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ABC News' Jonathan Greenberger reports: If she makes it to the White House, Sen. Hillary Clinton said today her husband will take on the same responsibilities as traditional presidential spouses, with no access to National Security Council meetings. "I think he would play the role that spouses have always played for presidents," said Clinton, in an exclusive interview with ABC News' George Stephanopoulos. "He will not have a formal, official role, but just as presidents rely on wives, husbands, fathers, friends of long years, he will be my close confidante and adviser as I was with him."

Sandy Bungler's Burglary Exposed or...Why Character Matters “My staff’s investigation reveals that President Clinton’s former National Security Advisor Sandy Berger compromised national security much more than originally disclosed,” Davis said. “It is now also clear that Mr. Berger was willing to go to extraordinary lengths to compromise national security, apparently for his own convenience. “The 9/11 Commission relied on incomplete and misleading information regarding its access to documents Mr. Berger reviewed. No one ever told the Commission that Mr. Berger had access to original documents that he could have taken without detection. “We now know that Mr. Berger left stolen...

Investigation into pilfered documents reveals former president signed letter President Bill Clinton signed a letter authorizing former National Security Adviser Sandy Berger's access to classified documents that later came up missing, according to a newly released investigation report by the National Archives and Records Administration. The sensitive drafts of the National Security Council's "Millennium After Action Review" on the Clinton administration's handling of the al-Qaida terror threats in December 1999 suspiciously disappeared after Berger said he intended to "determine if Executive Privilege needed to be exerted prior to documents being provided to the 9/11 Commission." Then-Attorney General John Ashcroft testified...

<p>The case is a spin-off of a probe that has already led to charges under the Espionage Act against two AIPAC lobbyists, whose case is still pending, and to a 12-and-a-half-year prison sentence for former Defense Intelligence Agency official Lawrence A. Franklin. Franklin pleaded guilty a year ago to three felony counts involving improper disclosure and handling of classified information about the Middle East and terrorism to the two lobbyists, who in turn are accused of passing it on to a journalist and a foreign government, widely believed to be Israel. The two lobbyists, who have denied any wrongdoing but were dismissed by AIPAC in April of 2005, were indicted on felony counts of conspiring with government officials to receive classified information they were not authorized to have access to and providing national defense information to people not entitled to receive it.</p>

WASHINGTON - Elliott Abrams, a special assistant to the president and an assistant secretary of state in the Reagan administration, has been appointed deputy national security adviser with a focus on promoting global democracy and human rights. President Bush's national security adviser, Stephen Hadley, also announced Wednesday that Faryar Shirzad will continue to serve in an expanded role as deputy national security adviser for international economic affairs. Abrams, who becomes national security adviser for global democracy strategy, will continue work on Israeli-Palestinian affairs in concert with Hadley and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Abrams has served as special assistant...

Federal authorities have subpoenaed bank records from a Chevy Chase nonprofit group over questions about its financial reporting for work performed for NASA, including the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt. The U.S. Attorney's Office in Maryland has sought financial records from the Alliance for Competitive Technology as part of a federal probe into whether the group made false claims to NASA, court records show. The Justice Department and the attorney's office filed papers in U.S. District Court in Greenbelt June 30 on behalf of NASA's Office of Inspector General based at Goddard. The papers say the nonprofit group refused...

Back in the early 1990s, when Los Angeles was stuck in the pits of a deep recession, somebody facetiously suggested that if Southern California were returned to Mexico _ maybe throw in south Texas and the San Joaquin Valley as well _ it could improve the economies of both countries. But given the current debate about immigration in all its economic and social complexity, that facetious idea left an increasingly compelling question: Where _ and what _ is the border? The obvious answer is that it's the line established by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo of 1848, which ended the...

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE - April 24, 2006 Contact: Robert Dixon [cell] (916) 441-6197 or email: robert@MoveAmericaForward.org CIA LEAKER MARY McCARTHY & WASH. POST’S DANA PRIEST HAVE PARTISAN HISTORY TOGETHER New Questions Arise About CIA Leaker & Washington Post Reporter’s Political Motivations (SAN FRANCISCO) – The nation’s largest pro-troop grassroots organization, Move America Forward (website: www.MoveAmericaForward.org) has uncovered new ties between disgraced CIA leaker, Mary McCarthy, and Washington Post reporter, Dana Priest. Priest was the reporter who received a Pulitzer Prize for reporting on classified information on the war on terrorism that CIA analyst Mary McCarthy leaked to her in...

