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Welcome to our weekly “Monday Morning News Kick Off” post exclusively on got geoint? As always, we hope everyone had a restful weekend and is re-charged and ready to take on the world. Today, there are plenty of actionable news and things happening in the defense and intelligence arena that make what we do so important. As we always say, fire up that second cup of coffee and read on! Happy Monday.

White House Approves Expansion of CIA’s Drone Program in Pakistan
The White House has approved an expansion of the CIA’s drone program in Pakistan, Fox News has confirmed. The U.S. has used drones to kill a dozen Taliban and Al Qaeda operatives, including those linked to direct attacks on U.S. and British targets, within the last year. Officials told Fox News on last Friday that they see the program as one of the primary tools in targeting Al Qaeda — specifically the terrorist network’s leaders hiding in tribal areas of Pakistan. Read more here.

30,000 U.S. Troops Not Fighting 100 Al Qaeda Terrorists, Officials Insist
Intelligence officials on Wednesday disputed suggestions that President Obama is sending 30,000 more troops just to fight 100 Al Qaeda operatives estimated to be remaining in Afghanistan, arguing that their influence with the thousands-strong Taliban makes them far more harmful than their numbers would indicate. Read the full article here.

DNRO Confident Of New Charter
According to our friends at DoD Buzz, although the Pentagon’s gen­eral counsel’s office is still slic­ing and dic­ing the lan­guage, the NRO’s boss says he is “con­fi­dent” that the Defense Secretary and Director of National Intelligence will soon approve a doc­u­ment lay­ing out new respon­si­bil­i­ties for the maker and oper­a­tor of the nation’s spy satellites. The doc­u­ment, known as the state­ment of prin­ci­ples, is all part of an effort by the national secu­rity lead­er­ship — and pushed hard by NRO Director Bruce Carlson — to improve the NRO’s per­for­mance and account­abil­ity. Once the prin­ci­ples are approved in the next few weeks, the new NRO char­ter should flow fairly effort­lessly from them. The NRO char­ter has not change sub­stan­tially in a quar­ter of a century. Read the full DoD Buzz post here.

Blackwater Boss Hits Back After CIA ‘Outing’
The former US Navy SEAL who gained notoriety as head of disgraced private security firm Blackwater said he felt betrayed after being outed as part of a CIA covert assassination program. Erik Prince told the US magazine Vanity Fair in an interview published Wednesday that he felt someone “threw him under the bus” in revealing his link to the program, which supposedly targeted top Al-Qaeda leaders. “I put myself and my company at the CIA’s disposal for some very risky missions,” said Prince, who eschewed a role in his family’s billion-dollar auto-parts firm to join the military. Read the full Vanity Fair article here.

Ariane Rocket to Launch French Spy Satellite
France plans to launch a military spy satellite on Wednesday, the defence ministry said, as Paris boosts spending on its independent surveillance from space despite closer military co-operation with the United States. This will be the first such launch under President Nicolas Sarkozy who brought France back into NATO’s military command earlier this year, following a 40-year partial rift with the military alliance. Read the full story here.

Tags: Blackwater, Bruce Carleson, Central Intelligence Agency, CIA, DIA Drone, Eric Prince, France spy satellite, GEOINT, GIS, NRO, USGIF, Vanity Fair