On the Senate floor before 10 a.m. Friday, the senator gave a speech describing how American politics have reached the level at which “a small group of willful men and women who have a certain ideology”—read: the tea party and Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas—have been able to take over the congressional budget debate in the last week. “Since they can’t get their way,” Harkin said, “they’re going to create this confusion and discourse and hope that the public will be so mixed up in who is to blame for this, that they’ll blame both sides.”

This isn’t just congressional business as usual, Harkin said. It’s much, much more dire:

It’s dangerous. It’s very dangerous. I believe, Mr. President, we are at one of the most dangerous points in our history right now. Every bit as dangerous as the break-up of the Union before the Civil War.

This isn’t the first time the senator has spoken out about the spiraling budget and the fight over Obamacare. Harkin suggested Thursday that Cruz looked “foolish” for his “little tirade” that lasted from Tuesday afternoon until Wednesday morning. Harkin called out Cruz as being part of “the most extreme tea-party wing” of his party, and for his “ideology-driven obstructionism.”

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McAuliffe invoked the Washington Navy Yard, Aurora, and Newtown tragedies and asked, “How many people have to be killed until we wake up to have sensible gun ownership?”

He said he was “dismayed with United States Senate this year” for not bringing up a bill which was co-sponsored by Sens. Pat Toomey (R-PA) and Joe Manchin (D-WV) that would have mandated universal background checks.

“As governor, I’m going to push,” McAuliffe said. “We need universal background checks for everyone to keep our loved ones safe.”

Cuccinelli mentioned that McAuliffe was the only candidate among the six running statewide who has received an “F” grade from the NRA. After the Colorado recall of State Senators John Morse and Angela Giron, McAuliffe vowed to bring Colorado-style gun control laws to Virginia.

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Alireza Forghani, also the former governor of southern Iran’s Kish Province, warned of mass abductions and killings of American citizens worldwide in the event the Obama administration launches a military strike in Syria.

‘Hopefully Obama will be pigheaded enough to attack Syria, and then we will see the … loss of U.S. interests [through terrorist attacks],’ he threatened.

‘In just 21 hours [after the attack on Syria], a family member of every U.S. minister [department secretary], U.S. ambassadors, U.S. military commanders around the world will be abducted. And then 18 hours later, videos of their amputation will be spread [around the world]‘ he said reportedThe Daily Caller.

The threat comes amid reports today that the U.S has intercepted an order from an Iranian official instructing militants in Iraq to attack U.S. interests in Baghdad if the attack goes ahead.

The American embassy in Baghdad was a likely target, according to unnamed U.S. officials quoted by the Wall Street Journal.

The Journal said the officials did not describe the range of potential targets indicated by the intelligence.

In addition, the State Department issued a warning on Thursday telling U.S. citizens to avoid all but ‘essential’ travel to Iraq.

President Barack Obama has asked the U.S. Congress to back his plan for limited strikes in response to a chemical weapons attack on civilians that the United States blames on Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s forces.

The Journal reported that the Iranian message was intercepted in recent days and came from the head of the Revolutionary Guards’ Qods Force.

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“Warning for Russian citizens traveling internationally,” the Foreign Ministry bulletin said. “Recently, detentions of Russian citizens in various countries, at the request of American law enforcement, have become more frequent — with the goal of extradition and legal prosecution in the United States.”

Citing examples in Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Lithuania and Spain, the Foreign Ministry said, “Experience shows that the judicial proceedings against those who were in fact kidnapped and taken to the U.S. are of a biased character, based on shaky evidence, and clearly tilted toward conviction.”

Extradition has frequently been a contentious issue between Russia and the United States, but the disagreements have been particularly sharp in recent months over the case of Edward J. Snowden, the former intelligence contractor who is wanted on criminal espionage charges but has been granted temporary asylum in Russia.

In response to the demands by the Obama administration for Mr. Snowden’s return, Russian officials have said the United States has routinely ignored extradition requests from Russia. Russia has also complained about the arrests of Russian citizens by the United States or by other countries at the Americans’ request.

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First, the New York Times published two emails Hasan provided them, and now Mother Jones is reporting the FBI released emails and other documents that prove they could have prevented the November 5, 2009 attack.

A military panel found Hasan guilty of 13 premeditated murders and 31 premeditated attempted murders. The jury will begin to deliberate the sentence on Wednesday. The verdict was unanimous, which means the death penalty is on the table.

The prosecution wanted to use the emails and documents as evidence of Hasan’s motive, but Judge Col. Tara Osborn threw them out. They include a string of emails between Hasan and Anwar al-Awlaki, in which Hasan said he murdered his fellow soldiers because he wanted to protect al-Qaeda and Taliban soldiers. The FBI intercepted these emails almost a year before the attack. Hasan even wanted to discuss them for his defense, but Osborn dismissed this.

