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Showing posts with label Carl Hulse. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Carl Hulse. Show all posts

Monday, March 20, 2017

A Promise Kept, A Message Delivered: President Trump delivers a much-needed reality check on Germany and Chancellor Angela Merkel re their longstanding failure to honor their NATO pledge. Trump bluntly says what Americans have wanted to hear: It's time for Germany to pay what they owe and live up to their promise. No more excuses!; Anne Applebaum continues to disappoint me

Screenshot of The Drudge Report of March 18, 2017: U Owe Us





Last Friday during her visit to the White House, German Chancellor Angela Merkel received a strong dose of unfiltered President Donald J. Trump, who delivered the reality check he promised to deliver to NATO allies during the 2016 election campaign regarding their longstanding failure to live up to their own past pledges to spend at least 2% of their GDP on their own defense spending. 

 Instead of doing what the U.S. foreign policy elites in Washington wanted him to do, which was to allow this unproductive behavior of Germany -and so many other NATO members- to continue, or, if brought up at all, to talk about it away from the prying eyes of cameras of the U.S. news media and the American people, President Trump delivered on yet another important campaign promise, and did so in an honest away that neither Presidents Obama, Bush or Clinton ever did, that left no room for any misunderstanding.
We are talking about you, Germany.











Spiegel
FEBRUARY 21, 2017
Germany’s Self-Imposed Obstacles to Increasing Defense Spending
Washington is threatening consequences if NATO member states don't increase their defense spending. Germany is the primary focus of the demand. But the Defense Ministry in Berlin is already having trouble spending the money it currently has at its disposal.


By Konstantin von Hammerstein and Peter Müller
http://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/natosource/germany-s-self-imposed-obstacles-to-increasing-defense-spending
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/pressure-on-germany-to-increase-defense-spending-for-nato-a-1135192.html























Message to Brussels: People on the Left in the U.S. and Europe who think that Germany is right on this issue, and that a government foolishly spending money on #ClimateChange but NOT honoring its pledge to its own allies regarding the amount of money it will spend on its own self-defense, are dreaming if they think Americans will support defending any nation that consciously chooses NOT to defend itself.
They won't. Period!




Both before and after I lived and worked in the Washington, D.C. area and was very much involved with then-current passing developments and perspectives from people involved with foreign policy and defense policy in DC, whether at the myriad Think Tanks and non-profits, Left and Right, or at the House Foreign Affairs Committee or the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, I was an admirer of Anne Applebaum, @anneapplebaum, and a longtime reader of her outstanding foreign policy/defense columns in the Washington Post.

 More times than I can count, Applebaum's column was the best thing in the entire newspaper that day, combining genuine insight, forthright candor and an original POV, relative to the stuffy/fussy and self-reverential nature of much of what passes for insight in 99% of the American Foreign Policy establishment, whose journals I subscribed to for years, with walls of past issues that lined my Arlington County garage in banker boxes.

For many years I was, in the abstract, Anne Applebaum's ideal reader: someone who not only devoured her Washington Post columns and shared them with friends around who were very involved in a direct way with foreign policy, but also someone who actually purchased multiple copies of her books with my own money as gifts for friends and colleagues, as opposed to people who bought them on a corporate account.
I even bought copies of the decidedly non-holiday-friendly books, Between East and West: Across the Borderlands of Europe and Gulag: a History.

 (As many of you longtime readers of this blog know, I have a longtime interest in Eastern European history and politics, especially Poland. My maternal ancestors fled Prussian-controlled Silesia and arrived in Texas right before Christmas of 1854, after a three-month boat trip from Bremen, eventually setting in the beautiful Hill Country of Texas and becoming Bandera County Pioneers.)

So, it's with all of that history in mind that I tell you now that it's been VERY disappointing to me the past few years that despite lots of opportunities for her to use her very important and very visible perch at the Washington Post to push for more honest and resolute critical thinking and reporting about the issue of NATO members finally delivering on their promises to pay 2% of their respective GDP for their own defense, she's punted.
Specifically, she's been far too quiet and NOT been publicly critical about Germany's failure.
Not that Gemany is alone, because only 5 of the 18 NATO members hit their marks.



Even worse in my mind, if possible, Applebaum has held her tongue about Germany's incredibly feeble response to the rise of ISIS (ISIL, IS) which I have talked to many of the people reading this blog post about over the years, as well as tweeted about when German-friendly individuals and groups seemed to be trying to give them a pass nd make excuses for them.

