OIG Interim Report: Review of VHA’s Patient Wait Times, Scheduling Practices, and Alleged Patient Deaths at the Phoenix Health Care System  (read summary)

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WASHINGTON – The CIA’s top officer in Kabul was exposed Saturday by the White House when his name was inadvertently included on a list provided to news organizations of senior U.S. officials participating in President Obama’s surprise visit with U.S. troops.

The White House recognized the mistake and quickly issued a revised list that did not include the individual, who had been identified on the initial release as the “Chief of Station” in Kabul, a designation used by the CIA for its highest-ranking spy in a country.

The disclosure marked a rare instance in which a CIA officer working overseas had his cover — the secrecy meant to protect his actual identity — pierced by his own government. The only other recent case came under significantly different circumstances, when former CIA operative Valerie Plame was exposed as officials of the George W. Bush administration sought to discredit her husband, a former ambassador and fierce critic of the decision to invade Iraq. (more…)

USA TODAY – It also follows intense criticism over the treatment of veterans at VA hospitals, including reports that officials are trying to cover up evidence of long wait times and that some veterans have died while awaiting treatment.

In his weekend radio address, Obama said the nation must work harder to ensure that military veterans get the benefits they’ve earned.

“They’ve done their duty,” Obama said, “and they ask nothing more than that this country does ours.”

The president is not scheduled to meet with Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai, with whom the president has had a difficult relationship.

Air Force One landed at Bagram Air Field on Sunday night, local time, after a secret overnight trip that began Saturday night in Washington, D.C. (more…)

This is an addendum to the article we posted yesterday with the history of the missing Libyan shoulder fired missiles.

Via Sharyl Attkisson – Some of you missed this article that I wrote a year ago about the fate of MANPADS left over from the Qaddafi regime in Libya. According to a well-placed source, hundreds of the missiles had already been tracked as having gone to Al Qaeda Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) and thousands are unaccounted for.

Before his overthrow and death in the fall of 2011, Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi was believed to have purchased 15,000-20,000 Soviet MANPADS. Concern over the whereabouts of the missiles – and the possibility that terrorists could buy them on the black market and even use them to shoot down American passenger jets – drove a U.S. effort to recover as many as possible. But only about 2,000 were accounted for prior to the Sept. 11, 2012 terrorist attacks on Benghazi, Libya, according to the source. He describes those working to locate the missiles as “beside themselves” and “frustrated.”  (read full article)

I’m going to outline the soup to nuts case of an Iran-Contra type weapons program that ultimately is at the heart of why President Obama and Secretary Clinton went to such lengths to cover-up the Benghazi operations. [context matters – sorry about the length.  /SD]

In December 2011 the New York Times published an article outlining the U.S. State Department initiative to buy shoulder fired missiles (MANPADS) away from the “rebels” in Libya.   (Story Here)

In February 2012 the U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Political-Military Affairs Andrew J. Shapiro said:

“Once the stalemate broke [in Libya] and the fighting rapidly shifted in the [Libya’s Transitional National Council] TNC’s favor in August, we immediately deployed a State Department expert from the MANPADS Task Force to Benghazi.

Mark Adams, who you will hear from shortly on the panel, is the head of our MANPADS Task Force and spent considerable time on the ground in Libya … The initial primary objective was to reach an agreement with the TNC to set up a MANPADS control and destruction program that would enable us to set up what we call our Phase I efforts. Phase I entailed an effort to rapidly survey, secure, and disable loose MANPADS across the country. To accomplish this, we immediately deployed our Quick Reaction Force, which are teams made up of civilian technical specialists”.   (link)

Ultimately, The question for the Gowdy Special Committee is what were we doing with those missiles we were purchasing?   Where did they go ?   Was that operation the entire construct of the joint State Dept/CIA objective in Benghazi?…  And if so, was the missile capture an Iran-Contra type weapons scheme to divert missiles from Libya, through Turkey, into the hands of the Syrian “rebels”.

