The Office of the Inspector General released a summary of its findings that found many deficiencies and vulnerability in national security arising from how the witness protection program was managed.

The program, known by the letters WITSEC, had been a way to shield witnesses in cases of high profile notably the World Trade Center attack of 1993, the Oklahoma City bomb attack of 1995 and the attacks on U.S. embassies in 1998 in East Africa.

However, the report from the OIG found that the office of the U.S. Marshals Service failed to locate two people with ties to known terror groups that were enrolled in WITSEC.

In July of 2012, the Marshals Service stated it could not locate two former participants in WITSEC identified as suspected or known terrorists, the OIG report revealed.

The report added that its investigators had concluded that one of the individuals was living outside the U.S., while the second individual was thought to be living outside the U.S.

The OIG warned that the Department of Justice failed to pass along information about the new identities of the participants in the program, leaving them the ability to fly commercial flights within the U.S. despite their terrorist background.

The report continued by saying the Department of Justice could not say definitively the number of suspected or known terrorists who had been admitted to the WITSEC program.

Issa also said that there are others, if they can overcome the fear of retaliation by superiors, who could also testify.

Issa named just three witnesses scheduled for Wednesday’s hearing. The hearing, promised Issa, will highlight the discrepancies between White House administration and others that have knowledge about the action the U.S. took part in before, during and just after the attack in Benghazi.

The White House has been attempting to put the ongoing scrutiny to rest. President Obama has denied that whistle blowers have been discouraged to come forward.

The May 8 witnesses will include the State Department’s acting deputy assistant secretary for counterterrorism Mark Thompson; Eric Nordstrom a security officer with the State Department; and Gregory Hicks, the former deputy chief of the Libya mission.

Numerous other people have contacted the committee. These people have direct knowledge of the terrorist attack in Benghazi, but Issa said they are not prepared to come forward because they fear their employers could retaliate against them

Christopher Stephens, the Ambassador to Libya from the U.S. and three others from the U.S. died on the September 2011 attacks on the diplomatic mission of the U.S. in Benghazi.

At first, the President said the attack was caused by a video on Internet that was anti-Muslim. However, later on, Obama had to back away from that opinion.

Obama, at a press conference this week, said his priority since the terrorist attack in Iraq has been to determine what took place and bring to Justice the perpetrators.

The strike was the second this year by Israel in Syria and the latest in its long running attempt to disrupt the quest by Hezbollah to increase its arsenal in order to build up an arsenal that is able to defend against the air force of Israel and spread its destruction inside the country.

The latest strike comes as officials in the U.S. are considering their response to intelligence indications that the regime in Syria might have used some of its arsenal of chemical weapons against rebels in the ongoing civil war.

President Obama described Syria’s use of such weapons as crossing the red line and the White House administration is now weighing what options it has, including military action.

Benjamin Netanyahu the Prime Minister of Israel repeatedly warned over the last few weeks that Israel was prepared to take its own military action if Syria used chemical weapons or other types of arms that might reach Hezbollah and throw out the balance of power.

Officials in Israel said the air attack took place early Friday and had been aimed at sophisticated weapons, but not ones that were chemical in nature. One Israeli official said it had targeted a shipment of long-range ground-to-ground missiles.

They would not say where they had attacked or if the air force had carried it out from airspace in Lebanon or Syria.

Schumer said the FBI has been very good in doing their job, and until Boston, it was not an accident that no successful terrorist events had taken place in the U.S. Schumer added that the FBI was good at tracking and listening, but something has happened that needs to be figured out.

Schumer plans to pursue an answer to his questions, as a member of the Senate’s Judiciary Committee, which oversees the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Paul Bresson a spokesman for the FBI said it had briefed Congress and would continue to brief Washington lawmakers as is necessary.

In 2011, authorities in Russia recorded a telephone conversation between Tamerlan Tsarnaev and his mother in which he discussed vaguely jihad with her.

Another conversation was recorded of his mother talking to a person in southern Russia who was being investigated by the FBI on an unrelated matter said FBI officials.

Either of the two conversations, if the FBI had known, could have been sufficient to start a thorough investigation of the whole Tsarnaev family. However, authorities in Russia told the FBI just the concerns they had that Tamerlan as well as his mother were extremists. Because the FBI did not receive any other information, a limited inquiry was completed and the case was closed in the middle of 2011.

Peter King a Republican from New York said a complete investigation by the FBI would have been done if Russia had told the FBI about the pair’s radicalization.

Today many of us carry life, car, health, dental, and home insurance, but not many people even think of carrying insurance for Terrorism. In the world we live in today, Terrorism insurance is very often considered due to the many acts of Terrorism that happen in our country today. Just a couple of weeks ago there were bombings at the Boston Marathon, and it seems to be happening more and more often these days.

The largest group of detainees being held at the Guantanamo Bay lockup is Yemenis. In all, there are 166 detainees at the naval base located on the island nation of Cuba. Most of the Yemenis were detained inside Afghanistan, after the invasion in 2001 by the U.S.

Protester and Human rights activist Abdel-Rahman Barman spoke of the conditions in the prison as being very poor with two or more of the detainees carrying on a hunger strike.

Those two are part of close to 33 prisoners that the military in the U.S. says started a hunger strike. Three had to be hospitalized due to dehydration.

