Desperate times call for desperate measures. Health care got done. Birthers are gone. Tea parties, ditto. Republicans need an issue. They think they got one.
Today's headlines in the Post: Great Balls of Fire; and the News: Pants on fire. Guess that Murdoch's boys aren't so fussy about wording.
Republicans have wasted no time in attacking Democrats on intelligence and screening failures leading up to the failed Christmas Day bombing of Flight 253 — a significant departure from the calibrated, less partisan responses that have followed other recent terrorist activity.
The strategy — coming as the Republican leadership seeks to exploit Democratic weaknesses heading into the 2010 midterms — is in many ways a natural for a party that views protecting the U.S. homeland as its ideological raison d’etre and electoral franchise.
Anything that sticks will be fine with the right.
“In the past six weeks, you’ve had the Fort Hood attack, the D.C. Five and now the attempted attack on the plane in Detroit … and they all underscored the clear philosophical difference between the administration and us,” said Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-Mich.), the ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee.
This is the party that allowed 9/11 to occur, that botched the war in Afghanistan.
“I think Secretary Napolitano and the rest of the Obama administration view their role as law enforcement, first responders dealing with the aftermath of an attack,” Hoekstra told POLITICO. “And we believe in a forward-looking approach to stopping these attacks before they happen.”
Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) went even further, telling FOX News that the Christmas attack proved President Obama’s talk-to-your-enemies approach might actually be encouraging terrorists.
DeMint is blocking a vote on the TSA nominee. Brilliant. His reason?
DeMint says he’s blocking Southers because the top cop at Los Angeles International Airport hasn’t vowed to block TSA unionization. And spokesman Wes Denton said the agency is better off headless than with big labor running the nation’s airports.
Anti-unionism interfering with national security, and this bozo is beefing?
Showing posts with label National Security. Show all posts
Showing posts with label National Security. Show all posts
Tuesday, December 29, 2009
Tuesday, August 4, 2009
Left concerned
Neither liberals nor Republicans have yet figured out President Obama. Each expected him to be the president each imagined he'd be, as defined by each, and he has turned out different. Both are rankled.
A Supreme Court filing from the Obama administration last month has set off alarm bells on the left. The filing was a friend-of-the-court brief, and it mostly dealt with an excruciatingly technical question about the attorney-client privilege. But its last five pages were about the state secrets privilege, which was not at issue in the case. That privilege, a favorite tool of the Bush administration, allows the government to shut down lawsuits by invoking national security.
The Obama administration’s brief argued, though no one had asked, that the state secrets privilege was rooted in the Constitution.
No socialist, as Republicans warned and continue to repeat, he is also turning out to be less liberal than the liberals expected.
On the campaign trail and in more recent statements, President Obama has indicated that he wants to limit the use of the state secrets privilege. In courtrooms, however, there has been little evidence of a new approach.
The Administration has been playing it very cautiously.
A federal judge in San Francisco, for instance, last year rejected a version of the constitutional argument in a case brought by Mr. Eisenberg’s client, Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation. The foundation said it had been subjected to illegal surveillance in the Bush years. Both the Bush and Obama administrations have argued that the charity’s suit must be dismissed under the state secrets privilege.
This is where the issue of the pedigree of the privilege really matters. If the privilege is an ordinary common-law rule of evidence, Congress is probably free to alter it. If it is required by the Constitution, things get more complicated.
The judge in San Francisco, Vaughn R. Walker, ruled that Congress had indeed overridden the state secrets privilege when it enacted the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978. The judge said that by setting up a secret court to consider requests for intelligence surveillance, and by setting up other domestic regulations of foreign intelligence surveillance, “Congress intended for the executive branch to relinquish its near-total control over whether the fact of unlawful surveillance could be protected as a secret.”
The government’s recent brief cited the leading Supreme Court decision on state secrets, United States v. Reynolds in 1953, but it said nothing about Judge Walker’s reading of it.
This last case is an interesting one: It concerned an Air Force accident report. The government refused to turn it over in an injury lawsuit, saying that disclosure of the report would endanger national security by revealing military secrets.
And?
When the report was finally released in 1996, it contained no secrets, but it did show that the deaths of nine men in the crash of a B-29 bomber had been caused by the Air Force’s negligence.
Nixon also claimed national security, often.
Thus, the first case in which the Supreme Court recognized the state secrets privilege illustrated how problematic it can be. By giving the executive branch close to unilateral power to have lawsuits dismissed on national security grounds, the privilege can become a way to conceal government misconduct.
