A secret history

Government and military secrets can range from terrifying to amusing to downright absurd, but most are nothing short of intriguing. From a secret U.S. Air Force project to build a supersonic flying saucer to a now-famous World War II-era research program that produced the first atomic bombs, here are seven declassified military or CIA secrets.

Project 1794

In late 2012, the U.S. Air Force declassified a trove of documents, including records of a secret program to build a flying saucer-type aircraft designed to shoot down Soviet bombers.

The ambitious program, called Project 1794, was initiated in the 1950s, and a team of engineers was tasked with building a disc-shape vehicle capable of traveling at supersonic speeds at high altitudes.

The declassified documents reveal plans for the plane to reach a top speed of Mach 4 (four times the speed of sound), and reach an altitude of 100,000 feet (30,480 meters). The project's estimated cost was more than $3 million, which in today's dollars would be more than $26 million.

Project 1794 was canceled in December 1961 after tests suggested the flying saucer design was aerodynamically unstable and would likely be uncontrollable at high speeds (let alone supersonic speeds).

The woman who led police on a high-speed chase near the U.S. Capitol before being shot dead had a history of mental illness and believed President Obama was electronically monitoring her Connecticut home in order to broadcast her life on television, sources said.

Sources told ABC News that Connecticut police had twice in 2012 been called by Miriam Carey's boyfriend, who reported the woman was delusional, acting irrationally and putting her infant daughter in danger.

Carey, 34, a dental hygienist from Stamford, Conn., was killed by police Thursday after trying to ram a White House gate and leading cops on a chase down Pennsylvania Avenue with her 1-year-old daughter in the car. The toddler was uninjured and placed in police custody.

According to sources Carey believed she was the "prophet of Stamford" and was capable of communicating with Obama.

The woman shot to death on Capitol Hill after trying to ram a White House barricade Thursday was described by neighbors and others as a quiet woman who owned a home-based dental employment business in Connecticut.

More than a dozen shots rang out on two sides of Capitol Hill in midafternoon, sending legislators, staffers and tourists running for cover. Police cars and officers converged on a female driver, whom authorities later said was killed. A 1-year-old child was rescued from the car, a black Infiniti, and taken to a hospital.

The incident took place in a city already frayed over the government shutdown and a shooting rampage two weeks ago at the Washington Navy Yard that left 13 people dead.

The incident began about 2:12 p.m. at the White House, where President Obama was working inside. Police said the driver of the car tried to breach the barricades at an outer checkpoint on the mansion's northeastern side. The sedan with Connecticut license plates struck a Secret Service agent as it sped away, police said.

Signs grew clearer today that the debates about reopening the government, raising the debt limit and setting spending levels for the next year are being rolled into one. And one unspoken consequence is that the partial shutdown, now in its third day, looks increasingly likely to stay in effect for the next two weeks - until the Treasury's deadline for either gaining more borrowing authority or defaulting.

Senior congressional Republicans and Democrats are conceding it makes little policy or political sense to put much more effort into finding votes for a continuing resolution lasting only a few weeks, when the even more consequential debt ceiling must be confronted almost immediately after.

GOP conservatives still believe they can win concessions from President Barack Obama - on both entitlement curbs and curtailing Obamacare - as part of a double-barrel bargain on both spending and borrowing. The president forcefully rebutted that expectation this morning.

Are Emergency Plans Meant Only for Nuclear War the Real Justification for Spying?

To understand the scope, extent and reason that the government spies on all Americans, you have to understand what has happened to our Constitutional form of government since 9/11.

State of Emergency

The United States has been in a declared state of emergency from September 2001, to the present. Specifically, on September 11, 2001, the government declared a state of emergency. That declared state of emergency was formally put in writing on 9/14/2001:

A national emergency exists by reason of the terrorist attacks at the World Trade Center, New York, New York, and the Pentagon, and the continuing and immediate threat of further attacks on the United States.

NOW, THEREFORE, I, GEORGE W. BUSH, President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States, I hereby declare that the national emergency has existed since September 11, 2001 . . .

That declared state of emergency has continued in full force and effect from 9/11 to the present. President Bush kept it in place, and President Obama has also.

The percentage of US forces in Europe based in Italy has tripled since 1991.

The Pentagon has spent the last two decades plowing hundreds of millions of tax dollars into military bases in Italy, turning the country into an increasingly important center for US military power. Especially since the start of the Global War on Terror in 2001, the military has been shifting its European center of gravity south from Germany, where the overwhelming majority of US forces in the region have been stationed since the end of World War II. In the process, the Pentagon has turned the Italian peninsula into a launching pad for future wars in Africa, the Middle East, and beyond.

