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The Boston Marathon is coming up this Monday.I've lived a 2 minutes walk from the route for years.It's always been a tradition for neighbors to go out at least for a while and watch (and cheer).Just went out today to pick up some milk and saw four copters flying low over the route over a period of about 20 minutes. Two of them had State Police markings and two had markings that I couldn't make out.I also saw a couple of National Guard Humvees as well as those bright orange markings you see on manhole covers when police have sealed...

I'm northeast of Tampa..about 30 miles from MacDill. Was just walking the dog, (1 PM EST )and a pair of F-16s..close formation.. just busted by overhead, really moving.. heading south.... easily BELOW 1000 feet. This is highly unusual..anyone hear anything?

US Navy SEAL commander dies in Afghanistan AAP December 24, 2012 8:51AM A SAILOR identified by US media as the commanding officer of US Navy SEAL Team 4 has died in Afghanistan, military officials say. The Pentagon said Commander Job Price, 42, did not die in combat, and that his death was under investigation. Price, of Pottstown, Pennsylvania, died on Saturday of a "non-combat related injury while supporting stability operations in (central) Uruzgan province, Afghanistan," a Defence Department statement said. It said Price was assigned to a Naval Special Warfare unit in Virginia Beach, Virginia. NBC News reported that Price...

Plans call for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter to get its first overseas deployment in 2017 to Marine Corps Air Station Iwakuni in line with the military’s “Pacific pivot,” according to Defense Secretary Leon Panetta. The F-35B Lightning II — the Navy and Marine Corps variant featuring short takeoff and vertical landing capabilities — has been billed as the next-generation stealth fighter despite complaints about noise and cost overruns. It can travel at speeds of Mach 1.6 — about 1,200 mph — and can land on ships or damaged runways, according to the web site for developer Lockheed Martin Corp....

Hi! Are you an employee of the State Department? Treasury? Defense? Justice? Interior? Agriculture? Labor? Health & Human Services? Housing & Urban Development? Transportation*? Energy? Education? Veterans Affairs? Homeland Security? Commerce? [pause] Wow. I didn’t actually think that I’d be able to find shenanigans going on in the Commerce Department. Aside from the Census, it doesn’t really do all that much. …anyway, if you are a member of this or any other government agency, please take this test. Please look around your desk Monday and see if you can see anything that will make you go Man, if Darrell Issa...

A loosely organized crime ring that targeted vulnerable adults set their sights on Navy veteran Frances "Patrick" Fleming after learning about his prized coin collection last year, according to King County prosecutors. Fleming, 70, got to know members of the group, believing they were related to a neighbor at the Four Freedoms House, a senior independent-living center in Seattle's Bitter Lake neighborhood, prosecutors say in court documents. People closest to Fleming said he was extremely friendly and often talked about his nearly 40-year-old coin collection to anyone who would listen. It was his eagerness to chat about the coins that...

US and South Korean special forces have been parachuting into North Korea to gather intelligence about underground military installations, a US officer has said in comments carried in US media. Army Brigadier General Neil Tolley, commander of US special forces in South Korea, told a conference held in Florida last week that Pyongyang had built thousands of tunnels since the Korean war, The Diplomat reported. "The entire tunnel infrastructure is hidden from our satellites," Tolley said, according to The Diplomat, a current affairs magazine. "So we send (South Korean) soldiers and US soldiers to the North to do special reconnaissance."...

Here's a disturbing update to last week's amazing story about the U.S. mole who infiltrated al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and thwarted an airliner attack with a more sophisticated underwear bomb. Someone in Washington whose boss stood to gain from an election year story about alert intelligence operatives successfully protecting American voters at great personal risk leaked the heroic story to the Associated Press. The AP held the story until Obama administration sources said the CIA operative was safe. But, it turns out, the mole was not a CIA operative. The Obama administration had nothing to do with the...

U.S. and Yemeni officials say the supposed would-be bomber at the heart of an al-Qaida airliner plot was actually an informant working for the CIA. The revelation, first reported by The Los Angeles Times, shows how the CIA was able to get its hands on a sophisticated underwear bomb well before an attack was set in motion. Officials say the informant was working for the CIA and Saudi Arabian intelligence when he was given the bomb. He then turned the device over to authorities. Officials say the informant is safely out of Yemen. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity...

Kiriakou, 47, was a source for stories by The New York Times and other news organizations in 2008 and 2009 about some of the agency’s most sensitive operations after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. ......... that the information Kiriakou supplied to journalists ... enabling defense attorneys there to obtain photographs of CIA operatives suspected of being involved in harsh interrogations. Some of the pictures were subsequently discovered in the cells of high-value detainees.