The recent brief from the Obama administration cited just one decision directly invoking the Constitution as the basis for the state secrets privilege. Other courts have said the state secrets privilege is rooted in the common law.
A Supreme Court filing from the Obama administration last month has set off alarm bells on the left. The filing was a friend-of-the-court brief, and it mostly dealt with an excruciatingly technical question about the attorney-client privilege. But its last five pages were about the state secrets privilege, which was not at issue in the case. That privilege, a favorite tool of the Bush administration, allows the government to shut down lawsuits by invoking national security.
The Obama administration’s brief argued, though no one had asked, that the state secrets privilege was rooted in the Constitution.
No socialist, as Republicans warned and continue to repeat, he is also turning out to be less liberal than the liberals expected.
On the campaign trail and in more recent statements, President Obama has indicated that he wants to limit the use of the state secrets privilege. In courtrooms, however, there has been little evidence of a new approach.
The Administration has been playing it very cautiously.
A federal judge in San Francisco, for instance, last year rejected a version of the constitutional argument in a case brought by Mr. Eisenberg’s client, Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation. The foundation said it had been subjected to illegal surveillance in the Bush years. Both the Bush and Obama administrations have argued that the charity’s suit must be dismissed under the state secrets privilege.
This is where the issue of the pedigree of the privilege really matters. If the privilege is an ordinary common-law rule of evidence, Congress is probably free to alter it. If it is required by the Constitution, things get more complicated.
The judge in San Francisco, Vaughn R. Walker, ruled that Congress had indeed overridden the state secrets privilege when it enacted the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978. The judge said that by setting up a secret court to consider requests for intelligence surveillance, and by setting up other domestic regulations of foreign intelligence surveillance, “Congress intended for the executive branch to relinquish its near-total control over whether the fact of unlawful surveillance could be protected as a secret.”
The government’s recent brief cited the leading Supreme Court decision on state secrets, United States v. Reynolds in 1953, but it said nothing about Judge Walker’s reading of it.
This last case is an interesting one: It concerned an Air Force accident report. The government refused to turn it over in an injury lawsuit, saying that disclosure of the report would endanger national security by revealing military secrets.
And?
When the report was finally released in 1996, it contained no secrets, but it did show that the deaths of nine men in the crash of a B-29 bomber had been caused by the Air Force’s negligence.
Nixon also claimed national security, often.
Thus, the first case in which the Supreme Court recognized the state secrets privilege illustrated how problematic it can be. By giving the executive branch close to unilateral power to have lawsuits dismissed on national security grounds, the privilege can become a way to conceal government misconduct.
The recent brief from the Obama administration cited just one decision directly invoking the Constitution as the basis for the state secrets privilege. Other courts have said the state secrets privilege is rooted in the common law.
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
National Security posts revamped
A fascinating story; a small piece appeared in today's WSJ.
WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama is merging the domestic and foreign sides of the White House national-security team, effectively eliminating a division created after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
Just because it was put in place eight years ago does not mean it needs stay on permanently.
The White House will use the reorganization to make broader changes as well. Among them is the creation of positions at the National Security Council focused on cybersecurity, energy, the environment and the threat of terrorism involving weapons of mass destruction, officials said Tuesday.
All three are critical to national security.
Mr. Obama's decision to merge the teams carries some political risk, as Republicans have been stepping up attacks on the administration's handling of national-security matters.
Whether the charges that the President is lax on national security convince anyone other than the usual suspects on the right wing is highly debatable. Republicans are looking for something, anything, to hang their hats on, and are trying everything to see what might work.
The president said Tuesday that the change reflects "the fundamental truth that the challenges of the 21st century are increasingly unconventional and transnational, and therefore demand a response that effectively integrates all aspects of American power."
Indeed.
Homeland-security duties will be folded into the NSC, said John Brennan, deputy national-security adviser for homeland security. Mr. Brennan said the separate White House staffs made sense in the early days after the Sept. 11 attacks, when the Department of Homeland Security was still young and benefited from additional oversight and input. The department "has become a more capable department and is able to address a lot of these issues now on their own," he said.
In effect, government is being streamlined and reduced, which should, of course, appeal to the supposed advocates of smaller government -- except that it isn't their idea.
The move follows a review that started in February. Retired Marine Gen. James Jones, who heads the NSC, said foreign and domestic distinctions are often moot. He also suggested the prior system might have blinded officials to imminent danger. "There is no right hand, left hand anymore. There's a single vector," Gen. Jones told reporters.
