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Thanks to testimony and "real-time" video, lawmakers said they got their clearest picture yet Thursday of the deadly attack on a U.S. diplomatic compound in Libya, though questions and tensions remain as to how President Barack Obama's administration handled the matter. Republicans and Democrats who attended closed-door sessions of the House and Senate intelligence committees described what they heard and saw as informative, albeit not necessarily conclusive. [....] Legislators saw a "real-time film (showing) exactly what happened" on September 11 in Benghazi, starting before the attack began up "through the incident and the exodus," said Feinstein. A source familiar with...

....In David Petraeus’s final days at the helm of the Central Intelligence Agency, his relations with chiefs of other U.S. agencies, including his boss, National Intelligence Director James Clapper, took a contentious turn. Mr. Petraeus wanted his aides to push back hard and release their own timeline of the Sept. 11 attacks on the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi and a nearby CIA safe house, seeking to set the record straight and paint the CIA’s role in a more favorable light. Mr. Clapper and agencies including the Pentagon objected, but Mr. Petraeus told his aides to proceed, said the senior...

A House committee is planning to hold a hearing next week on the Libya consulate attack, following up on an issue that Republicans had emphasized before the presidential election in questioning President Obama's foreign policy record. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans were killed in the Sept. 11 terrorist attack on the consulate in Benghazi. A local Libyan extremist group is suspected of carrying out the attack, but the Obama administration has been criticized for its confusing explanation for the strike and for security warnings that apparently weren't heeded. The House Intelligence Committee will hold its hearing on the...

As the poster of this article, I STRONGLY urge you to go to Glenn Beck's site and watch Part 1 video first (at the bottom of the linked page's article) and then watch Part 2 video at the top. Former CIA Officer: Obama Administration let Ambassador Stevens die Monday, Oct 22, 2012 Part 2 of the interview is below. Scroll down for Part 1 Glenn invited Clare Lopez, a former CIA officer, onto his TV show Monday night to discuss the attack on the U.S. embassy on Benghazi. Lopez has written extensively on the situation in Libya, as well as...

The office of the United States' top intelligence official appeared to take the blame Friday for the Obama administration's changing narrative on the U.S. Consulate attack in Libya, saying administration officials who initially claimed the attack was spontaneous did so based on intelligence officials' guidance. The statement by Shawn Turner, spokesman for Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, was put out late Friday -- at the close of a tumultuous week for the Obama administration over the Libya attack. The White House has had to steadily backpedal over initial claims that the attack was inspired by protests in Cairo over...

Reuters) - U.S. authorities are investigating possible collusion between militants who launched a deadly attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya and locally hired Libyan personnel guarding the facility, three U.S. officials said. So far there is no proof that the attackers, who killed U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other U.S. officials, were helped by Libyan security personnel hired by the consulate. One official said the Obama administration was playing down this possibility.However, all the officials said that the question of whether the attackers had inside help or advice was a serious issue in the U.S. investigation into...

At the mid-March 2012 congressional hearings on the "Iran-Hezb'allah Threat to the Homeland," chaired by Representative Peter King, top officials from the DEA, the FBI, and the New York City Police Department, as well as senior scholars addressed the alarming capability and motivation of this Axis of Jihad to strike inside the U.S. Critical and timely, this was the latest in a series of hearings that Rep. King, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, has held to focus attention on the deadly threat to America's national security from the forces of Islamic jihad and sharia. There was an unmentioned...

The Director of National Intelligence (DNI) via a letter to Senator Ron Wyden (R-OR) has confirmed Wyden's statement that The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) has, at least on one occasion, collected information through warrantless wiretaps that violate the Fourth Amendment. While agreeing with Wyden, the DNI issued this statement: The government has remedied these concerns and the FISC has continued to approve the collection as consistent with the statute and reasonable under the Fourth Amendment. Source. FISC is the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, a court which renders decisions with no transparency to the public and generally not to our...

Obama administration officials tell The Daily Beast that the CIA has sent officers to the region to assess Syria’s weapons program. James Clapper, now the Director of National Intelligence and formerly the director of the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, said in 2003 that he believed materials had been moved out of Iraq in the months before the war and cited satellite imagery.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith, R-Texas, told President Obama Thursday he’d like to interview seven current and former administration officials who may know something about a spate of national security leaks. The request follows suggestions by lawmakers a day earlier that they’re interested in potentially pursuing a congressional investigation into the leaks, on top of the Department of Justice-led probe. “Concern about these leaks knows no party line. When national security secrets leak and become public knowledge, our people and our national interests are jeopardized. And when our enemies know our secrets, American lives are threatened,” Smith said in...

