Policy & Strategy

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.”

The House on Thursday will start work on 172 amendments to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for 2014, H.R. 1960.

The House Rules Committee approved a rule for the bill very early Thursday morning, which makes in order 70 GOP amendments, 64 Democratic amendments and 38 bipartisan proposals — descriptions of all the amendments are here. The committee made most amendments in order, as members had offered 299 of them.

The Topline: Classified National Security Agency programs prevented dozens of terrorist plots, the man in charge of the agency told a Senate panel Wednesday.

National Security Agency (NSA) chief Keith Alexander Alexander said there were “dozens of terrorist events that these [programs] have helped prevent,” referring to the recently disclosed domestic surveillance programs run by the agency. 

Wednesday's Senate Appropriations Committee hearing was Alexander's first public appearance since the NSA programs were leaked by 29-year-old defense contractor Edward Snowden.

One program, code-named PRISM, that pulls data from tech companies on foreign Internet users helped to disrupt Najibullah Zazi's plot to bomb New York's subways in 2009.

The second program, allowing the NSA to sweep all cellphones on the Verizon network, played a key role in the federal manhunt for Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who were responsible for the Boston Marathon bombings.  

"What we need to do is bring as many facts out as possible to the American people ... to have this very public debate," Alexander added. 

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Senators gutted a measure from Kirsten Gillibrand that would have given the cases to military prosecutors.

The House approved a bill governing floor debate for the 2014 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), even as Democrats warned that they would look to add tougher language to help reverse the rising tide of sexual assault in the military.

Members voted 239-184 in favor of the rule; only 10 Democrats supported it. The rule calls for an hour of debate on the bill, H.R 1960, which will take place later Wednesday.

Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) announced Wednesday that she supports measures being debated by the Armed Service Committee to address sexual assault in the military, but does not think senior officials should be removed from the process.

“I have become convinced that the approach that the Armed Services Committee will take today is the right approach,” McCaskill said on the Senate floor. “It will better empower victims and lead to more reporting.”

The Joint Chiefs chairman said the special-ops team's request to enter Benghazi was denied, but was not a stand-down order.