Washington Extra – Obama’s China cloud
A bright spot of Barack Obama’s presidency – foreign policy – all of a sudden was taking some hits as the White House struggled to deal with a crisis involving a Chinese dissident.
Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney blasted away at Obama, talking of a “day of shame for the Obama administration.” Charges – vigorously denied by the White House – swirled that Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng may have been persuaded to leave his protective shelter at the U.S. embassy in Beijing so that high-level U.S.-China talks could go more smoothly. Another scenario being floated was that Obama’s team naively accepted Chinese assurances that Chen would not face government harassment if he rejoined his family at home.
The drama only escalated when Chen himself made an appeal, by telephone to a congressional panel, to come to the U.S.
Obama’s bid for re-election on Nov. 6 is thought to hinge on matters far from China: mainly whether he can convince voters that he is best suited to improve a U.S. economy that has been slow to add jobs in the aftermath of a deep recession. And that’s where Romney and his fellow Republicans are sure to keep most of their focus between now and November.
But today, Obama might have seen Romney’s attacks coming, as well as Chinese officials’ complaints of meddling in the Chen affair. He just may not have expected the stinging criticisms that emerged from some human rights groups.
Here are our top stories from Washington…
New Obama ad suggests Romney wouldn’t have gone after bin Laden
In advance of the May Day anniversary of Osama bin Laden’s assassination, the Obama reelection campaign is out with a new web ad, this one narrated by Bill Clinton who, echoing the words of another former president, praises Obama as “decider in chief.” The bin Laden operation was risky for Obama, Clinton says — if the intelligence was wrong or if the Navy Seals were captured or killed, “the downside would have been horrible” — but “that’s what you hire a president to do. You hire a president to make the calls when no one else can do it.”
The ad contrasts Obama’s action with speculation about whether Romney would have done the same, citing comments he made during the ’08 campaign suggesting it wouldn’t be worth it to spend “billions of dollars, just trying to catch one person.”
Watch the ad, via barackobama.com:
Photo credit: Screenshot/barackobama.com
The downside for Obama if the operation failed? What about the Navy Seals that would lose their lives if the operation failed. All that Obama thinks about is himself and his success. If it had failed, that photo with him sitting near the back of the crowd in the situation room would never have ever been shown to the public. This dude is a pure Narcissist no ifs, ands, or buts.
Washington Extra – Kids, cover your ears
With Washington gripped by a widening Secret Service scandal, reporters just couldn’t steer clear of the salacious story. Soon after spokeswoman Victoria Nuland saluted the handful of underage observers, the questions moved to charges that Secret Service agents and other government workers cavorted with strippers and prostitutes while on overseas assignments. Nuland lamented the topic du jour and one Department employee jokingly moved to cover his daughter’s ears.
The roughly half-dozen kids were models of decorum. There they sat, on the sidelines of the briefing room, staring down at the floor. None asked a question. But they might have been thinking “Mom, Dad, when we get home tonight, you’ll have some explaining to do.”
Here are our top stories from Washington…
US on guard for attacks ahead of bin Laden anniversary – President Obama has reviewed potential threats to the United States ahead of the anniversary next week of the killing of Osama bin Laden, but there is no concrete evidence that al Qaeda is plotting any revenge attacks, the White House said. Bin Laden’s killing last year by U.S. commandos is touted by the Obama administration as one of his top accomplishments and it may help inoculate the president from Republican election-year claims that he is weak on national security. For more of this story by Alister Bull, read here.
Biden knocks Romney for “back to the future” foreign policy – Vice President Joe Biden blasted Mitt Romney’s foreign policy vision as backward-looking and tied to George W. Bush, hammering the presumptive Republican nominee for thinking like a CEO and not like a commander in chief. The remarks were Biden’s latest attempt to define Romney as out of touch with Americans, and his foreign policy critique marked a shift from the Obama campaign’s focus on economic and domestic differences with the president’s Republican rival. For more of this story by Jeff Mason, read here.
Washington Extra – Au contraire
Who knew what when about where?
That is the persistent question about Pakistan after al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden was found practically in the backyard of the country’s military and its capital.
Top U.S. defense officials tried to calm the fury today by saying they had no evidence that anyone in the senior Pakistani leadership had knowledge of bin Laden’s location.
