Ahead of the limited premiere of Laura Poitras' documentary film "Citizenfour" about the Edward Snowden saga, a chilling 90-second trailer has been released.

The film, which will have its wide release on Oct. 24, has been billed as a "real-life thriller" that tells the story of Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor.

In May 2013, he took a trove of top-secret documents from the spy agency and fled the country to Hong Kong, where he handed them over to Poitras and journalist Glenn Greenwald. He ultimately made his way to Moscow where he still remains under asylum.

While working on a film about government surveillance in Jan. 2012, Poitras began receiving encrypted e-mails from a person who identified himself as "citizen four."

It was Snowden, who according to the trailer, wrote, "I am a senior government employee in the intelligence community. I hope you understand that contacting you was extremely high-risk."

Watch the trailer:

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Warning: Spoilers.

Documentarian Laura Poitras spent a lot of time with Edward Snowden in his Hong Kong hotel room from June 3 to June 10, and her new film sets the stage for what is arguably the biggest national security leak in American history.

"Citizenfour" presents fascinating footage from the Mira Hotel, revealing the raw interactions in room 1014 as Snowden, Poitras, journalist Glenn Greenwald, and Guardian reporter Ewan MacAskill unravel the first of many stories that exposed National Security Agency spying activities worldwide.

Unfortunately, the film, while revealing details about Snowden's time in Hong Kong (and Moscow), does little to answer fundamental questions regarding the former NSA systems administrator's alleged theft of more than a million NSA documents.

'What you know as Stellarwind has grown'

Snowden, 31, allegedly began copying documents in April 2012 while working as an NSA contractor in Hawaii. He emailed journalist Glenn Greenwald on Dec. 1, and helped run a "Crypto Party" on Dec. 11 that taught people how to could protect themselves online.

The former CIA technician reached out to Poitras in January 2013 with promises of top secret documents detailing pervasive spying by the US government on Americans and foreign citizens worldwide, and they began communicating. In June 2013, Poitras and Greenwald flew to Hong Kong to meet Snowden.

"Citizenfour" establishes the context of the Snowden leaks through whistleblowers who have come public about the US government spying on Americans.

One is Mark Klein, a former AT&T technician who revealed that the NSA built a special room at the central AT&T office in San Francisco that allegedly "vacuumed up Internet and phone-call data from ordinary Americans with the cooperation of AT&T."

William Binney, a 32-year veteran of the US intelligence community and one of the best code breakers in NSA history, tells Poitras how he built a program called "Stellarwind" that served as a pervasive domestic spying apparatus after 9/11.

Snowden told Poitras that "What you know as Stellarwind has grown" into a worldwide spying apparatus that includes an increasing amount of data related to US citizens.

What is not mentioned in "Citizenfour" is that beyond the estimated 200,000 documents given to Poitras and Greenwald, Snowden also took up to 1.5 million documents detailing NSA operations targeting American adversaries.

Two days after parting ways with Poitras and Greenwald, Snowden provided documents revealing"operational details of specific attacks on computers, including internet protocol (IP) addresses, dates of attacks and whether a computer was still being monitored remotely" to Lana Lam of the South China Morning Post.

"I did not release them earlier because I don't want to simply dump huge amounts of documents without regard to their content," Snowden told the Hong Kong paper in a June 12 interview. "I have to screen everything before releasing it to journalists."

'But now he is starting to talk about ... hacking into China and all this kind of thing'

Poitras, who narrates that she was in Hong Kong until about June 16, has not commented on the SCMP leaks.

Greenwald subsequently told the Daily Beast that he would not have "disclosed the specific IP addresses in China and Hong Kong the NSA is hacking."

Binney, another central figure in "Citizenfour," had a clear response after the implications of Snowden's decision to leaking details about operational national security information unrelated to civil liberties.

The mathematician told USA Today in June 2013 that Snowden's disclosures to SCMP went "a little bit too far" and said Snowden "is going a little beyond public service."

Binney subsequently described Snowden as a "patriot" and supports him in "Citizenfour," but has not retracted his comments about the documents Snowden stole but did not give to Poitras or Greenwald.

Those disclosures are crucial, and their omission from "Citizenfour" highlights key questions about Snowden's multifaceted theft.

"He is a whistleblower in the case of some documents, and not a whistleblower in the case of other documents,"Edward Jay Epstein of The Wall Street Journalsaid in an August interview with Powerline.

Epstein reported that Snowden quit his job at Dell on March 15, 2013, before joining Booz Allen to "get access to the crown jewels, the lists of computers in four adversary nations — Russia, China, North Korea and Iran — that the agency had penetrated."

James Bamford of Wired, who met Snowden in Moscow this summer, reported that Snowden went to Booz Allen to steal documents detailing"the highly secret world of planting malware into systems around the world and stealing gigabytes of foreign secrets."

'I'm not the story here ... [Nail] me to the cross'

"Citizenfour" presents Snowden's rendezvous with Poitras and co. in vivid human detail, including several segments of him watching CNN and fixing his hair. Consequently, the footage raises questions and contradictions about Snowden's formal introduction to the world.

"I'm not the story here," Snowden told the camera, emphasizing at another point that he didn't want to personally bias the reporting.

At the same time, Snowden is effusive about not hiding his identity — on the subject of anonymously leaking, Snowden says "Fuck that." He has subsequently appeared on camera dozens of times since June 2013.

"My personal desire is that you paint the target directly on my back," Snowden reportedly told Poitras.

He added, according to chats featured in "Citizenfour," that the best action to prevent people close to him from falling under suspicion was "immediately nailing me to the cross instead of protecting me as a source."

