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The ex-president's willingness to speak out on Syria spells disaster for Obama in more ways than one.I wish that when President Bill Clinton started spouting off the other day about the need for President Barack Obama to intervene in Syria's horrific civil war or risk looking like "a total fool," Obama had followed the example set by his wife when she was recently confronted by a heckler. I wish that Obama had leaped from his bully pulpit, got in Clinton's face and silenced him with a withering put-down. But of course, that didn't happen. Instead of resisting the intensifying pressure...

WASHINGTON: The United States will begin formal talks with the Taliban, including the Haqqani network, in Doha, Qatar, in a couple of days, Obama administration officials said in a major announcement on Tuesday. The engagement, the first of its kind since the post 9/11 conflict, follows key concessions made by Washington, including dropping the pre-condition that Taliban immediately break ties with al-Qaida, in return for much broader, generic, self-serving commitments by the unyielding terrorist group. In a conference call from Northern Ireland where President Obama is attending the G8 summit, US officials said they expected Taliban to issue a statement...

Bomb plots targeting the New York Stock Exchange and the city's subway were among more than 50 worldwide thwarted by top-secret surveillance programs since the al Qaeda attacks on the United States, authorities said on Tuesday. Gen. Keith Alexander, National Security Agency director, FBI and other officials revealed startling details at a House Intelligence Committee hearing aimed at finding out more about the telephone and e-mail surveillance initiatives that came to light this month through leaks of classified information to newspapers. It was the most comprehensive and specific defense of those methods that have come under ferocious criticism from civil...

To think it only took the world's most (in)famous whistleblower to get the NSA to disclose that it had heroically managed to prevent terrorist attacks involving the New York Stock Exchange (we supposed they refer to the Manhattan-based TV studio and not the actual exchange where the servers are now housed in Mahwah, NJ) and the NY Subway. Because whereas there was a time in the past when the various US secret services would scurry at the opportunity to disclose their expertise to the general public, now it is a false negative that is supposed to disprove a positive (pervasive...

General Carter Ham is scheduled to testify to the House Armed Services Committee on June 26 at a classified briefing about his knowledge of events that took place when the attack on the U.S. Consulate and CIA annex in Benghazi, Libya happened last September, reports Fox News' Greta Van Susteren: Below is from my FNC colleague Justin Fishel: Subject: Fox First: General Carter Ham to testify on Benghazi for first time next week Fox News has learned that the House Armed Services Committee will hold a classified briefing next Weds June 26 at 9:00 on Benghazi. Briefers will include: Gen....

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) said if he were president, he would have intervened in Syria much sooner than President Obama did to identify the “reasonable” rebels opposed to the regime of President Basher Assad. “It behooved us to kind of identify whether there was any elements there within Syria fighting against Assad that we could work with—reasonable people that wouldn’t carry out human rights violations and could be part of building a new Syria. We failed to do that,” Rubio told Jonathan Karl on ABC News’ “This Week.” … Obama announced this week that the Assad regime had crossed the...

Al Qaida-linked group Syria rebels once denied now key to anti-Assad victories Nearly a year later, however, Jabhat al Nusra, which U.S. officials believe has links to al Qaida, has become essential to the frontline operations of the rebels fighting to topple Assad. “When we finish with Assad, we will fight the U.S.!” one Nusra fighter shouted in the northeastern Syrian city of Ras al Ayn when he was told an American journalist present. He laughed as he said it and then got into a van and drove off, leaving the journalist unable to ask whether it had been a...

Below is from my FNC colleague Justin Fishel: Subject: Fox First: General Carter Ham to testify on Benghazi for first time next week Fox News has learned that the House Armed Services Committee will hold a classified briefing next Weds June 26 at 9:00 on Benghazi. Briefers will include: Gen. Carter Ham (ret.) He was head of AFRICOM during Benghazi attack. LTC Gibson RADM Brian Losey – Special Operations Command Africa This is being coordinated by the Oversight and Investigations subcommittee of the HASC. It will be closed door but will be the first time Ham has been questioned by...

<p>FBI agents are going to meet an incoming flight at a New Jersey airport after reports that a passenger claimed that everyone aboard had been poisoned.</p> <p>United Airlines Flight 116 from Hong Kong is scheduled to land at about 2 p.m. Eastern on Monday at Newark Liberty Airport, outside New York City.</p>

A report on Channel Two Monday said that the brother of Hizbullah head Hassan Nasrallah was killed recently in a fierce battle in the Syrian city of Al-Qusayr. Khader Nasrallah was buried in the village of Kfar Kana in south Lebanon on Sunday, Channel Two said. If true, it would make Nasrallah one of dozens, perhaps hundreds, of Hizbullah terrorists killed in the city, which has been a bloody battleground between troops loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, and rebel groups. Hizbullah, a direct agent of Iran, has been assisting Assad. Hizbullah has been supplying manpower and organization to Assad....