Instead of Applebaum being a leader for actively confronting manageable issues that a clear majority of Americans are quite justified in wanting to see FINALLY resolved, she has continued to champion the POV of the Foreign Policy elites in the U.S. and Europe, who are owners of so many broken Conventional Wisdom crystal balls that have not worked properly in many years. 
As Brexit proved to a fare thee well, as I predicted months before last year's June vote in the UK.

 She's exactly the sort of person who ought to be championing Trump on this issue because he happens to be right on the facts and right on the public's perceptions of it being an issue where supposed allies have failed to deliver.

 Plus, Applebaum's too smart to think that Trump and his supporters will simply allow the issue to evaporate. Trust me, Trump supporters like me will tell him that if Germany does not change course in tangible ways in the near-future that Americans can see with their own eyes, he will need to do something publicly to show his displeasure in a way that will leave no room for misunderstanding.

 Is that really what the folks at the German Embassy up on Reservoir Road NW, a place where I spent so much time in the late 1980's and the '90's, and the place that now continues to do such a consistently piss-poor job of public outreach to the U.S. public at large and Congress in particular, wants?
Because the truth is, that day where Trump is pushed into doing something is much closer than they think.
Every day Germany continues status quo brings it closer...

 I continue to be surprised at the large number of usually well-informed people who do NOT know that Germany's response to ISIS has been to dispatch, after more than a year's worth of debate in the Bundestag, 100 UNARMED men in non-combat positions located far from the fighting. 
That's the response of Europe's largest and most economically powerful country?
To place one-hundred unarmed men far from where the fighting against ISIS is? 
Really?

For many well-informed Americans who care about U.S. foreign policy and defense issues, regardless of their party preference, Germany's efforts of late, esp. vs. ISIS, seem incredibly underwhelming and not cause for thinking that cooler heads in Berlin are prevailing.
Just the opposite. :-(

In its own way, this Le Nouvel Observateur article makes the point.





 To which I replied with cool hard facts:

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Tuesday, January 6, 2009

Watch Out CIA Officers: You'll Learn to Hate Leon Panetta, Too!

If we were living in more normal times, which is to say, one where the MSM wasn't both rolling out the red carpet AND keeping their natural curiosity in suspended animation for a president-to-be that, for the better part of two years, they treated more like a college classmate who succeeded than an actual candidate, I'd say you ought to expect to see and hear a lot of anti-Panetta stories and anecdotes bubbling up from Washington and California from former staffers of his.

Perhaps even some from friends of mine from my days in D.C., since I know about 6-8 people who worked on Capitol Hill in some capacity for him, none, by the end, happily.

When we'd get together to do things on weekends, whether going to movies, 'road trips' or heading up to Oriole Park at Camden Yards for Oriole games -I had a 13-game mini-season
ticket plan, plus bought 6-7 additional sets of other individual game bleacher tickets for a total of 20 games a year- when there was a pause in the conversation, some of them often liked to bring up anecdotes about Panetta.

They especially liked those featuring Panetta screwing other Members of the House over left
and right, yet others getting the blame when the deal/project/bill eventually soured or withered on the line, largely because of his image as a reasonable guy.
They never ever suspected it was Panetta.

(Sometimes, I was told, so that he could end up being the 'voice of reason' and be the person who got to bring everyone back together again, the sort of thing that a David Gergen or David Broder would wax rhapsodic about, unaware that he was the one who "blew it up."
This is an old tactic, of course, and Panetta hardly had a patent on it.

The purpose of this tactic, depending on your assumed pecking order in the group to begin with, was to prove how invaluable you are. That you can compromise, "reach across the aisles," etc.
The result often being that the people who originally thought there was a done deal to begin with, would accord you a favor in the future, or, actually listen to some idea/bill proposal of yours in the future about some matter or another that they'd generally not be so interested in, but they owed you now, so...)

When these friends of mine worked for him, they thought this was a positive trait and often hysterically funny -not so much afterwards!

Panetta's carefully-crafted "image" as the reasonable guy was belied by the fact that he always had among the highest staff turnovers on the Hill -even for a Democrat from California.

It would've been one thing if he were in a tough competitive district, and constantly had to re-adjust his staff composition in order to accomplish something for the folks back home in the district, whatever that was, strategy-wise or fundraising-wise, but he wasn't.