Prisoners said they have not been allowed to drink water and inside the cells, air conditioning had been kept at frigid temperatures as a form of punishment while they were on thier hunger strike. U.S. military sources disputed those claims and said prisoners always are offered water inside the detention center.

The largest hunger strikes in Guantanamo started during the summer in 2005 and was at its peak of 131 prisoners. At that time, the facility had 500 detainees. Military personnel broke up the hunger strike by strapping down the detainees and forcing them to receive liquid nutrients so they would not die of starvation.

Relatives of those detained gave an employee of the U.S. embassy a letter. No one in the U.S. embassy released a comment about the protest or the content of the letter.

Pierson, who is 53, is a career veteran at the Secret Service and is currently the chief of staff at the agency. Her appointment to be Director at the Service does not require confirmation by the Senate.

Obama said, in announcing Pierson’s promotion on Tuesday that in her 30 plus years of experience in the Secret Service she has exemplified the dedication and spirit the women and men of the service demonstrate each day.

When the president started his second term in office, he received a considerable amount of criticism from fellow Democrats and the media that he was putting together a boys’ club around him. This thought process was fuelled in part when the first major appointments he made were white men, including Chuck Hagel as his defense secretary, Jack Lew for treasury secretary, Denis McDonough as his chief of staff and John Kerry for secretary of state.

The elevation of Kerry from the U.S. Senate was quite unsettling for critics of the President because he replaced a woman, Hillary Clinton, with a male as the top diplomat in the country.

Obama since that time has named both Hispanics and women to his top jobs. The new secretary of labor is Tom Perez, Ernest Moniz is the secretary of energy and Sally Jewell the secretary of the interior.

With Pierson added in, Obama can now charge that the critics’ cry for lack of diversity does not hold much water.

Judge Susan Illston made the ruling, which will bar any further issuance of “national security letters,” which are a type of administrative subpoena. The judge’s ruling was stayed while an appeal by the government is considered.

The NSLs give the FBI the authority to ask companies that are on the Internet and other providers of electronic communications to provide subscriber information on customers in the U.S. The letters also give the government the authority to demand that the different providers of the information keep the letter secret, including from the person or persons targeted by the letter.

To have an NSL issued, a supervisor only needs to certify that the information sought is relevant to an ongoing national security investigation. A warrant is not required. Officials from the FBI said that this type of flexibility, which was granted following the terrorist attacks of 2001, is crucial for preventing any future terrorist attacks.

Nevertheless, there has been much controversy attached to the letters. The inspector general of the Justice Department found a number of years ago that the authority to have the NSLs issued was abused by the FBI, often not justifying the need to make the surveillance.

The FBI said those problems were fixed, but questions still remain about the use of a gag order and the lack of clarity in the law about the type of data that can be obtained.

The press conference was to be an important part of the Defense Secretary’s first visit to Afghanistan. Of late, the relationship between the U.S. and Afghanistan has been strained because of the planned withdrawal of foreign troops led by NATO before the end of 2014.

However, the press conference was cancelled just a couple of hours before it was scheduled to start at the palace of the president in the capital of Kabul. Officials from the U.S. cited security concerns but they would not specify what the concerns were about.

On Saturday, two suicide bombs also disrupted Hagel’s trip. One was in Kabul within earshot of the Secretary. Then on Sunday, Karzai gave a provocative speech by saying the U.S. was holding talks daily with Taliban representatives in Qatar and that suicide attacks by insurgents enabled international military forces to justify their presence in the country.

Karzai said the bombs that had been detonated in Khost and Kabul were not done as a show of force, but were done to serve the U.S. He was referring to the two bombs that killed 19 people. Karzai said it was the U.S. slogan for the withdrawal of troops, implying that without the U.S. troops present the Afghan people would be killed.

Karzai’s speech was criticized strongly by NATO forces commander General Joseph Dunford. The general was forced to deny that the Taliban was working with the U.S.

In the conflict, rebels made substantial headway in northeastern Syria, which has been heavily contested. The rebels captured a complex containing a police academy just west of the city of Aleppo and stormed the city if Ragga’s prison. The rebels also took control of a border crossing along the border of Syria and Iraq, said a rebel spokesperson.

In a Sunday Times interview, al-Assad took a hard line against opponents, rewinding his earlier hints of flexibility over peace talks. Assad said he would negotiate with anyone, which includes the militants, if they surrender their weapons. He said his government would not negotiate with terrorists who want to have weapons, to kills civilians, to terrorize and to attack private enterprise or public places, while destroying the country.

The majority of the opposition groups have rejected peace talks with Assad’s regime, with some saying no talks would begin until Assad resigns.

However, Assad says resigning or going into exile is not an option, saying that no one who is patriotic would live in any other country but his own.

On Thursday, U.S. Secretary of State John Terry met in Rome with Syria’s rebel leaders. He announced the U.S. would give a $60 million aid package to rebels that was non-lethal. However, Assad said the financial, communication and intelligence assistance the U.S. was giving the rebels was very lethal.

Assad also criticized British leaders saying instead of trying to push for peace talks, David Cameron the Prime Minister of Britain was trying to have an arms embargo of the European Union ended, so he can arm the rebels with new weapons.