Vector, not silos; new buzzword? Still, he's right.
Sen. Susan Collins, the top Republican on the Senate Homeland Security Committee, said Mr. Obama is entitled to "considerable deference" on the national-security structure. But the Maine senator also said she is concerned that the structure would lead to confusion among staff and dilute the focus of the top official at the NSC in charge of counterterrorism.
How so?
In the months before the Sept. 11 attacks, President George W. Bush downgraded the status of the White House official in charge of counterterrorism, a move that drew substantial criticism in the aftermath. Following the attacks, he created the White House Homeland Security Council as a sort of parallel entity to the NSC.
Hey, smart move: downgrade counter-terrorism. Right on the mark, again. And, once proven wrong, what did he do? Grow government, of course, while continuing to invoke the aura of that Big-government advocate, Ronald Reagan.
Even though its dedicated staff will be gone, the Homeland Security Council itself survives under Mr. Obama's plan as a sort of discussion forum for domestic-security policy. Mr. Obama also said Tuesday that his top counterterrorism official would maintain a direct reporting line into the Oval Office.
Among the other shifts at the NSC, a new entity, dubbed the Global Engagement Directive, will aim to coordinate public diplomacy, foreign assistance and international communications at a single White House desk.
Streamline government; what a great idea.
WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama is merging the domestic and foreign sides of the White House national-security team, effectively eliminating a division created after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
Just because it was put in place eight years ago does not mean it needs stay on permanently.
The White House will use the reorganization to make broader changes as well. Among them is the creation of positions at the National Security Council focused on cybersecurity, energy, the environment and the threat of terrorism involving weapons of mass destruction, officials said Tuesday.
All three are critical to national security.
Mr. Obama's decision to merge the teams carries some political risk, as Republicans have been stepping up attacks on the administration's handling of national-security matters.
Whether the charges that the President is lax on national security convince anyone other than the usual suspects on the right wing is highly debatable. Republicans are looking for something, anything, to hang their hats on, and are trying everything to see what might work.
The president said Tuesday that the change reflects "the fundamental truth that the challenges of the 21st century are increasingly unconventional and transnational, and therefore demand a response that effectively integrates all aspects of American power."
Indeed.
Homeland-security duties will be folded into the NSC, said John Brennan, deputy national-security adviser for homeland security. Mr. Brennan said the separate White House staffs made sense in the early days after the Sept. 11 attacks, when the Department of Homeland Security was still young and benefited from additional oversight and input. The department "has become a more capable department and is able to address a lot of these issues now on their own," he said.
In effect, government is being streamlined and reduced, which should, of course, appeal to the supposed advocates of smaller government -- except that it isn't their idea.
The move follows a review that started in February. Retired Marine Gen. James Jones, who heads the NSC, said foreign and domestic distinctions are often moot. He also suggested the prior system might have blinded officials to imminent danger. "There is no right hand, left hand anymore. There's a single vector," Gen. Jones told reporters.
Vector, not silos; new buzzword? Still, he's right.
Sen. Susan Collins, the top Republican on the Senate Homeland Security Committee, said Mr. Obama is entitled to "considerable deference" on the national-security structure. But the Maine senator also said she is concerned that the structure would lead to confusion among staff and dilute the focus of the top official at the NSC in charge of counterterrorism.
How so?
In the months before the Sept. 11 attacks, President George W. Bush downgraded the status of the White House official in charge of counterterrorism, a move that drew substantial criticism in the aftermath. Following the attacks, he created the White House Homeland Security Council as a sort of parallel entity to the NSC.
Hey, smart move: downgrade counter-terrorism. Right on the mark, again. And, once proven wrong, what did he do? Grow government, of course, while continuing to invoke the aura of that Big-government advocate, Ronald Reagan.
Even though its dedicated staff will be gone, the Homeland Security Council itself survives under Mr. Obama's plan as a sort of discussion forum for domestic-security policy. Mr. Obama also said Tuesday that his top counterterrorism official would maintain a direct reporting line into the Oval Office.
Among the other shifts at the NSC, a new entity, dubbed the Global Engagement Directive, will aim to coordinate public diplomacy, foreign assistance and international communications at a single White House desk.
Streamline government; what a great idea.
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
Lawmaker Is Said to Have Agreed to Aid Lobbyists
One of the leading House Democrats on intelligence matters was overheard on telephone calls intercepted by the National Security Agency agreeing to seek lenient treatment from the Bush administration for two pro-Israel lobbyists who were under investigation for espionage, current and former government officials say.