Snowden says he wanted the US government to know where he was, but how he spent his time in the first few days after leaving Hawaii are still a mystery.

He told Vanity Fair that he "used a personal credit card so the government could immediately verify that I was entirely self-financed [and] independent."

That claim has been refuted. Epstein traveled to Hong Kong this summer and reported for WSJ that while Snowden arrived in Hong Kong on May 20, he didn't check into the Mira Hotel until June 1.

"Mr. Snowden would tell Mr. Greenwald on June 3 that he had been 'holed up' in his room at the Mira Hotel from the time of his arrival in Hong Kong. But according to inquiries by Wall Street Journal reporter Te-Ping Chen, Mr. Snowden arrived there on June 1," Epstein reported. "I confirmed that date with the hotel's employees. A hotel security guard told me that Mr. Snowden was not in the Mira during that late-May period and, when he did stay there, he used his own passport and credit card."

Assange's curious cameo

While "Citizenfour" also does not go in depth about how Snowden spent his time before and after Poitras filmed him in Hong Kong, his eventual flight to Moscow on June 23 is addressed.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange sent his trusted adviser (and former girlfriend) Sarah Harrison to Hong Kong to find the American asylum somewhere out of the reach of the US government.

The Australian publisher of US secrets makes a brief appearance in "Citizenfour," telling someone on the phone that the organization had helped Snowden leave Hong Kong and that the "CIA agent" was trapped in Moscow's Sheremetyevo Airport since the American government revoked his passport on June 22.

"We are trying to arrange a private jet to take him from Moscow to Ecuador or perhaps maybe Venezuela, or maybe Iceland, some of these places would be safe," Assange says.

However, Assange has stated multiple times that he advised Snowden to stay in Russia, as opposed to attempting to obtain asylum in Venezuela and Ecuador.

"In Russia, he's safe, he's well-regarded, and that is not likely to change," the Australian publisher told Janet Reitman of Rolling Stone in December 2013. "That was my advice to Snowden, that he would be physically safest in Russia."

And in May, the official WikiLeaks Twitter account (which Assange runs) stated that they "advised Snowden to take Russia. Not safe elsewhere."

A very important film

"Citizenfour" is an engrossing account of Edward Snowden's collaboration with US and UK journalists to expose pervasive surveillance activities by the American government and its allies.

What is left unmentioned — including details about Snowden's time in Hawaii, why he took a cache of documents unrelated to civil liberties, his first 11 days in Hong Kong, the fate of documents he didn't give to journalists, and the circumstance of his asylum in Russia — is equally fascinating.

The film is well constructed and disciplined, and Poitras presents a never-before-seen side of Snowden.

But crucial questions remain, and the work does little to address the unflattering choices that the American icon made.

"Citizenfour" premiered at The New York Film Festival on October 10 and opens in theaters October 24.

SEE ALSO: We Now Know A Lot More About Edward Snowden's Epic Heist — And It's Troubling

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TEHRAN, Iran (AP) — A senior Iranian official has confirmed that his country and the U.S. exchanged messages over the fight against the militant Islamic State group.

Deputy Foreign Minister Hossein Amir Abdollahian also was quoted Saturday by Iranian media as saying Iran warned Washington that Israel's security will be at risk should the U.S. and its allies seek to topple Syrian President Bashar Assad in the name of fighting the extremist group.

Iran has backed Assad during Syria's three-year civil war. The U.S. has called for Assad to resign and rules out cooperating with his government in the fight against the Islamic State group.

Abdollahian's comments were the first time a senior Iranian official confirmed that Iran and the U.S. had discussed fighting the Islamic State group.

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THESE are early days, but the campaign that Barack Obama announced almost exactly a month ago to "degrade and ultimately destroy" Islamic State is not going well. In both Syria and Iraq, IS is scoring victories against the West and its Sunni Arab allies.

The coalition's strategy is beset by contradictions and self-imposed constraints, with two of the worst offenders being the two countries that could do the most to degrade IS: America and Turkey. The coalition must rise above these shortcomings, or IS will end up being validated in the eyes of could-be jihadists--the very opposite of what the coalition's leaders set out to achieve.

As The Economist went to press, the strategically important Kurdish town of Kobane, on the border with Turkey, had been entered by heavily armed IS fighters and surrounded on three sides. Coalition air strikes have delayed the town's fall, but probably by only a few days. If Kobane succumbs there will be a chorus of demands for a redoubled coalition effort, offset by dire warnings of the dangers of mission creep.

IS poses a threat to the entire Middle East and is potentially a source of terrorism against the West. So more effort makes sense, but only if the campaign can resolve its contradictions.

That task starts with Turkey. Despite a vote in the parliament in Ankara on October 2nd, authorising the country's forces to operate in Syria, Turkey's president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, is engaged in an elaborate juggling act. He says, correctly, that air strikes alone cannot overcome IS and that every means must be used to defeat it. But although he has tanks parked along the border, he refuses to help the Kurds, whom he sees as his enemies.

Indeed, even as he leaves Kobane to its fate, his riot police are killing Kurds protesting within Turkey. Mr Erdogan seems wary of offering anything more than rhetorical Turkish support for the coalition, unless America enforces a buffer and no-fly zone on the Syrian side of the border. He is also insisting that America should make removing the Assad regime a higher priority than tackling IS.

America's strategy is also beset with tensions. Although it wants to see Mr Assad go, it is reluctant to join that fight for now, partly because success in Iraq depends on persuading the government in Baghdad to become sufficiently inclusive to woo back the alienated Sunni tribes. And for that it needs the help of Iran, Mr Assad's closest ally.

