Free Republic

Hillary Rodham Clinton, the former secretary of state and potential 2016 presidential candidate, is planning to make remarks about the intensifying situation in Syria during a visit to the White House on Monday. Clinton has not personally addressed the Aug. 21 chemical weapons attack that U.S. officials say was carried out by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime or how she believes the United States should respond. Although an aide issued a statement last Tuesday saying she supports President Obama’s effort to seek authorization from Congress for a retaliatory strike.

The Obama administration secretly won permission from a surveillance court in 2011 to reverse restrictions on the National Security Agency’s use of intercepted phone calls and e-mails, permitting the agency to search deliberately for Americans’ communications in its massive databases, according to interviews with government officials and recently declassified material. In addition, the court extended the length of time that the NSA is allowed to retain intercepted U.S. communications from five years to six years — and more under special circumstances, according to the documents, which include a recently released 2011 opinion by U.S. District Judge John D. Bates, then...

US President Barack Obama has the authority to launch air strikes against Syria. But he has to notify lawmakers in Congress -- a process which has begun, according to both sides. "The administration is actively consulting with members of Congress, and we will continue to have these conversations in the days ahead," Kerry said Monday in a strongly-worded statement on Syria.

Sunday, June 30, 2013 A Season for Treason Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog Set aside all the politics over the War on Terror and then ask what Bradley Manning, Julian Assange and Edward Snowden have in common. All three are arrogant and unstable men filled with aimless grievances and animated by the sense that they never received the things that they really wanted out of life. They are in short exactly the sort of people that foreign intelligence agencies recruit when trying to spot weak links in the security chain. Foreign intelligence agencies look for people...

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said Thursday the U.S. intelligence community believes the Syrian regime used the chemical weapon sarin, a revelation that immediately raised the question of whether a "red line" had been crossed in the country's civil war. Hagel confirmed the intelligence assessment, which was detailed in a letter to select members of Congress, while speaking to reporters on a visit to Abu Dhabi. The administration swiftly released those letters, which said U.S. intelligence determined with varying degrees of confidence that "the Syrian regime has used chemical weapons on a small scale in Syria, specifically the chemical agent sarin."...

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