Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) announced that the White House has agreed to provide the Senate Intelligence Committee access to all of the Justice Department drone memos dealing with the targeting of Americans.
The fight over the drone memos has delayed the confirmation of John Brennan to be CIA Director.
The Committee will finally vote on his nomination later today.
The Senate Intelligence Committee will vote on John Brennan’s nomination for CIA Director on Thursday. We’ll see how many senators get pissy about wanting to see the drone memos and how many are successfully distracted by the bright shiny object of Benghazi emails.
The full Senate is expected to vote next week.
Interesting story up at the National Journal* explaining why the President doesn’t want to show the House and Senate Intelligence Committees all of the Justice Department drone memos. The article says it’s because they “contain secret protocols with foreign governments, including Pakistan and Yemen, as well as ‘case-specific’ details of strikes.”
The Administration believes that even if released just to certain members of Congress, the sensitive information would become public and embarrass the governments we have protocols with, which may include additional countries like Mali and Algeria.
This would explain why the Administration is supposedly trying to get John Brennan’s nomination for CIA out of the Senate Intelligence Committee by giving up some Dem votes over the drone memos and going for GOP votes by giving them more info on Benghazi.
National security issues can create some strange bedfellows!
* “What’s in the Secret Drone Memos,” Michael Hirsh and Kristin Roberts
I despise Charles Krauthammer’s reflexive and mindless bashing of the President — he’s bright enough to know that much of what he says is pure BS. But I’m with Charles 110% on the drone war. I’m just sorry that he manages to justify Obama’s policy without giving Obama any credit for following it.
From “In defense of Obama’s drone war,” WaPo:
“1. By what right does the president order the killing by drone of enemies abroad? What criteria justify assassination?
“Answer: (a) imminent threat, under the doctrine of self-defense, and (b) affiliation with al-Qaeda, under the laws of war.
“Imminent threat is obvious. If we know a freelance jihadist cell in Yemen is actively plotting an attack, we don’t have to wait until after the fact. Elementary self-defense justifies attacking first.
“Al-Qaeda is a different matter. We are in a mutual state of war. Osama bin Laden issued his fatwa declaring war on the United States in 1996; we reciprocated three days after 9/11 with Congress’s Authorization for Use of Military Force — against al-Qaeda and those who harbor and abet it.
“Regarding al-Qaeda, therefore, imminence is not required. Its members are legitimate targets, day or night, awake or asleep. Nothing new here. In World War II, we bombed German and Japanese barracks without hesitation.
“2. But Awlaki was no ordinary enemy. He was a U.S. citizen. By what right does the president order the killing by drone of an American? Where’s the due process?
“Answer: Once you take up arms against the United States, you become an enemy combatant, thereby forfeiting the privileges of citizenship and the protections of the Constitution, including due process. You retain only the protection of the laws of war — no more and no less than those of your foreign comrades-in-arms.
“3. Who has the authority to decide life-and-death targeting?
“In war, the ultimate authority is always the commander in chief and those in the lawful chain of command to whom he has delegated such authority.
“This looks troubling. Obama sitting alone in the Oval Office deciding which individuals to kill. But how is that different from Lyndon Johnson sitting in his office choosing bombing targets in North Vietnam?
“Moreover, we firebombed entire cities in World War II. Who chose? Commanders under the ultimate authority of the president. No judicial review, no outside legislative committee, no secret court, no authority above the president.
“Okay, you say. But today’s war is entirely different: no front line, no end in sight.
“So what? It’s the jihadists who decided to make the world a battlefield and to wage war in perpetuity. Until they abandon the field, what choice do we have but to carry the fight to them?”
“Drone strikes are an innovation in anticipatory self-defense, requiring careful oversight and a high threshold for action. They are also a technology that allows the most discriminate application of force in the history of warfare. That the use of drones protects U.S. troops from risk is a virtue. And the targeting of American citizens who are fighting for the enemy is neither new nor forbidden by the laws of war. At least eight American volunteers for the Waffen SS were killed during World War II. Should their U.S. citizenship have earned them membership in a special, protected category of combatant?
“This, of course, is the essence of the matter. If America is in an ongoing war against al-Qaeda and associated groups, then the rules of war apply, Yemen and the Afghanistan/Pakistan border are battlefields, and al-Qaeda operatives are lawful targets. This is the position taken by both the Bush and Obama administrations, consistent with America’s inherent right of self-defense and the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force.
“Labeling Obama as ‘judge, jury and executioner’ is his critics’ prerogative. But defending the country is not their responsibility. It is easy for those without executive authority to dismiss risks that are prospective. After a terrorist attack on America, the critics would likely be silent, hoping that no one recalled their complacency.” Emphasis added.
Michael Gerson, “Obama’s drone policy, rooted in self-defense,” WaPo
President Obama announced today, after meeting with Afghan President (or as I think of him, Kabul Mayor) Hamid Karzai, that our troops will move to a support role in the spring.
He didn’t announce troop levels either between now and the end of 2014, when the war is supposed to end, or beyond 2014, when we may leave a lower level of troops under a new bilateral agreement.
Obviously our troops, currently at 66,000, are in less danger if they play a support role, but I’d still like to get them the hell out of there ASAP. Even if our government were running a surplus, I still wouldn’t want to waste any more American lives and healthy brains and limbs on this hopeless effort.
Forget the counter insurgency. That requires a strong, stable central government, which Afghanistan still doesn’t have despite our decade of sacrifice. Focus on counter terrorism. That requires drones and special forces, which we have in abundance.