Meanwhile, America's collaboration with the Shia-led government has not made it any easier to win over suspicious Sunnis. While air strikes have helped the Kurds regain some ground from IS, security in Sunni-dominated Anbar province has continued to deteriorate.

After IS fighters overran some Iraqi army bases and seized control of Abu Ghraib, within shelling range of Baghdad's international airport, America sent in Apache attack helicopters to hit IS targets along the road that runs west of Baghdad to the IS stronghold of Falluja. Calling up the Apaches--not boots on the ground, perhaps, but certainly boots in the air--is an admission that high-flying fast jets have their limitations.

The coalition is also up against the law of unintended consequences. After its first big attack in Syria, it has targeted the oil refineries which help finance IS's activities and other bits of IS infrastructure.

But military action has also driven the dwindling band of "moderate rebels"--the ones that America aims to train and arm--into the embrace of jihadist groups, such as the al-Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra, which now portray the coalition as an anti-Sunni stooge of the Assad regime.

Kurds all the way

John Allen, a former general and Mr Obama's special envoy for the coalition against IS, flew to Ankara this week in an effort to find common ground with the Turks. Nobody would claim there are easy answers for either Mr Obama or Mr Erdogan, but both are guilty of willing an end while withholding the means to secure it.

In Mr Erdogan's case, it is nonsense to claim he backs the effort to destroy IS while he leaves Kobane's Kurds to be slaughtered. If the town falls, both Turkey's reputation and its security will suffer a grievous blow. Better to act as a full member of the coalition and use the goodwill this generates to influence it from the inside. Mr Erdogan should use his troops to save Kobane--and give America permission to fly from the giant NATO airbase at nearby Incirlik.

For his part, Mr Obama needs to face up to two things. First, most of the coalition wants to see the back of Mr Assad: his serial brutalities against his own people have appalled Sunnis everywhere. Russia and Iran have hinted that they would accept a more pragmatic military figure in his place if their interests were respected.Mr Obama should work on that.

Second, the fight against IS cannot succeed without competent troops on the ground to guide coalition aircraft to their targets, pursue enemy leaders and take and hold territory. That calls for the use of special forces in greater numbers and on more missions. Other troops need to be embedded in the better Iraqi units to train and mentor them. When Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, called for that, he was slapped down by Mr Obama.

With such actions the president means to look resolute, but the people he reassures most are the jihadists.

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There are two obvious weaknesses with the Obama administration's plan to "degrade and destroy" the Islamic State (aka ISIS or ISIL) in Iraq and Syria: Weak partners on the ground, especially in Syria, and the further emboldened Syrian regime of Bashar Assad.

Both are increasingly problematic as the broad campaign unfolds.

The US-backed Iraqi military keeps losing ground to ISIS militants who are consolidating their hold on the western Anbar province and inching toward Baghdad.

As for Syria, on Wednesday Pentagon spokesman Rear Adm. John Kirby flatly told reporters: "We don’t have a willing, capable, effective partner on the ground inside Syria. It’s just a fact. I can’t change that."

And Anne Barnard and Eric Schmidt of The New York Times report that the Syrian government has stepped up aerial bombardments of rebel-held areas as American warplanes target ISIS infrastructure.

“It would be silly for [Assad and his allies] not to take advantage of the US doing airstrikes,” one official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss confidential intelligence reports, told The Times. “They’ve focused in the west and left off the east, where we are operating. Essentially, we’ve allowed them to perform an economy of force. They don’t have to be focused all over the country, just on those who threaten their population centers.”

That stakes are high as Assad and ISIS both aim to eradicate nationalist rebels seeking to topple the regime, and they are on the verge of doing so.

The relatively moderate opposition forces — including thousands of defectors from the Syrian army — are currently being squeezed by both Assad's troops and ISIS fighters in Syria's largest city, Aleppo, and a new ISIS offensive threatens to cut off FSA rebel supply lines to Turkey.

Hussam Marie, the Free Syrian Army spokesman for northern Syria, told The Times last month that the loss of FSA positions in and around Aleppo would be “unrecoverable” and “a blow to our shared goals of a moderate Syria.”

Furthermore, it would play into Assad's strategy of facilitating the rise of ISIS and eliminating the Free Syrian Army, thereby presenting the West with "a classical choice between military powers and Sunni extremists."

Overall, the situation in Syria is beginning to look like an intensified version of the State Department's worst-case scenario as of June 2013: "rebel gains evaporating, the moderate opposition ... imploding, large ungoverned spaces [ruled by ISIS], Assad holding on indefinitely, neighbors endangered, and Iran, Hizbollah, and Iraqi militias taking root."

SEE ALSO: Obama Now Owns A War He Helped Create

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Dick Morris, a former adviser to President Bill Clinton who later became a conservative pundit, thinks recent critiques of the Obama administration made by former official Leon Panetta were orchestrated by Hillary Clinton. 

"What Panetta is doing is a hit – a contract killing – for Hillary," Morris said during an interview Sunday on billionaire John Catsimatidis' show "The Cats Roundtable" on New York's AM970 radio.

Panetta served in the Clinton White House before joining the Obama administration as CIA director and secretary of defense. While promoting his new book, "Worthy Fights," this month, Panetta has criticized President Barack Obama's handling of Syria and the jihadist group Islamic State (also known as ISIS and ISIL).

"Panetta at core is a Clinton person, not an Obama person. By accurately and truthfully describing the deliberations in the [Obama] cabinet, he makes Hillary look better, and he makes Obama look worse. And I think Hillary … put him up to it," said Morris. 

