Today's Headlines and Commentary

Lots of coverage of the House hearing on the security lapses that led to the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi. State Department officials admitted that requests for additional security were denied in the weeks leading up to the attack, and Republicans were---shocking in an election season!---ferocious in their criticism of the Obama administration’s handling of the situation. Here are Anne Gearan of the Washington Post, Michael R. Gordon of the New York Times, and CNN. Dana Milbank of the Post has this op-ed about the classified information that may have been revealed during the rancorous hearing. Speaking of leaks, President Obama has issued this Presidential Policy Directive “extend[ing] whistleblower protections to national security and intelligence employees,” reports Joe Davidson of the Post. Meanwhile, Julian Pecquet of The Hill reports that Qassem Aqlan, the head of the security team at the U.S. embassy in Yemen, was killed on his way to work. He was “in charge of the investigation into last month's breach of the embassy walls by protesters angered by an American-made anti-Islam video.” From the Department of Oops: Aerial images of the Navy SEALs’s rehearsal site for the Osama bin Laden raid were found on Bing before the model compound was destroyed. Noah Shachtman has more about this as well as other secrecy breaches that have resulted from ubiquitous mapping technology. The excellently-named Stephen N. Xenakis, psychiatrist and a retired brigadier general in the United States Army, argues in this op-ed in the Times that ex-Guantanamo Bay detainee Omar Khadr is “emphatically not” a dangerous man or a national security threat. There has been much outrage over the Taliban’s shooting of 14-year old Malala Yousafzai, an activist for girls’ education and a recipient of Pakistan’s National Peace Award. Here are Declan Walsh of the Times, Natasha Fatah of CBC News, the Times editorial board, the Post editorial board, and Pakistan’s Express Tribune on reactions and developments in the story. SecDef Panetta asked NATO allies to “help fill the shortfall of military training teams in Afghanistan in order to build the capabilities of the Afghan forces so they can take control of their country's security by the end of 2014.” The Associated Press has the story. Michael V. Hayden, ex-CIA director under President George W. Bush and an adviser to Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign, has this op-ed in CNN about the Obama administration’s pattern of “wishful thinking on terrorism.” Alexis. C. Madrigal writes in the Atlantic about the privacy issues associated with UAVs. And, Jennifer Schuessler of the Times provides a description of Lincoln's Code, a new book by Yale professor John Fabian Witt, about

American engagement with the idea that the brutality of war should be constrained by humanitarian rules. . . .In "Lincoln’s Code" [Witt] argues against two competing and, in his view, equally false notions: on the left, the idea that George W. Bush’s war on terror represented a radical break with the American past; and on the right, the idea that Americans started caring about the laws of war only when pointy-headed Europeans forced them to.

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