Well, this is a timely topic, given the furious dispute between Dems and Republicans on Capitol Hill over whether Congress should have been informed about CIA plans for a "hit squad" to take out al Qaida leaders, not to mention a Senate Intelligence committee examination of the CIA's detention and interrogation programs, disputes over Iraq war intelligence, etc.

So we at Nukes & Spooks were glad to hear from the folks at Harvard University's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs about their new memo, Confrontation or Collaboration? Congress and the Intelligence Community.

 No bombshells here, but the document, presented as a briefing book for members of Congress, should be of interest to intel junkies, journalists, Hill staffers and academics alike. We at N&S did a quick review, and found that it neatly sums up the history of major issues like intel reform, congressional oversight, as well as specific programss like electronic surveillance, interrogations and cyber-security.

Co-authors Eric Rosenbach, a former Senate Intelligence Committee staffer, and Aki Peritz, do a good job of packing a lot of information in an easy-to-digest format, useful even for those of us who have followed this stuff for a while. Check it out.

Back in April, a Pentagon study, first leaked to the New York Times, claimed that 14 percent of the more than 540 detainees released from the Guantanamo Bay detention center were confirmed or suspected of "reengagingng in terrorist activities." The study provided fuel for the ongoing debate over President Barack Obama's plans to close GTMO, as it's known, by next January, as well as the larger fight over his and his predecessor's national security policies.

The Pentagon report, based on information from the Defense Intelligence Agency, came in for some immediate criticism, not least because it assumed that every individual detained at Guantanamo was a terrorist in the first place. An exhaustive McClatchy series last year found that some of the men detained at Guantanamo did not belong there, while others were radicalized by conditions at the facility.

(The Times acknowledged errors in the way it handled the story in an editors' note).

Now comes a new analysis by the New America Foundation, a centrist think tank, that also challenges the Pentagon assessment. Analysts Peter Bergen and Katherine Tiedemann put the actual recidivist at about one in 25, or 4 percent. They define recidivism as those who are confirmed or suspected to be involved in anti-U.S. violence, and base their study on Pentagon reports, news studies and other public records.

The New America Foundation report found 21 individuals who engaged or may have engaged in anti-U.S. or insurgent activities after release from GTMO. (The Pentagon study found 27 confirmed and 47 suspected recidivists, although 45 of them were not named to protect intelligence sources and methods, according to Navy Cmdr. J.D. Gordon, a Pentagon spokesman).

Gordon said Monday, "We stand by the analysis that approximately 14 percent of the ex-Guantanamo detainees are confirmed or suspected of having returned to terrorism."

One difference in the analyses is that the New America Foundation study excluded former detainees who may have engaged in political violence, but not against U.S. interests, such as two men convicted in 2006 of blowing up a Russian gas pipeline. Even if this group is included, the recidivism rate if about 7.5 percent, not 14 percent, the report states.

Spokesman Gordon, meanwhile, rejected the proposition that some of the detainees may not have been terrorists when they went into Guantanamo, but were by the time they left. "Our views is that all the detainees who went to Guantanamo were enemy combatants," he said, noting that formal review panels have found that 38 of the approximately 540 released were "no longer enemy combatants." None of those, he said, were included in the Pentagon's list of 74 recidivists.

The chairman of the House intelligence commitee, Rep. Silvestre Reyes, D-Texas, said Friday that the panel is opening an investigation into whether the CIA has properly notified Congress of significant covert actions.

Reyes' move was triggered by CIA Director Leon Panetta's June 24 disclosure that Congress had not been notified of a major planned counter-terrorism program, later reported to be an agency effort to form elite teams to hunt down and kill top terrorist operatives at close range. The effort never got off the ground, and then-Vice President Dick Cheney told the agency not to tell Congress' intelligence committees of the matter.

The news of the probe could be a further disappointment to President Barack Obama, who has resisted a whole-scale investigation into alleged wrong-doing on the national security front by the Bush administration, fearing it would complicate his domestic and security agenda.

Republicans on Capitol Hll oppose the probe, and accuse Democrats of politicizing the agency.

The American Civil Liberties Union welcomed the investigation. "We know now more than ever that government transparency is essential to a functioning democracy and our government cannot be held accountable if Congress and the American people are left in the dark. Only by vigorously exercising its oversight responsibility can Congress reassert its critical role as an effective check against abuse of executive authority," Michael Macleod-Ball of the ACLU's Washington office said in a statment.

The word among the chattering classes in Washington these days is that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has not yet publicly asserted herself as a forceful presence in the foreign policy arena--has, in fact, been a bit in the background while the White House takes the lead on key foreign policy issues such as Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran and Russia.

Several things seem to be at work here:

1) The White House is aggressive and energetic in pursuing Obama's agenda and putting his personal stamp on it.

2) Clinton has been busy running her department, getting various undersecretaries and assistant secretaries in place, and launching initiatives to reform foreign aid and better target U.S. diplomatic resources. The buzz is that morale at State is pretty good.

