The American Emperor - The President of the United States of America

To be honest I doubt if things will be any worse under Obama then they would have been under Mitt Romney.

No I don't think Mitt Romney is any less of a crook or tyrant then President Obama is, I just wanted a change in my masters.

Kind of like a slave wanting to get rid of his old master who will be replaced by a new master. In either case the slave will lead the same lousy life. The only question is will the slaves life be slightly better with a new master rather then the old master.

OK, if I had a real choice I would have wanted the Libertarian guy Gary Johnson to become the President.

That is despite the fact that I was screwed over by the Arizona Libertarian Party.

I don't think the problem is with the Libertarian platform, but rather the problem is there are a bunch of hypocrites in the Arizona Libertarian Party who are not really Libertarians.

If the people in the Arizona Libertarian Party that screwed me over would have behaved like Libertarians and followed the NIFF principle I would not have been screwed over.

Dow loses 313 in post-election sell-off

NEW YORK - Wall Street greeted a second Obama term the way it greeted the first.

Investors dumped stocks Wednesday in the sharpest sell-off of the year. With the election only hours behind them, they focused on big problems ahead in Washington and across the Atlantic Ocean.

Frantic selling recalled the days after Obama’s first victory, as the financial crisis raged and stocks spiraled downward.

Four years later, American voters returned a divided government to power and left investors fretting about a package of tax increases and government spending cuts that could stall the economic recovery unless Congress acts to stop it by Jan. 1.

In Europe, leaders warned that unemployment could remain high for years, and cut their forecasts for economic growth for this year and 2013. The head of the European Central Bank said not even powerhouse Germany is immune.

The Dow Jones industrial average plummeted as much as 369 points, or 2.8 percent, in the first two hours of trading. It recovered steadily in the afternoon, but slid into the close and ended down 313, its biggest point drop since this time last year.

“It does look ugly,” said Robert Pavlik, chief market strategist at Banyan Partners LLC. He said it was hard to untangle the impact of Europe-related selling from nerves about the nation’s fiscal uncertainty.

It was the worst day for stocks this year, but not the worst after an election. That distinction belongs to 2008, when Barack Obama was elected at the depths of the financial crisis. The Dow fell 486 points the next day.

This time, energy companies and bank stocks took some of the biggest losses. Both industries would have faced lighter, less costly regulation if Mitt Romney had won the election.

Stocks seen as benefiting from Obama’s decisive re-election rose. They included hospitals, suddenly free of the threat that Romney would roll back Obama’s health care law.

The blue-chip average hit bottom at 6,547 in March 2009, less than two months after Obama took office.

Then it doubled over the next three-plus years as the crisis eased and a fragile economic recovery took root.

Things were looking so good that until recently, some analysts were betting on when the market might hit an all-time high.

Of course, the market today is far less precarious than it was in 2008. The financial system has stabilized. Europe appears to be serious about tackling its debt crisis, despite frequent setbacks.

The housing market appears to be coming back, and the economy has added jobs for more than two and a half years.

On the day after the 28 other presidential elections since 1900, the stock market has gone up 13 times and down 15 times, according to research by Bespoke Investment Group, a market research company.

The best day-after performance was in 1900, another re-election. The Dow jumped more than 3 percent on the day after William McKinley won a second term, according to Bespoke.

With the 2012 election over, traders turned to Europe’s increasingly sickly economy, dragged down by a debt crisis for more than three years. The 27-country European Union said unemployment there could remain high for years.

The European Commission, the executive arm of the EU, said that it expects the region’s economic output to shrink 0.3 percent this year. In the spring, the group predicted no change.

For next year, the commission predicted 0.4 percent growth, barely above recession territory. It predicted 1.3 percent last spring.

Renewed focus on European economic problems also pushed the price of oil down $4.27 per barrel, its biggest decline of the year, to finish at $84.44, the lowest since July 10.

The Dow closed down 312.95 points, or 2.4 percent, at 12,932.73 — its first close below 13,000 since Aug. 2.

The Standard & Poor’s 500 index fell 33.86 points, or 2.4 percent, to 1,394. That was the broader index’s first close below 1,400 since Aug. 30.

