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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LindyBill who wrote (295367)	3/7/2009 12:52:21 AM
From: unclewest	2 Recommendations Respond to of 793888

This has been tried before and failed. It would be a travesty and a tragedy to attempt it again today. Before trying it again, there ought to be a rule that any civilians working with an ODA are subject to the same rules and disciplinary controls as the soldiers - namely the UCMJ or Uniformed Code of Military Justice. Such a rule will quickly end any more BS about this subject. What the CIA wants and gets from ODAs is situational ground truth. They can and do get that from post-mission debriefings. Besides the above reasons, this is potentially politically disastrous for America. The most dangerous and lethal military organization on earth should never be under the personal control of and secret orders of the most powerful politician in the world. I consider this another attempt by O followers to consolidate power and resources for nefarious reasons. uw armytimes.com news/2009/03/army_sfhearing_030509w Experts call for SOCOM, CIA to share personnel By Sean D. Naylor - Staff writer Posted : Friday Mar 6, 2009 12:28:38 EST Special Forces soldiers and Central Intelligence Agency operatives could soon be moving seamlessly between the military and intelligence realms if Congress follows advice it received Tuesday. The special operations community and the CIA each would benefit from a much closer integration of their personnel, Roger Carstens, a recently retired Special Forces lieutenant colonel who is a non-resident fellow at the Center for a New American Security, and Robert Martinage, senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, told a hearing of the House Armed Services Committee’s terrorism, unconventional threats and capabilities subcommittee. Martinage, who authored an 82-page report titled “Special Operations Forces — Future Challenges and Opportunities” that was published in November, argued for “increased institutionalized cooperation between the CIA and SOCOM [i.e. U.S. Special Operations Command], including hybrid career paths, so people could go back and forth between the two.” “Ideally, personnel should not only be able to move back and forth from CIA stations and SOF ground units, but also to compete for selected mid- and senior-level leadership positions in either organization,” Martinage said. The Defense Department should “migrate Special Forces [units] over to the CIA,” suggested Carstens, who conducted a yearlong study of the U.S. special operations community for CNAS in 2008. “I’m not talking about just onesies and twosies,” he said. “Why not take a Special Forces company and just plop them down in Virginia and say, ‘When you go to that company, you’re spending a three year-long tour working for the agency’?” CIA operatives as well as members of other government agencies, could also serve on A-teams, the 12-man units also known as operational detachments-alpha, or ODAs, that are the lowest echelon of command in Special Forces, Carstens said. Such arrangements would have multiple benefits, they said. What Martinage termed “flexible and routine detailing of SOF personnel” to the CIA would allow special operations forces to use the agency’s Title 50 foreign intelligence authorities, which permit covert activities in which the U.S. role is hidden, he said. The same would be true if a CIA operative was serving on an A-team, according to Carstens, who noted that adding a State Department representative would give the A-team access to authorities under Title 22, the section of the U.S. Code that covers foreign relations. Seconding a Special Forces company to the ground branch of the CIA’s Special Activities Division would give the agency “a resident capability in foreign internal defense, which is not a bad thing,” Carstens said. Foreign internal defense is the training of host-nation security forces in counterinsurgency and related techniques. Any special operators detailed to the agency “would also benefit from being exposed to the tradecraft of National Clandestine Service personnel,” Martinage said in his prepared remarks. Contacted by Army Times, U.S. SOCOM spokesman Ken McGraw declined to answer questions on the relationship between the CIA and special operations forces. “The Central Intelligence Agency is one of U.S. Special Operations Command’s key interagency partners,” he wrote in an e-mail “It would be inappropriate to discuss the details of that partnership or speculate how the CIA and special operations forces may or may not integrate in the future.”

To: LindyBill who wrote (295367)	3/7/2009 1:17:08 AM
From: unclewest	6 Recommendations Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793888

Deception at Core of Obama Plans March 06, 2009 By Charles Krauthammer WASHINGTON -- Forget the pork. Forget the waste. Forget the 8,570 earmarks in a bill supported by a president who poses as the scourge of earmarks. Forget the "$2 trillion dollars in savings" that "we have already identified," $1.6 trillion of which President Obama's budget director later admits is the "savings" of not continuing the surge in Iraq until 2019 -- 11 years after George Bush ended it, and eight years after even Bush would have had us out of Iraq completely. Forget all of this. This is run-of-the-mill budget trickery. True, Obama's tricks come festooned with strings of zeros tacked onto the end. But that's a matter of scale, not principle. All presidents do that. But few undertake the kind of brazen deception at the heart of Obama's radically transformative economic plan, a rhetorical sleight of hand so smoothly offered that few noticed. The logic of Obama's address to Congress went like this: "Our economy did not fall into decline overnight," he averred. Indeed, it all began before the housing crisis. What did we do wrong? We are paying for past sins in three principal areas: energy, health care, and education -- importing too much oil and not finding new sources of energy (as in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the Outer Continental Shelf?), not reforming health care, and tolerating too many bad schools. The "day of reckoning" has now arrived. And because "it is only by understanding how we arrived at this moment that we'll be able to lift ourselves out of this predicament," Obama has come to redeem us with his far-seeing program of universal, heavily nationalized health care; a cap-and-trade tax on energy; and a major federalization of education with universal access to college as the goal. Amazing. As an explanation of our current economic difficulties, this is total fantasy. As a cure for rapidly growing joblessness, a massive destruction of wealth, a deepening worldwide recession, this is perhaps the greatest non sequitur ever foisted upon the American people. At the very center of our economic near-depression is a credit bubble, a housing collapse and a systemic failure of the entire banking system. One can come up with a host of causes: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac pushed by Washington (and greed) into improvident loans, corrupted bond-ratings agencies, insufficient regulation of new and exotic debt instruments, the easy money policy of Alan Greenspan's Fed, irresponsible bankers pushing (and then unloading in packaged loan instruments) highly dubious mortgages, greedy house-flippers, deceitful homebuyers. The list is long. But the list of causes of the collapse of the financial system does not include the absence of universal health care, let alone of computerized medical records. Nor the absence of an industry-killing cap-and-trade carbon levy. Nor the lack of college graduates. Indeed, one could perversely make the case that, if anything, the proliferation of overeducated, Gucci-wearing, smart-ass MBAs inventing ever more sophisticated and opaque mathematical models and debt instruments helped get us into this credit catastrophe in the first place. And yet with our financial house on fire, Obama makes clear both in his speech and his budget that the essence of his presidency will be the transformation of health care, education and energy. Four months after winning the election, six weeks after his swearing in, Obama has yet to unveil a plan to deal with the banking crisis. What's going on? "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste," said Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. "This crisis provides the opportunity for us to do things that you could not do before." Things. Now we know what they are. The markets' recent precipitous decline is a reaction not just to the absence of any plausible bank rescue plan, but also to the suspicion that Obama sees the continuing financial crisis as usefully creating the psychological conditions -- the sense of crisis bordering on fear-itself panic -- for enacting his "Big Bang" agenda to federalize and/or socialize health care, education and energy, the commanding heights of post-industrial society. Clever politics, but intellectually dishonest to the core. Health, education and energy -- worthy and weighty as they may be -- are not the cause of our financial collapse. And they are not the cure. The fraudulent claim that they are both cause and cure is the rhetorical device by which an ambitious president intends to enact the most radical agenda of social transformation seen in our lifetime.