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For this week's Big Ideas with Ben Weingarten podcast, my guest was Rich Higgins. Higgins, an expert in unconventional warfare and combatting terrorism with over 20 years experience at senior levels of the Defense Department, and early supporter of President Trump, served as director for strategic planning in President Trump's National Security Council (NSC). That all changed when a memo that he produced for President Trump warning of the political warfare he was to face internally from the Deep State, and externally from the media and like-minded interest groups in collusion with the administrative state, leaked out to the public....

South Korea's Army said Friday it has put a drone combat team in operation, a move to take advantage of the country's advanced ICT prowess. The unit is part of a new "ground intelligence unit" established under the wing of the Third ROK Army (TROKA), headquartered in Yongin, just south of Seoul. ROK is the acronym for South Korea's official name, the Republic of Korea. Army officials hope that the country's first drone battalion will help sharply enhance combat capabilities as a potential game changer in future warfare. "In the midst of rapidly changing strategic circumstances, the role and mission...

There is one constant throughout the past 100 years. Professors of education came up with ever more exotic schemes and nomenclatures for how education should be organized, even as these schemes confused students and destroyed achievement. Each scheme had a catchy name (Open Classroom, Life Adjustment, Multiculturalism, Constructivism, Common Core) and a phalanx of resistance-is-futile jargon. Somehow the proposals didn’t translate into gains. One might cynically conclude that the jargon was a goal in itself (to get a grant, to build a career, to impress ordinary citizens). You may even suspect that the larger purpose of all these schemes is...

The White House dismissed the bulk of President Barack Obama’s premier panel of outside intelligence advisers earlier this year, leaving the blue-ribbon commission largely vacant as the public furor built over the National Security Agency’s widespread tracking of Americans’ telephone calls. The President’s Intelligence Advisory Board stood 14 members strong through 2012, but the White House website was recently updated to show the panel’s roster shrinking to just four people. In the past four years, the high-powered group has waded into the implications of WikiLeaks for intelligence sharing, and urged retooling of America’s spy agencies as the United States withdraws...

For this week's Big Ideas with Ben Weingarten podcast, I had former CIA operative and leader of CIA's Counter Terrorism Center’s WMD unit, author of the must-read and highly relevant 2009 book Beyond Repair: The Decline and Fall of the CIA and outspoken critic of the politicized leadership in America's intelligence and national security apparatus, Charles Sam Faddis on the podcast to discuss among other things: Why Faddis supports revoking John Brennan's security clearance -- and the bureaucratization and politicization of the leadership of the intelligence community versus the rank-and-file analysts and operatives in the field Whether politics dominates over...

John Brennan may not know it, but he’s acting in a drama scripted and produced by Donald J. Trump. As Eli Lake perceptively observed, President Trump isn’t trying to silence Brennan by revoking his security clearance, as the former CIA director’s defenders insist, but elevate him as a foil. Trump couldn’t hope for a better poster boy for the so-called “deep state” than a former CIA chief who immediately began to sound like a commentator for MSNBC upon leaving government — and, indeed, signed up as a commentator for MSNBC. It has been the usual practice of former top intelligence...

Former CIA and National Security Agency Director Michael Hayden said Sunday that he'd be fine with having his security clearance revoked, as President Donald Trump threatened to do to him and other former intelligence officials who have been critical of the President. Hayden made the comment on CNN's "State of the Union" when asked about a recent op-ed from retired Adm. William McRaven, who oversaw the 2011 Navy SEAL raid that killed Osama bin Laden. In his piece, McRaven issued a stunning rebuke of Trump's decision to revoke the security clearance of former CIA Director John Brennan, whom the former...

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis expressed solidarity with President Trump’s stripping of former Obama CIA Director John Brennan’s security clearance earlier this week. “All I can tell you is, I have taken security clearances away from people in my previous time in uniform, and a security clearance is something that is granted on an as-needed basis,” he told Pentagon reporters traveling with him in South America on Friday. The comment came in response to a question on what he thought about former intelligence officials denouncing the president for stripping Brennan’s security clearance. Earlier this week, retired Navy Adm. Bill McRaven published...

For this week’s Big Ideas with Ben Weingarten podcast, I had historian, Freedom Scholar at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, former Special Advisor to the Secretary of State and consultant to the National Security Council during the Reagan administration, author of 38 books and most pertinent to today, Iran expert, Michael Ledeen on the podcast to discuss among other things: The impending collapse of the Khomeinist regime and what the U.S. can do to accelerate it The false narrative about alternatives for Iran being either appeasement or war The history of U.S. intelligence failures in Iran How secular...

