U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice may get the last laugh. Republicans won't be able to stop her from claiming her consolation prize, which, if a new report proves to be accurate, will be as the head of national security.
President Obama will reportedly nominate John Brennan, the nation's current head of counterterrorism operations, to replace David Petraeus as the new director of the Central Intelligence Agency.
Well, this is pretty terrifying: A little known agency called the National Counterterrorism Center has a big ole database of civilian information that it can use to monitor innocent people for suspicious behavior, without probable cause.
Discovery News on pandas, Grist on for-profit local food, Scientific American on falling trees, Politico on how climate change threatens national security, The Guardian on sea ice.
It's been more than six weeks since the U.S. compound in Benghazi was attacked, but reporters are still turning up sensitive U.S. documents lying about the wreckage.
Following a pair of denials by the CIA and the National Security Council to a Fox News story published Friday, the Pentagon has come under scrutiny for its response to the assault on the U.S. compound in Benghazi. However, in a statement to The Atlantic Wire, a senior defense official says the Pentagon never denied requests for military intervention in Benghazi.
Here's something that could alter the discussion on the attacks in Benghazi: According to Fox News national security correspondent Jennifer Griffin, CIA operators on the scene repeatedly transmitted requests for military backup but were denied by U.S. officials.
It sounds like the ultimate Washington euphemism but it's the name White House officials are moving toward: The secret list the president uses to order drone strikes on unsuspecting militants is being re-vamped under the name "disposition matrix."
For a country that already has a problem with roving outlaws, this is the last thing you want to have happen.
We may know a little more about why former Navy SEAL author Matt Bisonnette rushed to publish his memoir No Easy Day before receiving Pentagon approval: to get his book out before Mark Bowden published his own big Osama bin Laden raid book.
It's the most anticipated House hearing in weeks and will likely provide the Romney campaign with talking points for the rest of the presidential race.
One of the reasons U.S. Navy SEALs were able to so skillfully execute the raid on Osama bin Laden's compound last year was a CIA training facility in North Carolina that mirrored the architecture of bin Laden's actual compound in Pakistan.
North Korea finally broke its silence on the U.S. agreement to allow South Korea to produce missiles capable of targeting all of North Korea and the announcement is vintage Pyongyang.
The State Department insists it didn't cut corners on security in the run-up to the deadly Sept. 11 terrorist attack in Benghazi, but a former U.S. security official in Libya is doing his best to torpedo those claims.
Despite journalists and witnesses simply walking into the U.S. consulate for weeks now, the FBI didn't conduct an on-site investigation until today because of 'security concerns.' They also needed Libya's permission and an extensive military escort before they could go in.
Yesterday, The Washington Post reported that a trove of sensitive U.S. documents have been lying in plain sight at the U.S. consulate in Benghazi for almost a month. Today, the Post itself has become part of the story: How the heck did they get inside the consulate?
It doesn't seem to make much sense: At the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, the State Department reduced the number of security guards on the ground just as reports of security threats at the compound increased dramatically accoridng to two new reports by CBS News reporter Sharyl Attkisson and Daily Beast reporter Eli Lake.
In a report that's frankly difficult to believe, Vanity Fair says President Obama intended to put Osama bin Laden on trial in federal court if the Al Qaeda leader had survived the Abbottabad raid last May.
Imagine having all the downsides of Big Brother, but with none of the benefits: That's what you get with the Department of Homeland Security's vast network of "fusion" centers, according to a damning new report by the Senate's bipartisan Subcommittee on Investigations.
U.S. intelligence officials are putting the final touches on reports about the militants suspected to be involved in the attack on the Libyan embassy that killed Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three others.
It's a grim morning of news from the Afghan war. While hopes are fading for a peace deal with the Taliban, deadly "insider" attacks threaten to force an early retreat of NATO forces before 2014.
A lot went wrong at the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi on September 11, but according to new interviews with the staff, the staff should've been better prepared.
There was yet another green-on-blue attack in Afghanistan on Sunday in which two Americans and three Afghans were killed. The death of a U.S. soldier brings the total number of troop deaths in the Afghan war to over 2,000.
Yemen's president is so in love with the fleet of drones the U.S. uses in his country that he thinks they're more advanced than the human brain.
For years, cable news analysts have used fancy graphics to map out the blueprint of an Israeli strike on Iran's nuclear facilities. Turns, they may have been forecasting the wrong scenario.
It's been 17 days since the deadly attacks on a U.S. consulate in Benghazi and the scene of the crime is still too dangerous for a proper FBI investigation.
