list is able to buy a gun,” he said in

While Democrats in Congress have been calling almost daily for a fix to the so-called watch list loophole, Republicans have succeeded in defeating measures that would prevent people on the lists from buying guns. Democrats say they intend to keep pushing the issue, and on Thursday the House Democratic leader, Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, introduced a motion demanding a vote to restrict the sale of guns from anyone on a federal terrorism watch list. House Republicans swiftly shelved it.

What some critics have called a startling gap in the law has gnawed at counterterrorism officials for years. But it has now emerged as a flash point following the terrorist attack in San Bernardino, Calif., in which a married couple who the authorities believe were inspired by foreign extremists killed 14 people using legally obtained firearms.

But the argument, gun rights advocates say, is a matter of due process. They say that the no-fly list — with tens of thousands of names on it — is unreliable, with innocent people like Edward M. Kennedy, the Massachusetts senator who died in 2009, and other well-known Americans wrongly placed on the list.

While federal gun control legislation has gone nowhere in recent years, certain states have had more success. Connecticut has passed some of the strictest gun laws in the country, including measures enacted after the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, when a gunman killed 20 schoolchildren and six staff members before killing himself.

Daniel Webster, the director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research, said it was unclear what the practical implications of Connecticut’s proposed ban would be in stopping someone who is determined to carry out an act of terrorism. That person could simply travel to another state.

especially exasperated with Mr. Trump, who has called for a temporary ban on Muslims’ entering the United States.

Mr. Obama said that it was “understandable” that Americans were concerned, but that they should be reassured.

Mr. Obama claimed progress in pushing back the Islamic State, also called ISIS or ISIL, through a strategy of airstrikes combined with Special Operations raids and support for local forces on the ground.

Moreover, he added, part of the group’s strategy is to draw the United States into a broader military entanglement in the region.

Many studies seem to warn of the adolescent condition, singling out young, impatient men with a sense of adventure who are “struggling to achieve a sense of selfhood.”

Such generalizations are why civil libertarians see only danger in government efforts to identify people at risk of committing crimes.

“The people with guns and badges are so eager to have something. The fact that they could actually do harm? This doesn’t deter them.”

That has spurred debate abroad, and has raised questions in the United States about whether the Constitution would allow the government to keep tabs on lawful political or religious speech.

Researching terrorism is admittedly difficult. It involves tough questions about who qualifies as a terrorist, or as a rebel or a soldier

A 2012 National Counterterrorism Center report, for instance, declared that anxiety, unmet personal needs, frustration and trauma helped drive radicalization.

Research linking terrorism to American policies, meanwhile, is ignored.

As a practical matter, scientists note, checklists are mathematically certain to fail. Even a test with 99 percent accuracy would be wrong far more often than right.

With its echoes of stranger-than-fiction plots from the Cold War and from the Putin era, the case threatens to worsen the already tense relations between the West and a Russian government that has annexed part of Ukraine and propped up the Assad government in Syria and that stands accused of disrupting elections and sowing discord within democracies.

The United States is in Syria mainly because of ISIS.

Iran is in Syria to protect the Assad regime, and also to use its proxies to menace its archenemy Israel from a neighboring country.

European countries like France and Britain are also in Syria because of ISIS. These countries’ policies have hewed largely to those of the United States

Russia is in Syria to protect the Assad regime from rebels it sees as terrorists, and project influence in the Middle East. Its military intervention in September 2015 ensured Assad would not only reverse his losses, but regain much of Syria. America’s scattershot approach to Syrian policy helped, as did the metastatic spread of ISIS that created a common enemy for both the pro- and anti-Assad camps.  

Prior to the rise of ISIS in 2014, the United States generally sought to contain the conflict, as efforts at international diplomacy failed to resolve it. The Obama administration advocated for Assad to step aside, but was reluctant to send weapons or funds to the rebels opposing him, out of fear that they would fall into the hands of Islamists and radical jihadists among them. In 2012, Obama also famously set a “red line” regarding chemical weapons, saying that their use would change his calculus on U.S. strategy there. But when Assad used sarin gas on civilians in 2013, Obama opted, instead of using force, for an agreement with Russia to destroy Assad’s stockpiles of chemical weapons. The U.S. started bombing Syria for the first time a year later, hitting not regime targets but targets associated with ISIS. It has continued bombing ever since.President Trump recently said the U.S. would leave Syria “very soon”—even as his military advisers were planning to send additional troops. By the time he spoke, the U.S. presence in the country had grown to some 2,000 troops; news reports say Trump wants them out within six months.Then came the suspected chemical attack of last weekend, to which Trump retaliated with strikes against the regime, as he did to a similar attack last year. This means the United States has once again expanded its mission beyond counterterrorism.

Saudi Arabia is in Syria—primarily by financing the rebellion—to oppose Iran.

Israel is in Syria to oppose Iran. For years, its border with Syria was its quietest frontier—despite its poor relationship with Assad and his father, Hafez al-Assad. But Israel has watched Iran’s growing influence there with alarm.

Turkey is in Syria because of the Kurds.

That misjudgment appears particularly to have fueled new tension between Facebook and Democrats, who had long been close to the company.

a former Federal Bureau of Investigation counterterrorism agent now at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, a Philadelphia-based think tank. Mr. Watts added that Facebook has done more to address the Russian issue than other tech companies, but has borne the brunt of public criticism.

The issue of Russian election interference on our platform is something we continued to learn more about as we conducted our own internal reviews and provided information to law enforcement officials and legislators to inform their own inquiries.”

Indeed, while the security team worked to uncover Russian accounts through 2017, Facebook assigned a small team to boost user growth in Russia and other markets, says a person familiar with the team. The team considered developing Russia-specific products such as a music service, although it didn’t launch it, the person says.

