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As head of the Senate Intelligence Committee since 2009, Sen. Dianne Feinstein has spent hundreds of hours in secret briefings and seen thousands of pictures from battlefields in Syria, Iraq and Yemen. She keeps two images with her. One shows a little girl wearing a gingham dress, white tights and black Mary Janes — but the girl's head is gone. Another is of a teenage boy, duct tape over his mouth, eyes bulging out, being forced to hold two severed heads. "To me, it's what we are up against," Feinstein said in an interview. "It is a testament to pure...

Nine years as chaplain of an 800 bed state mental hospital taught me that one can be mentally ill and highly intelligent. Talking with the patients often was more interesting than talking with their psychiatrists. Mad men are not mindless. They just do not distinguish between delusion and fact. Chesterton summed this up by aphorism: “The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.” This explains why it is often hard to distinguish university faculties from mental wards, save for the latter being kept under...

WASHINGTON (AFP) - A former Iraqi general, Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, is reported to be coordinating attacks in Iraq by foreign fighters and Iraqi regime loyalists, a US defense official said. "There are reports that the al-Douri is coordinating the attacks," said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. The reports in military channels fingering al-Douri as the coordinator of the attacks probably came from the recent capture in Mosul of a former secretary of al-Douri and two senior members of Ansar al-Islam who were close to the general, the official said. Number six on the US list of 55...

DEBKAfile remains temporarily on hold, due to the chief editor's sudden illness. Service is due to be resumed early December, 2014. Please accept our apologies for this interruption and assurance that DEBKA will be up and running again after this delay.

President Obama this week committed professional suicide. Let me explain. There is a theory in politics that once a leader has fired 50 or more people from his or her administration, he or she is finished. The reason being that by creating so many enemies ‘outside the tent’, the tent itself becomes too deluged with poisonous bile to avoid sinking into a quagmire of back-stabbing ignominy. Obama went a lot further than firing 50 people. He managed to single-handedly alienate 200,000 employees in the American intelligence agencies by going on 60 Minutes and ruthlessly chucking them all under a bus...

Yesterday, we said that President Obama was either reckless or incompetent.  He either didn't pay attention at the briefing or kept the country in the dark about ISIS.Today, I'm leaning toward the irresponsible, or a major dereliction of duty that we have not seen in U.S. history. According to a U.K. newspaper,  President Obama was told about ISIS back in 2012, or before the presidential campaign: President Barack Obama's intelligence briefings have provided him with specific information since before he won re-election in 2012 about the growing threat of the terror group now known alternatively as ISIS and ISIL, an administration insider told MailOnline...

Joseph Miller is the pen name for a ranking Department of Defense official with a background in U.S. special operations and combat experience in Iraq and Afghanistan. He has worked in strategic planning. President Barack Obama has taken a lot of flack since his Sunday night “60 Minutes” interview, in which he blamed the intelligence community for his failure to tackle the threat posed by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. And that is right and proper. Because not only was his excuse of blaming us a lie, but when questioned on his lie, White House press secretary Josh...

President Obama’s 60 Minutes interview, taped last Friday and aired Sunday, is turning out to be a disaster for him, and may even be a tipping point of sorts. There are six dimensions to the disaster.1.  By blaming the intelligence community for his failure to act on the ISIS threat, he ensured that a series of damaging leaks will be coming, and they are already starting. The UK Daily Mail, always far less constrained than the American media when it comes to revealing information damaging to the American progressive establishment, quotes “an administration insider,” summarized in its own bullet points:...

We mention President Obama’s narcissism not as an exercise in name-calling but because it continues to be relevant to how he conducts himself in office, and it’s not pretty. This undeniable character trait was on full display in his interview with Steve Kroft of “60 Minutes,” in the sense that he simply cannot entertain the possibility, much less — infinitely less — admit the possibility that he has made a mistake or exercised poor judgment. If anything remotely positive happens on his watch, he presumes to take full credit for it — way more than the normal opportunistic politician. With...