The arguments Panetta makes concerning the president's handling of ISIS echo the only major critique of the administration Hillary Clinton has made since leaving her position as Obama's secretary of state last year. Similarities between their arguments and the fact Hillary Clinton is widely expected to run for president in 2016 have led multiple members of Obama's inner circle to suspect Panetta has been attempting to help her distance herself from critiques of the present administration's handling of the situation in Syria. 

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Eighty-three percent Russians approve of Vladimir Putin as president, a number that has soared from 54% last year since his annexation of Crimea and intervention in Ukraine as well as the Sochi Olympics.

Westerners may wonder why Russians so happily approve of a man who is becoming an international pariah.

And that might get them wondering what else Russians think and what Russians are like anyway.

Taking care to avoid unfounded stereotypes, we've turned to data from polling centers, the World Health Organization, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, and Pew Research Center to identify facts about the majority of Russia's 144 million citizens.

The average Russian adult consumes 15 liters of pure alcohol annually, far more than the 9-liter average in America. Heavy drinking has been blamed for alarmingly high early death rates for Russian men.

Source: WHO and Reuters

56% of Russians aren't pleased with the quality of their drinking water, the worst of the 36 nations ranked by OECD.

Current data from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development

60% of Russians think their country is moving in the right direction.

August 2013 Levada Center Poll

A former defence chief tells all

BARACK OBAMA worries a lot about the unintended consequences of action by America, the last superpower. Yet there is a flip-side to that doctrine, as a former top official makes clear in a new memoir: inaction can leave a vacuum.

In "Worthy Fights", Leon Panetta, who served Mr Obama as CIA chief from 2009-11 and as defence secretary from 2011-13, describes a "supremely intelligent" president who nonetheless did real harm by vacillating and withholding his full support when it was needed.

Mr Panetta, who is 76, is not the first Obama hand to write a tough memoir. But his account will sting. As a chief of staff to President Bill Clinton, he writes wistfully of his old boss's willingness to endure political pain to do big deals.

Three failures stand out in Mr Panetta's account. Controlling Obama aides left him "frustratingly alone" as he tried to defend the Pentagon's budget from indiscriminate cuts imposed by a feckless Congress. Second, without Mr Obama's "active advocacy", a deal to leave a troop presence in Iraq was allowed to "slip away", though--Mr Panetta believes--American advisers could have helped Iraqi commanders fight the rise of the Islamic State. Finally, Mr Panetta echoes, from the inside, a criticism levelled by foreign powers: that Mr Obama harmed American credibility by failing to enforce a "red line" against the use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime in Syria.

The problem is not a lack of intellect, Mr Panetta concludes, but of "fire". Mr Obama--perhaps because he has endured unprecedented attacks on his legitimacy, with opponents questioning his very birthplace--is "reticent" about engaging foes and rallying friends. He too often relies "on the logic of a law professor rather than the passion of a leader".

Washington commentators have called Mr Panetta disloyal. That is missing the point. Mr Obama has two years in which to change. Mr Panetta is trying to tell him how to.

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On August 6th and 9th of 1945, the United States dropped atomic bombs over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, causing significant death and destruction in both areas. To this day, the bombings remain history's only acts of nuclear warfare.

Many things are known about the sequence of events leading up to the dropping of the bombs, known as "Little Boy" and "Fat Man," which were loaded onto airplanes on the North Field airbase on Tinian Island, part of the Northern Mariana Islands to the south of Japan.

Until recently, though, few photographs were available documenting the final preparations before the bombings. But newly declassified pictures shed additional light on the hours leading up to the nuclear attacks, showing how and where the bombs were loaded.

These chilling photos show us what it was like to prepare for one of the most important moments in modern history.

(First seen on AlternativeWars.com)

Soldiers check the casings on the "Fat Man" atomic bomb. Multiple test bombs were created on Tinian Island. All were roughly identical to an operational bomb, even though they lacked the necessary equipment to detonate.

On the left, geophysicist and Manhattan Project participant Francis Birch marks the bomb unit that would become "Little Boy" while Norman Ramsey, who would later win the Nobel Prize in Physics, looks on.

A technician applies sealant and putty to the crevices of "Fat Man," a final preparation to make sure the environment inside the bomb would be stable enough to create a full impact once it detonated.

Over a dozen transport planes that the US donated to the Afghan military were sold for scrap metal in yet another sign of questionable American policy in the country.

A set of high-level US government letters recently disclosed as part of a Pentagon Inspector General's investigation reveal that sixteen G222 military cargo planes were scrapped after years of poor maintenance and failed integration into the Afghan Air Force. The planes were part of a failed military aid package that ran a nearly half-billion dollar price tag for US taxpayers.

The aircraft were hardly used before being ground down and sold to an Afghan construction company for 6 cents a pound, or a total of $32,000. 

The training of Afghan security forces is a huge challenge for the US, which is pulling most of its troops out of the troubled central Asian country at the end of 2014. Afghan soldiers are responsible for numerous "insider attacks" against coalition troops, including the assassination of a two-star US general in Afghanistan this past August.

In a memo about "lessons learned" from the debacle, the Pentagon Inspector General for Afghanistan reconstruction project wrote that the Department of Defense had found problems with the G222 program in January 2013. The project's managing office and NATO's Afghanistan training mission command "did not properly manage the effort to obtain the spare parts needed to keep the aircraft flightworthy."

The program ran a $486.1 million tag, but the aircraft logged only 234 of the 4,500 required hours from January through September 2012.

Even then, at that point the aircraft were at least still physically in existence, even if they weren't really being used.

The Afghan air force obviously wasn't as far along as this huge American investment in hardware anticipated it to be. But in November 2013, Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction John Sopko observed the G222 fleet "parked unused on a tarmac at Kabul International Airport" during a visit to Afghanistan.