Thanks to the dastardly genius gerrymandering of Congressman Phil Burton, which made the largest state in the country the least competitive for elections, see 
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1282/is_n6_v41/ai_7483113/pg_1 , Panetta was in a snug-as-a-bug-in-a-rug Democratic Congressional District (CD), while lots of other House Democrats I knew or dealt with regularly, who, in my opinion were smarter, more hard-working, more geared towards realistically confronting difficult issues -and a lot more pleasant to work with- had to actually worry about getting re-elected in their competitive districts, like two people I was very well-acquainted with.

Sam Gejdenson from Connecticut, who served on the House committee I closely followed
the entire time I was in Washington, where I knew the Members and was friends with many of the the staffers, the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

This was under both Chairman Dante Fascell and Lee Hamilton, both of whose CDs I lived in during the 1980's, which some of you reading this may've already thought of, if you've thought about what I've written here over the past two years and where I've lived: greater Miami and Bloomington.

Or former Bloomington mayor and congressman Frank McCloskey, whose southern Indiana, Evansville-based CD was one of the most bitterly fought congressional districts in the country, over and over for a decade. http://www.arlingtoncemetery.net/fxmccloskey.htm

Frank McCloskey was mayor of Bloomington when I moved from Miami to Hoosierville in the Fall of 1979, and then as well as later when he was on Capitol Hill, when I'd swing by his friendly office every so often to say hi to him and some of his staffers, he was a personable and stand-up guy who continually stood up to bullies, no matter how powerful and no matter where they were.

He personally caused President Clinton and the White House lots of grief when he would not go quietly and follow the Dem leadership and abandon Bosnia to the nonsensical whims of Warren Christopher's State Dept, who were opposed to lifting the arms embargo, even as Serbian troops committed genocide.

McCloskey may've lost his congressional seat, but he never ever lost his dignity or willingness to fight the good fight for the underdog.

Leon Panetta? Um... not so much while he was in the Congress.   

Weeks, months or even years later, when I'd discreetly mention the Panetta anecdotes to others, in Washington-area places as varied as suburban Chevy Chase or at Joe Theisman's very popular restaurant in Old Town (Alexandria) opposite the Old Town Metro station, people would invariably say in response, "Oh Dave, you think THAT'S bad, do you know about the time Panetta..."

In fact, once on a date with my then-girlfriend up at Red Sea, the fabulous Ethiopian restaurant in Adams Morgan -a restaurant I fell in love with after one of my Arlington housemates, who was from Ethiopia, took me to- after I related an anecdote about Panetta that had been recently told to me by a friend and former staffer, a person seated at the next table to us turned around and said completely out of the blue, "Are you talking about Leon Panetta?"

I nodded, sort of unsure of what I'd let myself in for, having thought my voice had been low enough not to be overheard outside of our table.
This nattily-dressed stranger leaned towards us, cupped his hand and said: "Panetta is a real prick to work for and to be around.  Period!"

I just sorta laughed, relieved that it hadn't turned into an embarrassing social situation, and fortunately, my girlfriend laughed, too.

I suspect that someone as politically savvy as Dianne Feinstein, who has had to deal with Panetta for a LONG time, knows FAR BETTER than anyone else in D.C. how likely him at Langley will be an albatross around our nation's neck from an intelligence and security point-of-view.  I know that I certainly will see him as such if he somehow manages to gets confirmed as Director there.

Not that it's really been mentioned anywhere yet, but I'd love to see someone with resources really go over the list of corporate contributors to the Panetta Institute with a fine tooth comb.

No doubt, lots of well-heeled folks he met while he was on the Board of Directors at the New York Stock Exchange!

I guess he was qualified for that sort of position from having been OMB Director, huh?

In a related matter, I also wanted to share with you this excerpt of a New York Times dispatch 
from late Monday night, written by Mark Mazzetti and Carl Hulse:

Mr. Deutch, now a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said there would have been good reasons for Mr. Obama to select a C.I.A. veteran to lead the agency. But Mr. Deutch also cited the examples of John McCone in the Kennedy administration and George Bush in the Nixon administration as cases in which outsiders became "two of the agency's most successful directors."

While I wouldn't say that Carl and I were "friends" per se, he and I probably had a few hundred conversations over the 15 years I was in D.C., and he and I were on pretty good terms while he was in a management position -not a reporting role- at the Times' D.C. bureau at 1627 Eye Street, where as I've mentioned here before, I spent LOTS of time.