Secrets of the CIA A former colleague says the fired Mary McCarthy ‘categorically denies’ being the source of the leak on agency renditions. WEB EXCLUSIVE By Mark Hosenball and Michael Isikoff Updated: 7:07 p.m. ET April 24, 2006 April 24, 2006 - A former CIA officer who was sacked last week after allegedly confessing to leaking secrets has denied she was the source of a controversial Washington Post story about alleged CIA secret detention operations in Eastern Europe, a friend of the operative told NEWSWEEK. The fired official, Mary O. McCarthy, “categorically denies being the source of the leak,” one...

Proving that he’s just as adept at stuffing an election candidate’s coffers as he is at stuffing his own socks, Sandy Berger hosted an "almost secret" Washington fund-raiser for a recently retired three-star vice admiral last night. Vice Adm. Joseph Sestak Jr, as the Village People would say, is "In the Navy". And when you want to take an Able Danger Congressman Curt Weldon down, what better way than to send in the Navy? Berger, dubbed "Sandy Burglar" by radio meister Rush Limbaugh, gained notoriety for trying to stuff classified documents into his socks and other attire. The man, who...

Several members of President Bill Clinton’s national security team are hosting a Washington fund-raiser tonight for retired Vice Adm. Joseph Sestak Jr., the Democrat running against U.S. Rep. Curt Weldon in November. Officials at Sestak’s campaign headquarters in Media will not comment on the event, though an invitation sent out to potential donors and obtained by the Daily Times lists Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger as a host. "As a general rule, campaigns don’t comment on fund-raisers or people who hold them," said Sestak’s campaign chairman, Myles Duffy. Berger, who served as Clinton’s second-term national security adviser, pleaded guilty last year...

How the CIA Funds Anti-Bush Propaganda By Bill Gertz The Washington Times | September 14, 2004 The CIA's Counterterrorist Center has spent more than $15 million in the past three years funding studies, reports and conferences produced by former Democratic administration officials and other critics of the Bush administration. The latest effort was a $300,000 grant by the CIA to the Atlantic Council for a study co-authored by Richard A. Clarke, the former counterterrorism official who wrote a best seller accusing the Bush administration of failing in the war on terrorism by invading Iraq.

Censorship of the Press: Do not “Imply Defeat” Sun. Feb. 12, 2006 The secretariat of Iran’s National Security Council (NSC) has asked the managers of the local press not to publish any news reports or stories regarding Iran’s referral to the UN Security Council which imply that all is lost and that the Islamic Republic has suffered a defeat. The request asks that writers and commentators to demonstrate Iran’s national unity to foreigners by writing nationalistic and heroic articles portraying the nuclear issues as a national and popular cause. The NSC has exercised control over what the local press and...

NSC warns against visiting Sinai Herb Keinon, THE JERUSALEM POST Oct. 1, 2005 The National Security Council's counter-terrorism unit called on all Israelis in Egypt, including Sinai, to leave immediately because of concrete information of plans to kidnap Israeli vacationers there. The counter-terrorism unit also called on Israelis to refrain from visiting Sinai or any part of Egypt during the upcoming holiday period, a period during which Israelis have in the past streamed into Sinai by the tens of thousands. This warning is an upgrade of a warning issued in April that designated Egypt a 'high threat level' destination after...

     Inman on the Culture of Leaks 07/26 06:04 PMI recently asked Admiral Bobby R. Inman (USN Ret.), a professor at UT's LBJ School of Public Affairs who served as both Director of the National Security Administration and former Deputy Director of Central Intelligence, what he thought about Wilson, Plame and the leaking of classified information. Inman brought up an episode that has been overlooked in the recent debate — the CIA leaks during the 2004 election cycle, particularly the book Imperial Hubris, published by former CIA analyst Michael Scheuer under the pseudonym Anonymous. Inman said: I was utterly...