After 9/11, we kicked out Al Qaeda in a few months, without a lot of ground troops. We can do it again if we have to — and again and again.But the Taliban isn’t interested in coming after us, they just want to run Afghanistan, so they have no reason to let Al Qaeda have the safe haven they did before. Lessons learned all around.
We have to let Afghanistan go back to the war lords and the poppy growers. The Pashtuns will support the Taliban and the non-Pashtuns will fight them. And we will go after Al Qaeda wherever they are.
Those who oppose Chuck Hagel for DoD, and either whisper or shout that he is anti-Israel/anti-Semitic are really saying that to be pro-Israel, you have to support absolutely everything that Benjamin Netanyahu wants and stands for.
It’s like saying that you’re anti-American unless you support the GOP or anti-British unless you support the Tories.
Suddenly support for Israel is limited to support for its far right.
By this bizarre standard there are a whole lot of folks in Israel and politicians in its Knesset who are anti-Israel and anti-Semitic.
Senators like John McCain and Lindsey Graham and newbie Ted Cruz are afraid of Hagel. They want to stay in Afghanistan forever, and they know that Hagel will argue to get out sooner than the end of 2014, which is what this war-weary country wants.
Now sometimes being war-weary doesn’t mean you’re right, sometimes you have to suck it up and stick it out, but in this case, the mood of the country matches the strategic reality that we have nothing to gain by staying longer in Afghanistan.
The Hagel haters also fear that he will be an effective spokesman for making DoD more efficient. They can see him on the Sunday talk shows convincingly arguing that some weapons systems can be eliminated, that the defense budget can be cut without making us less safe. They can see him authoring cogent op-eds that will sway opinion leaders.
I am excited about the combo of Hagel at DoD and Brennan at CIA. Brennan is our Drone Guy, and he and Hagel will continue to fight the War on Terror the way it needs to be fought, with more drones and special forces, not tens of thousands of troops stuck manning mountain outposts while Al Qaeda finds other homes.
As Al Qaeda and its affiliates move and spread, we have to be as flexible as they are. We had as many drone strikes in Yemen in 2012 as we did in Pakistan because we are taking the fight to the enemy. There is talk of drone strikes in Mali (and maybe they are happening as I write this) because that’s where Al Qaeda is.
Obama, Hagel, and Brennan get it. They see the big picture of how everything fits together. They see the importance of our relationship with Pakistan, frustrating and infuriating as it is. They see how the war in Iraq destabilized the region and upset the balance of power by taking away Iran’s biggest rival and constraint. Now Iran and Iraq are friends, and Iran is freer to pursue its dreams of hegemony in the region. Hagel is a realist like Bush 41, who recognized that we should kick Iraq out of Kuwait, but not continue to Baghdad because we were better off with Saddam Hussein in power.
The Pentagon has just submitted its semi-annual report to Congress on Afghanistan, “Report on Progress Toward Security and Stability in Afghanistan,” covering the period from April through September, and it’s same-old, same-old.
Only one of the 23 Afghan Army brigades can function independently, there is more violence now than when we began the surge two years ago, the Afghan government is hopelessly corrupt, the Taliban is still strong, and Pakistan is still providing safe havens for them.
It’s never going to get better, and we just need to get the hell out of there ASAP. We can’t keep pouring American dollars and blood down this rat hole. Drones and special forces, people, not 68,000 U. S. troops defending nothing in the middle of nowhere.
In his foreign policy speech today at Virginia Military Institute, Mitt showed how out of touch he is with American voters, not just on economic issues, but on military ones as well.
He said that he would have stayed longer in Iraq, when the country as a whole is glad to be out of there: “America’s ability to influence events for the better in Iraq has been undermined by the abrupt withdrawal of our entire troop presence.”
Strategically, we’d be better off today with Saddam Hussien in power as a bulwark and counter-weight to Iran. The problem isn’t that we left, it’s that we went there in the first place.
Mitt said that he won’t be bound by Obama’s promise to get out of Afghanistan by the end of 2014, when the country as a whole would like to get out even sooner: “I will evaluate conditions on the ground and weigh the best advice of our military commanders.”
If Mittens thinks we want to lose more lives and limbs and healthy brains, thinks we want to waste more money we don’t have in either Iraq or Afghanistan, he has no clue how the American people feel about these wars.
The terrorists who threaten us have long since moved on from Afghanistan — across the border to Pakistan, north to Yemen and Somalia — and a big ground war there makes absolutely no sense. This is a war for special forces and drones.
As for Iran’s nuclear quest, where Mitt has criticized Obama for not being tough enough, he spoke of sanctions, not military action: “I will not hesitate to impose new sanctions on Iran and will tighten the sanctions we currently have.” Iran has made it clear that sanctions won’t deter their nuclear ambitions. So Mitt’s saying he’d do more of a failed policy.
Both Reuters and CNN are now confirming that a U. S. drone strike in Pakistan has killed Al Qaeda’s #2, Abu Yahya al-Libi.
I hope he enjoys his 72 virgins as much as I enjoy his no longer being on this planet.
Al Qaeda is having to spend much more effort trying to avoid our drones than they are plotting attacks against us, which is fine with me.
President Obama doesn’t get anywhere near the credit he should for his aggressive and successful drone campaign. It makes the left queasy, and it makes the GOP mad that he’s stealing their thunder on national security. But I’m really impressed, and history will be too.
If this is how you “apologize” for America, keep those apologies raining down on our enemies.
Embattled Farmers 