Category Archives: United States Presidents

09.08.13
by

Yahoo News: Then and now: Obama on use of US military might

In this Aug. 31, 2013, photo, President Barack Obama arrives to make a statement about Syria in the Rose Garden at the White House in Washington. As a candidate Obama championed restraint and global cooperation when faced with security threats but noww, as commander in chief of a world superpower, his rhetoric of the past is being tested by the reality of today as he presses Congress to allow the United States to launch a military strike against the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad over the objections of most major U.S. allies. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)
As a candidate focused on his own election, Barack Obama championed restraint and global cooperation when faced with security threats.Now, as commander in chief of a world superpower, his rhetoric of the past is being tested by the reality of today as he presses Congress to allow the United States to launch a military strike against the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad, over the objections of most major U.S. allies.

It’s a posture that conflicts with positions he took as a young senator, a 2008 presidential candidate and even a first-term president as he cast himself as a counterweight to the more aggressive approach to national security embodied by his Republican predecessor, President George W. Bush.

The Democratic president long has advocated a U.S. foreign policy that prioritizes negotiation over confrontation, humility over diplomatic bravado and communal action over unilateralism.

Those positions are under question as Obama seeks the approval of Congress back home and as he meets with skeptical world leaders abroad while at the G-20 summit in Russia this week.

A look at some of Obama’s historical and recent comments on the use of America’s military might:

ON CONGRESS

THEN: “In instances of self-defense, the president would be within his constitutional authority to act before advising Congress or seeking its consent. History has shown us time and again, however, that military action is most successful when it is authorized and supported by the legislative branch.” — Response to candidate questionnaire from The Boston Globe, December 2007.

NOW: “As commander in chief, I always preserve the right and the responsibility to act on behalf of America’s national security. I do not believe that I was required to take this to Congress. But I did not take this to Congress just because it’s an empty exercise. I think it’s important to have Congress’ support on it.” — News conference in Stockholm, Sept. 4, 2013.

ON ACTING ALONE

THEN: “In a world in which threats are more diffuse and missions more complex, America cannot act alone. America alone cannot secure the peace.” — Speech accepting Nobel Peace Prize, December 2009.

NOW: “I’m comfortable going forward without the approval of a United Nations Security Council that, so far, has been completely paralyzed and unwilling to hold Assad accountable.” — Remarks in the White House Rose Garden, Aug. 31, 2013.

ON APPETITE FOR WAR

THEN: “It is easier to start wars than to end them. It is easier to blame others than to look inward, to see what is different about someone than to find the things we share. But we should choose the right path, not just the easy path.” — Speech in Cairo, June 2009.

NOW: “The American people, understandably, want us to be focused on the business of rebuilding our economy here and putting people back to work. And I assure you, nobody ends up being more war-weary than me. But what I also believe is that part of our obligation as a leader in the world is making sure that when you have a regime that is willing to use weapons that are prohibited by international norms on their own people, including children, that they are held to account.” — Remarks at meeting with Baltic leaders, Aug. 30, 2013.

ON JUSTIFICATION

THEN: “We may not always have national security issues at stake, but we have moral issues at stake. If we could have intervened effectively in the Holocaust, who among us would say that we had a moral obligation not to go in? … And so I do believe that we have to consider it as part of our interests, our national interests, in intervening where possible.” — Presidential debate, October 2008.

NOW: “This kind of attack is a challenge to the world. We cannot accept a world where women and children and innocent civilians are gassed on a terrible scale. This kind of attack threatens our national security interests by violating well-established international norms against the use of chemical weapons. … If we are saying in a clear and decisive but very limited way, we send a shot across the bow saying, ‘Stop doing this,’ that can have a positive impact on our national security over the long term.” — Remarks at meeting with Baltic leaders, Aug. 30, 2013.

——————-

Click below for the full article.

http://news.yahoo.com/then-now-obama-us-military-might-112844522–politics.html

07.18.13
by

Yahoo News: NSA spying under fire: ‘You’ve got a problem’

Robert S. Litt, general counsel in the Office of Director of National Intelligence testifies during a House Judiciary Committee hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, on Wednesday, July 17, 2013. Six weeks after a leaked document exposed the scope of the government's monitoring of Americans' phone records, the House Judiciary Committee calls on key administration figures from the intelligence world to answer questions about the sweeping government surveillance of Americans in war on terrorism. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

In a heated confrontation over domestic spying, members of Congress said Wednesday they never intended to allow the National Security Agency to build a database of every phone call in America. And they threatened to curtail the government’s surveillance authority.

Top Obama administration officials countered that the once-secret program was legal and necessary to keep America safe. And they left open the possibility that they could build similar databases of people’s credit card transactions, hotel records and Internet searches.

The clash on Capitol Hill undercut President Barack Obama’s assurances that Congress had fully understood the dramatic expansion of government power it authorized repeatedly over the past decade.

