Tag: National Security

Late last week, the White House took aim at a central and established tenet of national security: the threats posed by climate change. Our military and...

Efforts in the past two weeks in the dead-heat U.S. Senate race have focused on getting voters to mail in ballots and now to drop them directly at polling centers. It's all about turn out now.

WITH a week until this off-year election, Republicans had two options to prod their party members to vote. One was to pull months of punches...

Colorado U.S. Senator Mark Udall, a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, has been a champion in the post-9/11 era of the need to balance tough national security measures against concerns for civil liberties and privacy protections. Wednesday he sent a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder expressing "deep concern" over a plan to rework a key regulation tied to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). The new regulation, known as 16.6(f)(2), would allow the government to lie to citizens seeking sensitive information.

Colorado Democratic U.S. Senator Mark Udall has long urged his colleagues to reform three of the most controversial provisions of the Patriot Act, saying the provisions are ripe for abuse. This week Congress decided against reform and extended the act as it stands for four more years. In voting with the slim minority that opposed extension, Udall made clear that, as a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee privy to executive branch information, he felt the provisions were now being abused, that the government was unnecessarily trampling rights and also blocking oversight.

Colorado's senior U.S. senator, Democrat Mark Udall, was named today to the Senate’s Select Committee on Intelligence, which oversees all of the federal agencies that gather intelligence information on national security issues. Udall now serves on four committees: Armed Services, Energy and Natural Resources and the Special Committee on Aging.

Despite the Gulf oil spill, a massive pipeline break in Michigan and broad concerns about global warming, ambitious climate-change and energy legislation is likely dead for the year. That poses a conundrum, going forward, for environmentalists: How to convince lawmakers of the need for legislation to sever the country’s decades-long ties to oil and to reform energy policy more generally?

John Brennan has a tough rhetorical job ahead of him Wednesday morning. Speaking to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Brennan, President Obama’s most influential terrorism and intelligence adviser, will attempt to reconcile the harder edges of Obama’s escalation in Afghanistan and his enthusiastic embrace of drone-enabled assassinations of terrorists with the broader approach to grand strategy that the White House will finally unveil this week. Some wonder if that reconciliation is even possible.

Solicitor General Elena Kagan will be President Obama’s second Supreme Court nominee. The emerging conventional wisdom is that Kagan, a rare nominee for the high court who hasn’t been a judge, is a very smart blank slate. On at least one category of issues that Kagan will face — the intersection of national security and law during a time of war — that conventional wisdom looks correct. But there’s a proxy for that set of issues, however inexact, that offers a few clues in advance of her confirmation hearings: Kagan’s deference to executive power.

In a major victory for opponents of the military’s ban on open homosexual service, Defense Secretary Robert Gates significantly revised how the Pentagon will implement the so-called “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” law, effectively making it difficult to remove a soldier, sailor, airman or marine who does not out himself or herself as gay.