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June 12, 2013 State Department Whistleblower, a Career Foreign Service Officer, Seeks Congressional Protection After State Threatens Her Kids Bryan Preston The State Department whistleblower is Aurelia Fedenisn. She worked in the department’s inspector general’s office until her retirement in December 2012. According to USA Today, she has sought protection as an official whistleblower after the State Department directly threatened her, once at her home. It threatened her with criminal charges when she turned over documents to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) showing evidence that the department had watered down her report, in which she alleged that the department at the...

If you had any questions about how antiwar liberals were going to respond when the Democrats didn't withdraw American troops from Iraq like they promised during the 2006 campaign, you got your answers last night on HBO's "Real Time with Bill Maher." When the host moved the discussion to what the panel thought of "the Democrats, you know, caving in on this Iraq spending bill," actor Ben Affleck went on a tirade about these "f***ing people," saying that the "Democrats live in fear of basically, you know, being called cowards" and of "looking like p***ies." Affleck concluded his attack on his...

Actor Ben Affleck has made it very clear where his sympathies lie in the Leakgate affair -- and it isn't with the White House. Appearing on HBO's "Real Time with Bill Maher," Affleck charged that President Bush "probably also leaked” CIA agent Valerie Plame's name and so "if he did, you can be hung for that! That's treason!” He continued: "You could be killed. That's not a joking around Tom DeLay 'I'll do a year, I bribed the state officials with corporate money.' That's like they shoot you in the battlefield for doing that.” Affleck also called DeLay a "criminal."

Ben Affleck: Bush Can Be Hung for 'Leaks' in Plamegate By Josh Hart Apr 9, 2006 Actor Ben Affleck suggested this weekend on 'Real Time with Bill Maher' that President Bush “probably leaked” Valerie Plame's name and so “if he did, you can be hung for that! That's treason!” The would be politician and Democrat went through this exchange according to News Busters that gives a brief and rough transcript on how Mr. Affleck came to this conclusion. *** The panel guests were Senator Joe Biden (D-DE) who was quite humorous as he let loose with some funny four-quotes. Bill...

In “The Story: A Reporter’s Journey,” which hit book store shelves Tuesday, April 7, former New York Times reporter Judith Miller revealed in the final chapter that she now believes that she was induced by then-Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald to give false testimony in the 2007 trial of I. “Lewis” Scooter Libby, former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney. Given that Fitzgerald’s three-and-a-half year-long investigation and prosecution of Libby riveted the nation’s capital and generated vast news coverage implying, when not outright declaring, that the Bush administration lied the nation into war, one might think that recantation...

On July 4, 2016 (8:35 pm Iraqi time), over 50 missiles were fired against Camp Liberty. Because of the proximity of TehranÂ’s militias in range of Camp Liberty, it appears as if they were launched by those affiliated with the Quds Force of IranÂ’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Damage assessment reveals that parts of the camp were completely destroyed. As many as 40 residents were injured, and astonishingly no one was killed during this massive attack.Nevertheless, each time the oppressors of Liberty get away with attacking the camp it increases the likelihood of even more hostile assaults in the future.Once...

Supporters of Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton on Saturday rejected a proposal to include a statement in the party's platform calling for Israel's "end to occupations and illegal settlements," CNN reported. ... While the committee voted against the addition 95-73, CNN reported that the move garnered the loudest negative response of the day from the audience. ... One crowd member was escorted out of the meeting after he stood up and yelled that the party had "sold out" to AIPAC (the American Israel Public Affairs Committee).

On the outskirts of Fallujah, the commander of the Fallujah liberation operations, Lt. Gen. Abdul-Wahab al-Saadi, stood smiling and surrounded by troops from the Counterterrorism Service. He talked to them about the city, long touted as impregnable to any outside force. His men laughed heartily and shared stories of the storming of the city. He exchanged bits of conversation with them, agreeing with some and disagreeing with others. He joked with them all, as they stood by him taking pictures. Since the Fallujah offensive was launched, social networking sites have been awash with smiling selfies showing Iraqi army soldiers and...

Responding to parents who complained about the distribution at public schools of a map which labeled Israel as “Palestine,” the City of Paris said it was the result of “a simple production error.” The city’s media department gave the explanation in a statement it published Friday about the distribution earlier this year to elementary school pupils of a calendar that contains a map of Europe and parts of the Middle East. The map, which ends north of central Israel and the West Bank, designates the territory of Israel included in it as “Palestine,” alongside Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Turkey. In...

On Friday and Saturday (8-9 July 2016), the leaders of the 28 NATO Allies and many partner nations will meet for a landmark Warsaw Summit. Together, they will take decisions to enhance the Alliance’s security by strengthening its deterrence and defence, and projecting stability beyond its borders. Allies will agree to deploy four robust and multinational battalions to Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland, on a rotational basis. A multinational framework brigade in Romania will provide a tailored presence in south-eastern Europe. NATO will also take further steps to improve cyber defences, civil preparedness and to defend against ballistic missile attack...