How many calls are being intercepted?
How many calls are being intercepted?
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
Challenges and Perhaps More Influence
As President-elect Barack Obama convened the first meeting of his national security advisers on Monday, there was just one person at the table whom Mr. Obama did not choose to have there: Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
He did not really choose Gates, I'd say, as much as accept him. A prudent choice, nonetheless.
Admiral Mullen, who was selected by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates for a two-year term, has been on the job for a year. Come January, he will face perhaps the biggest challenge of his career: pivoting from one commander in chief to another, in the middle of two wars. Friends describe him as an even-tempered, intellectually curious and politically astute presence who sees the world beyond the immediate battles of the Pentagon and the White House, all skills that they say will serve him well in the new administration.
Seems a good choice made by Gates. The Admiral is son of a Hollywood press agent who counted Ann Margret, Anthony Quinn and Julie Andrews among his clients. It was a different day then than it is now; Mullen grew up in what seems much a middle class home, and relied on a scholarship to go to college, and he got one when he was recruited to play basketball for the Naval Academy at Annapolis. So the President and the Admiral have basketball in common. A good thing, having something personally in common.
“He’s not dogmatic or doctrinaire, and he’s also not a lap dog,” said Lt. Gen. Gregory S. Newbold of the Marine Corps, who retired in 2002 after objecting to Mr. Rumsfeld’s plans for a small Iraq invasion force and then aired his views in Time magazine as part of what became known as a “revolt of the generals” against Mr. Rumsfeld in 2006.
Lap dogs are bad for effective governing and military strategy. Mullen now speaks to some of those generals who revolted against Rumsfeld. That is very good.
These days Admiral Mullen gives regular dinners at his 19th-century home on a small naval compound near the State Department, where the walls are hung not with medals but with framed Playbills from nearly every Broadway show that he and his wife have attended. Recent guests have included Brent Scowcroft, the national security adviser to the first President Bush who enraged the second when he publicly warned against war with Iraq. Mr. Scowcroft is now advising Mr. Obama.
Scowcroft, himself a retired military, is enjoying a prominent role these days, an elder statesman with impeccable credentials.
Admiral Mullen has also reached out in recent weeks to Gen. Eric K. Shinseki, who is retired and was reviled by the Bush administration for saying publicly on the eve of the Iraq war that far more troops would be needed than had been committed by the Pentagon under Mr. Rumsfeld. General Shinseki has since been chosen by Mr. Obama to be secretary of veterans affairs.
Also good that Mullen reached out to Shinseki, another one of Obama's great choices.
Adem Altan/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images — Adm. Mike Mullen, who is serving a two-year term as chairman of the Joint Chiefs, has a world view that friends say is closer to that of President-elect Barack Obama than to President Bush.
He did not really choose Gates, I'd say, as much as accept him. A prudent choice, nonetheless.
Admiral Mullen, who was selected by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates for a two-year term, has been on the job for a year. Come January, he will face perhaps the biggest challenge of his career: pivoting from one commander in chief to another, in the middle of two wars. Friends describe him as an even-tempered, intellectually curious and politically astute presence who sees the world beyond the immediate battles of the Pentagon and the White House, all skills that they say will serve him well in the new administration.
Seems a good choice made by Gates. The Admiral is son of a Hollywood press agent who counted Ann Margret, Anthony Quinn and Julie Andrews among his clients. It was a different day then than it is now; Mullen grew up in what seems much a middle class home, and relied on a scholarship to go to college, and he got one when he was recruited to play basketball for the Naval Academy at Annapolis. So the President and the Admiral have basketball in common. A good thing, having something personally in common.
“He’s not dogmatic or doctrinaire, and he’s also not a lap dog,” said Lt. Gen. Gregory S. Newbold of the Marine Corps, who retired in 2002 after objecting to Mr. Rumsfeld’s plans for a small Iraq invasion force and then aired his views in Time magazine as part of what became known as a “revolt of the generals” against Mr. Rumsfeld in 2006.
Lap dogs are bad for effective governing and military strategy. Mullen now speaks to some of those generals who revolted against Rumsfeld. That is very good.
These days Admiral Mullen gives regular dinners at his 19th-century home on a small naval compound near the State Department, where the walls are hung not with medals but with framed Playbills from nearly every Broadway show that he and his wife have attended. Recent guests have included Brent Scowcroft, the national security adviser to the first President Bush who enraged the second when he publicly warned against war with Iraq. Mr. Scowcroft is now advising Mr. Obama.
