Former U.S. ambassador Joseph Wilson, a man whose family was turned upside down by Scooter Libby and other President George W. Bush administration officials, sharply criticized President Donald Trump for pardoning Libby, saying it showed his disregard for America’s national security.
“It has nothing to do with Libby, and it has nothing to do with me,” Wilson told HuffPost Friday. “Libby’s problem was with the Justice Department. He was indicted, tried and convicted on obstruction of justice and perjury charges for basically violating the national security of the United States of America.”
“Now he’s being pardoned for it, which suggests of course that Mr. Trump is willing to allow people to violate the essence of our defense structure, our national security, our intelligence apparatus and essentially get away with it,” he added.
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Valerie Plame’s cover at the CIA was blown by the Bush administration. Her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, helped show that the administration fabricated intelligence to invade Iraq.
Weeks before she stepped down as secretary of state, Hillary Clinton wrote a memo urging President Barack Obama to step up his administration’s efforts to close the military detention facility in Guantanamo Bay in his second term. In the confidential January 2013 memo obtained by The Huffington Post, Clinton told Obama she worried that support for closing Guantanamo would further erode unless the administration took action.
“We must signal to our old and emerging allies alike that we remain serious about turning the page of GTMO and the practices of the prior decade,” Clinton wrote in the document, using the military abbreviation for the U.S. naval base. “The revitalization of transfers, efforts to prosecute some detainees in federal courts, a longer-term approach to the return of Yemeni detainees, and credible periodic reviews would send the signal and renew a credible detention policy.”
She also encouraged Obama to consider moving Guantanamo detainees into the country. “If the law permits, I recommend that you consider transfers to the United States for pre-trial detention, trial, and sentences,” Clinton wrote.
At least a dozen U.S. National Security Agency employees have abused secret surveillance programs in the past decade, most often to spy on their significant others, according to the latest findings of the agency’s internal watchdog.
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In a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee’s top Republican, Charles Grassley, NSA Inspector General George Ellard outlined 12 instances of “intentional misuse” of the agency’s intelligence gathering programs since Jan. 1, 2003.
Grassley had asked the NSA internal watchdog to report on “intentional and willful” abuse of the NSA surveillance authority as public concerns mount over the vast scope of the U.S. government’s spying program.
The agency’s operations have come under intense scrutiny since disclosures this spring by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden that the U.S. government collects far more Internet and telephone data than previously publicly known.
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