Fighting terrorism? Don't be a chump. Excuses usually trade on something very important and genuine. But what is truly important can be abused, precisely because it should impress us. Government tries to fool us with phony excuses to do whatever officials and bureaucrats want to do. The NSA, et al., failed to detect the Tsarnaev brothers -- even after being tipped off by Russia -- before the Boston Marathon bombing. FBI agents actually investigated the Tsarnaev family in detail. Russia's tip would justify continuing, specific search warrants and phone taps. Yet the NSA and FBI never saw the bumbling brothers...

Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld of the New York-based American Center for Democracy's Economic Warfare Institute warns that last July "al-Qaeda's English-language online magazine, Inspire, published an article called 'It Is of Your Freedom to Ignite a Firebomb,' which featured instructions on how to build an incendiary bomb to light forests on fire. "A few months later, Russia's security (FSB) chief, Aleksandr Bortnikov warned, 'al-Qaeda was complicit in recent forest fires in Europe' as part of the terrorists' 'strategy of a thousand cuts.' Bortnikov spoke of 'extremist sites [that] contained detailed instructions of waging the forest jihad and stressed that such a...

Iran will deploy 4,000 Revolutionary Guards to Syria to bolster Damascus against a mostly Sunni-led insurgency, media reported. Meanwhile, US F-16s and Patriots will stay in Jordan – speculatively, to help establish a no-fly zone to aid Syrian rebels. The deployment of the first several-thousand strong military contingent was reported by The Independent on Sunday who quoted Iranian sources tied to the state’s security apparatus. The sources said the move signals Iran’s intention to drastically step up its efforts to preserve the government of President Bashar Assad. The Islamic Republic’s heightened military commitment could reportedly extend to the opening up...

It's becoming increasingly difficult to give the government the benefit of the doubt in regards to dragnet domestic surveillance. Even before Glenn Greenwald published a top secret court order compelling Verizon to give the NSA information on all telephone calls in its systems and interviewed NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, there were credible reports that the NSA was intercepting U.S. communications. The most significant of those occurred in July, when the court that was established to "hear applications for and grant orders approving electronic surveillance," called the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), found that the NSA violated the Fourth Amendment's restriction...

House approach on Benghazi: Crazy — or plain stupid? By: Fred J. Eckert June 16, 2013 09:52 PM EDT Sometimes watching Speaker John Boehner and his House Republican “leadership” team in action calls to mind that scene from “Forrest Gump” in which Bubba’s mother looks incredulously at Forrest and asks: “Are you crazy — or just plain stupid?” More than six months ago, Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.) introduced a proposal to create a House Select Committee on the terrorist attack in Benghazi, a select committee being generally regarded as the best way to ensure an intelligent, well-coordinated, bipartisan investigation without...

While Director of Boston’s EMS, Richard Serino (now the Obama Deputy FEMA Director) developed and authored a 39 page PDF publication entitled “A Tale of Two Cities and the Running of a Planned Mass Casualty Event.” (1) In 2009, Serino retired from his Boston post to serve under FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate. Prior to his promotion, Serino created Course 18 which contains the following seven chapters: “Presentation Overview, Planned Disaster Concept, Groundwork, Collaboration , Planning, Execution, and Evaluation and Analysis.” Florida Atlantic University Professor James F. Tracy is being credited for bringing this important publication to our attention in...

We might expect Keith Alexander to advocate on behalf of the two programs at the center of our national debate about terrorism and surveillance. He is, after all, the head of the National Security Agency, which runs them. “It’s dozens of terrorist events that these have helped prevent—both here and abroad—in disrupting or contributing to the disruption of terrorist attacks,” Alexander testified last week. And it’s not entirely surprising that the four leading members of Congress on intelligence matters would argue on behalf of these programs, known as “215” and “702,” for the sections of the laws that authorize them....

A senior Pakistani police officer says gunmen have taken over parts of a hospital in a southwestern Pakistan. Fayaz Sumbal, the head of police operations in Quetta, says armed men captured different sections of the hospital complex Saturday and were positioned on rooftops. He says Frontier Corps troops, and police commandos have been called in.