3) The SecState has literally been on injured reserve since fracturing her elbow in a fall in the State Department parking garage on June 17. She pared back her schedule for several weeks, and skipped several foreign trips, including Obama's summit with the Russians in Moscow.

Clinton and her team will try to change her public impression beginning Wednesday, when she is due to give what is being billed as a major foreign policy speech at the Council on Foreign Relations. You can find Politico's take on the speech here. Don't expect major headline news, State Department officials say. Instead, Clinton is expected to lay out her foreign policy priorities and principles.

She'll follow it up with a week long trip to India and Thailand, where she'll participate in a meeting of Southeast Asian nations.

Clinton, meanwhile, let a little bit of frustration show on Monday. The dart, interestingly, was aimed at the White House, The SecState complained that the onerous vetting process for job candidates has meant that there is still no nominee to head the US Agency for International Development.

She told a US AID town hall-style meeting:  "The process, the clearance and vetting process, is a nightmare. And it takes far longer than any of us would want to see. It is frustrating beyond words. I pushed very hard last week when I knew I was coming here to get permission from the White House to be able to tell you that help is on the way and someone will be nominated shortly, and I was unable
– it just was – the message came back we’re not ready."

Full text of her remarks here.

When you're president of the United States, you deal with the other world leaders you have, not the ones you might wish to have, to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld.

We were reminded of that this week, when we saw screen grabs of video footage of North Korean leader Kim Jong-il addressing a memorial for his late father, state founder Kim Il-sung. Not too put too fine a point on it: He don't look so good. Kim, 67, believed to have suffered a stroke in August, looked thin, old and tired. His once-parodied bouffant hair had given way to baldness.

Leadership transitions, particularly in authoritarian states, can be perilous times, as North Korea demonstrates. It's been lighting off missiles, conducting nuclear tests and stepping up its bombastic rhetoric in what at least some analysts say is an effort to show strength while Kim arranges a succession to his son.

All this got us thinking about potential leadership transitions elsewhere. That don't look so good either. In some of the most sensitive spots around the world, leaders are, not to be macabre about it, getting on in years.

Moving on from North Korea, we come to the Middle East, where Saudi's King Abdullah is 85 years old, albeit reportedly in decent health. Abdullah has been an important behind-the-scenes ally to the United States, pushing, however slowly, for reforms in the Kingdom, while also trying to advance the Middle East peace process and counter influence from Iran and Syria in Lebanon.

Also in the Middle East is Egypt's Hosni Mubarak, at 81 a spring chicken compared to Abdullah. Say what you will about Mubarak, he's managed to hold Egypt together for 26 years since the assassination of Anwar Sadat. What will happen to the Arab world's most populous country, and home to the Muslim Brotherhood movement, after he's gone, is anybody's guess.

Closer to home is Cuba, where Fidel Castro, in declining health for several years now, is 82, and his brother Raoul, now the country's president, is 76. 'Nuf said. Commentators have been predicting the Castros' demise for decades, and we'e not going to go there.

The leaders of Burma, Kuwait and many other places are well into their '70s and '80s. But the prize goes to Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe, born February 21, 1924, and like Saudi's Abdullah, 85 years old.

So, change, for good or ill, lies ahead for some pretty important countries and for President Obama. 

P.S. - With John McCain (age 72) running for the U.S. presidency last year (he would have been the oldest man to assume the presidency), Foreign Policy magazine was cheeky enough to do a list of the World's 10 Oldest Leaders. You can find it here.  

The State Department does not have an accurate accounting of its laptop computers, including ones meant for classified use, and has failed to encrypt machines as it is supposed to do to protect sensitive information, according to a new report by the department's inspector general.

Inspectors found that 27 laptops, worth $55,000 were missing out of a sample of 334 from four State Department bureaus, the report states.

"Because thecontent and the encryption status of the missing laptop computers are unknown, there is a risk that PII (Personally Identifiable Information) and other sensitive Department information may be susceptible to unauthorized access and use," it says.

While no security breaches were confirmed, the report is critical of the State Department's system for tracking its laptop computers, and recommends changes to improve it.

The report is the latest in a series of developments that cast doubt on the federal government's ability to protect classified and personal data.

In 2006, an analyst from the Veterans Administration took home a laptop computer containing social security numbers and other data for more than 26 million veterans, and it was subsequently stolen in a burglary. The machine was recovered without any apparent data breach.

In March 2008, it became known that State Department employees, most of them contractors, had snooped into the passport files of the three presidential candidates: Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, who is now secretary of state.

The latest State Department report also found that the department had failed to meet its own mandate to encrypt all laptop computers containing unclassified or "sensitive but unclassified" information by July 1, 2008, to protect against data breaches.

More than half the machines tested were not encrypted, including some used for classified information.

The Inspector General audited laptop inventories at four department bureaus: Diplomatic Security; Intelligence and Research; Information Resource Management; and Overseas Building Operations. Of the four, only the Intelligence and Research bureau, State's intelligence arm, could account for all its laptop computers.