FBI officials always claimed the documents proved little, but they would not allow the Senate’s Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee to review them. Even without these documents, however, the committee established in their report “A Ticking Timebomb: Counterterrorism Lessons from the U.S. Government’s Failure to Prevent the Fort Hood Attack” that officials had enough evidence to stop Hasan.

It turns out Hasan was brought to the FBI’s attention in December 2008. From Mother Jones:

The FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force in San Diego, which was tracking Awlaki, intercepted Hasan’s December email, along with another sent in January. A search of the Pentagon’s personnel database turned up a man named Nidal Hasan who was on active military duty and was listed as a “Comm Officer” at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, DC.

Normally, when the FBI unearths this kind of raw intelligence, it issues an Intelligence Information Report (IIR), which is shared with law enforcement agencies and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. (This system was designed to prevent the kind of information bottlenecks that allowed the 9/11 plot to go undetected.) But the San Diego agents misinterpreted the “Comm Officer” label in Hasan’s file to mean “communications officer” (in fact, it meant “commissioned officer”) and believed that a person in this role might have access to IIRs. To avoid tipping him off, they skipped the report and sent a detailed memo requesting an investigation directly to the Washington, DC, Joint Terrorism Task Force, a multiagency team overseen by the FBI that investigates terrorism cases in the capital. The message noted that Hasan’s “contact with [Awlaki] would be of concern if the writer is actually the individual identified above.”

The file languished for nearly two months before it was assigned to an agent for the Defense Criminal Investigative Services, who was on the task force. According to a 2011 report on the Fort Hood shootings by the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, DCIS—a law enforcement agency within the Pentagon, which normally deals with fraud and cybercrime among military personnel and contractors—was ill-equipped to tackle a counterterrorism investigation.

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Manning, 25, a former Army intelligence analyst, was convicted July 30.

He was found guilty of 20 of the 22 charges he faced, mostly for espionage, theft and fraud. But a judge found him not guilty of the most serious charge of aiding the enemy, which carries a life sentence.

The 20 charges originally carried the possibility of 136 years in prison, but Judge Col. Denise Lind later granted a defense motion that reduced the potential maximum sentence to 90 years.

Bradley Manning Guilty on Most Charges, but Not Aiding Enemy

At the end of the sentencing phase of the trial, Army prosecutors said Manning should serve at least 60 years in prison. But Manning’s defense attorney argued that he should not serve more than 25 years.

In his closing arguments during the two-week sentencing phase, Manning’s defense attorney, David Coombs, continued to portray Manning as a naïve young soldier who believed he could change the world.

Coombs said Manning had “pure intentions” in releasing the documents to WikiLeaks. “At that time, Pfc. Manning really, truly, genuinely believed that this information could make a difference.”

But in court documents released earlier this week that explained her verdicts, Lind said Manning’s conduct “was both wanton and reckless.” She added that it “was of a heedless nature that made it actually and imminently dangerous to others.”

Manning last week apologized for his actions in a short statement he read during the trial’s sentencing phase. “I’m sorry that my actions hurt people,” Manning said. “I’m sorry that they hurt the United States.

“When I made these decisions, I believed I was going to help people, not hurt people.”

He said he was sorry for the “unintended consequences” of his actions and offered that with hindsight, “I should have worked more aggressively inside the system.”

Although he acknowledged that “I must pay a price for my decisions and actions” he also expressed the hope to “return to a productive place in society.”

Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, said Manning’s apology was a “forced decision” aimed at reducing his potential jail sentence. In a statement, he said the apology had been “extorted from him under the overbearing weight of the United States military justice system.”

The court-martial began three years after Manning was first detained in Iraq for suspicion of having leaked the video of a 2007 Apache helicopter attack that killed several Iraqi civilians. He was subsequently charged with the leak of 750,000 documents that were a mix of U.S. military battlefield reports from Iraq and Afghanistan and diplomatic cables.

The release of the documents has been described as the most extensive leak of classified information in U.S. history.

During the nearly two-month court martial, prosecutors presented detailed computer forensics of Manning’s computer activity during his deployment to Iraq in late-2009 to mid-2010. They said the evidence showed that within weeks of his arrival in Baghdad, Manning had begun searching classified military computer networks for materials that were of interest to WikiLeaks.

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The defendant was subsequently convicted but upon appeal argued that the information obtained from his phone was a Fourth Amendment violation since it was obtained without a warrant. The First Circuit Court accepted this argument.

The Obama administration countered the Court’s decision, maintaining it is in conflict with previous rulings that allow the police broad discretion to search possessions of a suspect. The government argued that a cell phone is no different than other possessions.