Newt Gingrich said Friday that a former CIA official has told him that President Obama's administration has leaked more secrets than any administration that official had seen. "You have an Obama administration who's dedicated to appeasing our enemies and dedicated to giving away our secrets," Gingrich said in an interview with WHO radio in Des Moines. "I've had a former very senior CIA person tell me this White House has leaked more secrets than any White House in his lifetime." A senior Obama campaign official said in response: "His definition of appeasement must be decimating al Qaeda's leadership." Obama has...

Update: Rep. Brad Sherman (D-CA), who asked Clinton about the War Powers Act during a classified briefing, said Clinton and the administration are sidestepping the measure's provisions giving Congress the ability to put a 60-day time limit on any military action. "They are not committed to following the important part of the War Powers Act," he told TPM in a phone interview. "She said they are certainly willing to send reports [to us] and if they issue a press release, they'll send that to us too." The White House would forge ahead with military action in Libya even if Congress...

The US national intelligence director has predicted embattled Libyan leader Col Muammar Gaddafi will defeat the rebels challenging his grip on power. James Clapper told the US Senate that Col Gaddafi's superior military force would prevail over the long term. And Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said the US would not act in Libya without international authorisation. Meanwhile, Libyan rebels are fleeing the port of Ras Lanuf after sustained attacks by Col Gaddafi's forces. In Washington, Gen Clapper, who is the top intelligence adviser to US President Barack Obama, told the Senate he saw no evidence Col Gaddafi would step...

On Feb 10, while addressing a question about the Muslim Brotherhood from the House Intelligence Committee, James Clapper Director of National Intelligence responded, “The term ‘Muslim Brotherhood’ …is an umbrella term for a variety of movements, in the case of Egypt, a very heterogeneous group, largely secular, which has eschewed violence and has decried Al Qaeda as a perversion of Islam. In the case of Egypt, [it is] a very heterogeneous group, largely secular, which has eschewed violence and has decried Al Qaeda as a perversion of Islam…” This isn’t the first Gen Clapper’s public faux pas. In an interview...

With this comeback, Ronald Reagan famously ridiculed the foolish statements made by Jimmy Carter in the 1980 election campaign. For the past several days I’ve been pointing out how the inexplicable and contradictory policies of President Obama can be explained, once you understand that his main purpose in life is to transfer our wealth and power to peoples in the third world because of his anti-colonialist obsession. This explains his stubborn commitment to Cap & Trade even though manmade global warming has been disproved. This explains his loan of $2 billion to help Brazil develop its oil while shutting down...

This is the caliber of personnel we have come to expect from the Obama Administration. From Josh Gerstein at Politico : "During a House Intelligence Committee hearing Thursday, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper called Egypt's branch of the Muslim Brotherhood movement 'largely secular.' "In response to questioning from Rep. Sue Myrick (R-N.C.) about the threat posed by the group, Clapper suggested that the Egyptian part of the Brotherhood is not particularly extreme and that the broader international movement is hard to generalize about. "'The term 'Muslim Brotherhood'...is an umbrella term for a variety of movements, in the case of...

  WASHINGTON — On Thursday morning, the heads of America's intelligence services went to Capitol Hill to testify before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence on worldwide threats to the United States. We won't know what was said in the committee's closed sessions until it's leaked by one of the participants. But to paraphrase former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, based on their public testimony, what we now know about what our intelligence services don't know ought to alarm us.The director of national intelligence, retired Air Force Lt. Gen. James Clapper, stunned the committee by describing Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood...

The Obama administration took the rare step Thursday of correcting its own intelligence chief after the official claimed Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood is "largely secular." Director of National Intelligence James Clapper discussed the Islamist group during a hearing on Capitol Hill earlier Thursday. He testified that the organization has "pursued social ends" and a "betterment of the political order," and downplayed its religious underpinnings. "The term 'Muslim Brotherhood' ... is an umbrella term for a variety of movements, in the case of Egypt, a very heterogeneous group, largely secular, which has eschewed violence and has decried Al Qaeda as a perversion...

State Department Confirms American Embassy in London Was Target of British Terror Plotters The U.S. State Department confirms that the 12 terrorism suspects arrested in the United Kingdom last week had targeted the American Embassy in London. British authorities arrested 12 men Dec. 20 for suspicion of terrorism. Few details of a possible plot emerged until a court hearing in London today for the nine men still in custody. A British police statement released earlier in the day did not provide a list of targets but said the men had conspired to cause "explosions of a nature likely to endanger...

The fallout from the Dept. of Homeland Security's interview with Diane Sawyer keeps getting worse. Following Janet Napolitano's "364 days a year" gaffe (funny if not all that worrisome) Sawyer asked Director of National Intelligence James Clapper about the arrests of 12 suspected terrorists in London earlier that morning. Said Sawyer: "First of all, London. How serious is it? Any implication that it was coming here?" He didn't know what she was taking about.