(Carl was also the first and only serious person to ever tell me he'd never go back to a MLB game after the '94 baseball strike wiped out the World Series. I thought he was joking at first since he knew how often I went up to Camden Yards, and knew how much I despised Peter Angelos, the Orioles majority owner, but Carl was serious in a way about refusing to shell out money for tickets in a way that dopey guys interviewed in sports bars by dim-witted local TV sports reporters, aren't. 
Carl kept his promise and didn't go to a ballgame again, even after the strike ended and play returned in the 1995 season, almost 14 years ago.
Don't know whether he's since gone to a Washington Nationals game, since they moved into town from Montreal after I left the Washington area.)

Since I subscribed to the New York Observer before they had an online operation and the Times didn't have a subscription at 1627, I used to make a copy of the funny and often snarky Media columns in the Observer, or an especially great piece by Ron Rosenbaum -now at popular website, pajamasmedia.com and http://pajamasmedia.com/ronrosenbaum/- of which there were so many, and then give them to Carl when I saw him, or slipped them under his office door when I'd stop by to see a friend who worked there in the building, or to pick up my issue of Daily Variety.

Because the area I worked at in D.C. was a few blocks outside their tiny next-day delivery zone in D.C., a friend at 1627 let me use them as a mailing address for the courier to drop them off in the morning at the concierge's desk, just a few hundred feet away from Jack Valenti's office down at the MPAA., 
That was the place where I always wanted to work, since it would've combined so many interests of mine in one job, plus, I know I'd have done a great job there. 

(If you never met him, Mr. Valenti was someone whom everyone along that street had a kind word for, as he was extremely friendly in the Texas way he'd been raised -like my older relatives
in Bandera I imagine- and would say hello to seemingly everyone he passed as he walked over
to the CVS on 17th Street, and people would do double-takes coming out of the Farragut West Metro station there as he passed by wearing those sharp suits and his trademark deep tan.
The regular folks he'd see day-after-day, month-after-month in the neighborhood, at the hot dog stand on Conn. & Eye St., or the folks waiting for their suburban commuter bus to Virginia, always waved at him, even from across the street, something folks in D.C. rarely ever did.  I must've seen that happen at least two hundred times, if I saw it happen once.)

Maureen Dowd and I both had subscriptions to the Gotham edition of Daily Variety that were delivered to the building first thing in the morning, so sometimes, if I didn't swing by there after getting off the Farragut West Metro before she got in, she'd pick up my copy by mistake if she didn't look carefully at the mailing labels, and I'd then have to take hers.

(This was back around the time when Mike Kinsley used to come by 1627 a lot more, and we'd sometimes talk about her enigmatic personality down in the lobby, while she kept him waiting!
I'm pretty sure that was more or less after Michael quit co-hosting the popular CNN public events show Crossfire.
Maureen could be so frustrating and confounding, seemingly treating people who genuinely cared about her, worse than strangers.
My sense of things, from seeing her up-close in person a few times a week for years at a time, and speaking to her every so often, even doing her a favor or two, was that she, like many successful women, really doesn't handle compliments well, in her case, ones that are in print. And I wasn't alone in that sentiment in that building.  At least pre-2003.)

I have a read hard time understanding why Carl and his colleague would choose to quote someone the likes of John Deutsch on national security and the CIA, since he is someone
who had his own top secret government clearance removed by George Tenet (when he
headed the CIA) because of Deutsch's disgraceful inability to follow common sense security
rules -and the rumors his son accessed porn sites on Deutsch's take-home laptop- well, let's just say that a very curious choice for an expert, given what we actually know about him.

It's a choice I wouldn't have made, given the choice of all the people in the world who would and could speak on the topic.
________________________________________
U.S. Probe Of Former CIA Chief Expands
By David A. Vise and Vernon Loeb
Washington Post Staff Writers September 16, 2000

John M. Deutch, who has admitted mishandling classified information while serving as
director of the CIA, is now under investigation for similar security violations when he
previously held high-level posts in the Defense Department, according to confidential
documents and officials familiar with the case.

Deutch allegedly used unsecured computers at home and his America Online account
to access classified defense information in the early to mid-1990s, the documents,
compiled as part of a Pentagon probe, show. The alleged violations occurred before
and after Deutch issued a February 1995 memo reminding Defense Department
employees that only "properly reviewed and cleared" information should be placed
on computer systems accessible to the public.