... Obama authorized his administration to provide arms to rebels fighting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, officials said Thursday, a major policy shift after the White House said it had confirmed that Damascus used chemical weapons in the country's civil war.

AP story so no excerpt

More details of a massacre in Homs late last month have emerged following the global outcry of a massacre in Deir el-Zour yesterday.The massacre, carried out by Free Syrian Army militants reportedly targeted men, women and children in the Christian village of al-Duwayr/Douar close to the city of Homs and the border with Lebanon. The incident received little media attention, having occurred at the same time as thousands of Syrian troops converged on the insurgent-occupied town of al-Qusayr.According to sources, around 350 heavily armed militants entered the village, broke into homes and assembled residents in the main square of...

Attorney General Eric Holder has agreed to meet with House Republicans as part of their probe into whether he misled Congress or acted inappropriately in the Justice Department’s investigation of two separate leaks to media outlets. House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) made the announcement late Friday after exchanging several weeks worth of testy letters with the nation’s top cop. In agreeing to meet with the lawmakers, Holder staved off the threat of a subpoena from Goodlatte for a second time in as many weeks. Goodlatte is investigating whether Holder misled the committee last

FORT HOOD, Texas — A uniformed Army psychiatrist had no justification for gunning down U.S. troops and won’t be allowed to tell jurors that he was protecting Taliban leaders in Afghanistan, a military judge ruled Friday, appearing to clear the way for the Fort Hood murder trial to begin. Maj. Nidal Hasan’s “defense of others” strategy fails as a matter of law, Col. Tara Osborn said during a 45-minute hearing. That strategy must show that a killing was necessary to prevent the immediate harm or death of others. Osborn said no soldiers at the Texas Army post on Nov. 5,...

Avril Haines will be the first woman to be second in command at the CIA, but critics point not to her gender but her lack of CIA experience. Her choice suggests Obama wants a close ally. Plucking from a collection of high-powered female lawyers serving the White House, President Obama has nominated Avril Haines as the next deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency. One former senior CIA official tells the Monitor that her nomination has prompted surprise among his former colleagues, not due to Haines’s gender, of course, but because she is a relative unknown in the community. He...

Complete Headline: Thousands Of Firms Trade Confidential Data With The US Government In Exchange For Classified Intelligence The rabbit hole just got deeper. A whole lot deeper. On Sunday we predicated that "there's one reason why the administration, James Clapper and the NSA should just keep their mouths shut as the PRISM-gate fallout escalates: with every incremental attempt to refute some previously unknown facet of the US Big Brother state, a new piece of previously unleaked information from the same intelligence organization now scrambling for damage control, emerges and exposes the brand new narrative as yet another lie, forcing even...

Regarding the Patriot Act’s Section 215, Rep. Sensenbrenner says that it “was originally drafted to prevent data mining,” not protect it. In a recent op-ed railing against Obama’s Big Brother tactics, the Wisconsin Representative writes: “[B]ased on the scope of the released order, both the administration and the Fisa court are relying on an unbounded interpretation of the act that Congress never intended. The released Fisa order requires daily productions of the details of every call that every American makes, as well as calls made by foreigners to or from the United States. Congress intended to allow the intelligence communities...

Republican Sens. John McCain (Ariz.) and Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.) welcomed the chemical weapons assessment. The two have been among the sharpest critics of the administration, saying it has not been doing enough to help the rebels. “U.S. credibility is on the line,” they said in a joint statement. “Now is not the time to merely take the next incremental step. Now is the time for more decisive actions,” they said, such as using long-range missiles to degrade Assad’s air power and missile capabilities.

In a sharp escalation of the U.S. role in Syria's bloody civil war, the White House announced late Thursday that it will provide military aid to rebels fighting to topple President Bashar al-Assad after confirming that his government used chemical weapons on the opposition. Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications Ben Rhodes told reporters on a conference call that President Barack Obama had heard pleas from Syria's rebel Supreme Military Council (SMC) for more help. "Our aim is to be responsive," Rhodes said, underlining that the new assistance would have "direct military purposes."

Texas Congressman Louie Gohmert lit-up and clearly irked Obama FBI Director Robert Mueller, who testified under oath before the House Judiciary Committee today. Gohmert specifically focused on the FBI’s handling (i.e., mishandling) of the Boston Bombings. Below is a partial text of the heated exchange...

