Afghanistan: US Defense Secretary Panetta had talks with Afghan President Hamid Karzai at the Pentagon on Thursday. Panetta told the media the two countries were “at the last chapter” in their effort to rebuild Afghanistan's institutions and security. Panetta said, “We've come a long way towards a shared goal of establishing a nation that you and we can be proud of, one that never again becomes a safe haven for terrorism.”
Comment: Panetta was playing to the gallery… or the mainstream American media. The situation in Afghanistan is not so rosy that anyone should be proud or thumping his or her chest or doing a victory lap.
Unless Congress achieves a deal to head off the revised schedule for across-the-board spending cuts, the Defense Department in March will be forced to begin rotating monthly furloughs of all 791,000 of its civilian employees, a prominent budget analyst said on Wednesday.
“This would be a contracting nightmare for DoD because civilian contracting officers would be furloughed for a month,” Todd Harrison, senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, told reporters.
Using “back of the envelope” calculations interpreting the new American Taxpayer Relief Act, he said the roughly 8.8 percent cut that would kick in under the sequestration penalties would have “a real impact” on the $70 billion a year spent on the civilian workforce — the equivalent of a 15 percent cut over the remaining seven months of the fiscal year.
“There’s no way to avoid it unless Congress changes the law,” Harrison said in releasing a new paper on the impact of the so-called fiscal cliff that projects revised cuts aimed at the Pentagon of about $48 billion in fiscal 2013. “Not all the furloughs would happen at the same time,” he said, but planners should decide soon who would be furloughed in what month and make it public “to help inform public debate so we could make a good decision as a nation on what we are going to do.”
Here’s your ridiculous poll of the day: Public Policy Polling recently asked people if they had a higher opinion of Congress or a long series of highly unpleasant or unpopular things. As it turns out, people really don’t like Congress. At all.
According to the survey, people prefer root canals and traffic jams to John Boehner and the clown college (no offense to clowns) that is the United States Congress. Below is a sad look at some awful things Americans like more than Congress:
Root canals
NFL Replacement refs
Head lice
Nickelback
Colonoscopies
Washington DC political pundits
Carnies
Traffic Jams
Cockroaches
Donald Trump
France
Genghis Khan
Used-car salesmen
Brussels Sprouts
But it’s not all bad news for Congress. Here are a few things Congress is more popular than:
Unfortunately for the Obama regime, this report says, and the reason for another “tragic event” needing to happen, is that the “official story” about the Sandy Hook Massacre, like nearly all such events before it, is beginning to break down in the light of critical scrutiny and analysis.
CIA's Publications Review Board (PRB) and its small staff perform a balancing act more than 300 times a year, navigating a process sanctioned by the US Supreme Court to clear the writing of Agency authors for nonofficial publication. The challenge: to balance CIA's secrecy agreement with the Bill of Rights. Business is brisk, as a growing number of former CIA employees seek to become published authors–especially former operations officers reflecting on their clandestine careers abroad.
According to some observers, several well-known manufactures of guns have died recently, and in one case, police declare the death a homicide.
“John Noveske is one of the most celebrated battle rifle manufacturers in America. His rifles, found at www.NoveskeRifleworks.com are widely recognized as some of the finest pieces of American-made hardware ever created. (I own one of his rifles, and it's a masterpiece of a machine that just keeps on running.) Sadly, John Noveske was killed in a mysterious car crash just a few days ago, on January 4, 2013.
“John Noveske wasn't the first prominent gun rights supporter to be killed in the last few days. Keith Ratliff, the creator of a super-popular YouTube channel featuring videos of exotic weapons, was also recently found dead. The Daily Mail reports that Ratliff was “discovered on a rural road in Carnesville, Georgia. Ratliff had a single gunshot wound the head and police are treating his death as a homicide.” Someone murdered Ratliff, in other words, and it had to be someone with the ability to get close enough to Ratliff to take him out without warning.”
“…the widely-discredited CNN journalist Piers Morgan, wanted for questioning in Britain's Daily Mirror phone hacking scandal, invited guests onto his show who threatened Alex Jones' children and laughed about the idea of Piers Morgan shooting Alex Jones with an AR-15.”
Cambridge, Mass. — IN the last week, the American public has been reminded of the Central Intelligence Agency’s contradictory attitude toward secrecy. In a critique of “Zero Dark Thirty,” published last Thursday in The Washington Post, a former deputy director of the C.I.A., Jose A. Rodriguez Jr., defended the use of waterboarding and said that operatives used small plastic bottles, not buckets as depicted in the film, to carry out this interrogation method on three notable terrorists. On Sunday, The New York Times reported on the Justice Department’s case against a former C.I.A. officer, John C. Kiriakou, a critic of waterboarding who faces 30 months in prison for sharing the name of a covert operative with a reporter, who never used the name in print.
The contrast points to the real threat to secrecy, which comes not from the likes of Mr. Kiriakou but from the agency itself. The C.I.A. invokes secrecy to serve its interests but abandons it to burnish its image and discredit critics.
Over the years, I have interviewed many active and retired C.I.A. personnel who were not authorized to speak with me; they included heads of the agency’s clandestine service, analysts and well over 100 case officers, including station chiefs. Five former directors of central intelligence have spoken to me, mostly “on background.” Not one of these interviewees, to my knowledge, was taken to the woodshed, though our discussions invariably touched on classified territory.
Somewhere along the way, the agency that clung to “neither confirm nor deny” had morphed into one that selectively enforces its edicts on secrecy, using different standards depending on rank, message, internal politics and whim.
I am no fan of excessive secrecy, or of prosecuting whistle-blowers or leakers whose actions cannot be shown to have damaged American security. The C.I.A. needs secrecy, as do those who place their lives in the agency’s hands, but the agency cannot have it both ways.
Afghanistan: US Defense Secretary Panetta had talks with Afghan President Hamid Karzai at the Pentagon on Thursday. Panetta told the media the two countries were “at the last chapter” in their effort to rebuild Afghanistan's institutions and security. Panetta said, “We've come a long way towards a shared goal of establishing a nation that you and we can be proud of, one that never again becomes a safe haven for terrorism.”