Bias: Last week a report from far-Left Politico detailing Russian and Chinese espionage efforts in Silicon Valley contained a massive bombshell nugget that ought to have been the top story for a week for every major news outlet. In reporting on the ongoing espionage efforts, which are aimed at stealing trade and technology secrets, the news site noted that the Chinese especially are also conducting political espionage, as there is a large ethnic Chinese presence in San Francisco and the surrounding area.

While it is a normal business practice for former employees to turn in their keys and lose access to their employers' confidential communications, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper says the Trump Administration removing his security clearance would be "a low blow." "I was hired by CNN with the expectation that my continued access to the government's classified information would make my commentary more interesting and credible," Clapper pointed out. "Stripping my clearance from me is a direct attack on my ability to fully monetize my expertise. It will deter my contacts who are current DNI employees from leaking...

I don’t believe in coincidences, especially not when they are THIS STARK.   Consider: From June 8th – The indictment of former senior senate intelligence committee staffer James Wolfe is filled with information to highlight a much bigger picture. [Indictment pdf here] CTH has continually stated the SSCI is one of the most corrupt committees in congress.  It did not come as a surprise to see the staff from this specific committee leaking secret and top-secret classified information.  The committee rots from the head down.From Page #6 of the Wolfe indictment: View Document Back to the Wolfe indictment: View Document The...

President Donald Trump proved to Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday that he is nobody’s puppet — not Putin’s, not the Deep State’s, and not the establishment media’s. Like the moral strength he showed in Charlottesville, VA, last year, Helsinki should be remembered as one of Trump’s finest moments. snip--President's response to Charlotte Almost a year later, Trump is still walking around with the flaming arrows in his back over Charlottesville, simply because he told the truth about Charlottesville. Which brings me to what happened Monday in Helsinki. Once again, and this time with the help of that dirty cop,...

A British Muslim of Pakistani origin, known as a "master bomb maker" for the Islamic State (ISIS) terrorist group, triggered the US laptop ban on flights last year, a former MI6 spy has revealed in a new autobiography. According to 'The Sunday Times', Aimen Dean a former al Qaeda explosives expert recruited by MI6 to infiltrate UK Islamist extremist circles writes in 'Nine Lives' that he first met 41-year-old Hamayun Tariq from the West Midlands region of England as an undercover agent in 2004. Tariq, who used the alias 'Abu Muslim', evaded the UK authorities twice to travel abroad where...

Researchers have discovered an alarming trend: the average I.Q.s of human beings is on a downward spiral. Westerns have lost 14 IQ points on average since the Victorian age, according to a study published by the University of Amsterdam last year.  Jan te Nijenhuis thinks this could be because intelligent women tend to have less [sic] children than women who are not as clever[.] ... [E]ducated people are deciding to have fewer children, so that subsequent generations are largely made up of less intelligent people. Richard Lynn, a psychologist at the University of Ulster, calculated the decline in humans' genetic potential....

CIA, source operating as far back as April, 2016 looks to be a long line of setups by the Clinton team, many times aided and abetted by our (Obama) intelligence bureaucracies.

A former officer with the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency was arrested over the weekend for allegedly trying to spy on the United States for China, the Justice Department said on Monday. The department said the suspect is accused of trying to transmit national defense information to China and with receiving “hundreds of thousands of dollars” while acting illegally as an agent for the Chinese government. He was taken into custody while he was on his way to the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport ...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Two Republican Senators introduced legislation on Wednesday that would block the U.S. government from buying or leasing telecommunications equipment from Huawei Technologies Co Ltd or ZTE Corp, citing concern the Chinese companies would use their access to spy on U.S. officials. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/senators-propose-bill-block-u-025751887.html

The Senate Intelligence Committee is preparing to question top Obama administration intelligence officials behind closed doors on Wednesday on their explosive assessment that officially accused Russia of meddling in the 2016 presidential election to boost then-candidate Donald Trump.The committee, led by Chairman Richard Burr, R-N.C., and Vice Chairman Mark Warner, D-Va., invited former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, former Central Intelligence Agency Director John Brennan, former National Security Agenda Director Michael Rogers (who retired earlier this year) and former FBI Director James Comey. Comey, though, plans to skip the closed-door session Wednesday due to a “previously scheduled engagement,” his...

Two senior House Republicans are accusing the Justice Department of being behind “anonymous attacks” in the press targeting a House Intelligence Committee GOP staffer who helped author the committee’s well-publicized memo alleging surveillance abuse by the FBI and DOJ during the 2016 election. The same House staffer is also a driving force behind the latest Russia records standoff. "I would have a lot more respect for DOJ or House committee Democrats if they would take out their frustrations on members of Congress, and leave staffers alone,” South Carolina Rep. Trey Gowdy, the Republican chairman of the House Oversight Committee, told...