By John Solomon
How the government's punishing of the exposure of official wrongdoing can linger for years
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.
The chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee is faulting a flawed bureaucratic system for the State Department's failure to blame top U.S. officials for ignoring pleas for more security before the Sept. 11 terrorist attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Libya.
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.
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.
The spooks don't preside over the most secretive agency of the government. It's no place for spies or their spymasters, so it isn't the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency or even the Office of National Intelligence. The place where the deepest secrets are kept is where the gnomes of the central banks work.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
The military has always been adamant that we cannot tolerate adultery in our ranks, at any level. That is why it is an article in the Uniform Code of Military Justice — Article 134, the "good order and discipline" article — because it is a major cancer on any organization or society and will destroy the moral fabric of our basic motto of "Duty, Honor and Country."
