Policy & Strategy

The House on late Thursday approved several Defense Department policy proposals, including language saying Congress approves of high-level meetings in the United States with Taiwan officials, and a requirement to fly POW/MIA flags on federal buildings.

These and other amendments were added to the 2014 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).

The House passed on Thursday an amendment to the Defense authorization bill that establishes a two-year mandatory minimum setence for servicemembers convicted of sexual assault or rape.

The amendment from Rep. Mike Turner (R-Ohio) added to the minimum punishment of dismissal or dishonorable discharge that was included in the policy bill last week by the Armed Services Committee.

Turner said that a two-year minimum confinement would have a stronger deterrent against potential perpetrators and would get the military in line with state sentencing standards, as 22 states currently have a minimum sentence for sexual assault.

"We will certainly have legislation which will limit [or] prevent contractors from handling highly classified data," Sen. Dianne Feinstein said.

The House votes Thursday afternoon in favor of an amendment to the 2014 Defense policy bill that would make it an offense to abuse rank in the military by raping or sexually assaulting a subordinate.

The amendment, from Rep. Lois Frankel (D-Fla.), was would apply to commissioned and noncommissioned officers.

Carney sidestepped questions on whether Obama backs a proposal to strip sexual assault cases from the chain of command.

Members of the House on Thursday voted in favor of a rule that allows a marathon session of debate and votes on 172 amendments to the 2014 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).

The House voted 238-189 in favor of the rule, after which members were to start considering changes to the bill, likely until late into the night. Only eight Democrats voted for the rule.

The Kentucky Republican said at the Faith and Freedom Conference foreign aid should be slashed to Egypt, Libya and Pakistan.

Counterintelligence officials at the National Security Agency are conducting a “damage assessment” to see what other top-secret information former National Security Agnecy contractor Edward Snowden leaked about the agency’s intelligence programs. 

Two proposed amendments to the defense authorization bill that would remove the decision to prosecute sexual assault cases from the chain of command will not receive votes on the House floor.

The House Rules Committee declared the two amendments out of order on Wednesday, which meant they were not among the list of 172 amendments that will be considered to the bill on the floor beginning Thursday.

One of the amendments was identical to a proposal from Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) that would have given the decision to prosecute major criminal cases to military lawyers, and not commanders.

The death toll in Syria is nearing 100,000, the United Nations said in a new report Thursday that comes as the Obama administration struggles with how to respond to Bashar Assad's gains in the civil war.

Some 93,000 were killed between the start of the conflict in March 2001 and the end of April 2013, the U.N. Human Rights Office said in a report released Thursday. The report found that 5,000 people are being killed every month, 82.6 percent of them male and many of them non-combatants.

“This extremely high rate of killings, month after month, reflects the drastically deteriorating pattern of the conflict over the past year,” U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay said in a statement. “As clearly indicated in the latest report by the Commission of Inquiry on Syria, civilians are bearing the brunt of widespread, violent and often indiscriminate attacks which are devastating whole swathes of major towns and cities, as well as outlying villages.”