THAT is the substantive issue the Special Committee should seek. (more…)

Forget the fact we still don’t know why Ambassador Stevens was in Benghazi. Forget the fact that none of the other injured victims have been allowed to testify publically about events in Benghazi. Forget the fact that both the White House and State Dept have fought to hide information about the Benghazi 9-11 attack. Forget the fact the CIA and White House are in direct contradiction to each other.  Forget the fact that for some reason the activity in Benghazi Libya was an unknown joint State Dept./CIA operation.   Forget the fact Obama, Clinton, Power and Rice armed al-Qaeda operatives, “the rebels” in Benghazi.

Forget all that stuff…. Any Libyan inquiry is grounded in a racist motivation. So sayeth the CBC and Clyburn.

The White House legal advisor who framed the administrations legal references for drone killing of American citizens is due to be confirmed without allowing his drone memos to be reviewed prior to confirmation vote.  Yeah, we have a problem with that…. 

WASHINGTON DC – Bolstered by the promised public release of a secret legal memo, Senate Democrats are ready to approve a top federal judgeship for a former Obama administration official who helped formulate the justification for the drone killings of suspected American terrorists overseas.

The Senate was expected Thursday to approve David Barron to join the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which is based in Boston.

Barron cleared a pivotal hurdle Wednesday when senators voted 52-43 to end opponents’ efforts to derail the nomination. In that roll call, Barron was opposed by every voting Republican and two Democrats, Sens. Mary Landrieu of Louisiana and Joe Manchin of West Virginia. (more…)

If Eli Lake leaves the Daily Beast you will see this level of exposition stop immediately.  Despite his leftist leanings on the subject of Libya and Islamic extremism Mr. Lake is perhaps the most accurate of all reporters on the specifics.  We  give him props for swimming against the tide of his colleges and outlining the falsehoods present in the Obama ‘head-in-the-sand’ hypocrisy around Islam.  -SD

(Via Eli Lake – Daily Beast) In 2012, the Obama administration produced a draft National Intelligence Estimate that reached a surprising conclusion: al Qaeda was no longer a direct threat to America. That classified assessment, which has never before been publicly disclosed, was in keeping with the message coming from the White House. President Obama rode to re-election in 2012 partly on the success of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. At rallies and in press conferences, the president and top officials publicly said al Qaeda was on the run.

But some senior U.S. intelligence officials, like Defense Intelligence Agency Director Gen. Michael Flynn, fought hard against that assessment, which amounted to an official pronouncement of the American intelligence community’s collected wisdom. Flynn and his faction won a partial victory, striking the judgment that the terrorist group no longer posed a threat to the homeland. “Flynn and others at the time made it clear they would not go along with that kind of assessment,” one U.S. intelligence officer who worked on the al Qaeda file told The Daily Beast. “It was basically: ‘Over my dead body.’” (more…)

As you read this, and absorb the implications, ask yourself: “what do you think the White House is doing with the communication flow of the GOP, Congress, and Congressional opposition”? The IRS and DOJ James Rosen scandal alone provide all the substance needed to let you know the White House is gaining all of the communications from any party or entity they want. So what do you think the administration is doing with that information ?

(Via Ladar Levison) My legal saga started last summer with a knock at the door, behind which stood two federal agents ready to to serve me with a court order requiring the installation of surveillance equipment on my company’s network.

My company, Lavabit, provided email services to 410,000 people – including Edward Snowden, according to news reports – and thrived by offering features specifically designed to protect the privacy and security of its customers.

I had no choice but to consent to the installation of their device, which would hand the US government access to all of the messages – to and from all of my customers – as they travelled between their email accounts other providers on the Internet.

But that wasn’t enough. The federal agents then claimed that their court order required me to surrender my company’s private encryption keys, and I balked. What they said they needed were customer passwords – which were sent securely – so that they could access the plain-text versions of messages from customers using my company’s encrypted storage feature. (The government would later claim they only made this demand because of my “noncompliance”.) (more…)

One media analyst not impressed (more…)