War is hell and should be else there would be more of it, but there are things that are far worse. Living in a godless tyrannical Marxist/fascist hell with no liberty, no religious, political or economic freedom for one. No thank you. I'll stand by the constitution and defend my God-given unalienable rights, including the rights to free speech, free religion, to be armed, to be free from government spying, freedom from over-reaching tyrannical government, etc., etc., etc. The corrupt democrat politicizing of our government agencies must stop NOW!! The government snooping programs MUST be shut down NOW! Our borders...

The US officials have repeatedly mentioned Headley's case to defend the controversial spying programme, saying the surveillance had been critical in thwarting potential terror attacks and also to track the 2008 Mumbai attack convict. Washington: Questioning the effectiveness of America's secret surveillance programme, a top investigative publication here has said the US intelligence failed to track Mumbai attack convict David Headley and he was arrested only after a tip off was provided by the British intelligence. The US officials have repeatedly mentioned Headley's case to defend the controversial spying programme, saying the surveillance had been critical in thwarting potential terror...

Homeland Insecurity: The White House assures that tracking our every phone call and keystroke is to stop terrorists, and yet it won't snoop in mosques, where the terrorists are. That's right, the government's sweeping surveillance of our most private communications excludes the jihad factories where homegrown terrorists are radicalized. Since October 2011, mosques have been off-limits to FBI agents.

Chad Pergram �@ChadPergram 2m Deputy CIA Director Mike Morell resigns.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said Wednesday that four members of Army special forces in Tripoli were never told to stand down after last year's deadly assault on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, disputing a former top diplomat's claim that the unit might have helped Americans under siege. Army Gen. Martin Dempsey said timing and the need for the unit to help with casualties from Benghazi resulted in orders for the special forces to remain in Tripoli. Four Americans, including U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens, died in two separate attacks several hours apart...

There have been at least a dozen attacks by Muslim terrorists on U.S. soil since Ramzi Yousef’s parked rental van exploded in the basement of the World Trade Center on February 26, 1993. Some have caused death and injury—such as the 9/11 attacks, Nidal Hasan’s mass shooting at Fort Hood, Texas in 2009, and the Boston Marathon bombings. Other attacks—such as Faisal Shahzad’s fizzled Times Square bombing or Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s unsuccessful underwear bombing of a flight—were thwarted or aborted. Yet fatal or not, all of these attacks were successful in some respects. They scared Americans and reduced freedom in...

On Sept. 11, 2001, 19 people hijacked four U.S. commercial airliners after those airliners took off from airports inside the United States. They then flew those airliners into the World Trade Center towers, the Pentagon and a field outside Shanksville, Pa. The hijackers had certain characteristics in common. All were young males from regions of the world that in recent decades had produced radicalized Muslims -- and the U.S. government had given all of them visas to enter the United States. The oldest of the hijackers was 33; the youngest was 20; their average age was about 24. One came...

All can agree that the Obama administration is mired in myriads of scandals, but as yet no one can quite figure out what they all mean and where they will lead. Benghazi differs from all the other scandals — and from both Watergate and Iran-Contra — because in this case administration lapses led to the deaths of four Americans. Nine months later, the administration’s problems of damage control remain fourfold: (a) there was ample warning that American personnel were in danger in Libya, and yet requests for increased security were denied; (b) during the actual attack, the American tradition of...

WASHINGTON (AP) — A leading Republican senator on Tuesday described controversial U.S. spy programs as looking far deeper into Americans' phone records than the Obama administration has been willing to admit, fueling new privacy concerns as Congress sought to defend the surveillance systems. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-SC., says the U.S. intelligence surveillance of phone records allows analysts to monitor U.S. phone records for a pattern of calls, even if those numbers have no known connection to terrorism.

A couple in Philadelphia has filed a class-action lawsuit against the National Security Agency and Verizon, claiming they and their phone records were targeted for surveillance because of their outspoken criticism of Barack Obama and the U.S. military. This is believed to be the first official lawsuit filed against the government and the company, since it was revealed that Verizon had been ordered to turn over phone metadata for all of its customers. The couple who filed the class-action suit are not just any disgruntled Verizon customers, however. They are Charles and Mary Ann Strange, the parents of a Navy...

On November 14, 2002, the late, great New York Times columnist William Safire wrote a column called "You Are a Suspect." It is posted below, an early signpost to our current state of dislocation and upset. It is dislocating and upsetting to be confronted with the Edward Snowden leaks: the leaked court order, the leaked logistical scope of what is being aptly labeled the Surveillance State. This what Safire predicted would be foisted on Us, the People. We are told it is The Only Means Possible to prevent "another 9/11." The mendacity of this rationale is as appalling as the...

