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No Gutsy Call on the Osama bin Laden Mission
Today, Time magazine got hold of a memo written by then-CIA head Leon Panetta after he received orders from Barack Obama’s team to greenlight the bin Laden mission. Here’s the text, which summarized the situation:
Received phone call from Tom Donilon who stated that the President made a decision with regard to AC1 [Abbottabad Compound 1]. The decision is to proceed with the assault.
The timing, operational decision making and control are in Admiral McRaven’s hands. The approval is provided on the risk profile presented to the President. Any additional risks are to be brought back to the President for his consideration. The direction is to go in and get bin Laden and if he is not there, to get out. Those instructions were conveyed to Admiral McRaven at approximately 10:45 am.
This, of course, was the famed “gutsy call.” Here’s what Tom Hanks narrated in Obama’s campaign film, “The Road We’ve Traveled”.
HANKS: Intelligence reports locating Osama Bin Laden were promising, but inconclusive, and there was internal debate as to what the President should do.
VICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: We sat down in the Situation Room, the entire national security apparatus was in that room, and the President turns to every principal in the room, every secretary, “What do you recommend I do?” And they say, “Well, forty-nine percent chance he’s there, fifty-one … it’s a close call, Mr. President.” As he walked out the room, it dawned on me, he’s all alone. This is his decision. If he was wrong, his Presidency was done. Over.
Only the memo doesn’t show a gutsy call. It doesn’t show a president willing to take the blame for a mission gone wrong. It shows a CYA maneuver by the White House.
The memo puts all control in the hands of Admiral McRaven – the “timing, operational decision making and control” are all up to McRaven. So the notion that Obama and his team were walking through every stage of the operation is incorrect. The hero here was McRaven, not Obama. And had the mission gone wrong, McRaven surely would have been thrown under the bus.
The memo is crystal clear on that point. It says that the decision has been made based solely on the “risk profile presented to the President.” If any other risks – no matter how minute – arose, they were “to be brought back to the President for his consideration.” This is ludicrous. It is wiggle room. It was Obama’s way of carving out space for himself in case the mission went bad. If it did, he’d say that there were additional risks of which he hadn’t been informed; he’d been kept in the dark by his military leaders.
Finally, the memo is unclear on just what the mission is. Was it to capture Bin Laden or to kill him? The White House itself was unable to decide what the mission was in the hours after the Bin Laden kill, and actually switched its language. The memo shows why: McRaven was instructed to “get” Bin Laden, whatever that meant.
President Obama made the right call to give the green light to the mission. But he did it in a way that he could shift the blame if things went wrong. Typical Obama. And typical of him to claim full credit for it, when he didn’t do anything but give a vague nod, while putting his top military officials at risk of taking the hit in case of a bad turn.
The above is word for word from HERE.
(see, Obama and his campaign are lying like hell about “Obama got Osama”)
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Public Intelligence
Most of the public discussion surrounding the use of drones both internationally and domestically has focused on issues of privacy or civilian casualties. Due to the technical complexity of drone operations, there has been little media examination of the practical feasibility of widespread domestic drone deployment. In February, the FAA Reauthorization Act of 2012 was signed into law clearing the way for more than 30,000 domestic drones by 2020. The law requires the FAA to create procedures for commercially-operated drones by 2015 and enables law enforcement agencies to operate small-scale drones at low altitudes. While this has a number of negative implications for the right to privacy, such as the lack of any laws governing the usage of data collected via drones, the thought of a future where U.S. skies are filled with an array of drones has a much larger, more practical problem: is it even logistically possible to operate thousands of pilot-less aircraft in the domestic airspace?
Lost-Links
The first set of problems that will likely plague any attempt at the widespread use of drones inside the U.S. relate to frequency allocation and electromagnetic interference (EMI). In order to be controlled from a remote location, drones must communicate via with a ground control station via some sort of data link. In order for this link to be maintained, there must be protection against electromagnetic interference that can disrupt the communications link. If the interference is sufficient in scale, it can lead to what is called a lost link event causing the drone to lose contact with its operator. Sometimes the link is reestablished and the pilot is able to maintain control of the drone. Sometimes the link cannot be reestablished and the drone is effectively turned into a zombie that can drift far from its intended target, as may have occurred recently with the RQ-170 captured by Iran in December 2011.
A U.S. Air Force Scientific Advisory Board report from April 2011 obtained by Public Intelligence warns of the potential vulnerabilities of communications links used for remotely piloted aircraft (RPAs): “Limited communications systems result in communications latency, link vulnerabilities, and lost-link events, which limits mission roles assigned to RPAs, operational flexibility, and resiliency in the face of unanticipated events.” The report notes that there are a “wide range of methods that a determined adversary can use for attacking RPA guidance and navigation systems” such as constructing “simple GPS noise jammers” that “can be easily constructed and employed by an unsophisticated adversary.”