By all accounts, the planes could still be made airworthy. In a letter to the Secretary of the Air Force last week, Sopko called for an inquiry into the scrapping, including whether alternatives like selling the planes had been considered, and what their condition at the time had been when the Pentagon's Defense Logistics Agency allowed them to be scrapped.

The incident is arguably representative of the US and NATO's failed efforts at setting up a proper Afghan military to keep the Taliban at bay when the US pulls its troops out at the end of this year.

And it shows how massive Pentagon expenditures can literally end up as scrap metal in just a couple short years.  

SEE ALSO: The Pentagon is agreeing to its first-ever independent audit — 24 years after being required to have one

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A 14-year-old girl became the youngest recipient of the CIA's second-highest award in the late 1960s, and she went on to become a successful intelligence officer in adulthood.

It's one of the many fascinating insights gleaned from newly declassified documents as a result of a FOIA lawsuit.

In May 1966, Maureen Devlin was living in the Congo with her parents — her father, Lawrence, was the CIA's station chief — amid civil war and general lawlessness in the capital of Kinshasa. One night, the family had a firsthand encounter with the turmoil.

Maureen was awakened by armed burglars in her bedroom as she pretended to sleep. As she kept up the ruse, the robbers stole a ring and bracelet from her hand, but it wasn't long before she woke.

From "The Youngest Intelligence Star"in the agency's "Studies in Intelligence" journal:

The girl heard the burglars discussing the possibility of harming her. She understood their local language, Lingala, but she did not understand the word rape, only that it was a physical threat. They turned on the lights, and one used a butcher knife to cut her nightgown. She managed to roll over and cover herself with the sheet, still feigning sleep. Her greatest fear at the time was that perhaps the men had already killed her mother and father.

She couldn't pretend to be sleeping any longer after the burglars pricked her neck with the knife. But she acted quickly, speaking their language to tell them they shouldn't harm anyone in the house — and in a genius move to capitalize on local superstition — told them the US embassy had "secret and magic" ways of identifying people who harmed Americans.

Later, after her parents were woken up and put into a corner of the bedroom, the girl's mother talked back to the robbers in French and told them to leave. Maureen, for her part, told the bandits the family had "a dawa," a black-magic spell that would result in the deaths of their wives, children, parents, and others if any harm came to them.

The journal noted the bandits had killed other families under similar circumstances.

“My God, this is the end of us,” Lawrence Devlin thought at the time, according to an account in The Washington Times. He knew of the other families found murdered in their bathrooms, but he was able to slam and lock the door.

The robbers eventually gave up and left. They were later captured by police, tried, and executed.

Maureen Devlin received the CIA's second-highest award — the Intelligence Star — for "her quick appraisal of the situation, calm deportment, knowledge and use of the local language, exploitation of local lore, and resolute action," the article says, adding that it "served her well as a teenager, and they continue to do so now in her career as a case officer in the Directorate of Operations."

A 2008 New York Times article also recognized Maureen as having followed her father into the CIA. Her calm during this episode was similar to her father's reaction to a trigger-happy Congolese soldier, who "defused a potentially lethal confrontation by calmly offering the soldier a cigarette."

NOW WATCH: How The Secrets Of The Samurai Can Help You Achieve Laser Focus

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ANKARA (Reuters) — Turkey has not reached a new agreement to let the United States use its Incirlik air base in the fight against Islamic State militants, and talks are continuing on the subject, sources at the Turkish prime minister's office said on Monday.

Turkey had reached an agreement with Washington on the training of Syrian rebels, the sources told reporters, without saying who would train the insurgents or where.

The comments come after US National Security Adviser Susan Rice said Turkey had agreed to let forces from a US-led military coalition use its bases for activities inside Iraq and Syria and to train moderate Syrian rebels.

"The Turks have, this just in the last several days, made a commitment that they will in the first instance allow the United States and our partners to use Turkish bases and territory to train ... the moderate Syrian opposition forces," Rice said on NBC's "Meet the Press."

"So that is a new commitment that they have now joined Saudi Arabia in giving the go-ahead for that important contribution. In addition, they have said that their facilities inside of Turkey can be used by the coalition forces, American and otherwise, to engage in activities inside of Iraq and Syria."

US Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel called Turkish Minister of Defense Ismet Yilmaz on Sunday, and a Department of Defense spokesman said Hagel thanked his Turkish counterpart for providing the support in the fight against the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL.

"Secretary Hagel thanked Minister Yilmaz for Turkey's willingness to contribute to coalition efforts, to include hosting and conducting training for Syrian opposition members," Rear Adm. John Kirby, the Pentagon press secretary, said in a readout of the call.

The US and Turkey have exhibited public disagreement over the strategy to confront ISIS, presenting a potentially key rift in the fragile coalition. 

Turkey has been unwilling to intervene in the battle in the Syrian border town of Kobani, causing frustration and exposing a fundamental disagreement between allies over how to confront the extremist group.

Under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey has maintained a passive role while the US has ramped up airstrikes in and around the town on targets held by the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL. Turkey wants the US to commit to ousting the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

(Reuters reporting by Ozge Ozbilgin; Writing by Daren Butler; Editing by Andrew Heavens)

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Naval Submarine Base New London is one of the US Navy's most important and fascinating facilities.

Located along the eastern bank of the Thames River in eastern Connecticut, New London serves as the home of fifteen attack-class submarines, the largest single contingent of subs in the US Navy. The submarines serve throughout the world, including beneath the polar ice cap.

Almost every sailor serving aboard a submarine will pass through New London for some kind of training. The base is known as "home of the submarine force," although personnel at the base like to call New London the "submarine capital of the world."

