Word: secretiveness
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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They shouldn't be shocked. Secret overseas operations are nothing new for the CIA, which was created in 1947 with the broad authority to conduct foreign intelligence missions. In 1953 the agency orchestrated a coup against Iranian Premier Mohammed Mossadegh that returned the pro-American Shah to power. Over the ensuing decade, it supported coups and assassinations in places such as Guatemala and the Dominican Republic to install leaders considered sympathetic to U.S. interests. Despite this legacy, many Americans were unaware of the CIA's clandestine operations until May 1960, when a U-2 spy plane was downed over...
...restrictions were eased in the '80s, when the agency backed Afghan mujahedin fighting against the Soviets and meddled in Central America. And since 9/11, the agency has attracted a new load of critics, this time for matters such as "extraordinary renditions" and the harsh interrogation of suspected terrorists in secret overseas prisons known as black sites. Poor Langley--praise is a scarce commodity for an agency whose missions, as President George W. Bush put it, remain "secret even in success...
...Iannucci and written by Thick veterans Iannucci, Jesse Armstrong, Simon Blackwell, Tony Roche and Ian Martin. Its central character is a Candidean foreign minister in the British cabinet, Simon Foster (tiny, beset Tom Hollander). A sweet-souled doofus of the second tier, Simon is invited to attend to top-secret conferences, but not to give opinions, only as an extra body - "room meat." And he's so fearful of scandal that, if left alone at night in a hotel room on a trip to Washington, he'd be "trying to spank one out over a shark documentary, 'cause...
...judge's enthusiasm for harrying the government with rulings that were popular with the public. Chaudhry had burnished his reputation by striking down the planned privatization of a steel mill and hearing petitions raised by the relatives of Pakistanis that human rights groups allege are being held in secret custody as terror suspects. When Chaudhry refused to yield to Musharraf's demand that he resign, the country's lawyers took to the streets in his support...
...wholesale course correction of his presidency in his second term. The pivot was hard to miss. Where Cheney had urged unilateral U.S. action in the first term, "in the second term we're going to be doing more diplomacy," Bush told top aides. Where Cheney had orchestrated a secret push to embrace the "dark side" in the war on terrorism, Bush instructed aides in 2005 to begin to seek congressional approval for some of the Administration's most controversial programs, such as its terrorist-detention policies. At the State Department, Bush installed Condoleezza Rice, for whom some Cheney allies...