The House Judiciary Committee hearing also represented perhaps the most public, substantive congressional debate on surveillance powers since the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Previous debates have been largely theoretical and legalistic, with officials in the Bush and Obama administrations keeping the details hidden behind the cloak of classified information.

That changed last month when former government contractor Edward Snowden leaked documents to the Guardian newspaper revealing that the NSA collects every American’s phone records, knowing that the overwhelming majority of people have no ties to terrorism.

Civil rights groups have warned for years that the government would use the USA Patriot Act to conduct such wholesale data collection. The government denied it.

The Obama administration says it needs a library of everyone’s phone records so that when it finds a suspected terrorist, it can search its archives for the suspect’s calling habits. The administration says the database was authorized under a provision in the Patriot Act that Congress hurriedly passed after 9/11 and reauthorized in 2005 and 2010.

The sponsor of that bill, Rep. James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., said Wednesday that Congress meant only to allow seizures directly relevant to national security investigations. No one expected the government to obtain every phone record and store them in a huge database to search later.

As Deputy Attorney General James Cole explained why that was necessary, Sensenbrenner cut him off and reminded him that his surveillance authority expires in 2015.

“And unless you realize you’ve got a problem,” Sensenbrenner said, “that is not going to be renewed.”

He was followed by Rep. Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., who picked up where his colleague left off. The problem, he said, is that the administration considers “everything in the world” relevant to fighting terrorism.

Later, Rep. Blake Farenthold, R-Texas, asked whether the NSA could build similar databases of everyone’s Internet searches, hotel records and credit card transactions.

Robert S. Litt, general counsel in the Office of Director of National Intelligence, didn’t directly answer, saying it would depend on whether the government believed those records — like phone records — to be relevant to terrorism investigations.

After the phone surveillance became public, Obama assured Americans that Congress was well aware of what was going on.

“When it comes to telephone calls, every member of Congress has been briefed on this program,” he said.

Whether lawmakers willingly kept themselves in the dark or were misled, it was apparent Wednesday that one of the key oversight bodies in Congress remained unclear about the scope of surveillance, more than a decade after it was authorized.

The Judiciary Committee’s senior Democrat, Rep. John Conyers of Michigan, noted that the panel had “primary jurisdiction” over the surveillance laws that were the foundation for the NSA programs. Yet one lawmaker, Rep. Ted Poe, R-Texas, said some members of Congress wouldn’t have known about the NSA surveillance without the sensational leaks: “Snowden, I don’t like him at all, but we would never have known what happened if he hadn’t told us.”

The NSA says it only looks at numbers as part of narrow terrorism investigations, but that doesn’t tell the whole story.

For the first time, NSA deputy director John C. Inglis disclosed Wednesday that the agency sometimes conducts what’s known as three-hop analysis. That means the government can look at the phone data of a suspect terrorist, plus the data of all of his contacts, then all of those people’s contacts, and finally, all of those people’s contacts.

If the average person calls 40 unique people, three-hop analysis could allow the government to mine the records of 2.5 million Americans when investigating one suspected terrorist.

Rep Randy Forbes, R-Va., said such a huge database was ripe for government abuse. When Inglis said there was no evidence of that, Forbes interrupted:

“I said I wasn’t going to yell at you and I’m going to try not to. That’s exactly what the American people are worried about,” he said. “That’s what’s infuriating the American people. They’re understanding that if you collect that amount of data, people can get access to it in ways that can harm them.”

The government says it stores everybody’s phone records for five years. Cole explained that because the phone companies don’t keep records that long, the NSA had to build its own database.

——

Click below for the full article.

http://news.yahoo.com/nsa-spying-under-fire-youve-got-problem-164530431.html

07.04.13
by

Video: Fourth of July Reflection, What if we actually had a sound (and constitutional) foreign policy?

On the anniversary of the Declaration of Independence for the GREATEST country in the world, let us reflect as to what our foreign policy should be going forward. What would the founding fathers have wanted? Does our current foreign policy follow the constitution? What does our current foreign policy do to our national debt? Does our foreign policy actually make us safer? Please keep those questions in mind when watching this video…..

05.24.13
by

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

Watch this video

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.

—–

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

05.20.13
by

San Francisco Chronicle: More Obama aides knew of IRS audit; Obama not told

White  House chief of staff Denis  McDonough and other senior advisers knew in late April that an impending  report was likely to say the IRS had inappropriately targeted conservative  groups, President Barack  Obama‘s spokesman disclosed Monday, expanding the circle of top officials  who knew of the audit beyond those named earlier.

But  McDonough and the other advisers did not tell Obama, leaving him to learn about  the politically perilous results of the internal investigation from news reports  more than two weeks later, officials said.

