According to the New York Times' James Risen, Bush White House officials asked the CIA to gather dirt on and discredit left-wing academic Juan Cole because they didn't like the things he wrote on his blog.

The CIA's website is down, and the hacking group Lulz Security is claiming credit on Twitter.

According to Time magazine, a special prosecutor tasked with investigating CIA personnel for torturing and murdering detainees during the Bush Administration has convened a grand jury and started issuing subpoenas.

New York Times reporter and blogger-hater James Risen has been subpoenaed to testify in the criminal trial of a former CIA agent accused of leaking Risen classified information.

You've probably never heard of Marty Martin. He spent most of his life as an anonymous CIA operative. But he very recently came out of the closet as the man Bush put in charge of finding Osama bin Laden in the aftermath of 9/11, and guess what? It turns out the man Bush put in charge of finding bin Laden is an extremely shady and allegedly corrupt war profiteer. Who would have thought?

The CIA will now let select senators view Osama bin Laden's gross death photos "if they wish," Reuters reports. But they'll have to make appointments. Sounds like a hassle. Just look at Sen. Scott Brown's fake photos instead.

Now that Barack Obama has released his long-form birth certificate, let's play What Other Evil News Is He Trying to Distract Us From? Maybe it's this: The AP reports that CIA Director and former Bill Clinton chief of staff Leon Panetta will take over for Defense Secretary Robert Gates this summer, while Afghanistan commander Gen. David Petraeus will replace Panetta at the CIA. Does the Obama administration want us talking about this?

Happy Earth Day, everyone! The CIA wants you all to know that it is at the forefront of conservation by… shredding and burning documents. They sent out this official Earth Day press release highlighting its "sustainability and conservation initiatives":

In a bid to show its transparency bona fides, the CIA has released six previously secret documents from World War I, thirty years before the Agency was created. They concern invisible ink. Which, until today, was a national secret.

The Smoking Gun has uncovered an old mugshot of Susan Burns, the woman who attacked Gauguin's "Two Tahitian Women" over the weekend. They've also got the criminal complaint, and as it turns out, she's a CIA agent! (According to her.)

The Central Intelligence Agency is a fundamentally lawless organization that secretly influences events around the globe on behalf of the U.S. It turns out Obama has deployed its agents to Libya, and for some reason liberals are up in arms about it.

Reuters reports that President Obama "signed a secret order authorizing covert U.S. government support for rebel forces seeking to oust Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi" within the last "two or three weeks." So there's your channel for arming the rebels.

American government officials now say that Raymond Davis, the American man arrested in Pakistan last month after shooting two men dead in Lahore, was part of a covert, C.I.A.-led team of operatives, according to The New York Times.

Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi, an Iraqi defector under Saddam Hussein whose claims about the former dictator's mobile biological weapons programs were used heavily in the Bush Administration's public case for war, has an interesting story to tell everyone. The source, who, under the alias "Curveball" in intelligence reports, provided a foundation for Secretary of State Colin Powell's famous speech to the United Nations a month before the Iraq invasion, admits that he just made it up to get Hussein out of power.

The Associated Press' Adam Goldman and Matt Apuzzo have a breathtaking-but-sadly-unsurprising story detailing the CIA's habit of promoting the very people responsible for the Agency's most spectacular fuck-ups. The analyst responsible for illegally abducting, drugging, sodomizing, and beating a completely innocent man because she thought he was someone else? She's running the hunt for bin Laden now. The guy who let a prisoner freeze to death in Afghanistan? He oversees spying operations in the Middle East.

Here's the indictment accusing ex-CIA officer Jeffrey Sterling of leaking classified information to the New York Times' James Risen.

Jeffrey Sterling, a former CIA officer, was indicted today for leaking classified information to New York Times reporter James Risen. The indictment shows that the federal government had access to their e-mail and phone contacts going back several years.

The Department of Justice was too scared to prosecute the CIA for deliberately destroying evidence that its employees illegally tortured terror detainees. But fear not: The National Archives and Records Administration is still on the case.

Back in the day, the U.S. had a policy of waterboarding people, but the CIA secretly destroyed the videotapes of these "sessions" in 2005. Now the agents responsible won't even be prosecuted. So that's how it works. [AP, photo]

Justice Department officials took the controversial step yesterday of invoking the government's state secret privilege to try and dismiss a terrorism lawsuit over the "targeted killing" of a U.S. citizen.