Scowcroft, himself a retired military, is enjoying a prominent role these days, an elder statesman with impeccable credentials.
Admiral Mullen has also reached out in recent weeks to Gen. Eric K. Shinseki, who is retired and was reviled by the Bush administration for saying publicly on the eve of the Iraq war that far more troops would be needed than had been committed by the Pentagon under Mr. Rumsfeld. General Shinseki has since been chosen by Mr. Obama to be secretary of veterans affairs.
Also good that Mullen reached out to Shinseki, another one of Obama's great choices.
Adem Altan/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images — Adm. Mike Mullen, who is serving a two-year term as chairman of the Joint Chiefs, has a world view that friends say is closer to that of President-elect Barack Obama than to President Bush.Thursday, July 17, 2008
A carbon-free vision
Since losing the Presidency to the Republican-controlled Supreme Court, AL Gore has branched out. He has gotten involved with new business ventures, become director of at least one company, Apple Inc., and become an advocate for environmental sanity by writing a book and making a film, both called An Inconvenient Truth. For that effort he won a Nobel Prize.
Quite a good list. Who knows just how lucrative, but even if he hasn't made as much as Bubba, er, former President Clinton, he certainly is doing very well. Yet more than just money, both have done good. It was reported just today, Bill Clinton's foundation is setting up a Malaria-Drug Price Plan. That is but one of the good deeds he has done in the last eight years. Al Gore has taken on a bigger issue: global warming.
Former Vice President Al Gore said on Thursday that Americans must abandon electricity generated by fossil fuels within a decade and rely on the sun, the winds and other environmentally friendly sources of power, or risk losing their national security as well as their creature comforts.
To see gas prices over $4 and to see SUVs racing down boulevards is to know the US is not near ready to understand just what we are facing; and then there are those who deny global warming is even true.
Although Mr. Gore has made global warming and energy conservation his signature issues, winning a Nobel Prize for his efforts, his speech on Thursday argued that the reasons for renouncing fossil fuels go far beyond concern for the climate. In it, he cited military-intelligence studies warning of “dangerous national security implications” tied to climate change, including the possibility of “hundreds of millions of climate refugees” causing instability around the world, and said the United States is dangerously vulnerable because of its reliance on foreign oil.
Quite a good list. Who knows just how lucrative, but even if he hasn't made as much as Bubba, er, former President Clinton, he certainly is doing very well. Yet more than just money, both have done good. It was reported just today, Bill Clinton's foundation is setting up a Malaria-Drug Price Plan. That is but one of the good deeds he has done in the last eight years. Al Gore has taken on a bigger issue: global warming.
Former Vice President Al Gore said on Thursday that Americans must abandon electricity generated by fossil fuels within a decade and rely on the sun, the winds and other environmentally friendly sources of power, or risk losing their national security as well as their creature comforts.
To see gas prices over $4 and to see SUVs racing down boulevards is to know the US is not near ready to understand just what we are facing; and then there are those who deny global warming is even true.
Although Mr. Gore has made global warming and energy conservation his signature issues, winning a Nobel Prize for his efforts, his speech on Thursday argued that the reasons for renouncing fossil fuels go far beyond concern for the climate. In it, he cited military-intelligence studies warning of “dangerous national security implications” tied to climate change, including the possibility of “hundreds of millions of climate refugees” causing instability around the world, and said the United States is dangerously vulnerable because of its reliance on foreign oil.
The US increases its reliance on imported oil more each year; the figures are staggering.
“We’re borrowing money from China to buy oil from the Persian Gulf to burn it in ways that destroy the planet,” Mr. Gore said. “Every bit of that’s got to change.”
It is mind-boggling to consider how different things would have been if this man, who actually has a functioning intelligence he uses, would have won the presidency, rather than the dunces that we are, thankfully, about to toss out.
The Texas oilman T. Boone Pickens said in a statement that Mr. Gore’s plan would still not address “the stranglehold that foreign oil has on our country.” Mr. Pickens has called for a blend of government leadership and private enterprise to harness the full potential of wind power to help break what he calls “our deadly addiction to foreign oil.”
It does address precisely that. Boone Pickens just wants to be given credit for solving the problem and to make scads of money in the process. His plan is to use wind energy for those functions we now use natural gas for, and to use natural gas to replace petroleum. Sounds fine, only for as long as one does not consider that natural gas is produced by those sources, read nations, that produce petroleum. And, one needs also consider, Boone is a major investor in wind turbines. Next?
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