Steeped in history, Submarine Base New London was the first port to host US submarines in 1915, prior to the country's entrance into World War I. Since then, the base has continuously expanded as the US has grown into the world's largest naval power, with the most advanced submarine fleet of any country.

In October, Business Insider was given an all-encompassing tour of the base and its operations.

Naval Submarine Base New London started as a Naval Yard and Storage Depot in 1868 but didn't host submarines until 1915, two years before the US entered World War I.

Since its founding, New London has continuously grown. In the 1960s, the base had expanded beyond the waterfront and into the surrounding hills.

Today the base is the home port of fifteen attack subs, and its ten piers allow it to berth 18 subs. Even so, the base has plans to expand over the next two decades.

Comedian Louis C.K. just broadcasted his unfiltered thoughts on the jihadist Islamic State group (also known as ISIS) — on Twitter.

In a series of profanity-laced tweets Monday morning, C.K. advocated various forms of violence against ISIS, which has recently beheaded multiple US and British hostages.

At one point, C.K. even wondered, "Whether or not ISIS is really a bunch of Halliburton employees."

View the full set of tweets below:

Oh, fuck you, ISIS. Sincerely please fuck each other in the mouth with forks. You're 7 year old boys. You're stupid. You suck.

— Louis C.K. (@louisck) October 13, 2014

I'm 47. seen a lot of assholes. But these ISIS fuckfaces Are the worst. ISIS please drink Sunoco gas and then have a smoke.

— Louis C.K. (@louisck) October 13, 2014

Whether or not ISIS is really a bunch of Halliburton employees

— Louis C.K. (@louisck) October 13, 2014

Or just homegrown raping marauding cunts they appear to be. Just really. Fuck them already. They stink.

— Louis C.K. (@louisck) October 13, 2014

Fuck ISIS doesn't mean yay America. I'm not saying this as an American. I don't believe they're coming here. I'm a Martian.

— Louis C.K. (@louisck) October 13, 2014

a Martian just like every displaced killed raped Iraqi Syrian by Assad bush saddam Cheney ISIS. The separation is an illusion.

— Louis C.K. (@louisck) October 13, 2014

But right now. As a cranky guy reading the paper, Fuck ISIS in all 3 holes and make a fifth and fuck them there too.

— Louis C.K. (@louisck) October 13, 2014

I mean a fourth hole. Sorry. Seriously sorry.

— Louis C.K. (@louisck) October 13, 2014

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"Citizenfour," the Laura Poitras documentary featuring Edward Snowden, debuted this weekend at The New York Film Festival to rave reviews.

The film is an utterly fascinating account of the week Poitras and Glenn Greenwald spent interviewing Snowden in his Mira hotel room in Hong Kong in early June 2013. It also covers some of the preparations and fallout.

William Binney, a 32-year veteran of the US intelligence community and one of the best code breakers in NSA history, is a central character in the film. The mathematician tells Poitras how he built a program called "Stellarwind" that served as a pervasive domestic spying apparatus after 9/11, which sets the stage for Snowden's collaboration with Poitras.

But the vivid presentation in "Citizenfour" avoids one of the most important aspects of the Snowden saga: the massive cache of documents that the 31-year-old former NSA contractor allegedly stole but didn't give to American journalists.

And Binney has shared his views of that subject.

The China Leaks And William Binney

Beyond the estimated 200,000 documents given to Poitras and Greenwald, Snowden also took up to 1.5 million documents detailing NSA operations targeting American adversaries.

Two days after leaving the Mira Hotel, Snowden provided documents revealing"operational details of specific attacks on computers, including internet protocol (IP) addresses, dates of attacks and whether a computer was still being monitored remotely" to Lana Lam of the South China Morning Post (SCMP).

"I did not release them earlier because I don't want to simply dump huge amounts of documents without regard to their content," Snowden told the Hong Kong paper in a June 12 interview. "I have to screen everything before releasing it to journalists."

That Snowden took a bunch of documents unrelated to civil liberties and showed some of them to a Chinese newspaper is not mentioned in "Citizenfour." And Binney's previous comments on the SCMP become an elephant in the room.

"Among the leaked documents are details of foreign-intelligence gathering that do not fall under the heading of unlawful threats to American democracy — what Snowden described as his only concern. Binney, generally a fervent Snowden supporter, told USA Today that Snowden’s references to 'hacking into China' went too far: 'So he is transitioning from whistle-blower to a traitor," George Packer of The New Yorker, who spent time with Poitras and co. in Germany, writes in his detailed review of the film and overall situation.

"This is a distinction that Poitras might have induced Binney to pursue," Packer adds. "Because Poitras is so close to her subject, politically and psychologically, 'Citizenfour' is not the tour de force it might have been."

Earlier this year, Binney described Snowden as a "patriot," but he has not retracted or clarified his comments to USA Today.

And we know even more about the second part of Snowden's epic theft. 

James Bamford of Wired, who met Snowden in Moscow this summer, reported that the former CIA technician moved from Dell to Booz Allen in March 2013 to steal details on "the NSA’s aggressive cyberwarfare activity around the world" and became immersed in"the highly secret world of planting malware into systems around the world and stealing gigabytes of foreign secrets."

Edward Jay Epstein of The Wall Street Journal — who has reported extensively on Snowden's theft — echoed Binney's criticism when he told Powerline that Snowden was "a whistleblower in the case of some documents, and not a whistleblower in the case of other documents."

"So in the case of his work [for Booz Allen] at the National Threat Operations Center, he is not in my book under any theory a whistleblower,"Epstein concluded to Powerline. "At Dell, he could be a whistleblower. These are two different jobs and two different phases."

