FBI to brief lawmakers on deceased bombing suspect

The FBI will brief the House Intelligence Committee on Tuesday about what it learned from an interview it conducted in 2011 with Boston Marathon bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev, according to Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger (D-Md.).

“What we want to do is to see when the FBI investigated the tip that came from Russia about whether or not bomber No. 1, who came from Russia, was really cleared about what Russia was concerned about,” Ruppersberger told CNN on Tuesday. “We will have a classified hearing about it today at five o’clock.”

The FBI will brief the Senate Intelligence Committee on the same matter at a hearing earlier in the afternoon.

Tsarnaev, 26, was killed after a firefight early Friday morning after the police tracked down him and his younger brother, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19. They are the only suspects in last week’s Boston Marathon bombing.

Lawmakers have pledged to hold hearings into how the brothers operated under the radar of the FBI after the Russian government notified federal investigators that the older brother was a potential threat. The tip from Russian authorities came after the suspect spent six months in two Russian provinces in 2010 and 2011 before returning to the U.S.

Ruppersberger, the ranking member on the House Intelligence Committee, said he hoped to find out what might have influenced the older brother during his time abroad, and how he learned the skills necessary to put together a bomb.

“When he went to Russia, it seemed when he came back a lot of things changed and also his younger brother’s attitude started to change,” Ruppersberger said. “And as more evidence comes out — about when he came back from Russia, did he become more orthodox in his Muslim religion, did that make him change? And one of the things we’re looking at also — when you have these bombs, what kind of sophistication? How were they trained to make the bombs?”

Ruppersberger said reports that cellphones were used to detonate the explosives were troubling, because it indicates a higher degree of sophistication. The Maryland Democrat said it didn’t appear there were any third parties involved, and that the brothers were likely acting as lone wolves, which he said is a more difficult threat for intelligence officials to detect.

“Those of us who have been in the intelligence committee a while have always been concerned about the lone wolf and a lone wolf doesn’t just mean one individual, it means a small group of people that will come in under the radar,” he said. “And why there’s a concern about that is that when you’re under the radar we can’t get the intelligence we would normally get.”

“After 9/11 we’re the most sophisticated country in the world as it relates to receiving any intelligence from people or from a technical point of view,” he continued. “If in fact there’s chatter or there’s a big type of plot, we will probably pick it up. But what worries us are the type of situations like the Times Square bomber, the underwear bomber, the shoe bomber, these were all under the radar.”

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Rubio to brief GOP on immigration talks

By Daniel Strauss and Molly K. Hooper - 04/05/13 03:15 PM ET

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) plans on briefing Republicans on progress in crafting an immigration reform bill during the next Republican policy luncheon.

Rubio, who has been involved in bipartisan negotiations on crafting an immigration reform bill, said he had been given the green light to update his Republican colleagues next week.

"Earlier this week, I requested and received permission to brief the entire Republican conference during our policy lunch next week. I look forward to briefing you at that meeting," Rubio wrote in a letter to four Senate Republicans on Friday.

Rubio's letter was in response to the four GOP senators, Mike Lee (Utah), Jeff Sessions (Ala.), Chuck Grassley (Iowa), and Ted Cruz (Texas), who urged Rubio and other senators involved in the immigration negotiations to offer more transparency on the bill's progress.

The four senators sent a letter to the Republican senators in the so-called bipartisan Gang of Eight, urging them to release more details on their negotiations in crafting the immigration proposal. Members of the bipartisan group have recently said they plan to unveil their immigration reform bill soon.

"It is time for you to discuss the status of your negotiations, disclose what concessions have been made, and provide details to members of the Judiciary Committee as well as the entire Republican Caucus," the senators wrote in the letter, released Friday. "As members of the Judiciary Committee, we believe it is critical that the public and the entire Senate body be given adequate time to read and analyze the contents of any immigration bill put forth by the Majority. Our Committee has had only three hearings in recent months, barely touching on issues involving enforcement, border security or the creation of a temporary worker program."

They said that they were "deeply concerned" with recent statements made by Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) that a basic agreement has been reached by the group on legalizing undocumented workers in the U.S. Schumer is one of eight senators involved in the talks.

"We should not further test the faith of the American people by implementing a major overhaul of the immigration system that prioritizes legalizing law breakers over the long-term needs of the country," their letter stated. 

"In that regard, we are deeply concerned by Senator Schumer’s recent statement that your group has “come to a basic agreement, which is that first, people will be legalized. In other words, not citizens, but they'll be allowed to work, come out of the shadows, travel. Then, we will make sure the border is secure," the GOP senators wrote.

  The senators wanted staffers to brief members of the Republican Committee staff by the end of Monday on the specifics of the immigration reform negotiations.