At bases in Naples, Aviano, Sicily, Pisa, and Vicenza, among others, the military has spent more than $2 billion on construction alone since the end of the Cold War - and that figure doesn't include billions more on classified construction projects and everyday operating and personnel costs. While the number of troops in Germany has fallen from 250,000 when the Soviet Union collapsed to about 50,000 today, the roughly 13,000 US troops (plus 16,000 family members) stationed in Italy match the numbers at the height of the Cold War. That, in turn, means that the percentage of US forces in Europe based in Italy has tripled since 1991 from around 5% to more than 15%.

Last month, I had a chance to visit the newest US base in Italy, a three-month-old garrison in Vicenza, near Venice. Home to a rapid reaction intervention force, the 173rd Infantry Brigade Combat Team (Airborne), and the Army's component of the US Africa Command (AFRICOM), the base extends for a mile, north to south, dwarfing everything else in the small city. In fact, at over 145 acres, the base is almost exactly the size of Washington's National Mall or the equivalent of around 110 American football fields. The price tag for the base and related construction in a city that already hosted at least six installations: upwards of $600 million since fiscal year 2007.

BBC Newsnight exclusive interview with journalist Glenn Greenwald on Edward Snowden, the PRISM revelations and mass surveillance.

An Italian Senate committee has approved a motion to expel former prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, from the parliament over a tax fraud conviction.

The senators voted on Friday to strip Berlusconi of his parliamentary seat after debates were held at the Senate Palace in Rome.

The head of the committee, Dario Stefano, said the committee had "decided by a majority to propose to the Senate assembly to debate invalidating the election of Senator Berlusconi."

The committee's decision must be also ratified by a full Senate chamber vote, which is planned to be held later in the month.

This was the second blow to Berlusconi in just a few days, as he was forced to abandon his bid to topple Prime Minister Enrico Letta on October 2 after more than 40 of his lawmakers said they would defy him and instead vote in support of the coalition government.

Ilija Trojanov was at the airport in Brazil's Salvador da Bahia, on September 30, checking in for his flight to the United States, when the person behind the American Airlines counter told him that the computer had issued a "Border Security Crossing" alert - and that it was necessary to contact the American authorities before he could be issued a boarding pass. As the time for his flight approached he was told the airline was forced to refuse him entry to the flight - and that he must return to Germany.

Trojanov is an acclaimed author of 20 books, including Along the Ganges, Collector of Worlds, and Mumbai to Mecca. He is the co-author of Angriff auf die Freiheit (Attack on Freedom), with Juli Zeh, a 2009 jeremiad against State surveillance. Trojanov was on his way to the Denver conference of the German Studies Association, and had been issued an invitation to appear at the Goethe-Institut's "New Literature From Europe" Festival in November.

He had earlier been denied a visa to enter the United States, but with the help of an American university he was finally granted his travel papers: thus the "security alert" came as a surprise.

So why all the trouble over traveling to the US?

In response to media queries, the US embassy in Berlin had "no comment" to make. That's because no comment was necessary: Trojanov was among the prominent signers of an open letter addressed to German Chancellor Angela Merkel protesting NSA surveillance on German soil as an "historic attack on our democratic, constitutional state." That is clearly the reason for this Soviet-style harassment by the Obama administration.

This latest outrage is part of a disturbing pattern of repression that all points to one ineluctable conclusion: the United States is the Soviet Union of the new millennium - an ideological state with global ambitions that holds itself up as the epitome of "freedom" and yet is the single most powerful enemy of liberty worldwide.

The latest superpower dysfunctional spectacular, aka the US shutdown, has forced President Barack Obama to cancel an entire Asian trip. First the White House announced Obama was shutting down Malaysia and the Philippines - supposed stars of the "pivoting to Asia". Then it was finally confirmed he was also shutting down the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation (APEC) summit in Bali on Tuesday and the ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) and East Asia summit next Thursday in Brunei.

That leaves Chinese President Xi Jinping to bask, unrivalled, in center stage glow. As if any extra Stateside "help" was needed, and as if Xi was not already on a roll.

On Thursday, Xi became the first foreign leader ever to address the Indonesian parliament in Jakarta. He stressed that Beijing wanted by all means to boost trade with ASEAN to a whopping US$1 trillion by 2020 - and establish a regional infrastructure bank.

His message, in a nutshell: China and "certain Southeast Asian countries" must solve their wrangling over territorial sovereignty and maritime rights "peacefully" - as in we will discuss that messy South China Sea situation (he made no direct reference to it in his speech) but don't let that interfere with our doing serious business in trade and investment. Who is ASEAN to say no?

And then, after upstaging Obama in Indonesia (hefty tomes could be penned about that), and signing the requisite $30 billion-plus deals (mostly in mining), Xi was off to Malaysia.

Compare Xi's Indonesian triumph - complete with his glamorous wife Peng Liyuan wearing batik - to a recent visit by Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who, for all practical purposes, wanted to convince the Indonesians to essentially encircle China. Elaborately polite as usual, the Indonesians brushed Abe aside. China is Indonesia's biggest trading partner after Japan, and it's bound to overtake Tokyo soon.