U.S. stock futures had risen overnight after Obama cruised to victory. They turned sharply lower after the European forecasts and discouraging comments from Mario Draghi, president of the European Central Bank.

Now that the U.S. election has been resolved, it’s natural for traders to focus on Europe’s problems, said Peter Tchir, who manages the hedge fund TF Market Advisors.

What they’re tuning in to, he said, is the failure of a major European summit last week and minimal progress on the issues that are holding the region back.

“People can only digest one or two stories at a time, and people had put Europe on the back burner” before the election, he said.

Obama’s win followed a costly campaign that blanketed markets with uncertainty about possible changes to tax rates, government spending and other issues seen as crucial to the prospects of some industries and the broader economy.

As jitters about the election subsided, traders confronted an ugly reality: The so-called fiscal cliff, which will impose automatic tax increases and deep cuts to government spending at the end of the year unless the president and Congress reach a deal.

That’s no easy task for a deadlocked government whose overall composition has barely changed — a Democratic president and Senate and a Republican House.

If Congress and the White House don’t reach a deal, the spending cuts and tax increases could total $800 billion next year. Some economists say that could push the economy back into recession.

“Obama’s re-election does not change the bigger economic or fiscal picture,” Paul Ashworth of Capital Economics, an economic research company, said in a note to clients.

Fitch Ratings offered a warning Wednesday about the perils facing the U.S. If Obama does not quickly forge agreement with Congress to avert the fiscal cliff, the credit rating agency said, it may strip the U.S. of its sterling AAA credit rating.

The government’s failure to come up with a plan to reduce the deficit led Standard & Poor’s to cut its rating of long-term U.S. Treasury securities last year from a sterling AAA to AA+. It was the first-ever downgrade of U.S. government debt.

Tobias Levkovich, a financial analyst at Citi Research, told clients Wednesday that a compromise on taxes and spending was likely in mid- to late January, but that stocks will probably fall in the meantime.

A deal early next year is much more likely “once the political class begins to negotiate realistically and as the consequences … are too costly for either party to ignore,” he wrote.

European markets closed sharply lower, with benchmark indexes in France and Germany losing 2 percent. Italy lost 2.5 percent; Spain lost 2.3 percent.

As traders streamed into lower-risk investments, the yield on the 10-year Treasury note plunged to 1.64 percent from 1.75 percent late Tuesday. A bond’s yield declines as demand for it increases.

Big, publicly traded hospital companies soared because of expectations that they will gain business under the health care law, known as ObamaCare. HCA Holdings leapt 9.4 percent, Tenet Healthcare 9.6 percent, Community Health Systems 6 percent and Universal Health Services 4.3 percent.

Not all hospital companies are expected to benefit. Many serve patients who will be covered by Medicaid plans that generally do not cover the full cost of care provided by hospitals.

Health insurance stocks sank, defying many analysts’ expectations. ObamaCare will expand coverage of the uninsured in 2014, giving insurers millions of new customers. But the overhaul also imposes fees and restrictions on the companies, potentially threatening their profitability. Humana slid 7.9 percent, UnitedHealth Group 3.8 percent, Aetna 4.2 percent and Wellpoint 5.5 percent.

With Obama seeking to restrain the growth of military spending, defense companies could struggle to win government contracts. Their stocks fell sharply: Lockheed Martin lost 3.9 percent, Northrop Grumman 4.6 percent and General Dynamics 3.9 percent.

Among the 10 industry groups in the S&P 500 index, financial stocks and energy companies fell the most.

Banks figure to face tougher regulation in a second Obama term than they would have under Romney. JPMorgan Chase fell 5.6 percent, Citigroup 6.3 percent, Bank of America 7.1 percent, Goldman Sachs 6.6 percent and Morgan Stanley 8.6 percent.

The biggest losers were coal companies, which had hoped that a Romney administration would loosen mine safety and pollution rules that make it more costly for them to operate. Peabody Energy dived 9.6 percent, Consol Energy 6.1 percent, Alpha Natural Resources 12.2 percent and Arch Coal 12.5 percent.

Trading also reflected the outcome of ballot measures decided in Tuesday’s election. After two states approved the recreational use of marijuana for the first time, Medical Marijuana Inc., a company too small to be listed on major exchanges, surged 22 percent.

