The nation’s top spy on Monday requested a broad review into “the US government’s handling of intelligence information leading up to up to the Boston Marathon bombings,” according to an internal memo, the latest sign that top officials are concerned that critical warning signs may have been missed that could have prevented the worst terrorist attack on American soil since 9/11. Read full story

The former chief of the federal government’s information-sharing program said Friday that preliminary signs indicate authorities failed to give proper attention to one of the Boston Marathon bombing suspects after he was added to a terror watch list by the CIA, months after FBI investigators concluded he did not pose a threat. Read full story

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano on Wednesday said the twin bombings in Boston on Monday do not appear to be tied to a wider plot. “...There is no current indication to suggest that the attack was part of a larger plot,” she told the Senate Homeland Security Committee in previously scheduled testimony on her agency’s budget. Read full story

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It was exactly 40 years ago, on March 29, 1973, that Operation Barrel Roll -- the secret US bombing of Laos during the Vietnam War -- ended after nine years, more than a half a million bombing runs, and more than two million tons of ordnance dropped. But it is still claiming victims like Thoummy Silamphan, who is preparing to begin a nationwide tour next week organized by the nonprofit group Legacies of War to raise awareness -- and money -- to help remove the thousands of unexploded cluster bombs that still litter an estimated 30 percent of the Southeast Asian nation and have maimed or killed an estimated 20,000 civilians since the bombing ended. Read full story

Blistering charges of misplaced power and a morally bankrupt culture in the nation’s “military-industrial complex” are rarely leveled by one of the defense establishment’s own. But that is exactly what an instructor of the military’s rising stars lobbed on Tuesday when he very purposely engaged in friendly fire at a defense budget conference co-hosted by the Cambridge-based Project on Defense Alternatives. Read full story

“Any threat, any misson.” That’s the message Waltham-based defense giant Raytheon wants Congress to hear in these lean budget times when it is considering how much of the federal purse strings to let loose for the company’s latest suite of weapons and military technologies. For thousands of congressional staffers who commute to Capitol Hill each day it’s a message that is hard to forget. That’s because it’s all around them, in the form of new campaign by the one of the Pentagon’s top contractors to blanket the subway station just steps from the U.S. Capitol with ads for some of its most lucrative products. Read full story

Seven decades later, what really happened to Canadian war correspondent Paul Morton still matters because it highlights the difficulty in truthfully reporting about war, the dangers of journalists embedding with fighting forces, and the tenuous relationship between the truth and propaganda in wartime, writes War and Peace contributor Don North. His is a cautionary tale about why journalists should be wary of manipulation by the military when covering conflict. And today there is as much secrecy and as many covert military operations as there were in 1944.  Read full story

John Wypyszinski, former Navy corpsman from Millis. Mass., who was wounded in Iraq, is now taking on another fight: fixing the backlog of claims at the Department of Veterans Affairs. “I had heard stories and I just never imagined I would have to go to the length I would have to to get the benefits and compensation I had earned,” he said. Read full story

WASHINGTON _ An online professional network for members of the military recently launched by a pair of Iraq War veterans who reconnected at Harvard Business School is now being billed as the fastest growing community of its kind on the Internet. RallyPoint.com, which was featured in the Boston Globe in February, now boasts more than 10,000 members.  Read full story