"Therefore, we ask that your staff be made available to brief Republican Committee staff no later than close of business on Monday, April 8," the senators wrote. "We also request that you personally discuss your group’s proposal with the entire caucus early next week so that all members can raise concerns and questions before the deal is finalized."

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) recently told Rubio that he wanted to move quickly on moving the immigration bill to through his committee once it was unveiled.

"Because the President has failed to lead on this matter, your group has secretly met for months and not consulted with members of the Committee about major changes to our nation’s immigration laws," the senators wrote in the letter. "The time for transparency has come. Given the majority’s rushed timetable, we believe it is time for you to discuss the status of your negotiations, disclose what concessions have been made, and provide details to members of the Judiciary Committee as well as the entire Republican Caucus."  

--This report was updated at 5:10 p.m.

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National Security Brief: Former Top Obama Military Aide Questions Benefits Of Drone Program

The former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said on Thursday that the costs of the Obama administration’s counter-terror drone program may be outweighing its benefits.

“We’re seeing that blowback,” said retired General James Cartwright at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. “If you’re trying to kill your way to a solution, no matter how precise you are, you’re going to upset people even if they’re not targeted.”

The CIA will reportedly be moving its armed drone program under the auspices of the Defense Department and because of that, according to the New York Times, Cartwright is also worried about “blurring the line” between soldiers and spies if DOD is running armed drones “outside a declared area of hostility.”

Meanwhile, the Washington Post reports that the new U.S. drone base in Niger is starting to take shape. “We welcome the drones,” Niger’s President Issoufou Mahamadou said. “Our countries are like the blind leading the blind,” he said. “We rely on countries like France and the United States. We need cooperation to ensure our security.”

In other news:

Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei suggested in a lengthy speech on Thursday that he is open to nuclear talks with the United States, if not optimistic about their outcome.

The Washington Post reports: The U.N. secretary general said Thursday that he will launch an investigation into whether chemical weapons were used in Syria, seeking to address accusations that, if proven, could alter the trajectory of the two-year-old civil war in the country.

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National Security Brief: Top Senate Democrat Wants Greater U.S. Role In Syria

Senate Armed Services Committee chairman Carl Levin (D-MI) said on Monday that the United States should play a more active role in bringing about Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s downfall. “I would go further than the President,” Levin said, adding that President Obama should consider establishing so-called “safe zones” for Syrian rebels within the country. Levin also said the U.S. should consider taking out the Syrian military’s anti-aircraft batteries and other Syrian Air Force assets.

Meanwhile, House Foreign Relations Committee Ranking Member Rep. Eliot Engel (D-NY) introduced legislation on Monday giving Obama that authority to provide “lethal equipment” to Syrian rebels fighting Assad’s forces. In a statement, Engel said the U.S. is “long past due to arm friendly rebels and turn the tide to allow for a more hopeful Syrian future.”

While U.S. officials mull whether and how much to intervene in Syria, the Syrian opposition coalition elected a Syrian born U.S. citizen to be the first prime minister of an interim government there should Assad fall. The group chose Ghassan Hitto, an information technology executive who lived in Texas until recently.

In other news:

Former Pentagon top counsel Jeh Johnson criticized the idea of any secret court to oversee the Obama administration’s targeted killing program, saying it would simply act as a “rubber stamp” for anything the executive wants to do. Johnson said that instead, the program should be brought within the auspices of the Defense Department in order to ensure its legality.

The AP reports: A hunger strike at the Guantánamo Bay prison has grown and now involves at least 21 men, a U.S. military official said Monday while denying reports trickling out from prisoners through lawyers that there is a more widespread protest and lives are in danger.

The Washington Post reports: Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel has ordered the Pentagon to reconsider a sweeping military strategy that the Obama administration unveiled just last year to determine whether it is still affordable in light of recent budget cuts.

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Ellen DeGeneres Submits Unofficial Marriage Equality Brief To Supreme Court

Friday was the deadline for individuals and organizations to submit amicus briefs to the Supreme Court adding to the arguments for marriage equality. Ellen DeGeneres took to her blog to write a brief of her own, hoping that someone will tweet it to the Court on her behalf. Speaking of her marriage to Portia de Rossi, DeGeneres explained that for as happy as she is, they’re still not equal in society:

Portia and I have been married for 4 years and they have been the happiest of my life. And in those 4 years, I don’t think we hurt anyone else’s marriage. I asked all of my neighbors and they say they’re fine.

But even though Portia and I got married in the short period of time when it was legal in California, there are 1,138 federal rights for married couples that we don’t have, including some that protect married people from losing their homes, or their savings or custody of their children.

The truth is, Portia and I aren’t as different from you as you might think. We’re just trying to find happiness in the bodies and minds we were given, like everyone else. [...]

I hope the Supreme Court will do the right thing, and let everyone enjoy the same rights. It’s going to help keep families together. It’s going to make kids feel better about who they are. And it is time.