Other notable moves included Apple, the world’s most valuable company. It fell 3.8 percent to $558.00 and has dropped 20 percent from its all-time high of $705.07, reached Sept. 21.

Stocks turn lower on Wall Street

NEW YORK — Stocks slid on Wall Street Thursday, a day after the Dow Jones industrial average logged its biggest one-day drop of the year, as investors fretted about the potential for gridlock in Washington.

The Dow was down 20 points to 12,910 as of 11:30 a.m. The Standard and Poor’s 500 index fell three points to 1,392 and the Nasdaq composite slipped six to 2,931.

The Dow plunged 313 points Wednesday, its fifth worst one-day drop following a U.S. presidential election. The biggest, in 2008, came in the midst of the financial crisis on the day after President Barack Obama won his first term.

The sell-off came the day after Obama was elected for a second four-year term as investors turned their focus back to Europe’s problems and the so-called fiscal cliff, a package of tax increases and government spending cuts in the U.S. that could stall the economic recovery unless Congress acts by Jan. 1.

“The thinking before the election was that it would remove some of the uncertainty, but it seems to have done the opposite,” said Tyler Vernon, chief investment officer at Biltmore Capital Advisors in Princeton, New Jersey.

Investors were encouraged by two reports on the U.S. economy that came out before the market opened. The Dow climbed as much as 48 points but started to sink after the first hour of trading.

The Labor Department reported that the number of people seeking unemployment benefits fell 8,000 last week to 355,000, a possible sign that the job market is healing. Officials cautioned that the figures were distorted by Superstorm Sandy.

A separate report showed that the U.S. trade deficit narrowed to its lowest level in almost two years as exports rose to a record high.

There was also encouraging news from Europe, where leaders shocked markets a day earlier with a dire forecast for economic growth next year.

European Central Bank head Mario Draghi said financial market confidence “has visibly improved” as the 17-country group that uses the euro struggles with its debt crisis. But he said the outlook for the economy remains “weak.” Draghi spoke after the bank’s governing council left its key interest rate unchanged at 0.75 percent.

The European Commission, the executive arm of the European Union, on Wednesday slashed its outlook for growth for this year and 2013. The report helped set off a sharp decline in stocks in the U.S and Europe.

— Energy drink maker Monster Beverage sank $2.41 to $42.56 after the company said its revenue growth slowed in the third quarter.

— Dean Foods rose 88 cents to $16.96 after the company reported a third quarter profit of $36 million for the third quarter, compared with a $1.5 billion loss in the same period a year earlier.

— Burger chain Wendy’s rose 25 cents to $4.51 after the company said that a key sales figure rose. Revenue at restaurants open at least 15 months rose 2.7 percent, the sixth straight quarter of growth.

Using statistics to win elections??

Obama campaign's investment in data crunching paid off

In effect who wins the election is NOT the so called "will of the people", but the special interest group that gets the most people to vote for their cause.

I suspect that if the Libertarian party got two percent of the registered voters to become hard core Libertarians who voted in every election we could consistently win elections.

And I am sure the same statistical techniques could be used in an election to legalize marijuana.

CHICAGO — Early on election day, in two tightly tucked-away rooms at Obama headquarters known as the Cave and the Alley, the campaign's data-crunching team awaited the nation's first results, from Dixville Notch, a New Hampshire hamlet that traditionally votes at midnight.

Dixville Notch split 5-5. It did not seem an auspicious outcome for the president.

But for the math geeks and data wizards who spent more than a year devising sophisticated models to predict which voters would back the president, Dixville Notch was a victory. Their model had gotten it right, predicting that about 50% of the village's voters were likely to support President Obama.

Daniel Wagner, the 29-year-old chief analytics officer, erupted in joy. The model was also projecting that Obama would be reelected. And as the night wore on, swing state after swing state came in with results that were very close to the model's prediction.

For the nation, last Tuesday was election day. For Wagner's crew, it's now known as Model Validation Day.

"We're kind of a weird bunch of kids," he said, standing near the Cave, where one wall was covered with a large canvas of a Martian landscape. "I haven't seen the sun in a while. We worked brutally inhuman hours this cycle. Twenty-hour days, often. But they bet a lot on us being right. And it was good to be right."

