Get beyond the headline of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates’ admission, “I think it has been years” since the US had good intelligence on Osama bin Laden’s, and here are the important points from this interview:
1. The Obama approach on Afghanistan, no matter how many times Gates says “transition strategy”, is to “kick the can down the road”, putting off the deadline for another significant decision to mid-2011.
2. The Obama Administration still has no confidence that it can rely on a political center in Kabul. Look at Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s far-from-ringing endorsement of Afghan President Hamid Karzai: “The proof is in the pudding. We’re going to have to wait to see how it unfolds.”
3. There is not a hint of an approach in Pakistan other than the Pakistani military being told to go and beat up the “Taliban”.
4. The Obama Administration has no real idea how to deal with the economic strain of this increased commitment, other than to hope that it goes away sooner rather than later.
5. So how to proceed, given all these obstacles? Repeat: Al Qa’eda, Al Qa’eda, Al Qa’eda.
GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS, HOST: And we begin with the cornerstones of President Obama’s national security cabinet, the secretary of state, Hillary Clinton; secretary of defense, Robert Gates. Welcome to you both.
This is the first time you’re here together on “This Week”. Thanks for doing it.
HILLARY CLINTON, SECRETARY OF STATE: The first time we’ve been called cornerstones.
Keeping you strong takes something else—a country that never forgets this simple truth. It’s not the remarkable platforms that give the United States our military superiority. Although you have some pretty impressive aircraft here. It’s not the sophisticated technologies that make us the most advanced in the world, although you do represent the future of naval aviation. Read the rest of this entry »
Have a good viewing of the video or read of the transcript of the interview of General James Jones, President Obama’s National Security Advisor, on CBS’s Face the Nation and you’ll get the big story. The fight between Obama advisors who want to limit US involvement in Afghanistan and the military commanders who want escalation just went public, big-time. The decision of General Stanley McChrystal, in a speech in London, to trash Vice President Joe Biden’s preference for a tightly-defined American effort against Al Qa’eda was a Take That to the Administration. That’s why he got hauled aboard Air Force One, as President Obama made a special stopover en route to Copenhangen, for “consultations”.
Jones, with his military background, has been Obama’s chosen tough guy to face down the commanders (thus his comment this summer to the commanders in Afghanistan that, faced with a request for more troops, the President would react, “WTF?”). So, watching and reading this, how firm a line will Obama hold against the persistent demands and public pressures of his Generals?
(Below the CBS interview we’ve added the transcript of Jones’ appearance on CNN’s State of the Union, which goes over similar ground.)
BOB SCHIEFFER, CBS NEWS ANCHOR: General, thank you for coming. More bad news from Afghanistan this morning. Eight American troops killed in this latest attack. This as the White House is debating whether to send more troops to Afghanistan. I want to begin by asking you about this meeting that the president had with General McChrystal, our top general in Afghanistan. He met with him in Copenhagen after the general basally shot down the idea of changing strategy in Afghanistan. Two questions. First, did the president feel that the general was trying to bring pressure on him in public and did he tell him not to do that?
GEN. JIM JONES, NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISER: Well, Bob, first, thank you very much for having me on. It’s good to be back. Secondly to answer your question, I wasn’t at that meeting. And this is a one- on-one meeting between the two of them. And I haven’t really talked to the president about that. So I couldn’t answer this question except to say that the two had a good meeting and it was a good opportunity for them to get to know each other a little bit better. I’m sure they exchanged very direct views. Read the rest of this entry »
First of all, Dick Cheney has all sorts of nerve purporting to speak in defense of the CIA. His administration outed a senior CIA operative, Valerie Plame, in retaliation for her husband, Ambassador Joseph Wilson, exercising his freedom of speech (because he exercised it to criticize the Bush administration’s lie-filled, one-way propaganda train to the Iraq war).