Here is the monologue DeGeneres shared on her show shortly after her wedding, in which she described the special day:

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The 6 Best Arguments For Gay And Lesbian Equality In Obama’s DOMA Brief

On Friday, President Obama’s Solicitor General, Donald Verrilli, filed a brief in United States v. Windsor, a case urging the Supreme Court to outlaw Section 3 of a 1996 federal law that prohibits the federal government from recognizing same-sex marriages.

The Defense of Marriage Act or DOMA, the Obama administration contends, “denies to tens of thousands of same-sex couples who are legally married under state law an array of important federal benefits that are available to legally married opposite-sex couples,” does not substantially further “any important governmental interest” and is thus unconstitutional, violating “the fundamental constitutional guarantee of equal protection.” Here are the six most pro-equality arguments in the administration’s brief:

1. Section 3 “denies to legally married same-sex couples many substantial benefits afforded to legally married opposite-sex couples under federal employment, immigration, public health and welfare, tax, and other laws.” For instance, a same-sex spouse of an “active-duty military servicemember is excluded from certain housing, healthinsurance, and disability benefits that would be afforded to an opposite-sex spouse…. A non-citizen same-sex spouse of a United States citizen cannot qualify as the citizen spouse’s immediate relative for purposes of obtaining lawful permanent residence. ”

2. Gay and lesbian people have been subject to a significant history of discrimination in this country. Until Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. 558 (2003), criminal laws in many states prohibited their private sexual conduct. In addition, gay and lesbian people have long suffered discrimination in employment, immigration, criminal violence, child custody, police enforcement, voter referenda, and other contexts. “That history ranges from colonial laws ordering the death of “any man [that] shall lie with mankind, as he lieth with womankind,”… to state laws that, until very recently, “demean[ed] the[] existence” of gay and lesbian people.”

3. Sexual orientation is such a “distinguishing characteristic,” and that is true even though so many gay and lesbian people have been forced for so long to hide their identities in order to avoid discrimination. As this Court has recognized, sexual orientation is a core aspect of human identity, and its expression is an “integral part of human freedom.”

4. The “broad consensus in the scientific community is that, for the vast majority of people (gay and straight alike), sexual orientation is not a voluntary choice.There is likewise a medical consensus that efforts to change an individual’s sexual orientation are generally futile and potentially dangerous to an individual’s well-being. Accordingly, sexual orientation readily constitutes an “obvious, immutable, or distinguishing characteristic” for purposes of equal-protection law.”

5. “No sound basis exists for concluding that same-sex couples who have committed to marriage are anything other than fully capable of responsible parenting and child-rearing. To the contrary, many leading medical, psychological, and social-welfare organizations have issued policy statements opposing restrictions on gay and lesbian parenting based on their conclusions, supported by numerous scientific studies, that children raised by gay and lesbian parents are as well adjusted as children raised by heterosexual parents.”

6. If anything, “the denial of federal benefits otherwise accorded to married individuals undermines the efforts of same-sex couples to raise their children, hindering rather than advancing any interest in promoting child welfare.”

The brief also cites California’s Proposition 8 “as an example of the ongoing problem of bias against homosexuals.” Obama is reportedly considering asking the Court to overturn California’s ban against same-sex marriage before it hears oral arguments in that case on Tuesday, March 26. The Windsor case will be heard on Wednesday, March 27.

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Obama administration brief: Defense of Marriage Act is unconstitutional

President Obama’s administration said Friday that the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) was unconstitutional, filing a brief weeks ahead of scheduled arguments before the Supreme Court.

In its brief, the Justice Department said that DOMA, which defined marriage as only between a man and a woman, “violates the fundamental constitutional guarantee of equal protection.”

“The law denies to tens of thousands of same-sex couples who are legally married under state law an array of important federal benefits that are available to legally married opposite-sex couples,” the brief added.

Obama has already ordered his administration not to defend DOMA, and announced he supported same-sex marriage during the heat of last year’s presidential campaign.

The Supreme Court will hear arguments next month on the case of Edith Windsor, who was forced to pay taxes on the estate of her deceased partner, Thea Spyer. 

The couple had married in Canada, and their marriage was recognized in their home state of New York at the time Spyer died in 2009. But Windsor was forced to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in estate taxes that would not have been required if her deceased spouse had been a man. 

House Republicans have taken up the defense of DOMA, which overwhelmingly passed Congress in 1996 and was signed by former President Clinton. 

Congressional Democrats are currently pushing measures that would repeal DOMA, in addition to groups’ legal efforts to have the law ruled unconstitutional. 

The Supreme Court is also scheduled to hear arguments about California’s Proposition 8, a ballot initiative to ban same-sex marriage approved in 2008.

