TV News LIES

It was an innocuous e-mail, one of millions sent every day by spouses with updates on the situation at home. But this one was of particular interest to the National Security Agency, and contained clues that put the sender’s husband in the cross hairs of a CIA drone.

Days later, Hassan Ghul — an associate of Osama bin Laden who provided a critical piece of intelligence that helped the CIA find the al-Qaeda leader — was killed by a drone strike in Pakistan’s tribal belt.

The lawyer who defended Chelsea Manning against charges of leaking classified information said Wednesday that his client is being assessed at a military prison for gender identity disorder, and that he's hopeful the military will allow Manning to receive hormone therapy.

Civilian attorney David Coombs spoke to more than 150 students and faculty at Roger Williams University School of Law, where he has taught. Manning, previously known as Bradley, is serving a 35-year sentence for a July conviction on espionage and other offenses for sending more than 700,000 documents and some battlefield video to the anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks. She said after she was sentenced that she wishes to live as a woman and receive hormone therapy. The military previously said it does not provide it.

For all the public scrutiny of military sexual assault this year — from hearings to heated Senate debates — congressional efforts are only just beginning to challenge the Pentagon’s overarching strategy on the issue for the past 25 years: secrecy.

From tracking the extent of the problem to showing how cases are resolved, the military has consistently and forcefully resisted fully airing details.

In the eastern New Jersey suburbs, a train carrying radiological material is barreling toward a small town, and it is up to Pentagon cyber-operators to derail it. The town is the kind of idyllic whistle-stop hamlet where residents socialize at a cafe with complimentary Wi-Fi while surfing FaceSpace, a social networking site.

But danger lurks all around. Terrorists are using the open Wi-Fi connection to hack into the laptop of a patron who works at the hospital down the street. They plan to find the hospital codes stored in his computer to access the mayor's medical records, in which they will change the dosage of a prescription the mayor refills regularly in an effort to poison him.

The Obama administration said Wednesday it will stop enforcing a law that blocks benefits to partners of military veterans in same-sex marriages.

In a letter to congressional leaders, Attorney General Eric Holder said that a provision in federal law on benefits to veterans and their families defines "spouse" to mean a person of the opposite sex. He says that definition leaves out legally married same-sex couples, and runs afoul of a June Supreme Court ruling.

The nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS Nimitz and other ships in its strike group are heading west toward the Red Sea to help support a limited U.S. strike on Syria, if needed, defense officials said on Sunday.

The Nimitz carrier strike group, which includes four destroyers and a cruiser, has no specific orders to move to the eastern Mediterranean at this point, but is moving west in the Arabian Sea so it can do so if asked. It was not immediately clear when the ships would enter the Red Sea, but they had not arrived by Sunday evening, said one official.