I hesitate to weigh in on this subject with so many interesting and insightful contributions already posted. However, since I've been doing a series of interviews, I have had to develop opinions on all aspects of the Iranian elections. Since everyone else is doing it, here are my own questions, comments and evolving views. Ahmadinejad seems to have been the beneficiary of a populist revolt (in addition to a little polling station assistance from his friends in the Revolutionary Guards and Basij). A friend of mine compares this to the election of Communist mayors in Italy during the Cold War...

Democrats seem determined to filibuster John Bolton's nomination to be U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., embarrassing President Bush and sending a message that any public official who declines to kowtow to the permanent bureaucracy will be punished. Mr. Bush now has to decide how to respond in a way that shows he's not a lame duck. The easiest response would be to make a recess appointment, which would send Mr. Bolton to Turtle Bay for the duration of this Congress, roughly 18 months. But this would allow Democrats to claim that they've wounded Mr. Bolton and embolden U.N. officials to...

Who Undercut Ambassador Horan? Correspondence To the Editor: Your tribute to Ambassador Hume Horan was moving and richly deserved. He was a man of extraordinary decency, integrity, and ability. The only sentence in the piece with which I'd quibble is the one that reads, "Horan's clash with State Department Arabists ended in his recall from Saudi Arabia." I had the privilege of serving under Ambassador Horan in Saudi Arabia at the time in question and can attest that there was no clash with State Department Arabists. Arabists at the U.S. Embassy in Riyadh at the time were shocked and angered...

China: The Rest of the Story Last night, we did a post on an article in yesterday's Washington Times by Bill Gertz. The Gertz article talked about a "classified intelligence report that concludes that over the last ten years, America's intelligence agencies failed to detect China's aggressive arms buildup." This morning, we got the following email from a recently retired CIA intelligence analyst named Owen Johnson. It is intensely interesting, so I'm reproducing it in full despite its length: I have two comments regarding your post: History Seems to be Continuing. First, your comment: "government's main "experts" on a country...

Friday April 15, 09:03 AM South Korea scraps US military plan on North KoreaSEOUL (AFX) - South Korea said it has vetoed a joint US and South Korean combined forces plan for armed intervention in North Korea in the event of instability there.The country's National Security Council said it has ordered the classified plan to be scrapped because it could infringe on South Korean sovereignty.Under a bilateral treaty, the South Korean military comes under US command only in times of war.But analysts said that under the scrapped plan the US military wanted control of South Korean forces in the...

Until recently, Nancy Soderberg was just another blissfully forgotten face of the Clinton administration.... But she gained some notoriety this month during an appearance on "The Daily Show," in which host Jon Stewart was half-marveling, half-despairing at the turn of events in the Middle East after the Iraq elections, which seemed to vindicate President Bush.... Soderberg: "Well, there's still Iran and North Korea don't forget..." Begin with the simplest errors of fact.... [W]hen Ms. Soderberg snickers about how candidate Bush struggled through a foreign-policy pop quiz in 2000, one is compelled to snicker back. Next ... errors of analysis. "It...

September 11, 2001, was a catalytic event that revealed the core character of the Bush administration’s national security team. As rival factions fought for the president’s ear, the transformative ideals espoused by the neocons gained ascendancy—triggering a rift that has split the Republican foreign-policy establishment to its foundations. The inner circles of the U.S. national security community—members of the National Security Council (NSC), a select number of their deputies, and a few close advisors to the president—represent what is probably the most powerful committee in the history of the world, one with more resources, more power, more license to act,...

Since midsummer, the Senate Intelligence Committee has been attempting to solve the biggest mystery of the Iraq war: the disparity between the Bush Administration’s prewar assessment of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and what has actually been discovered. The committee is concentrating on the last ten years’ worth of reports by the C.I.A. Preliminary findings, one intelligence official told me, are disquieting. “The intelligence community made all kinds of errors and handled things sloppily,” he said. The problems range from a lack of quality control to different agencies’ reporting contradictory assessments at the same time. One finding, the official went...