None of the Dapchi girls has been found. Nigeria’s government on Tuesday said it had set up a probe led by senior security officials to investigate the abductions.

The U.S. State Department last week condemned the attack and emphasized its support for Nigeria’s efforts to counter terror groups.

The abduction could have an equally detrimental effect on Buhari’s electoral fortunes as Chibok had on his predecessor.”

But revelations after the abductions that the government recently withdrew security forces stationed to protect the town, saying they were needed elsewhere, has deepened anger in Dapchi.

The security situation is in a shambles—Boko Haram are calling the shots,” said Maria Urgbashi, who runs a food stall close to the Hilton hotel. Another trader, Umar Danjuma, agreed: “Buhari has done his best, but I don’t think his best is good enough to take Nigeria out this present hardship.”

remains the front-runner if he is healthy and popular enough to secure his governing APC party’s nomination.

The APC—which on Monday opened its annual congress—is deeply divided, as is the opposition PDP

The APC has the political and economic advantages of incumbency, and the president isn’t seen as personally corrupt.

Buhari has governed more like a king than a leader at the center of a sophisticated political structure,”

Buhari has repeatedly claimed to have technically defeated appears to be stubbornly resilient. After losing hundreds of square miles of territory to government forces, the jihadists have increased attacks in the past year, sending more than 90 children strapped with bombs into public places.

McCabe, 49, rose quickly through the FBI’s ranks as a counterterrorism supervisor, playing a key role in reorganizing how the U.S. government interrogates international terrorism suspects

David Bowdich, a senior FBI official who led the agency’s response to the San Bernardino terrorist attack, is expected to serve as the next deputy director

McCabe ran the FBI for three turbulent months last year, until Christopher A. Wray took over as director.

Trump’s dislike of McCabe dates back to October 2016, when news stories revealed that McCabe’s wife had run as a Democrat for the Virginia legislature

In recent months, McCabe has been harshly criticized by congressional Republicans who challenge the FBI’s rationale for opening the Russia probe in July 2016.

Former attorney general Eric H. Holder Jr. called McCabe “a dedicated public servant who has served this country well.” Holder, a Democrat, denounced “bogus attacks on the FBI and DOJ to distract attention from a legitimate criminal inquiry.”

The political scrutiny surrounding McCabe intensified in December, when The Post reported that his senior adviser, Lisa Page, had been engaged in a romantic relationship with Peter Strzok, a senior FBI agent, and the two exchanged anti-Trump, pro-Clinton text messages while they we

re immersed in ongoing investigations about the two presidential candidates.

Christians in the early European Middle Ages, between roughly the 5th and 11th centuries, believed that God knew all human secrets, yet God’s secrets remained fundamentally unknowable to human beings. This widespread and deep-seated belief in an omniscient and mysterious being shaped institutional structures and social behavior in profound ways, as human efforts at concealment were considered futile

Today, a new form of mysterious omniscience is having a similarly widespread and unpredictable effect on human social behavior. We know that data about us is being compiled at breathtaking speeds, but most of us have little way of knowing what information is being collected, how it is being used and, crucially, how the various algorithms, clouds, networks and devices even work

The belief in an omniscient God structured almost every part of medieval life, especially around the rapidly developing legal systems of the time. Law codes named God as a constant witness in legal disputes in which human witnesses were considered deficient and God’s judgment functioned as a compelling legal tool.

By the 18th century, new secular forms of institutional power and surveillance emerged. Jeremy Bentham, for example, theorized the panopticon, a prison structure designed to harness a prisoner’s belief that he was always being watched to shape his behavior in favor of docility. What makes the architecture of the panopticon work is the mysterious omniscience of the prison guards, who can see from their tower into every cell without ever being seen themselves.

Today’s global data economy is the new form of mysterious omniscience. And as the reach of these technologies expands, their mystery will be one of the greatest barriers to its regulation.

Indeed, as scholar Shoshana Zuboff has written, firms actively confuse the public about the data they process so that their capabilities “remain inscrutable to all but an exclusive data priesthood.”

tion of fear and a belief in the benevolence of the divine

Where people in the early Middle Ages assigned benevolence to and held tremendous fear in their omniscient God, we have been facing — indeed embracing with remarkably little fear — this mysteriously omniscient technology reasoned to be benevolent because it makes life more convenient.

The way medieval law used God’s omniscience in cases of unreliable testimony foreshadows a future — in some ways, one already here — in which the information collected into that mysteriously omniscient entity (including data recorded by devices and retained by corporations) can be harvested and harnessed as evidence in courts of law, particularly where no other human witnesses are available to testify

In these cases, corporations have so far resisted sharing the data with the state, with the exception of counterterrorism efforts. But it also contributes to the corporate entity’s growing omniscience and mysteriousness

the move from the panopticon to this future iteration of mysterious omniscience could potentially entail a more insidious form of discipline stripped of the fear of punishment and, with its godlike status, of the possibility of democratic regulation.

Former agency officials assert that the military, with its vast resources and manpower, is better suited to conducting large-scale counterinsurgencies.

The C.I.A.’s paramilitary division, which is taking on the assignment, numbers only in the hundreds and is deployed all over the world.

In Afghanistan, the fight against the Islamic State has also diverted C.I.A. assets.

The expansion reflects the C.I.A.’s assertive role under its new director, Mike Pompeo, to combat insurgents around the world.

The agency is already poised to broaden its program of covert drone strikes into Afghanistan; it had largely been centered on the tribal regions of Pakistan, with occasional strikes in Syria and Yemen.