A senior commander in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) recently threatened Israel, saying the ground is ready for the annihilation of “the Zionist regime”. The comments by IRGC Deputy Commander Hossein Salami were made at a sermon in Tehran this past Friday prior to prayers marking Al-Quds Day. He also declared that Iran has over 100,000 missiles waiting in Lebanon alone and that tens of thousands of other missiles were placed throughout the Muslim world in order to wipe "the accursed black dot" – that is Israel – from the map of the world. Salami also threatened Kurdish leaders...

President Hassan Rouhani said the last year’s nuclear deal “was the cheapest way to achieve Iran’s goals and interests.” Speaking in Tehran on Saturday at an iftar meal breaking the Ramadan fast, Rouhani said the pre-Iran nuclear-deal era is past and Iran now needs to take advantage of the new atmosphere to pursue its “national interests more than before,” Iran’s Islamic Republic News Agency reported. The country’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Saturday called for student associations to establish a “unified anti-US and anti-Zionist front” among the Muslim world’s students, Tasnim News Agency reported. “By using advanced means of...

WASHINGTON -- Frustrated over a stall in an arms sale to Saudi Arabia, Obama once questioned the necessity of maintaining Israel's qualitative military edge in the region, former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said on Monday. Panetta was confirming a report from Atlantic writer Jeffrey Goldberg, who attributed the claim to him in an article on Obama's foreign policy doctrine published last March. The former Pentagon chief said the White House, at the time, was deeply concerned that Israel was preparing to unilaterally strike Iran. Simultaneously, the administration was also hoping to complete with Riyadh a significant sale of fighter jets....

Baghdad, Iraq (CNN)"Our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators," read the proclamation to the people of Iraq. These could have been the words of British Prime Minister Tony Blair or President George W. Bush at the time of the invasion of Iraq in 2003. But it dates back to 1917, penned by Lieutenant General Sir Stanley Maude, the commander of British forces in Iraq. The British occupation that followed was messy, though not as messy as its modern U.S.-led version. Then, the people of Iraq waged a bloody insurrection against...

Three years into the tenure of Hassan Rouhani who himself and many in the West promised to be a “moderate” and “reformist” poised to bring about change in Iran, we have only witnessed an unprecedented spike in human rights violations, including horrendous public floggings and especially executions. Overt 2,400 executions in the past three years is the report card Iran and Rouhani carry, with Amnesty International and many other international human rights organizations registering Iran sent nearly 1,000 people to the gallows in 2015 alone. Various religious minorities, including Arabs, Baha’is, Christians, Jews and others have also been targeted...

LONDON (AP) — The long awaited British inquiry into the 2003 invasion of Iraq has been published. Led by former senior civil servant John Chilcot, the report took over seven years to prepare and runs over two million words. The report did not analyze the legality of the invasion and instead focused on the British decision-making process in the run up to the war in 2003.

Donald Trump, speaking in North Carolina, just praised deposed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein as a killer of terrorists, noting that Hussein “didn’t read them the rights” before executing them. “Saddam Hussein was a bad guy, right? He was a bad guy. Really bad guy,” Trump begins. “But you know what he did well? He killed terrorists. He did that so good. They didn’t read them the rights, they didn’t talk. They were a terrorists - it was over. Today, Iraq is Harvard for terrorism.” Hussein was labelled a major sponsor of terrorism by the American government for decades, a status...

UNCLASSIFIED U.S. Department of State Case No. F-2014-20439 Doc No. C05774970 Date: 09/30/2015 RELEASE IN PART B5,B6 From: H Sent: Sunday, March 14, 2010 10:34 AM To: 'millscd@state.gov' Subject: Re: iraq Odierno also asked for him and based on that we've already told him and our civ-mil B5 Baghdad team is expecting him. B6

Reuters, in its headline for a story reporting the death of Philip Agee, a former CIA agent turned traitor, labeled Agee a "CIA whistle-blower" ("CIA whistle-blower Philip Agee dies in Cuba [1]"). As the blog Little Green Footballs put it [2], Agee was "the traitor who exposed fellow CIA agents to violence and murder by revealing their names" in his 1975 book "Inside the Company: A CIA Diary." Agee, who had worked for the CIA for 12 years both in the United States and in Latin America, resigned from the Agency in 1968 after expressing "disagreement with U.S. support for...

It’s a well-known fact that Islamic State fighters enjoy using hardy Toyota pickups in their pursuit of cleansing the Middle East of people even slightly different from themselves, but they’ll need to restock after last week. Recent Allied military advances, including a huge, weeks-long push that liberated the Iraqi city of Fallujah, have ISIS on the run, and the U.S. Air Force’s best aerial hardware just caught a huge number of their vehicles making a break for it. The results, as Defense Department video of the strike shows, wasn’t pretty — for the insurgents or their trucks.