A majority in the U.S. Senate has told President Barack Obama not to do it. There’s no doubt that an overwhelming majority of Americans would oppose it — if the media ever told them about it. Nonetheless, this past Monday, Secretary of State John Kerry said that Obama will sign a controversial gun-control treaty promulgated by the United Nations. “We look forward to signing it as soon as the process of conforming the official languages is completely satisfied,” Kerry said in a prepared statement. The Rest…HERE

U.S. intelligence operatives covertly sabotaged a prominent al-Qaeda online magazine last month in an apparent attempt to sow confusion among the group’s followers, according to officials. The operation succeeded, at least temporarily, in thwarting publication of the latest issue of Inspire, the English-language magazine distributed by al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. When it appeared online, the text on the second page was garbled and the following 20 pages were blank. The sabotaged version was quickly removed from the online forum that hosted it, according to independent analysts who track jihadi Web sites. It’s unclear how the hacking occurred, although U.S....

The State Department has turned over some documents in response to a subpoena from Rep. Darrell Issa seeking more information about changed talking points after the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi. “Committee investigators are reviewing the documents to assess the completeness of the delivery,” Frederick Hill, spokesman for Issa, who chairs the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said in an e-mail.

A majority of Americans – 56% – say the National Security Agency’s (NSA) program tracking the telephone records of millions of Americans is an acceptable way for the government to investigate terrorism, though a substantial minority – 41% – say it is unacceptable. And while the public is more evenly divided over the government’s monitoring of email and other online activities to prevent possible terrorism, these views are largely unchanged since 2002, shortly after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Urgent. While some Tea Party groups testified at the House Ways and Means Committee Hearing last week over the Internal Revenue Service’s (IRS) abuse of power for targeting and harassing them and approximately 500 other conservative groups when they sought tax-exempt status, if you are looking for a political judicial solution, such as congress, impeachment or a special prosecutor to solve the tsunami of unlawful acts coming out of Washington, you are looking in the wrong place. What the IRS did tilted President Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election in his favor. The bottom line is this. You can’t get justice within...

William Binney worked as a National Security Agency analyst for nearly 30 years, eventually becoming the technical director of the of the world geopolitical and military analysis and reporting group. After retiring from the NSA in 2001, Binney became an increasingly vocal critic of the intelligence community, raising alarms about mission creep, wasteful projects and surveillance of law-abiding Americans. Although he still collects a pension from his old employer, the NSA has yanked his security clearance and his home was raided in 2007 as part of a leak investigation in which he was eventually cleared. Binney spoke with The Daily...

The short but profitable tale of how 483,000 private individual have "top secret" access to the nation's most non-public information begins in 2001. "After 9/11, intelligence budgets were increased, new people needed to be hired, it was a lot easier to go to the private sector and get people off the shelf," and sure enough firms like Booz Allen Hamilton - still two-thirds owned by the deeply-tied-to-international-governments investment firm The Carlyle Group - took full advantage of Congress' desire to shrink federal agencies and their budgets by enabling outside consultants (already primed with their $4,000 cost 'security clearances') to fulfill...

At least 26 people were killed and 80 wounded when a militia in the Libyan city of Benghazi opened fire on protesters gathered outside its base on Saturday. The demonstrators had gathered outside the headquarters of the Libya Shield brigade to demand it to submit to the authority of Libya's security forces. Television pictures showed people and cars fleeing in panic from the scene amid the crackle of gunfire. Benghazi's Jala hospital was overwhelmed with casualties being brought in by ambulance and private vehicles, with doctors saying they were struggling to cope. The Libyan prime minister, Ali Zidan, made a...

Washington is preoccupied with the political decisions surrounding last year’s attack in Benghazi, but nine months later the who and why of the terrorist assault that left four Americans dead remains shrouded in mystery. Some analysts say Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens was the target, while others believe he may have been an opportunistic way to smoke out the location of a CIA compound in the eastern Libyan city. It’s not even clear whether the attack was long premeditated or whether it was a last-minute strike organized after Stevens was seen in town the afternoon of Sept. 11. The FBI is...

Benghazi Matters By Ambassador Richard S. Williamson Tuesday, June 11, 2013 The Benghazi attack raises fundamental questions on how to keep America safe and whether to trust the administration. We need a substantive debate on how to protect America against the growing threat of Islamic extremists. In the aftermath of the killing of the U.S. ambassador in Benghazi and three other Americans, the Obama administration did the classic dance of political operatives confronted with an inconvenient truth: deny, deny, deny, and then say, “Oh that doesn’t matter because it was a long time ago.� President Obama has called efforts to get to the...