From HERE.
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Twitter Fun – #Say Something Nice About Obama
#SaySomethingNiceAboutObama was trending worldwide yesterday. Conservatives couldn’t resist. Here’s a taste:
#SaySomethingNiceAboutObama He is a GREAT Poker player But be aware he plays with RACE CARDS
He tracks those who criticize him thru #AttackWatch because he cares.#saysomethingniceaboutobama
RT @imstudwell: #SaySomethingNiceAboutObama He discovered the new earthquake region in Washington DC and named it Bush’s Fault.#tbrs
#saysomethingniceaboutobama When Barack called us ‘stupid, bitter clingers’ he said it in a nice tone of voice.
“@MattDycus: He knows at least 7 more states than you do.#SaySomethingNiceAboutObama” Illusion, Confusion, Delusion, Allusion, and??
#SaySomethingNiceAboutObama He’s so nice! He loaned $700 billion of our taxes to the banks & they don’t even need to pay us interest! -__
Read it all HERE.
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Wanna know the most common discussion among bloggers when they Pow wow? It’s about how pathetic the GOP apparatus is.
The right will piss and moan about left-wing media bias while they do absolutely nothing about it. It is painful to read about all the funding that left-wing blogs get from on high. It is more painful to know that extremely effective bloggers are barely subsisting, and as a result the country is poised to dramatically shift left forever. Bravo. The phrase “penny wise pound foolish” would be a vast understatement.
Stacy McCain does some simple math -
If you ask me how much conservative journalism we need, my answer is one simple word: “More.”
Yet for some reason, the people would write the checks always seem to think we’ve already got enough conservative journalism. Why is it, one wonders, that conservative donors always seem more eager to lavish millions on GOP political campaigns — including doomstruck losers — than on building a stronger online New Media apparatus?
My friend Jimmie Bise Jr. once pointed out that permatanned Florida RINO Charlie Crist raised $4.3 million in a single three-month span of 2009 for what anyone with an IQ above room temperature could see was a doomed senatorial campaign.
Do these dimwit Republican donors have any idea — anything even in the remote proximity of a f–king clue — how much reporting $4.3 million would buy? In case you weren’t paying attention earlier, Salon has persisted for more than 15 years with an estimated annual net loss of $1.5 million, and at one point had about 30 staffers.
So the $4.3 million Republican donors pissed away on Charlie Crist’s worthless Senate campaign might have been enough to run a decent online news/opinion magazine for three years.
The basic math isn’t complicated, people. Look at the expenditures for four Republican presidential campaigns:
Tim Pawlenty ………….. $5.0 million — Quit: Aug. 14, 2011
Herman Cain ………….. $16.2 million — Quit: Dec. 3, 2011
Michele Bachmann …… $9.0 million — Quit: Jan. 4, 2012
Rick Perry ……………… $19.3 million — Quit: Jan. 19, 2012Four candidates, two of whom quit before the first votes were cast, and two others who quit before the South Carolina primary, who between them raised and spent a total of $49.5 million.
Ask yourself, “How much journalism would $49.5 million buy?”
I’ll give you a rough estimate: Suppose that the average cost of employing one news staffer (including benefits and expenses) was $80,000. For $49.5 million, you could hire a staff of 60 people and employ them for 10 years even if you never collected a dime of revenue from advertising — and have $1.5 million left over, maybe to throw a really rockin’ Christmas party every year.
At a more modest level, a million bucks a year would hire a staff of 12 and leave a cushion of $40,000 for additional expenses (promotions, marketing, fees to freelancers, etc.). And for what was spent on those four GOP primary campaigns, you could fund four such operations for 10 years and still leave $9.5 million laying around.
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Again, shows you just how out of touch the obama regime is! They can not understand what is happening, just understand their own liberal/marxist/islamic viewpoint!
On Friday Vice President Joe Biden offered Turkey’s Islamist government a leading role in the Middle East, despite its recent crackdown on dissidents, expansion of Islamic culture and education, and regional conflicts with Greece and Israel.
“We’re looking for Turkish leadership in the rest of that entire region,” Biden declared at a fundraiser attended by roughly 200 people from the Turkish and Azerbaijani communities, according to a White House pool report.
“It’s a model as to how you can have an Islamic population, an Islamic state and a democracy, something the rest of the region is groping to figure out how to do,” he told the audience, who paid up to $2,500 each to attend the fundraiser.
Since last June Turkey’s Islamist government, led by Recep Erdogan, “has restricted freedom of expression, association, and assembly with laws that allow authorities to jail its critics for many months or years while they stand trial for alleged terrorism offenses on the basis of flimsy evidence,” according to a January report by the left-wing group Human Rights Watch.
The Turkish government’s Islamist policies also clash with Biden’s progressive policies, and with American culture and laws in general.
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