"We find his conduct in this regard particularly egregious in light of existing DOD policy
directives addressing the safeguarding of classified information," an internal Pentagon
memo said. "This situation was exacerbated because Dr. Deutch, while serving as the
[deputy secretary of defense], declined departmental requests that he allow security
systems to be installed in his residence.

"The evidence we obtained clearly establishes that Dr. Deutch failed to follow even the
most basic security precautions," the memo added.

Deutch's attorney, Terrence O'Donnell, did not return a telephone call for comment
yesterday.

Deutch served as defense undersecretary for acquisitions and technology from April 1993
to March 1994, when he became deputy defense secretary, a job he held until he was
appointed CIA director in 1995. He left the CIA in December of the following year.

Two days after Deutch retired from the CIA, agency computer personnel discovered
classified information stored on government computers at Deutch's home. After a
series of investigations, Deutch admitted the security breach, apologized for violating
CIA policy and was stripped of his security clearances.

Initially, the Justice Department decided not to prosecute Deutch. But earlier this year,
Attorney General Janet Reno decided to review the matter after criticism that Deutch
had received much more favorable treatment than former Los Alamos nuclear scientist
Wen Ho Lee.

Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), a member of the Judiciary Committee, confirmed
that the probe had been widened and challenged the Justice Department to take a
hard look at Deutch's alleged repeat violations.

"This is now a pattern," Grassley said. "Evidently, Mr. Deutch is a congenital downloader
of classified information. It will be interesting to see how the Justice Department deals
with this case, especially in light of the Wen Ho Lee case."

Paul E. Coffey, the retired prosecutor tapped by Reno earlier this year to review the
matter, has been briefed on Deutch's alleged use of computers at home, and has
expanded his investigation to include Deutch's years at the Pentagon.

Coffey has told Justice Department officials that he believes charges should be brought
against Deutch for improperly handling classified documents on unsecure computers
that were linked to the Internet, sources said.

Coffey's recommendation has not made its way from the Criminal Division to Reno,
who will make the decision on how to handle the case, sources said.

Generally, cases similar to Deutch's have not led to criminal charges but have been
handled through administrative sanctions. Reno recently declined to comment specifically
on Deutch's case.

There is no evidence that computer hackers or spies obtained classified information as a
result of Deutch's actions. It is not clear from the documents precisely what kinds of
information Deutch was working with. But among the computer files were Deutch's daily
journal, which included information on the range of military operations for which he was
responsible.

Some of the computers Deutch used were given away or sold by the Defense Department
as surplus property and ended up in various places, including a scrap metal dealer in
Baltimore and a university in Florida.

Senior advisers to Reno have expressed concern about the appearance of a double standard
when the Deutch case is compared with Lee's. The former Los Alamos National Laboratory
scientist, accused of 59 felony counts of downloading nuclear secrets to unsecured computers
and portable tapes, was released from jail earlier this week after receiving an apology from
a federal judge, who said the Justice Department's handling of the case had "embarrassed
our entire nation."

Lee pleaded guilty to a single felony count of mishandling classified information and agreed
to cooperate with investigators by answering questions about what happened to the tapes.

Deutch developed regular work habits at the Defense Department and the CIA that led him
to use a variety of unsecured computers at home while carrying computer memory cards
and disks in his shirt pocket, government documents show.

One unanswered question is the whereabouts of some floppy disks he used to store classified
military and intelligence data until he determined he needed more memory space and
transferred the information to larger personal computer memory cards.

A probe by the CIA inspector general determined that Deutch had four of these cards
containing nearly 100,000 pages of information, including the daily journal he kept.

Deutch used numerous government-owned Macintosh computers at his home in Bethesda
while serving in the high-level Defense Department posts, and several of those recovered
by investigators contained a "significant amount" of military information, according to the
documents. "Several witnesses told us that none of the computers . . . were designated to
store classified data," an internal Defense Department memo said.

Deutch and his family members used government-owned computers at his home to access
his America Online account, according to government documents.

Deutch acknowledged to investigators that before becoming CIA director, he was aware of
the principle requiring physical separation of classified and unclassified computers. However,
Deutch said he believed that when he deleted a document, the information was no longer
recoverable and that his general practice was to copy documents onto floppy disks and delete
the initial file.

But computer experts told investigators that each time Deutch updated his journal, his
computer automatically created a temporary file that was stored on the hard drive of the
computer and would have been available to hackers when he accessed the Internet via
America Online.

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