Further, no one knows exactly what happened to the other documents (beyond the SCMP leak).

James Risen of The Times reported in October 2013 that the former CIA technician said "he gave all of the classified documents he had obtained to journalists he met in Hong Kong." (ACLU lawyer and Snowden legal adviser Ben Wizner subsequently told Business Insider that the report was inaccurate.)

In May 2014, Snowden thentold NBC's Brian Williams in Moscow that he "destroyed" all documents in his possession while in Hong Kong.

Greenwald's Response

Greenwald, for his part, recently had a colorful answer to critiques like that of Binney and Epstein.

"I consider [questions about Snowden's motivations] absurd and idiotic,"Greenwald after a TED talk. "That accusation comes from people in the U.S. government, from people in the media who are loyalists to these governments, and ... they are saying a lot more about themselves then they are about the target of their accusations because those people ... never act for any reason other then corrupt reasons.

"So they assume that everyone else is plagued by the same disease of soullessness that they are," Greenwald added.

NOW WATCH: Scientists Say This Is Why You Hate The Sound Of Your Own Voice

SEE ALSO: The New Snowden Documentary Is Utterly Fascinating — And Critically Flawed

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North Korea leader Kim Jong-Un hasn't been seen in public since early September, leading to intense media speculation that a shakeup or even a coup could be taking place in one of the world's most opaque and repressive states. But South Korean officials do not see Kim's absence as significant, Barbara Demick reports for The New Yorker.

Demick, the author of a critically lauded book about daily life in North Korea, writes that the South Korean officials who deal most closely with the country's northern neighbor aren't terribly concerned with the current situation:

Scott Snyder, an analyst with the Council on Foreign Relations, who was in Seoul last week, told me that South Korean officials at the Ministry of Unification, which handles relations with the North, also attached no particular significance to Kim Jong-un’s absence ... As for the suggestion that Kim Jong-un is no longer in charge, Snyder said, “these are the usual low-credibility rumors.’’

Rumors have circulated throughout the media, suggesting scenarios ranging from Kim suffering from gout to the possibility that he's been overthrown in an internal coup and subsequent power struggle. 

The basis for all of these rumors stem from the fact that Kim has not been seen in public since the beginning of September. But this is not the first time that a North Korean leader has disappeared for significant periods of time, which perhaps explains South Korea's apparent lack of alarm.

During the rule of Kim Il-Sung, Kim Jong-Un's grandfather, the North Koreans even faked the death of Sung in order to gauge the international community's response. 

Subsequently, there are no external indicators that a coup has transpired within North Korea. Geo-political tremors that would indicate a coup, such as military buildups along the Chinese and South Korean borders with North Korea, have not taken place. 

Of course, given the closed-off nature of the Hermit Kingdom, there's little way to confirm any kind of speculation into the on-the-ground realities of North Korea. But ongoing health issues offer perhaps the most likely explanation for Kim's over month-long absence. 

SEE ALSO: Here are all the reasons people think there's something big happening in North Korea

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South Korea faces one of the biggest security challenges on earth: an opaque, belligerent, and possibly nuclear-armed northern neighbor with the largest artillery force in the world and a standing army of nearly 700,00 soldiers.

Seoul faces the constant prospect of war with North Korea, a country that's both militarily powerful and unpredictable — Jim Jong-Un hasn't been seen in public for other a month, and it's unclear who really calls the shots in Pyongyang under the best of circumstances.

One way South Korea has tried to keep pace with North Korea's military capabilities is through building up fearsome corps of special forces, consisting of seven special forces brigades with an eighth special mission battalion. 

That battalion, called the 707th, or the "White Tigers," is the most elite of the special forces within the South Korean Armed Forces.

The group is composed of volunteers from all branches of the military, along with handpicked candidates. Men and women both serve in the White Tigers.

Every member of the 707th is trained to the black belt level in Tae Kwon Do. Members of the battalion also take part in winter training, where troops must perform drills in the snow and freezing rivers. 

All members of the White Tigers are also fully SCUBA and parachute certified. A video from South Korean broadcasting company MBC provides a look at the sort of exercises and training that the 707th routinely go through. 

It's possible that the video is not a totally accurate representation of the 707th, and is more for morale, military public relations, or psychological warfare purposes.

However, the video still highlights some of the amazing capabilities of the South Korean military's most advanced special operations battalion.

Every member of the White Tigers is trained to a black belt level in Tae Kwon Do or another martial art.

The martial arts training utilizes both human and non-human targets.

Men and women equally train in hand-to-hand combat.

Aside from martial arts, the White Tigers participate in agility tests that would aid the battalion in urban warfare.

During training, the 707th practice infiltrating enemy-held buildings.

The battalion practices coordinating entry through a doorway with soldiers who rappel in through the windows.

The special forces also train in quick helicopter evacuations ...

... As well as in high speed parachute drops. 

SEE ALSO: China's special forces in Hong Kong go through a ridiculous training regimen

SEE ALSO: The craziest small arms maneuvers by South Korean SWAT, in 9 GIFs

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The US and Turkey have engaged in an at-times brutally public spat over the US-led coalition's strategy to "degrade and destroy" the group calling itself the Islamic State. And it might only get worse from here, threatening a key flank in the coalition unless the US agrees to take on an even more expansive role in Syria's civil war.

At the heart of the disagreement is Turkey's desire for the US to commit to the ouster of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, something the US has been reluctant to commit to during Syria's three-plus-year civil war.

But Turkey's government believes the cycle will repeat itself even if ISIS is defeated: Assad will foster the rise of extremist groups, protecting his own stranglehold on power while the groups present a fundamental threat to the West and their allies.