The Treasury  Department also told the White House twice in the weeks leading up to the  IRS disclosure that the tax agency planned to make the targeting public, a  Treasury official said.

The  apparent decision to keep the president in the dark about the matter underscores  the White House’s cautious legal approach to controversies and reflects a desire  by top advisers to distance Obama from troubles threatening  his administration.

Obama  spokesman Jay  Carney defended keeping the president out of the loop on the Internal  Revenue Service audit, saying Obama was comfortable with the fact that “some  matters are not appropriate to convey to him, and this is one of them.”

“It  is absolutely a cardinal rule as we see it that we do not intervene in ongoing  investigations,” Carney said.

Republicans,  however, are accusing the president of being unaware of important happenings in  the government he oversees.

“It  seems to be the answer of the administration whenever they’re caught doing  something they shouldn’t be doing is, ‘I didn’t know about it’,” Sen. John  Cornyn, R-Texas, told CBS News. “And it causes me to wonder whether they  believe willful ignorance is a defense when it’s your job to know.”

Obama  advisers argue that the outcry from Republicans would be far worse had McDonough  or White  House Counsel Kathryn Ruemmler told the president about the IRS audit before  it became public, thereby raising questions about White  House interference.

Still,  the White House’s own shifting information about who knew what and when is  keeping the focus of the IRS controversy on the West Wing.

—–

Click below for the full article.

http://www.sfgate.com/news/politics/article/More-Obama-aides-knew-of-IRS-audit-Obama-not-told-4532117.php

 

 

05.16.13
by

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.

——

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
by

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.

——

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

05.16.13
by

CNN: ‘Angry’ Obama announces IRS leader’s ouster after conservatives targeted

President Barack Obama vowed Wednesday to hold accountable those at the Internal Revenue Service involved in the targeting of conservative groups applying for federal tax-exempt status, beginning with the resignation of the agency’s acting commissioner who was aware of the practice.

In a brief statement delivered to reporters in the East Room of the White House, the president announced that Treasury Secretary Jack Lew had requested — and accepted — the resignation of acting IRS Commissioner Steven T. Miller.

The president said the “misconduct” detailed in the IRS Inspector General’s report released Tuesday over the singling out of conservative groups is “inexcusable

“Americans have a right to be angry about it, and I’m angry about it,” Obama said.

“It should not matter what political stripe you’re from. The fact of the matter is, the IRS has to operate with absolute integrity.”

Miller was made aware of the agency’s targeting of conservative groups in May 2012, according to the IRS, while serving as deputy IRS commissioner. He did not tell Congress about it when he testified before an oversight committee in July despite being questioned on the issue. Miller was named acting IRS commissioner in November.

Obama pledged to work “hand in hand” with Congress as it investigates, and he vowed new safeguards will be put in place at the IRS so that “this doesn’t happen again.”

In an internal message to IRS employees obtained by CNN, Miller said he would be stepping down as commissioner in early June.

——

Click below for the full article.

http://www.cnn.com/2013/05/15/politics/irs-conservative-targeting/index.html?hpt=hp_t1

05.15.13
by

TCSM: Will government probe of AP phone records cost Eric Holder his job?

Speculation has begun in Washington over whether a massive Justice Department investigation of Associated Press phone records will end up costing Attorney General Eric Holder his job.

Mr. Holder is “a battered survivor of many controversies and this could be the one that finally convinces him or Obama that it is time to go,” the National Journal’s Jill Lawrence writes.

Esquire blogger Charles Pierce adds: “He should be gone. This moment. Not only is this constitutionally abhorrent, it is politically moronic.”

And Northeastern University journalism professor Dan Kennedy tweeted, “It is 8:42. The AP phone story broke at 7:50. Why is Eric Holder still attorney general.”

Of course, only the president knows for sure whether Holder will be forced to step down to help quiet the multiple controversies engulfing the administration, which also include its handling of the attack on the US consulate in Benghazi and the IRS’s investigation of conservative political organizations. But the political stakes for the White House are high.

“The rule of three … means the president’s credibility is truly on the line right now,” NBC’s First Read observes.

Sacrificing Holder might be personally painful to the president. In his book “Kill or Capture” about President Obama’s national security team, Daniel Klaidman notes that Mr. Obama and Holder have become good friends since they met at a dinner party in 2004. And Holder’s wife, obstetrician Sharon Malone, is reportedly very close with first lady Michelle Obama.

Holder has long been controversial, especially with Republicans who voted in June 2012 to hold him in contempt of Congress, the first time a sitting attorney general has been in that position. The issue was Holder’s refusal to turn over certain documents in “Fast and Furious,” a botched federal gun sting operation that allowed hundreds of weapons to flow to Mexico, and which resulted in the death of a US federal agent.

—–

Click below for the full article.

http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Justice/2013/0514/Will-government-probe-of-AP-phone-records-cost-Eric-Holder-his-job