'Your papers, please' must never be heard in America
Independent voices from the TWT Communities
The tragedy of Benghazi, where a U.S. ambassador and three other Americans were killed, seemed a cut-and-dried story in the days after a mob attacked the State Department's mission in eastern Libya. Today, the public knows that those early administration pronouncements were false.
International sanctions are squeezing Iran's economy but are doing little to dissuade the regime's nuclear ambitions, the top U.S. intelligence officer told Congress on Thursday.
SEOUL — Secretary of State John F. Kerry arrived here Friday, within range of North Korea's recent nuclear threats on his first trip to Asia as America's top diplomat -- an expedition that analysts say will be defined by efforts to persuade China to influence Pyongyang away from making further provocations.
The director of national intelligence said Thursday he does not like being asked questions in public about the activities he oversees, telling lawmakers his efforts to avoid spilling secrets sometimes make him look as if he has something to hide.
In an annual report to Congress March 12, Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper said Iran could not produce weapons-grade uranium without it being detected. It already has.
Cybersecurity is the new terrorism, and the security threat from online hackers is starting to become the nation's biggest headache, said intelligence officials during a Tuesday hearing in the Senate.
According to research on the psychology and efficacy of predictions, long-term expert predictions have been found to be about as accurate as monkeys tossing darts at a board labeled with potential future outcomes. And yet forecasting remains a growth industry, in both the intelligence community and televised political punditry.
Live video from a drone flying over the U.S. Consulate during the Sept. 11 terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya, was monitored at a Defense Department facility, but was not fed to the White House, senior officials say.
The Obama administration's intelligence chief on Wednesday held a classified briefing on Capitol Hill in which he showed House members security camera footage of the Sept. 11 terrorist attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya.
Pentagon intelligence official Michael Vickers and National Security Council counterterrorism adviser John Brennan are being looked at by President Obama as top candidates to head the CIA.
Leading Republicans reacted angrily to an admission Tuesday by President Obama's director of national intelligence that his office scrubbed references to al Qaeda's role in the Sept. 11 attack in Benghazi, Libya, from the early talking points used by top administration officials, calling it the latest sign of the administration's bungling of the attack and its aftermath.
President Obama took responsibility last week for his administration's actions in Benghazi, Libya. He insisted those criticizing U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice for misleading the American people regarding the terror attack ought to come after him instead.
In his first testimony since stepping down last week, former CIA Director David H. Petraeus told a closed Capitol Hill briefing Friday that the Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya "was a terrorist attack and there were terrorists involved from the start," Rep. Peter T. King said Friday.
The senior Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee is raising questions over the FBI's legal authority to read the personal emails that revealed the extramarital affair between former CIA Director David H. Petraeus and his biographer, and led the nation's spy chief to step down last week.
The Obama administration's public versions of events in the attack on the U.S. Consulate in Libya have been riddled with discrepancies, starting soon after the American dead and survivors left behind a charred diplomatic compound and bullet-scarred CIA building in Benghazi.
U.S. National Director of Intelligence James Clapper said in February that those attacks "bore the earmarks" of the jihadists in neighboring Iraq.
"It remains unclear if any group or person exercised overall command and control of the attack, and if extremist group leaders directed their members to participate," Mr. Clapper said. "However, we do assess that some of those involved were linked to groups affiliated with, or sympathetic to al Qaeda."
