Category Archives: Foreign Policy

05.24.13
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CNN: Obama: U.S. will keep deploying drones — when they are only option

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Drone strikes are a necessary evil, but one that must be used with more temperance as the United States’ security situation evolves, President Barack Obama said Thursday.

America prefers to capture, interrogate and prosecute terrorists, but there are times when this isn’t possible, Obama said in a speech at the National Defense University in Washington. Terrorists intentionally hide in hard-to-reach locales and putting boots on the ground is often out of the question, he said.

Thus, when the United States is faced with a threat from terrorists in a country where the government has only tenuous or no influence, drones strikes are the only option — and they’re legal because America “is at war with al Qaeda, the Taliban and their associated forces,” Obama said.

He added, however, “To say a military tactic is legal, or even effective, is not to say it is wise or moral in every instance. For the same progress that gives us the technology to strike half a world away also demands the discipline to constrain that power — or risk abusing it.”

Increased oversight is important, but not easy, Obama said. While he has considered a special court or independent oversight board, those options are problematic, so he plans to talk with Congress to determine how best to handle the deployment of drones, he said.

 The nation’s image was a theme throughout the speech, as Obama emphasized some actions in recent years — drone strikes and Guantanamo Bay key among them — risk creating more threats. The nature of threats against the United States have changed since he took office — they’ve become more localized — and so, too, must efforts to combat them, he said.

“From our use of drones to the detention of terror suspects, the decisions that we are making now will define the type of nation and world that we leave to our children,” he said.

Today, al Qaeda operatives in Pakistan and Afghanistan worry more about protecting their own skin than attacking America, he said, but the threat is more diffuse, extending into places such as Yemen, Iraq, Somalia and North Africa. And al Qaeda’s ideology helped fuel attacks like the ones at the Boston Marathon and U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi.

Obama said the use of lethal force extends to U.S. citizens as well.

On Wednesday, his administration disclosed for the first time that four Americans had been killed in counterterrorist drone strikes overseas, including one person who was targeted by the United States.

“When a U.S. citizen goes abroad to wage war against America — and is actively plotting to kill U.S. citizens; and when neither the United States, nor our partners are in a position to capture him before he carries out a plot — his citizenship should no more serve as a shield than a sniper shooting down on an innocent crowd should be protected from a SWAT team,” Obama said.

To stop terrorists from gaining a foothold, drones will be deployed, Obama said, but only when there is an imminent threat; no hope of capturing the targeted terrorist; “near certainty” that civilians won’t be harmed; and “there are no other governments capable of effectively addressing the threat.” Never will a strike be punitive, he said.

Those who die as collateral damage “will haunt us for as long as we live,” the president said, but he emphasized that the targeted individuals aim to exact indiscriminate violence, “and the death toll from their acts of terrorism against Muslims dwarfs any estimate of civilian casualties from drone strikes.”

It’s not always feasible to send in Special Forces, as in the Osama bin Laden raid, to stamp out terrorism, and even if it were, the introduction of troops could mean more deaths on both sides, Obama said.

“The result would be more U.S. deaths, more Blackhawks down, more confrontations with local populations and an inevitable mission creep in support of such raids that could easily escalate into new wars,” he said.

The American public is split on where and how drones should be used, according to a March poll by Gallup.

Although 65% of respondents said drones should be used against suspected terrorists abroad, only 41% said drones should be used against American citizens who are suspected terrorists in foreign countries.

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What do you think?  Should American Citizens be targeted and killed on American or Foreign soil without due process of law?  Click below for the full article.

http://www.cnn.com/2013/05/23/politics/obama-terror-speech/index.html?hpt=po_c1

05.17.13
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Reuters: White House fights and loses battle to withhold Benghazi records

President Barack Obama’s White House fought and lost a battle to avoid making public what it claimed were confidential records of internal deliberations over the attack on a U.S. diplomatic post in Benghazi, Libya last September.

Obama administration officials portray their unsuccessful effort to avoid disclosing the records as the end result of a process of “accommodation” which the government’s executive branch routinely uses to respond to frequent requests and subpoenas by Congress for sensitive materials.