Second, CIA interrogators themselves have said that they believed that Cheney’s torture policy put individual CIA personnel in legal jeopardy. As Greg Sargent has pointed out, on page 94 of the recently released Inspector General’s report, we learn the following:
“During the course of this Review, a number of Agency officers expressed unsolicited concern about the possibility of recrimination or legal action resulting from their participation in the CTC program….One officer expressed concern that one day, Agency officers will wind up on some “wanted list” to appear before the World Court for war crimes…”
This is not even to mention, in a broader sense, the risk to any US personnel that possibly ended up in “enemy” hands where captors of US prisoners could justify their own acts of torture by pointing to US tactics. Read the rest of this entry »
I first learned of this video days after the 12 June Presidential election, but after much deliberation, I decided not to post it. The source, the Middle East Media Research Institute, is fervently critical of the Islamic Republic, and it has sometimes posted video “evidence” out of context.
In light of the “revelations” in the Tehran trials, considered in our analysis today of the regime’s portrayal of academics and “velvet revolution”, I decided to have another look. And there are enough matches between the trial’s indictments and the allegations in this video to make the initally ludicrous — could any Ministry of Intelligence really air this as “proof” of the enemy’s devious plots, especially to turn its population into informers on their fellow citizens? — into the very believable.
So sit back and enjoy badly-animated John McCain (“senior White House official”, rather than Republican candidate for President), George Soros (“Jewish tycoon and the mastermind of ultra-modern colonialism”), Gene Sharp (Harvard professor turned “theoretician of civil disobedience and velvet revolutions” and “one of the CIA’s agents in charge of infiltration into other countries”), and Bill Smith (first I’ve heard of this “CIA senior expert on Iranian affairs”) plot the downfall of Iran….
Video and Transcript: Colin Powell on Face the Nation.
On Sunday, former Secretary of State Colin Powell appeared on CBS’s Face the Nation. The interview is the latest round in an ongoing battle with other Bush Administration officials, notably the former Vice President Dick Cheney, over national security issues, the Republican Party, and attitudes toward President Obama.
SCHIEFFER: And good morning again. On this Memorial Day weekend, former Secretary of State and former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Colin Powell is with us in the studio this morning. Thank you, General. It has been quite a two weeks, as you know. It was on this broadcast that your old boss and colleague, Dick Cheney, accused this administration of putting the nation’s security at risk.
Ironically, as President Obama was trying to tuck away any more photographs revealing the US Government’s torture of detainees, former Bush Administration official Philip Zelikow was dissecting the legal and political cover for “enhanced interrogations” in testimony to a Senate committee. He reiterated that the techniques was approved at the highest levels of the Bush White House, including by his immediate boss, Condoleezza Rice, and that his memorandum objecting to the torture (still classified by the US Government) was blocked by other Bush officials. And he offered this pertinent point: if the torture methods were considered legal in their application against “foreign” detainees, then they would also be legal in application against US citizens.
C-SPAN has decided to charge $60 for the videos of the hearings before the Senate committee, which also included testimony by Ali Soufan (posted in a separate entry), the FBI agent who questioned 9-11 planner Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. So we offer two videos — a summary of the Soufan and Zelikow testimonies and Zelikow’s interview with Rachel Maddow — and the transcript of Zelkow’s statement:
We are still interviewing for a Medical Correspondent at Enduring America, so we have to rely on other experts to explain this sudden phenomenon called Swine Flu.
Our findings: this crisis could have been averted if the world relied on private health systems and if the US had voted for John McCain in November 2008.
James Taranto in The Wall Street Journal nails the socialists for this wannabe-pandemic, suggesting that death rates in Mexico are higher in the US “because the government provides health care”. Henry I. Miller, also in The Journal, goes for “unsanitary conditions, poverty and grossly inadequate public-health infrastructure of all kinds”.
(Miller also cites “intensive animal husbandry procedures that place poultry and swine in close proximity to humans”. He omits, however, this detail from the outbreak in Veracruz, Mexico, reported by The Daily Telegraph: “[Residents] claim they are suffering respiratory problems from contamination spread by pig waste at nearby breeding farms partly owned by a US company.)
Still, our preferred explanation for swine flu comes from Representative Michelle Bachmann of Minnesota, last heard warning that the Obama Administration was going to put children in “re-education” programmes:
Enduring America Minor Detail: Republican Gerald Ford, not Democrat Jimmy Carter, was US President in 1976
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