“I have seen no evidence at all that the senior leadership knew. In fact, I’ve seen some evidence to the contrary,” Defense Secretary Robert Gates said.
“And we have no evidence yet with respect to anybody else,” he said. “My supposition is, somebody knew.”
The military-intelligence hunt for bin Laden has morphed into the political hunt for bin Laden’s enabler in Pakistan — if there was one … no evidence so far.
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Down to the wire…
House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan expects his fellow Republicans to wait until the “last minute” to strike a deal that averts national default by raising the $14.3 trillion limit on the U.S. debt.
Failure to reach a deal could trigger a new global financial crisis, according to analysts and Democrats including President Barack Obama. But on Monday, the day the U.S. debt reached its current statutory limit, Ryan told an Illinois AM radio station that “we’re going to negotiate this thing probably up through July, that’s how these things go.”
“That’s how these things go” could place negotiations at the very doorstep of an Aug. 2 deadline, which is when the Treasury Department believes it will exhaust its bag of tricks for staving off a financial apocalypse.
Ryan’s comments came a day after Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell advised CNN’s viewers to see the approaching default deadline as a source of opportunity.
Meanwhile, inflation worries buttressed by still-way-high gas prices are driving U.S. states to consider making silver and gold coins legal tender. South Carolina is the latest to consider legislation to that effect, joining over two-dozen others in a trend that began this month in Utah.
What happens among the states often has a way of entering the circuitry of presidential politics, as Mitt Romney discovered with the healthcare reforms he championed in Massachusetts.
But at the moment, the presidential campaign debate is focused on Medicare, specifically the mini-GOP civil war between Newt Gingrich and Ryan over the latter’s Medicare reform plan. Newt, currently on the defensive, is being taken to the woodshed today by one of the strongest conservative voices in the United States: The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board.
Why keep bin Laden images secret? Have you seen the situation room pictures…
Defense Secretary Robert Gates says friends have sent him humorous versions of the iconic photo of President Barack Obama in the situation room with his national security team watching the raid that killed al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.
Versions with everyone wearing elaborate royal-wedding-style hats.
Versions with extra politicians added in.
Versions with football players.
“This is all harmless and humorous stuff,” he said.
But it is also a lesson in how easily photos can be altered.
Gates says he agrees with Obama’s decision not to publicly release death photos of bin Laden.
Yes, everything is a big conspiracy. What I want to know is where these people were when the Bush administration was raising terror alerts every time Bush’s poll numbers declined or another Republican was being indicted. Where were the deficit turkeys when Bush was spending millions of dollars renting the USS Abraham Lincoln for his “Mission Accomplished” propaganda stunt?
Obama’s poll numbers are climbing for one reason. People are waking up to the fact that Obama does what he thinks is best for the country, while the GOP only does what’s best for the GOP. The people who voted in the last batch of Republicans have the world’s biggest case of buyer’s remorse. Some of them aren’t even waiting for next November to recall them.
So keep throwing the conspiracy theories out there. It only helps the good guys.
Washington Extra – In pursuit
Osama bin Laden is gone, but plenty of questions remain about how the al Qaeda leader evaded an intense decade-long manhunt that ended in a dramatic U.S. raid on a house in Pakistan.
The real breakthrough that led to bin Laden came from a mysterious CIA detainee, Hassan Ghul, according to a Reuters special report published today. It was Ghul who, after years of tantalizing hints from other detainees, finally provided the information that prompted the CIA to focus intensely on finding Abu Ahmed al Kuwaiti, pseudonym for the courier who would lead them to bin Laden.
Fresh from the victory of finding the world’s most wanted man, President Barack Obama wants no let-up in the pursuit of terrorism suspects and surprised everyone by seeking a two-year extension of FBI Director Robert Mueller’s 10-year term.
At a time when Obama is shifting around his national security team, he’s also seeking areas of continuity.
Here are our top stories from Washington…
Special Report: The bin Laden kill plan
Looking to cash in on bin Laden bounty? Forget about it
Now that Osama bin Laden is dead, it doesn’t look like anyone will be claiming the multimillion-dollar bounty the U.S. government put on his head.
White House spokesman Jay Carney signaled that no one was likely to receive the $25 million reward, which the Secretary of State had discretion to double, because it was U.S. intelligence work rather than a tipster that led to the deadly raid on the al Qaeda chief’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, a week ago.