But some politicians and legal experts say the administration’s decision to not release the records sooner may have backfired, prolonging the controversy and deepening the determination of critics in Congress to keep the story alive.

“I don’t trust them as far as I can throw them,” said Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, who accused the administration of trying to “stonewall Congress at every turn.”

The administration at first refused to show copies of the Benghazi records, including emails and drafts of what proved to be inaccurate public “talking points” about the attack, to anyone outside the executive branch.

In the face of escalating congressional demands for the materials, the administration then offered closed-door briefings on these, officials said.

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Click below for the full article.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/05/17/us-usa-benghazi-legal-idUSBRE94G0VZ20130517

05.16.13
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The Daily Beast: Is Obama Worse For Press Freedom Than Nixon?

Is Obama Worse Than Nixon?

President Barack H. Obama’s outrageous seizure of the Associated Press’s phone records, allegedly to discover sources of leaks, should surprise no one. Obama has relentlessly pursued leakers ever since he became president. He is fast becoming the worst national security press president ever, and it may not get any better.

It is believed that Obama’s Justice Department sought AP’s records to find the source of a leak that informed an AP story about a failed terrorist attack. What makes this action particularly egregious is that Justice didn’t tell AP what it was doing until two months after it obtained the records. This not only violates Justice Department guidelines for subpoenas of this sort, but also common sense, decency, and the First Amendment.

 

Under the guidelines, subpoenas concerning the press cannot be issued without the express approval of the Attorney General. Further, before a subpoena is issued, the government is honor bound to negotiate with the party to which it is directed.

 

While Attorney General Eric H. Holder, Jr. may have approved the subpoena, he apparently never told AP about it. In the meantime, the Justice Department for two months has had all the details of AP’s newsgathering. AP could bring a lawsuit to declare its First Amendment rights have been violated and seek a return of its records. Gary Pruitt, President of AP, has already made a demand for them.

 

While this legal action by AP is possible, the government has picked the one federal jurisdiction most favorable to it for obtaining the source of leaks, namely, the federal court in the District of Columbia. Its subpoenas were directed to telephone companies located in D.C.

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The Liberty Report Take:  While Neocons, GOP Establishment, and general Conservative folks would all probably say Obama is the worst President not just for Freedom but overall, he probably has a ways to go before reaching the level of his predecessor W. or Richard Nixon.  After all, Nixon was the man who enhanced a Big Brother Government, got us off the gold standard, and started the unconstitutional war on drugs.

Click below for the full article.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/05/14/is-obama-worse-for-press-freedom-than-nixon.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+thedailybeast%2Farticles+%28The+Daily+Beast+-+Latest+Articles%29

 

05.16.13
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NY Times: Early E-Mails on Benghazi Show Internal Divisions

E-mails released by the White House on Wednesday revealed a fierce internal jostling over the government’s official talking points in the aftermath of last September’s attack in Benghazi, Libya, not only between the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency, but at the highest levels of the C.I.A.

The 100 pages of e-mails showed a disagreement between David H. Petraeus, then the director of the C.I.A., and his deputy, Michael J. Morell, over how much to disclose in the talking points, which were used by Susan E. Rice, the ambassador to the United Nations, in television appearances days after the attack.

Mr. Morell, administration officials said, deleted a reference in the draft version of the talking points to C.I.A. warnings of extremist threats in Libya, which State Department officials objected to because they feared it would reflect badly on them.

Mr. Morell, officials said, acted on his own and not in response to pressure from the State Department. But when the final draft of the talking points was sent to Mr. Petraeus, he dismissed them, saying “Frankly, I’d just as soon not use this,” adding that the heavily scrubbed account would not satisfy the House Democrat who had requested it.

“This is certainly not what Vice Chairman Ruppersberger was hoping to get,” Mr. Petraeus wrote, referring to Representative C. A. Dutch Ruppersberger of Maryland, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, which had asked Mr. Petraeus for talking points to use with reporters in discussing the attack on Benghazi.