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A recent report by the CIA’s inspector general shows that such cooperation can easily go wrong. Between 2002 and 2012 the CIA sent four agents to help the NYPD’s counterterrorism unit (which is led by a former agency official) without making sure that they knew the limits of what they could and couldn’t do. According to the inspector general, this type of “close and direct collaboration with any local domestic police department” could lead to the perception that the agency had “exceeded its authorities.”

But the problem goes far beyond one of perception. We should be concerned that CIA involvement with local police will influence them to adopt a counterinsurgency mentality that is simply not warranted on home turf. When deployed in Iraq or Afghanistan, the agency has to assume that it is working in a hostile environment. It’s operations are necessarily covert. It is not restrained by the full panoply of constitutional rules that apply at home.

One cannot help but wonder whether a CIA mentality helped shape the NYPD’s Muslim surveillance program. A Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation by the Associated Press has shown that police officers monitored every aspect of the lives of Muslim New Yorkers [since 9/11]. They secretly mapped out Muslim communities, noting the details of bookstores, barbershops and cafes. Informants in mosques reported on religious beliefs and political views that had nothing to do with terrorism. Muslim student groups across the Northeast were watched. All of this information, however innocuous or irrelevant to its purported counterterrorism purpose, landed in police files. It sure sounds like a program directed at a hostile population rather than a community with an exemplary record for cooperating with law enforcement.

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Assistant Secretary of the Army Katherine Hammack, who traveled from the Pentagon to meet with local officials with Democratic Sen. Mark Udall on Tuesday, described the Army in a “state of decline,” given federal budget cuts.

Hammack said even if the Army wanted to provide more training area for the Fort Carson troops readying for battle, they don’t have the money.

“The Army is in the era of limited resources,” Hammack said to ranchers, environmentalists and local politicians. “We’re downsizing. We’re reducing the number of troops, reducing the number of brigade combat teams.”

At issue is 235,000 acres of Army land in southeastern Colorado that buffets lucrative ranches and farms.

The Army has long used the land as a maneuver training site to recreate warlike battlefields. They take young soldiers stationed at Fort Carson with tanks and other training components to create conditions not dissimilar to what is found in Afghanistan or Iraq.

Adjacent to the site, however, are ranchers such as Kathy and Gary Hill, who have several hundred head of cattle on 20,000 acres they have owned for more than 40 years.

Udall is one in a long list of politicians who have strived for a resolution to the Piñon Canyon tension for years.

In a 2011 letter to Udall and Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet, the Army said it had no plans — and had made no budgetary requests to Congress — to expand the boundaries of the maneuver site.

Rep. Cory Gardner, R-Yuma, whose district includes Piñon Canyon, got a measure through the U.S. House of Representatives that requires an act of Congress for the Army to expand the site.

And even if Congress granted that approval, the House-approved measure requires the Army to complete an environmental impact study and receive federal money before it would happen.

“This is an important day,” Udall said Tuesday. “We’ve come to some agreements that will strengthen our national security … The (Piñon Canyon site) is important to many people for many reasons.”

In 2006 and 2007, at the height of two big wars, the Army made attempts to acquire more land to expand the training site, including issuing a “waiver” that could have tripled the size of the current footprint.

In some of the maps released at the time, the Hills’ ranch was in those plans and could have been taken by the government under eminent domain.

The Army told Gary Hill, when he traveled to Washington in protest several years ago, that it would give him $300 an acre, and he wouldn’t have a choice.

Hill was emotional with Hammack on Tuesday.

“We’re not at war with our own country,” he said. “We need land in production so we can feed the people of this nation. At some point in time, the government can’t own it all, or we should just move to Russia or something.”

Hammack did not say Tuesday that the Army was going to drop the waiver completely. She said, however, that with federal funding cuts under sequestration, “now is the right time to re-evaluate” the provision.

“I think there is a possibility to rescind it,” she said. “I’m not guaranteeing that will happen, but there is a real chance of that occurring.”

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Normally, KHOU 11 News would conceal the identity of victims in these types of crimes but Lisa Rodriguez wanted everyone to hear her story.

“He hurt me,” Rodriguez said. “He took something from me without even asking. That’s what hurt the most and my children were in the same house I was.”

Rodriguez said her three daughters were inside the apartment when the deputy showed up to question her about making harassing phone calls.

While she was doing an interview with KHOU 11 News, investigators showed up to take her in for more questioning.

Her brother, Bobby Rodriguez, picked up her story.

“He was like well, if you don’t go to jail what can you do for me,” Bobby Rodriguez was told. “That’s when they went upstairs and he told her it was best for them to talk in the room.”

Rodriguez said after the deputy raped her and left, Rodriguez called her brother and they reported what happened.

“The Harris County Sheriff’s Office takes these allegations extremely serious,” said Captain Ken Melancon. “He’s actually been temporarily relieved of duty pending the outcome of this investigation.”

The Harris County Internal Affairs department and the Special Victims Unit were investigating.

The deputy’s name has not been released.

video here