Word: secret
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...court. Lately there's been a terrible tendency to dismiss adultery lightly if no official lying is involved. Henry Hyde describes a long affair with a married mother of three as a youthful indiscretion (he was 41); Dan Burton says his affair with a state employee and the secret child it produced is O.K. because he pays child support; Helen Chenoweth excuses her affair with a married man who was a business associate because she wasn't married and it took place before she was elected. What message does that send the children...
...President Clinton signed a top-secret order, approved by the congressional intelligence committees, that authorized the CIA to begin covert operations to break up bin Laden's terror network. The agency's counterterrorism center--200 operatives housed in a windowless warren of cubicles in the CIA's Langley, Va., headquarters--had set up a special bin Laden task force. Analysts were assigned to read every word the Saudi had spoken or written. Computers with sophisticated "link analysis" programs were busy printing out diagrams of bin Laden's loose-knit network, which included thousands of Muslim fighters with varying degrees...
With bin Laden out of reach, the CIA launched a secret program to harass his network. Using its own informants plus the counterterrorism center's computers, which tracks passports worldwide, the CIA would spot bin Laden operatives in foreign countries, then quietly enlist the local security service to arrest or deport them and allow the agency to sift through materials left in their apartments. In many cases, the CIA didn't know "exactly what each person was doing," says an intelligence official, "just that he was doing something with a terror organization, so we should disrupt...
...August 1997 the CIA had identified a bin Laden cell operating in Nairobi. The agency believed it was headed by Wadih el Hage, a Lebanese who held American citizenship and who, according to court documents, once served as bin Laden's personal secretary. Washington sent a secret request to Kenyan authorities in Nairobi: roust Wadih el Hage. For several weeks Kenyan police, sometimes accompanied by visiting FBI agents, began paying visits to el Hage's Nairobi home, searching its rooms, confiscating computer disks and darkly warning him that he'd face more hassling if he remained in the country...
...Leno and Letterman raillery. Are the charges, whispers and gags true? Hardly matters; they need only be entertaining. Star tattle proceeds from two American impulses: cynicism and sentimentality. Sentimentally we imagine that a popular artist must have hidden depths. Cynically we suspect that every star must have a guilty secret; all that power, money and spare time allow them to act out any sick whim. Gossip has become the purest form of show biz, a story that can be as short as a gerbil joke or as epic as the Monica Follies. It attaches itself to any prominent person...