The White House released the e-mails to reporters after Republicans seized on snippets of the correspondence that became public on Friday to suggest that President Obama’s national security staff had been complicit in trying to alter the talking points for political reasons.

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Click below for the full article.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/16/us/politics/e-mails-show-jostling-over-benghazi-talking-points.html?_r=0

05.15.13
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Reason.com: On Benghazi, “What Difference, At This Point, Does It Make?” A lot.

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It was one of Hillary Clinton’s most infamous utterances during her tenure as secretary of state: “What difference, at this point, does it make?” The comment came at a Senate committee hearing on the attack in Benghazi, and it encapsulated the attitude that Barack Obama’s self-described “most transparent administration in history” has taken to actual transparency.

At issue was who knew what and when about the nature of the Benghazi incident. Was it a preplanned attack by terrorists or a spontaneous response to an anti-Islamic video on YouTube? The question didn’t seem to matter to Clinton, who pushed the YouTube narrative, leading the way in placing blame for the violence on an American’s exercise of free speech. A little later in the same answer, she offered these thoughts about accountablity: “it is, from my perspective, less important today looking backwards as to why these militants decided they did it than to find them and bring them to justice, and then maybe we’ll figure out what was going on in the meantime.”

When the attack was fresh, the story of a mob killing on a whim was embraced both by officials and their boosters in the media. (“It’s all about the video,” Chris Matthews told a Romney supporter last October. “Read a newspaper.”) Yet just three days after the assault, a report in The Independent suggested senior officials were becoming “increasingly convinced” the assault on the U.S. compound in Benghazi had been “planned.” Last week’s hearingshelped drive home the fact that the YouTube video had nothing to do with the violence. A New York Timeseditorial published just last week managed to miss the point, denouncing the“Republican obsession” over Benghazi while neglecting to mention the deliberately misleading statements government officials had made about the nature of the attack.

The Sunday after the Benghazi assault, UN Ambassador Susan Rice went on the political talk-show circuit to push the narrative of a spontaneous protest. It’s now been revealed that the talking points she relied on had been edited several times to excise all reference to any terrorist connection. White House Press Secretary Jay Carney deflected concern about that by pointing out that Republicans knew about the process. But that’s not relevant. The issue is that the government decided to mislead the American people. Whether the revisions came from the CIA or the State Department, they sought to conceal facts from the public. And government officials didn’t lean on any supposed national security concern for that deception, merely the understanding that what the American people were informed of is what they ought to know.

This “move along, nothing to see” attitude is hardly new to the Obama administration. But this president and his apologists have wrapped themselves in “the truth” in a way few of his predecessors have, even while acting in a relentlessly untransparent manner. Obama promised his would be “the most transparent administration in history,” yet his administration has brought up more cases against leakers (six) than all his predecessors combined, a fact that came up in reporting on the government seizing two months’ worth of phone records from the Associated Press.

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Click below for the full article.

 

05.12.13
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ABC News: Sen. John McCain Asserts Benghazi ‘Cover-Up’

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., this morning described the Obama administration’s handling of the Benghazi controversy as a “cover up,” following exclusive reporting by ABC News that showed the State Department was involved in editing the CIA’s Benghazi talking points used in the days after the attack on the American diplomatic compound in Libya last year.

“I’d call it a cover-up,” McCain said this morning on “This Week.” “I would call it a cover-up in the extent that there was willful removal of information which was obvious.”

McCain criticized White House spokesperson Jay Carney for his characterization of the edits to the talking points, which were eventually used by U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice on five Sunday talks shows the weekend after the Benghazi attack.

“For the president’s spokesman to say, that, ‘Well, there was only words or technical changes made in those emails’ is a flat-out untruth,” McCain said. “That’s just not acceptable.”

Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., disputed McCain’s assertions, saying it was “absolutely not” a cover-up, and that the talking point revisions reflected efforts to form a “consensus document that avoided all of the difficult issues.”

“I think this was the classic issue of interagency’s battle about who will say what,” Reed said this morning on “This Week.”

McCain also singled out former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who he suggested would have been aware of the State Department’s emails requesting changes to the talking points.