With his foreign policy approval ratings at a historic low, Barack Obama meets furious reaction after blaming US intelligence agencies for failing to predict rise of Isil in Syria

In a "60 Minutes" interview Sunday night, President Barack Obama placed blame squarely at the foot of the US intelligence community for the rise of the Islamic State, the extremist group also known as ISIS. Citing comments from Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, Obama said the intelligence community had "underestimated what had been taking place in Syria," referring to the rise of ISIS militants in the country's northeast. But American spies, experts, and journalists who have been watching the progress of ISIS, the extremist offshoot of Al Qaeda, immediately pushed back against the president's assessment. "Either the president doesn’t...

Cooperation between Germany's foreign intelligence service, the BND, and America's NSA is deeper than previously believed. German agents appear to have crossed into constitutionally questionable territory.

What is the enduring lesson of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, when the Bush administration overestimated and, in some cases, exaggerated the threat posed by Saddam Hussein? Some say it's to be skeptical of government officials who are making the case for war. I say the legacy should be skepticism toward government officials, period—all of them. Their hidden agendas can shade the case for peace as well as war, which might explain why there's no consensus among so-called experts about the threat posed today by ISIS. On a scale of zero to panic, Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint...

Psychologists have shown humans are poor judges of their own abilities, from sense of humour to grammar. Those worst at it are the worst judges of all. You're pretty smart right? Clever, and funny too. Of course you are, just like me. But wouldn't it be terrible if we were mistaken? Psychologists have shown that we are more likely to be blind to our own failings than perhaps we realise. This could explain why some incompetent people are so annoying, and also inject a healthy dose of humility into our own sense of self-regard.

The Obama administration is scheduled to brief members of Congress about the Islamic State (ISIS) on Friday after the beheading of two American journalists, but several Republicans on key committees involved told Newsmax on Thursday that they knew nothing about the classified session. The briefing is to be conducted by officials from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the National Counterterrorism Center, news reports say. The officials are expected to brief members of the congressional leaders' staffs, as well as the House Intelligence Committee, Foreign Affairs Committee, Armed Services Committee, and the defense and foreign operations appropriations...

A former top official at the National Security Agency says the Islamic State terrorist group has “clearly” capitalized on the voluminous leaks from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and is exploiting the top-secret disclosures to evade U.S. intelligence. Bottom line: Islamic State killers are harder to find because they know how to avoid detection. Chris Inglis was the NSA’s deputy director during Mr. Snowden’s flood of documents to the news media last year. Mr. Snowden disclosed how the agency eavesdrops, including spying on Internet communications such as emails and on the Web’s ubiquitous social media. Asked by The Washington Times...

[SNIP] ".....In all, the U.S. government would have access to more than a million documents detailing al Qaeda’s funding, training, personnel, and future plans. The raid promised to be a turning point in America’s war on terror, not only because it eliminated al Qaeda’s leader, but also because the materials taken from his compound had great intelligence value. Analysts and policymakers would no longer need to depend on the inherently incomplete picture that had emerged from the piecing together of disparate threads of intelligence—collected via methods with varying records of success and from sources of uneven reliability. The bin Laden...

Are we becoming more STUPID? IQ scores are decreasing - and some experts argue it's because humans have reached their intellectual peak Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2730791/Are-STUPID-Britons-people-IQ-decline.html#ixzz3B3dLJfeH Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook

The GOP-led House Select Committee on the Benghazi terror attack shows no sign of backing down despite a report from another congressional panel that, according to a top Democrat, found no intelligence failures around the deadly 2012 assault. "There is more work to be done and more to be investigated," a spokeswoman for House Select Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy told CNN on Wednesday. Shortly before beginning its August recess, the House Intelligence Committee, also led by Republicans, approved its report on the militant attack on the U.S. diplomatic compound in eastern Libya that killed Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other...

The intelligence community is about to get the equivalent of an adrenaline shot to the chest. This summer, a $600 million computing cloud developed by Amazon Web Services for the Central Intelligence Agency over the past year will begin servicing all 17 agencies that make up the intelligence community.