According to reports, the administration plans to file a brief in that case that supports the constitutionality of same-sex marriage.

“I have to make sure that I'm not interjecting myself too much in this process, particularly when we're not a party to the case,” Obama told a San Francisco television station this week. 

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National Security Brief: Netanyahu Weakened In Surprising Election Results

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his allies “were sharply weakened” in national elections on Tuesday, forcing him to try to form a coalition government with his opponents. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reports: In the past decades, the general understanding on the political scene was that Israeli elections are determined, above all, by voters’ sense of personal security. Apparently, however, the 2013 elections are different. Four years of relative calm did not help Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Neither did his implied threats that the Iranian bomb is approaching, and the Arab Spring is out there raging. Many voters took advantage of the calm to vote according to what really bothered them: their economic situation, the social gaps, the fact that some Israelis bear the burden of the military and taxation while others do not, or a sense of just being plain fed up with the existing regime.

In other news:

The Pentagon said that it will not demand payment to transport French troops to Mali in American planes, however the U.S. has not agreed to a French request to provide refueling tankers for its warplanes. Meanwhile, British special forces have arrived in Mali helping to co-ordinate and advise the French military effort against the jihadi groups in the north.

The Wall Street Journal reports: Afghan rural areas will be at greater risk of falling to the Taliban if the U.S. accedes to Kabul’s demands to speed up the withdrawal of special-operations teams working with Afghan village self-defense units, an internal report prepared for the U.S. military warned.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will appear before both House of Congress today to answer questions about the attack that killed American diplomats and other personnel in Benghazi, Libya last September. It will be one of her last duties as America’s top diplomat.

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National Security Brief: Number Of Military Suicides Hit Record High

The Washington Post reports that “the U.S. military lost more service members to suicide than combat last year as the number of troops who took their lives rose to a record high.” Nearly 350 active duty servicemembers committed suicide last year while 229 troops were killed in combat in Afghanistan, according to the Post. The AP reported last June that military deaths from suicide outnumbered combat deaths by a 2-to-1 ratio. A month after the AP report, a Pentagon-funded study reported for the first time, scientific data pointing to “intense psychological suffering and pain” as the main cause of military suicides.

In other news:

The New York Times reports: Nearly three years ago, a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood delivered a speech urging Egyptians to “nurse our children and our grandchildren on hatred” for Jews and Zionists. In a television interview around that time, the same leader described Zionists as “these bloodsuckers who attack the Palestinians, these warmongers, the descendants of apes and pigs. That leader, Mohamed Morsi, is now president of Egypt — and his comments may be coming back to haunt him.”

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta on Monday pledged American assistance to the French in its campaign to root out extremist militants in Mali.

The Pentagon says that it has improved its most lethal bunker busting bomb, which is now capable of “effectively prosecuting selected hardened, deeply buried targets.”

The Washington Post reports: “Rape has become a “significant and disturbing feature” of the war in Syria, one that many refugees cite as their leading reason for fleeing the country, according to a report released Monday by a New York-based humanitarian organization.” Meanwhile, Syrian warplanes have killed dozens of civilians, including 20 children, in the last few days of bombing Damascus suburbs.

A Washington think tank reported this week that Iran is on track to produce enough material for at least one nuclear bomb by the middle of 2014.

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National Security Brief: Former Top U.S. Ambassador Praises Hagel

Ryan Crocker, former U.S. ambassador to Lebanon, Kuwait, Syria, Pakistan, Iraq and Afghanistan, offered strong praise for former Republican senator Chuck Hagel in a Wall Street Journal op-ed today and endorsed his potential nomination to be the next Defense Secretary. “Chuck Hagel is a statesman, and America has few of them,” said Crocker, “He knows the leaders of the world and their issues. At a time when bipartisanship is hard to find in Washington, he personifies it. Above all, he has an unbending focus on U.S. national security, from his service in Vietnam decades ago to his current position on the Intelligence Advisory Council.” Crocker, along with 8 other former U.S. ambassadors, signed a letter last month calling Hagel an “impeccable choice” for Defense Secretary.

In other news:

The Washington Post reports that the Obama administration has embraced the practice of holding and interrogating terrorism suspects in other countries without due process — also known as rendition.

An influential Afghan warlord told the Daily Telegraph that he fears a decent into chaos and anarchy after NATO troops leave Afghanistan, a similar situation that occurred after the Soviet Union withdrew in the late 1980s.

The AP reports: Clashes between government troops and rebels on Tuesday forced the international airport in Aleppo to stop all flights in and out of Syria’s largest city, while fierce battles also raged in the suburbs of the capital Damascus. Meanwhile, pro-opposition Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said Syrian rebels, some from Islamist units, fired machineguns and mortars at helicopters grounded at a northern military air base near the main Aleppo-Damascus highway on Wednesday.

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