Frederic Hof, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East and a former special advisor for transition in Syria at the U.S. Department of State, explained the phenomenon in an email to Business Insider. He said Turkey and the US have fundamental differences in how to approach ISIS (emphasis added):

"Yes, there is a fundamental difference between the US and Turkey. The Obama administration sees Syria as an adjunct to an anti-ISIS war in Iraq; Syria as an ISIS safe-haven, logistical rear area, and headquarters; ISIS forces in Syria to be harassed while the main combat effort takes place in Iraq. This approach views the Assad regime as a bystander - someone to be ignored to the maximum extent possible. Turkey sees Syria and the Assad regime as the heart of the problem (as well as a direct threat to Turkey's national security). ISIS, from Ankara's point of view, cannot be 'degraded and destroyed' (Obama's words) without moving toward implementing President Obama's 'Assad should step aside' dictum of August 2011. "

The latest public hiccup came over the last two days, as the US proudly paraded around what they said was an agreement with Turkey to allow the US to use a key base in the fight against the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL. But on Monday, Turkey denied an agreement had been finalized.

The differences between the two key allies has come in full display as ISIS is reportedly close to seizing control of the Syrian border town of Kobane. The US does not yet have an effective partner on the ground in Syria. And Turkey has been reluctant to intervene because of its fragile relationship with the Kurds fighting ISIS militants in the town. 

Turkey's government is in an ongoing strife with the Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK, which is linked to the militias under attack by ISIS in Kobani. The PKK is classified as a terrorist organization even by the US. And though it is currently engaged in peace talks with the Turkish government, the sting of a 30-year conflict between the groups lingers.

Turkey is also pushing the US to establish a so-called buffer zone inside Syria, but that idea would go far beyond President Barack Obama's mission of confronting only ISIS and put it in direct confrontation with Assad's forces.

"This difference has come to a head with the ISIS assault on Kobane," Hof said. "Its solution requires two things: Turkish rededication to a cooperative relationship with Kurds, both in Turkey and Syria; and American agreement to DO something in Syria instead of just talking about Assad having lost all legitimacy, he must go etc etc."

"Grounding Assad's air force so that Turkey can establish a buffer zone inside Syria would be the near-term result of a solution. I'm not optimistic," Hof added. "President Obama seems satisfied with the Syria policy he's been pursuing for over three years."

SEE ALSO: The US And Turkey Fundamentally Disagree On How To Fight ISIS — And That's A Huge Problem

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A freshly declassified tranche of documents seemingly resolves one of the major espionage controversies of the early decades of the Cold War. 

Transcripts of the 1954 hearing that ended in disgrace for Manhattan Project physicist Robert Oppenheimer were finally declassified by the Department of Energy on October 3rd.

Oppenheimer got his security clearance revoked after the hearing, and "lived out his life a broken man," according to the New York Times.

 Yet several experts who spoke to the Times agreed that the transcripts offer nothing to justify the Red Scare-era prejudice against the legendary scientist, who had relatives and acquaintances in the Communist Party. 

The physicist had led the high-stakes American effort to develop an atomic bomb during World War II. Despite his major contributions to developing the technology that would effectively end the war — "That sunlike flash illuminated him as a scientific genius, the technocrat of a new age for mankind," read one of his obituaries in 1967 — Oppenheimer began to be ostracized even before his 19-day-long hearing in Washington, DC in the spring of 1954.

The year before, a former congressional aide accused him of being a Soviet spy in a letter sent to the FBI. President Dwight D. Eisenhower eventually revoked Oppenheimer's access to the government's nuclear-related information.

Oppenheimer's aversion to further investment in the hydrogen bomb — a much more powerful device that builds on atomic bomb technology — likely fueled suspicions against him, considering the US arms race against the Soviet Union at the time.

But it was a pragmatic, military concern that informed his resistance, rather than pacifism or Soviet allegiances.

Richard Rhodes, a historian who spoke with The Times, said the newly declassified material shows that hydrogen bomb research encouraged by Edward Teller and other nuclear physicists would have come at the opportunity cost of 80 atomic bombs (just after World War II ended, a scenario drawn up by the Pentagon estimated it would take hundreds of these weapons to deliver the Soviet Union a critical blow).

The newly released 19-volume transcript expands on a redacted version published soon after the hearing, in June 1954 (A twentieth volume includes instructions for preparing the 1954 document for public release).

Oppenheimer's legacy benefits from the new declassification, but it was arguably secure even when the physicist was still alive: Nine years after Oppenheimer's victimization, the Atomic Energy Commission awarded him the prestigious Enrico Fermi award.

The bigger victory may go to critics of official secrecy, since the government has offered no explanation for why the release had to wait over 60 years. In August the Department of Energy also declassified the "Manhattan District History," a multi-volume work on the project commissioned in late 1944.

SEE ALSO: A D-Day veteran talks about his four weeks in combat for the first time

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A series of recently uploaded photos from Naval History and Heritage Command reveal what life was like in the U.S. Navy over 100 years ago.

The photos are being released to coincide with the official 116 year anniversary of the start of the Spanish-American War on April 25.

The war, which only lasted for four months, is seen as one of the most important events in the structuring of the U.S. Navy. A resounding success for America, the war also began the process of the U.S. taking a more active role in international affairs.

The official cause of the war was the destruction of the USS Maine outside Cuba. The U.S. blamed the sinking of the ship on a Spanish mine.

In response, the U.S. declared war against Spain on April 25, 1898.

Admiral George Dewey, based in Hong Kong, was given the order to engage the Spanish fleet at Manila in the Philippines.