“As far as I’m aware, no one knowledgeably said, ‘Oh, Osama bin Laden’s over here in Abbottabad at 5703, you know, Green Avenue’,” Carney said, drawing laughs at the White House daily briefing.
The question of whether anyone had done enough to earn the reward has been one of intense speculation since a U.S. special forces team shot and killed bin Laden, ending a long manhunt for the world’s most-wanted militant who masterminded the Sept. 11 attacks.
U.S. officials have insisted they tracked bin Laden down mostly by piecing together clues from interrogations, electronic surveillance, satellite imagery and then spying on the compound where he was holed up.
Carney said that the reward isn’t given unless someone had provided the information intentionally — not “accidentally” — that led to bin Laden.
New York lawmakers have a suggestion for what to do with the reward money: give it to the survivors of the Sept. 11 attacks as well as the families of victims.
Gonzales wishes Bush admin had gotten to bin Laden first
Andrew Longstreth in New York interviewed the former Attorney General.
Former U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said he was grateful for the killing of Osama bin Laden even if he would have preferred it to have happened under the Bush administration.
“It was an important day,” Gonzales told Reuters on Wednesday. “We worked very hard to make this come about. I wished it happened under the Bush administration. But I’m grateful it happened when it did.”
Before Gonzales became attorney general, he served as White House counsel. In that position, he ordered a legal memo that was used to justify harsh interrogation techniques of terrorism suspects.
While Gonzales declined to weigh in on the effectiveness of such techniques and said he had no idea whether they helped commandos to find and kill bin Laden, he insisted they were legal and that was paramount to former President George Bush.
“What mattered to him was that they were lawful,” Gonzales said. “If he had been told they were unlawful, it wouldn’t have mattered whether they were effective or not.”
The “enhanced interrogation techniques” Gonzales says are legal are SPECIFICALLY PROHIBITED in the Geneva Convention, which also specifically states that those methods are prohibited under ANY circumstances, and the U.S. entered into that agreement knowingly and willingly. I’m sure the Bush admin wishes Gonzales had gone into the intelligence field so he could tell them what they wanted to hear prior to the invasion of Iraq. I wouldn’t care if leprechauns had shoved their shalele sticks so far up bin Laden’s backside that he glowed in the dark – he’s not dead enough to suit me. If Ganzales had a nonpartisan spine, he’d defend the legality of the SEALS having shot it in a dark, hostile environment without knowing what bin Laden and his Mrs. had hidden under their robes.
Bin Laden’s death relieves U.S. of tough decision about legal prosecution
U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder is probably relieved that al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden was killed during the military operation in Pakistan rather than being captured.
A year ago, Holder drew some scrutiny when Republicans in the House of Representatives questioned him about how bin Laden would be prosecuted if captured, whether in a traditional federal criminal court or a special military court.
Republicans and even some Democrats have opposed federal trials for the foreign terrorism suspects because they would be afforded all traditional U.S. legal rights. Military courts have more relaxed standards for allowing certain evidence to be used during trials and do not require that suspects be advised of their legal rights, such as the right to a lawyer or to remain silent.
Holder has been criticized for attempting to have some of the accused Sept. 11 suspects prosecuted in a federal criminal court and had to back down in the face of intense fury from politicians. A year ago Texas Republican Representative John Culberson questioned whether bin Laden was similar to convicted mass murderer Charles Manson and thus eligible for full U.S. legal rights.
“Well granting Osama bin Laden the right to appear in a U.S. courtroom, you are clothing Osama bin Laden with the protections of the U.S. Constitution. That’s unavoidable,” Culberson said.
“The reality is that we will be reading Miranda rights to the corpse of Osama bin Laden. He will never appear in an American courtroom,” Holder said in response. “That’s a reality. That’s a reality.”
His remarks provoked many questions at the time, a year ago, when seemingly there was no indication that U.S. intelligence agencies were hot on the trail of bin Laden and that the trail had gone cold years ago.
We’re being attacked. Training forces to carry out attacks is an act of war. Their members have declared this war publicly. Regardless they don’t have conventional military forces and weapons. They are not citizens, they are combatants, by their own will. Therefore military law applies. Whenever we get President Obama out of the presidential office, we’ll no doubt get a new Attorney General who can act and carry out his actions and responsibilities be they right or wrong or indifferent. We have a current administration who are all hand picked boot-lickers.