WASHINGTON, Feb. 1 - Scientific tests have led American intelligence agencies and government scientists to conclude with near certainty that North Korea sold processed uranium to Libya, bolstering earlier indications that the reclusive state exported sensitive fuel for atomic weapons, according to officials with access to the intelligence. The determination, which has circulated among senior government officials in recent weeks, has touched off a hunt to determine if North Korea has also sold uranium to other countries, including Iran and Syria. So far, there is no evidence that such additional transactions took place. Nonetheless, the conclusion about the uranium transfer...

As American post-conflict combat deaths in Iraq overtook the wartime number, the administration counseled patience. "The war on terror is a test of our strength. It is a test of our perseverance, our patience, and our will," President Bush told an American Legion convention. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice embellished the message with what former White House speechwriters immediately recognize as a greatest-generation pander. "There is an understandable tendency to look back on America's experience in postwar Germany and see only the successes," she told the Veterans of Foreign Wars in San Antonio, Texas, on Aug. 25. "But as some...

IS THE ESTABLISHMENT MEDIA BIASEDagainst conservatives? Dan Rather remains in the anchor chair at the CBS Evening News despite his involvement in recent news stories based on dishonest reporting, fabricated documents and even Internet gossip falsely alleging that President George W. Bush secretly intends to begin the military conscription of students. These stories were obviously designed to damage Mr. Bush in the final weeks before a national election. And now ABC News has left in place its Political Director Mark Halperin. ABC has done this despite the network’s acknowledgement that Halperin wrote a memo that to many seems to direct...

WHAT SHOULD WE DO IN IRAQ? The U.S. presidential election will likely be won or lost over the war and its aftermath. If the United States fails in Iraq--if it is driven out by violence, and the country descends into internecine strife--then former ambassador (and current Kerry adviser) Richard Holbrooke may well be right: Iraq will be "a mess worse than Vietnam." It's a good bet that few people in the administration, as in the country at large, think the counterinsurgency is going well. It is quite striking to listen to President Bush's speeches about Iraq--about its centrality to the...

President Reagan used several deft tactical maneuvers to exploit cracks in the Soviet armor. As president of the United States, Ronald Reagan initiated a sweeping and unprecedented program of covert actions and economic-warfare initiatives that acted to greatly weaken the Soviet economy, its support for "wars of liberation," and its hold on its power in Eastern Europe, former top Reagan administration officials said. The elements of these programs were contained in top-secret national-security directives signed by Reagan in 1982 and 1983, these sources told United Press International. "Any kind of covert-action program had to be expressed in a presidential finding,"...

New York ON A THURSDAY they had the book party. It was a simple affair: just family, friends, coworkers, and journalists. They came to Ambassador Joseph Wilson's house, nestled in the ritzy Palisades neighborhood of Northwest Washington, to celebrate the release of his first book, The Politics of Truth. One thing Joe Wilson keeps track of is his "Notoriety Quotient," or the amount of attention he receives from the media. And that Thursday it seemed to be on the rise. For the past week The Politics of Truth was mentioned in the same breath as Ron Suskind's The Price of...

The next shoe to drop in the Gorelick-gate scandal may be a still-classified report on the Millennium bomb plot that faults Gorelick's "wall" of separation between prosecutors and intelligence gatherers for nearly blowing the Millennium Bomb Plot probe. Writing in National Review Online, Landmark Legal Foundation President Mark Levin notes that the Commission is sitting on a damaging post-Millennium-Plot report that chronicles the impact of Gorelick's terrorist-friendly directive, which Attorney General John Ashcroft alluded to on during his Wednesday testimony. Dubbed the Millennium After Action Review by the Clinton National Security Council, Ashcroft said the report chronicles how al...

<p>If President Bush had followed every last letter of Richard Clarke's recommendations starting Inauguration Day, it still would not have prevented 9/11. How do we know this? Richard Clarke says so.</p> <p>Mr. Gorton: "Assuming that the recommendations that you made on January 25 of 2001 . . . including aid to the Northern Alliance which had been an agenda item at this point for two and a half years without any action, assuming that there had been more Predator reconnaissance missions, assuming that that had all been adopted, say, on January 26, year 2001, is there the remotest chance that it would have prevented 9/11?"</p>

Developing...