“I think the secretary of state has played a role in this,” McCain said. “She had to have been in the loop some way, but we don’t know for sure.”

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Click below for the full article:

http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2013/05/sen-john-mccain-asserts-benghazi-cover-up/

Update:

Here are 2 additional articles.

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/ticket/mccain-benghazi-cover-investigation-143339866.html

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/sen-john-mccain-investigate-obama-cover-up-benghazi-sept-11-attack-article-1.1341917

05.12.13
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Telegram: Boston Police chief: “I do not endorse actions that move Boston and our nation into a police state….”

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FBI agents did not tell Boston police they had receiving warnings from Russia’s government in 2011 about suspected bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev and had performed a cursory investigation, Boston Police Commissioner Edward Davis told Congress Thursday, in the first congressional hearing into last month’s terror attack on the Boston Marathon.

Davis said that none of four people he had assigned to the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force was aware that the FBI investigated the vague warning, found nothing and had closed the file. One of his detectives was in the dark despite being assigned to the unit that investigated Tsarnaev, Davis said.

“They tell me they received no word about that individual prior to the bombing,” Davis said.

Davis said he would have liked to have known but conceded that it might not have prevented the attack. The commissioner said his detectives would have wanted to interview Tsarnaev.

“The FBI did that and they closed the case out,” he said. “I can’t say I would’ve come to a different conclusion based on the information at the time.”

The House Homeland Security Committee hearing came less than three weeks after Tsarnaev died in a police shootout. His brother, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, was arrested and faces federal terrorism charges.

The committee chairman, Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas, said the hearing will be the first in a series to review the government’s initial response, ask what information authorities received about the brothers before the bombings and whether they handled it correctly.

Thursday’s hearing was unlikely to shed much light on those questions. Nobody from the federal government testified.

But in a time of widespread budget cuts, the hearing began laying the groundwork for an expected push for more counterterrorism money. Both Davis and Kurt Schwartz, the Massachusetts homeland security chief, praised federal grants that for years have kept cities flush with money for equipment and manpower.

“People are alive today” because of money for training and equipment, Schwartz said.

McCaul and Rep. Bennie Thompson, the top Democrat on the committee, also spoke of the importance of federal money, as did former Sen. Joe Lieberman, one of the founders of the Department of Homeland Security, who took a new seat as a congressional witness.

“You can’t fight this war without resources,” Lieberman said.

Lieberman said it would have been possible, albeit difficult, to have prevented the bombing. He said the U.S. should have shared threat information with state and local law enforcement.

“When you’re dealing with homegrown radicals, the community around them is going to be your first line of defense,” Lieberman said. “State and local law enforcement will always have a better knowledge of the neighborhood, the institutions the people are going to be involved with.”

In written testimony, Davis told lawmakers that cities should look at deploying more undercover officers and special police units and installing more surveillance cameras — but not at the expense of civil liberties.

“I do not endorse actions that move Boston and our nation into a police state mentality, with surveillance cameras attached to every light pole in the city,” Davis said. “We do not and cannot live in a protective enclosure because of the actions of extremists who seek to disrupt our way of life.”

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Click below for the full article.

http://www.telegram.com/article/20130509/NEWS/130509682/1052

05.11.13
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Yahoo News: White House Defensive Over Benghazi Memo; Draft revised 12 times

President Barack Obama’s standoff with congressional Republicans over Benghazi escalated on Friday as the White House rebuffed House Speaker John Boehner’s demand that it turn over unclassified internal emails linked to the deadly Sept. 11, 2012, attack.

Press secretary Jay Carney rejected the request and again accused Republicans of trying to milk the tragic death of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans for political gain.

“They’re asking for emails that they’ve already seen, that they were able to review and take extensive notes on, apparently provide verbatim information to folks,” Carney told reporters.

His comments came hours after ABC News reported that talking points crafted by the administration to explain the attack to the public underwent extensive revisions at the State Department’s request and with copious White House oversight.

“The fact that the very people who’ve reviewed this and probably leaked it–generally speaking, not specifically–are asking for something they’ve already had access to I think demonstrates that this is what it was from the beginning in terms of Republican handling of it which is a highly political matter,” the spokesman said.