When the U.S. troop surge wound down in Afghanistan last week, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta slapped a positive gloss on the operation, saying it succeeded in "reversing the Taliban momentum." While some anti-war critics questioned that outlook, one of the most damning assessments of the surge's efficacy now comes in the form of a chart by NATO itself.
As world leaders deadlock over what to do about Syria at the United Nations summit in New York, the war-torn country has experienced one of the bloodiest days of its 18-month civil war.
The Obama administration has soothed concerns about its Predator drone program by assuring that foreign governments give "full consent" before drones drop Hellfire missiles on unsuspecting targets on their territory. Turns out, though, that's not always the case.
While the Pentagon is still mulling over whether to prosecute Navy SEAL author Matt Bissonnette, it is sure about one thing: it doesn't want any of its employees tweeting about that guy's best-selling book.
China is making big headlines today, on our site and in newspapers, for the launch of its first aircraft carrier, the Liaoning. But to add some perspective to China's latest military gain, we've updated a chart to reflect the new naval status quo.
A new study by law professors at Stanford and New York University found that drones strikes have killed far more civilians in Pakistan than the U.S. has acknowledged and that the program has a "damaging and counterproductive effect."
It will likely be Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's last big speech on the international stage this week, and United Nations organizers are terrified he's going to go out with a bang.
The Taliban attack on an air base in southern Afghanistan on Friday drew coverage for the way the insurgents cloaked themselves in U.S. army uniforms to gain a tactical advantage, but few have taken note of the historical proportions of the damage inflicted.
It never lived up to the renown of the Iraq War troop surge, and now it's officially over.
Some people struggle to act grateful for symbolic gifts from friends or colleagues. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta is not one of those people.
After months of foot-dragging, the White House finally announced how it would implement the mandatory spending cuts to defense and domestic spending Republicans and Democrats agreed to last year, but that no one — not Congressional Democrats, Republicans, or the White House — wants to see go in effect.
If Mitt Romney was the President, how would he handle what's happening in the Middle East right now? If you listen to his staff, it's unlikely the attack would have happened at all.
Amid the belief that the attack in Benghazi was the work of premeditated terrorists, there's a report from the British newspaper The Independent saying the State Department had advance warning of an attack and decided not to do anything. A Department rep. called it "absolutely wrong."
A second charity is refusing to accept donations from former Navy SEAL Matt Bissonnette, author of the bestelling book No Easy Day about the mission to kill Osama bin Laden, The Atlantic Wire has confirmed.
The Defense Department threw down the gauntlet last night, telling former Navy SEAL author Matt Bissonnette he's in "material breach" of his agreements not to disclose military secrets with his book, No Easy Day, and, as a result, the Pentagon is considering legal action against him.
The three Georgia-based Army soldiers accused of killing a young couple and plotting to assassinate President Obama are getting the book thrown at them.
The publisher and author of No Easy Day, an upcoming tell-all on the mission to kill Osama bin Laden, promised the book doesn't reveal classified information. But government privacy lawyers speaking with The Atlantic Wire say the book almost certainly does.
For everyone who didn't get special access to information about the Osama bin Laden raid, today was a little bit discouraging as new e-mails revealed CIA officials gushing over Hollywood filmakers at the expense of trained reporters and documentarians.
In a disturbing report out of Georgia, prosecutors say four U.S. soldiers plotted to overthrow the government and assassinate President Obama.
If ex-Navy SEAL Matt Bissonnette discloses classified information in his upcoming tell-all on the mission to kill Osama bin Laden, he could be subject to criminal prosecution under the Espionage Act, as we noted earlier. But even if he doesn't divulge any secrets, he's still got major legal problems.
It only took one day for Fox News to identify the ex-Navy SEAL responsible for a new book on the death of Osama bin Laden. It took even less time for Al Qaeda-affiliated websites to begin distributing his name and image while calling for his "destruction."
White supremacists aren't the type of people you want to train to be unstoppable fighting machines, but that doesn't mean they're not signing up for the call of duty.
Investigative journalist Richard Miniter has a new book out today, Leading From Behind: The Reluctant President and the Advisors Who Decide for Him, in which he claims Barack Obama is "fully vetted" for the first time in history. He also claims Obama has been heavily influenced in his decision-making by women.
This year, U.S. troops in Afghanistan are dying at a rate of one per day thanks in part to the dramatic escalation of Afghan security forces turning their weapons on U.S. allies in so-called green-on-blue attacks.
Politically speaking, Navy SEALs aren't the safest targets to rail against in a presidential race, but the Obama campaign isn't hesitating to take down a group of former SEALs who've criticized the president's national security decisions.
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