<p>With the latest "uproar" over National Security Advisor Condolleezza Rice's lack of public testimony to the 9/11 commission, I thought everyone might find the following interesting.</p> <p>On July 29, 1999, Richard Clarke was scheduled to appear before the Senate Special Committee on the Year 2000 Technology Problem. Senator Bob Bennett (R-UT) chaired the hearing, and made the announcement that Richard Clarke would not be appearing before the committee due to a directive by the National Security Council. Since Clarke was not a confirmed member of the White House staff, the directive was made that Clarke was not allowed to testify before Congress.</p>

Critics from inside the intelligence community tell Newsweek that post-9/11, despite the Bush administration's establishment of the Terrorist Threat Integration Center (TTIC) to remedy U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies' failure to communicate, everything the various intelligence agencies learn is still not being shared. "The whole bureaucracy is against TTIC," says one CIA analyst. "They've got the long knives out for it." Launched last May, the TTIC is an independent body manned with analysts from more than a dozen agencies, including the CIA, FBI, Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, the National Security Agency, the Coast Guard, Homeland Security and the...

WASHINGTON -- Richard Clarke is the White House terrorism czar. His stock in trade is the stuff of techno-thrillers -- biological bombs in the Wall Street subway, chemical clouds of death in the Pentagon parking lot, cyberwar attacks crippling the nation's computers. Pale as skim milk, his once-red hair gone white at 48, he works long days and nights in Oliver North's old office at the National Security Council, keeping a profile so low that almost no one outside his top-secret world knows he exists. As chairman of the government's chief counterterrorism group for the past seven years, he has...

Avoiding attacking terrorist mastermind ...But NBC News has learned that long before the war the Bush administration had several chances to wipe out his terrorist operation and perhaps kill Zarqawi himself — but never pulled the trigger. In June 2002, U.S. officials say intelligence had revealed that Zarqawi and members of al-Qaida had set up a weapons lab at Kirma, in northern Iraq, producing deadly ricin and cyanide. The Pentagon quickly drafted plans to attack the camp with cruise missiles and airstrikes and sent it to the White House, where, according to U.S. government sources, the plan was debated to...

<p>First, Mr. Miniter recycles old, false Sudanese claims that the Clinton White House declined access to Sudan's intelligence files on al Qaeda and that an unnamed CIA official declined an offer from Sudan in 1996 to turn Osama bin Laden over to the United States.</p>

To cope with the possibility that terrorists might someday detonate a nuclear bomb on American soil, the federal government is reviving a scientific art that was lost after the cold war: fallout analysis. The goal, officials and weapons experts both inside and outside the government say, is to figure out quickly who exploded such a bomb and where the nuclear material came from. That would clarify the options for striking back. Officials also hope that if terrorists know a bomb can be traced, they will be less likely to try to use one.In a secretive effort that began five years...

<p>WASHINGTON - It was both an auspicious and ominous way to begin the week: Auspicious because of President George Bush's resolute demand that Saddam Hussein and his sons leave Iraq. There were also ominous noises from his predecessor in the White House, Bill Clinton, who bared not only his antagonism to the president but his horror at envisioning a strong America.</p>

WASHINGTON (AP) - With less than four months before a deadline to transfer Iraqi sovereignty to the people, the Bush administration has dispatched a senior White House official to Baghdad to help form an interim government - action that's needed before any handoff of power. In Baghdad, coalition spokesman Dan Senor identified the official as Robert Blackwill, deputy national security adviser for strategic planning at the National Security Council staff. Senor says Blackwill visits Iraq every four to six weeks. This time, Blackwill is working to resolve problems some Shiite members of the Iraqi Governing Council have with the interim...

BOSTON (AP) - The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library is making available papers pertaining to Henry Kissinger's work as a consultant to the National Security Council during the Kennedy administration. Kissinger, who later served in the Nixon and Ford administrations as secretary of state and assistant for national security affairs, was appointed a part-time consultant to Kennedy in 1961, a job he performed while continuing to work as a professor at Harvard. The files have been declassified and are now available to scholars, journalists and members of the public. The Kennedy Library said the papers include handwritten notes on White...