Carney noted that key Republicans had been given access to internal emails in which officials discussed the drafting of the talking points. Lawmakers were able “to review them, take notes, spend as much with with them as they liked,” Carney said. (The lawmakers were were not allowed to make copies or take the documents out, which is known as an “in camera” review. )

“There is a long precedent here for protecting internal deliberations. This is across administrations of both parties,” he said. House Republicans have hinted they may try to subpoena the emails if the administration does not cooperate.

“From the hours after the attack, beginning with the Republican nominee’s unfortunate press release, and then his statements the day after, there has been an effort to politicize a tragedy here, the deaths of four Americans,” Carney said, referring to Mitt Romney’s poorly received response to the attack.

“The administration wouldn’t allow our staff to keep any emails or make copies,” Boehner spokesman Brendan Buck told Yahoo News. “We believe the American public should be able to see the contents, and we continue to call on the president to live up to his promise of cooperation and release them publicly.”

Meanwhile, senior administration officials, briefing reporters at the White House on condition that they not be named or quoted, offered a detailed timeline of the administration’s efforts to draft the talking points, which the House Intelligence Committee had requested. And they sought to explain away one email from a senior State Department official, spokeswoman Victoria Nuland, who seemed to urge an edit to spare the department from attacks by congressional Republicans.

Much of the latest controversy has centered on a handful of meaningful changes to the original CIA-produced draft, which ABC reported underwent 12 revisions:

– The very first draft, from 11:15 a.m. on Friday, Sept. 14, refers to “the attacks in Benghazi.” And it asserts “we do know that Islamic extremists with ties to al-Qaida participated in the attack.” It suggests that the extremist group Ansar al-Sharia may be involved.

– By 4:42 p.m. on Friday, they are “demonstrations in Benghazi” that “evolved into a direct assault.” The al-Qaida reference is gone.

– A few edits later, at 8:59 p.m., “we do know” has become “there are indications that.” And Ansar al-Sharia is gone.

As is well known, the ultimate version linked the onslaught in Benghazi to Muslim anger at an Internet video denigrating Islam — which had sparked a violent demonstration and attack on the U.S. embassy in Cairo. There was no such demonstration in Benghazi.

Nuland’s email in particular has drawn scrutiny. She objected to an early draft’s reference to CIA warnings in the months leading up to the attack on grounds that such language “could be abused by members [of Congress] to beat up the State Department for not paying attention to warnings, so why would we want to feed that either? Concerned …”

One senior administration official described Nuland’s concerns as consistent with worries expressed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which leads the ongoing investigation into the attack, and the Department of Justice. The official said Nuland also made the case that the administration should not suggest that Congress point to Ansar al-Sharia when administration officials were waiting to do so until the results of the investigation.

Another official said the FBI had objected to the “we do know that Islamic extremists” participated phrasing.

“I think the overriding concern of everyone involved in that circumstance is always to make sure that we’re not giving, to those who speak in public about these issues, information that cannot be confirmed, speculation about who was responsible, other things like warnings that may or may not be relevant to what we ultimately learn about what happened and why,” Carney said at his public briefing later.

The officials also insisted that Carney had not meant to mislead reporters when he contended that the White House had only made one “stylistic” change — altering the description of the ransacked facility from a “consulate” to a “diplomatic post.” They said he had been referring to the process that unfolded after the interagency debate on the talking points, once the deputy director of the CIA had drafted a would-be final draft on Saturday morning, September 15th. The documents obtained by ABC showed that the White House oversaw the early back-and-forth among the agencies concerned.

The officials also tackled another issue that has drawn scrutiny: Why, after lumping Benghazi in with the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 as “acts of terror,” did the president and other top aides shy from calling it “terrorism”? The officials said that there was never any doubt that the attack was terrorism, but that they avoided the label because they were not certain who carried out the attack or whether it was spontaneous or pre-planned.

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Click here to read the article on the Yahoo News website:

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/ticket/white-house-rebuffs-boehner-benghazi-related-emails-214324542.html