An Army officer speaking on behalf of special forces confirmed on Thursday that a team of "highly trained personnel that excel in uncertain environments" are operating near Iran. Spencer Ackerman just published the scoop on Wired's Danger Room blog: The primary, day-to-day mission of the team, known as Joint Special Operations Task Force-Gulf Coordinating Council, is to mentor military units belonging to the U.S.' oil-rich Arab allies, who collectively are known as the Gulf Coordinating Council. Those Arab states consider Iran to be their primary foreign threat. The task force provides "highly trained personnel that excel in uncertain environments," Maj....

VANDENBERG AIR FORCE BASE, Calif. –  The secretive X-37B robotic space plane is about to set its own space-endurance record on a hush-hush project operated by the U.S. Air Force Rapid Capabilities Office. The craft, also known as the Orbital Test Vehicle-2, was boosted into Earth orbit atop an Atlas 5 rocket from Cape Canaveral, Fla., on March 5. Tomorrow (Nov. 30), the X-37B spacecraft will mark its 270th day of flight — a lifetime in space that was heralded in the past as the vehicle's upper limit for spaceflight by project officials. "It's still up there," U.S. Air...

After Bin Laden was killed, Robert Gates was insistent that nothing be revealed about the unit that accomplished the deed. But one man could not keep his mouth shut: Joe Biden, who credited the SEALs in a speech: Let me briefly acknowledge tonight’s distinguished honorees. Admiral James Stavridis is a, is the real deal. He can tell you more about and understands the incredible, the phenomenal, the just almost unbelievable capacity of his Navy SEALs and what they did last Sunday. Further irresponsible leaks from the Obama administration revealed the unit involved, causing the unit members to fear for their...

For a week, people have been asking, “Why won’t the president release Osama bin Laden’s photo?” That’s the wrong question. We should be asking, “Why was Barack Obama in such a hurry to tell us bin Laden was dead?” The White House says the information in bin Laden’s compound is the equivalent of a “small college library,” potentially containing incalculably valuable and unique data on al-Qaeda operations, personnel, and methods. “It’s going to be great even if only 10 percent of it is actionable,” a government official told Politico’s Mike Allen. I’m no expert on such matters — though I’ve...

Yesterday, The New York Times published another front-page article based on a leaked classified document. This time, it was an order signed by Gen. David Petraeus authorizing black operations against adversaries and such dubious friends as Iran, Syria, Yemen and Saudi Arabia. Gee, thanks. We really needed to know that. The world's a better place now. Yet the Times' sin was the lesser one. The paper has long since given up any pretense of patriotism. (Ugh! Yuck!) Its editors are just publishing and perishing as citizens of the world. It's whoever leaked the document that bears the burn-in-hell blame. We...

In his most recent interview with an Al Qaeda media outlet terrorist “Anwar Al Awlaki” the US born Al Qaeda terrorist said that he stopped his communications when he read in the Washington Post that he is being tracked by US intelligence. He said that once he stopped his communications he left the area in Yemen where he was hiding and then this area was bombed by US airstrikes. He also said that both terrorists “Nidal Hassan” who killed 13 of our troops at Fort Hood and “Omar Farouk Abd Al Moutaleb” who had the failed terrorist attack on the...

SNIPPET: "WASHINGTON: A US official identified as Michael Furlong organised a network of private contractors in Afghanistan and Pakistan with the purpose of finding and killing suspected militants, The New York Times reported Monday. Citing unnamed military officials and businessmen in Afghanistan and the United States, the newspaper said Furlong, who works for the Defence Department, hired contractors from private security companies that employed former CIA and Special Forces members. These people gathered intelligence on the whereabouts of suspected militants and the location of insurgent camps, the report said. After that, the information was sent to military units and intelligence...

The Senate Judiciary Committee has cause to consider finding Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. in contempt of Congress. During his confirmation process last year, Mr. Holder withheld a tremendously important legal brief from the committee. Combined with a series of other occasions on which the attorney general has stonewalled congressional queries, this new revelation reflects so badly on Mr. Holder's ethics that it puts in doubt his fitness for office. This wasn't just any old legal brief. It was a brief (actually, two of them on the same basic case) before the Supreme Court regarding one of the most...

JERUSALEM, Israel (AP) -- The Israeli military says a planned raid on a West Bank village was called off after an Israeli soldier disclosed its details online. The military says the combat soldier posted the time and location of the raid on his Facebook page . . .

War On Terror: The Justice Department employs nine lawyers previously involved in the defense of terrorist detainees. This is a colossal conflict of interest. Just whose side are they on? From the dropping of a voter-intimidation case against the New Black Panther Party to the decision to try 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Muhammed in a civilian court within blocks of where the World Trade Center once stood, the actions and attitudes of the Justice Department and Attorney General Eric Holder toward the thugs and terrorists who threaten us has grown curiouser and curiouser. We may now have a clue as...