ELIZABETH, N.J. (Reuters) - President Bush (news - web sites) countered those questioning his justification for the invasion of Iraq (news - web sites) on Monday, dismissing "revisionist historians" and saying Washington acted to counter a persistent threat. "Now there are some who would like to rewrite history; revisionist historians is what I like to call them," Bush said in a speech to New Jersey business leaders. Referring to the ousted Iraqi president, Bush said, "Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) was a threat to America and the free world in '91, in '98, in 2003. He continually ignored the...

Diplomatic Missteps The State Department works for the American Left in Macedonia. It is a beautiful country to be sure, but the small Balkan nation of Macedonia has some big problems. As it works to satisfy cumbersome requirements for integrating into NATO and the EU, Macedonia continues to experience high unemployment and a staggering trade deficit. It has fallen victim to the eastern European criminal network active in trafficking women and children into prostitution. Both its majority and minority political parties are trying to balance national unity with ethnic recognition. It is a ticking time bomb for ethnic violence that...

<p>First, Mr. Miniter recycles old, false Sudanese claims that the Clinton White House declined access to Sudan's intelligence files on al Qaeda and that an unnamed CIA official declined an offer from Sudan in 1996 to turn Osama bin Laden over to the United States.</p>

The National Archives Opens Additional National Security Council Files Relating to the Nixon Presidency 7/14/03 2:33:00 PM -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- To: National Desk Contact: National Archives Public Affairs, 301-837-1700 COLLEGE Park, Md., July 14 /U.S. Newswire/ -- The National Archives and Records Administration has announced that it will open approximately 180,000 pages of materials from the Nixon Presidential Materials Project on Thursday, July 17 beginning at 9 a.m. in Conference Room D at the National Archives at College Park, 8601 Adelphi Road, College Park, Md. These newly declassified documents are from the National Security Council (NSC) Institutional Files. These records were...

<p>In order to depoliticize any claim that any U.S. president would ever take military action &#8212; especially one involving tactical nuclear weapons &#8212; based on politically predetermined intelligence, Congress needs to legislate and fund with a small budget what I'm calling the Contrarian Threat Assessment Directorate.</p>

Five days before the war began in Iraq, as President Bush prepared to raise the terrorism threat level to orange, a top White House counterterrorism adviser unlocked the steel door to his office, an intelligence vault secured by an electronic keypad, a combination lock and an alarm. He sat down and turned to his inbox. "Things were dicey," said Rand Beers, recalling the stack of classified reports about plots to shoot, bomb, burn and poison Americans. He stared at the color-coded threats for five minutes. Then he called his wife: I'm quitting.

WASHINGTON, March 19 (UPI) -- The top National Security Council official in the war on terror resigned this week for what a NSC spokesman said were personal reasons, but intelligence sources say the move reflects concern that the looming war with Iraq is hurting the fight against terrorism. Rand Beers would not comment for this article, but he and several sources close to him are emphatic that the resignation was not a protest against an invasion of Iraq. But the same sources, and other current and former intelligence officials, described a broad consensus in the anti-terrorism and intelligence community...

US postpones visit by Israeli loan guarantee delegation The delegation was scheduled to hold the almost final round of talks on Israel request for military aid grants and loan guarantees. Ran Dagoni, Washington 11 Feb 03 13:30Thursday’s planned Washington trip by an Israeli delegation to discuss US special aid has been postponed for several days, for “technical reasons relating to the coordination of the Americans’ timetable.” Minister for Economic Affairs at the Israel Embassy in Washington Boaz Raday said, “A new date will be scheduled soon.” The original date was arranged with the US National Security Council, with the participation...

Web magazine publishes, retracts virus hoax story NEW YORK (AP) - In a bizarre case of one journalist deceiving another, an Internet news site published -- then embarrassingly retracted -- a story that claimed a radical Islamic group was behind a virus-like attack that clogged the Internet. The Web site of Computerworld magazine published on Wednesday an article penned by journalist Dan Verton that he based on an e-mail interview with a person he identified as "Abu Mujahid," a member of Pakistan-based Harkat-ul-Mujahadeen. Verton wrote that "Mujahid" claimed the group, believed linked to Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida network, had...