For years, campaigns have used reams of information to predict voter behavior, relying on a science known as analytics. But Obama's advisors elevated the practice to new heights, very likely changing the way presidential campaigns will be conducted in the future.

No other presidential campaign has so completely embraced this science. The campaign hired a team that topped out at 54 people and invested undisclosed millions in the effort. Analytics helped the campaign efficiently recruit volunteers, buy ads, tailor emails and mailers, raise money, dispatch surrogates — and, most importantly, scour the swing states for hard-to-find voters most likely to support the president.

Political guru David Plouffe and campaign manager Jim Messina made key decisions based on real-time reports from the geek squad, according to many people on the campaign's staff.

"Our entire goal is to make the maximum use of our time and our volunteers' time. And that means using analytics across the campaign spectrum," Messina said after the election. "We invested unprecedented resources to do this because our entire theory was to get as micro-targeted — to get as close to the ground — as we could."

Another campaign official, who asked not to be named because he was not authorized to speak for the campaign, put it this way: "It's about turning over control to some nerds. And more than any other year, campaign leadership really took that leap of faith."

For campaign professionals, that is a major leap. Politics long has been ruled by truisms, conventional wisdom and intuition, with millions spent based on a murky mix of polling and focus groups. The shift to data-driven decision-making has been gradual and steady — becoming increasingly sophisticated as political parties amass more information about individual voters through traditional means, such as polls, and new ones, such as data mining.

The Obama campaign has made the transition over two elections. In this one, it employed analytics in a far more systematic and thorough way, officials said. But the work was a closely guarded secret. Officials denied requests for interviews with the analytics experts, and when journalists visited Obama headquarters, the team was ordered to shut the Cave door.

At its most basic, Messina, Wagner and others explained, the goal was to rank individual voters in the swing states based on their likelihood of voting for the president or of being persuaded to vote for him, to volunteer for his campaign and to vote early. The Obama campaign developed separate models for each.

To build the "support model," the campaign in 2011 made thousands of calls to voters — 5,000 to 10,000 in individual states, tens of thousands nationwide — to find out whether they backed the president. Then it analyzed what those voters had in common. More than 80 different pieces of information were factored in — including age, gender, voting history, home ownership and magazine subscriptions.

Much has been made of the last type of data — the tastes or trends that divide Democrats and Republicans. But Obama officials downplayed the impact of consumer habits, claiming the more important information is the most basic and publicly available.

It's not about subscriptions to "Cat Fancy" magazine, Wagner joked as he scribbled on a white board, blinking through his rectangular glasses. The most important data, he said, was the Democratic National Committee's database, containing voting history and demographic information, as well as feedback from contacts with individual voters going back to 1992, such as whether a voter warmly received a door-to-door canvasser or shut the door curtly.

The campaign compared the data on individual voters with the "support model" and ranked voters from 1 to 100, which told the campaign where to focus its turnout efforts.

The notion of a campaign looking for groups such as "soccer moms" or "waitress moms" to convert is outdated. Campaigns can now pinpoint individual swing voters. "White suburban women? They're not all the same. The Latino community is very diverse with very different interests," Wagner said. "What the data permits you to do is to figure out that diversity."

One of the campaign's most powerful tools was its "persuasion model," which sifted through millions of voters that the DNC had labeled as not very partisan to find those most likely to be won over to Obama's side.

In Obama's 2008 campaign, as in most campaigns, these "middle partisans" were assumed to be swing voters and were heavily targeted. But in reality, many are partisan conservatives, and many more don't vote.

So early this year, the Obama campaign called more than 10,000 voters in the category and talked to them about the president's views on healthcare and taxes, the official said. Then it called those voters back a few days later to find out if their opinions had shifted. The campaign analyzed those who had moved toward Obama to find out what they had in common and, from those results, created a separate model of persuadable voters for each swing state.

A data director applied the model to the voter databases and generated lists of voters to be contacted. Those were put in the hands of canvassers who were also armed with a script tailored to an individual voter's pet issues.

The Obama campaign even found voters to target in ruby-red precincts, a break from earlier campaigns when solidly partisan precincts were simply written off.

Among its many decisions driven by data, the campaign chose to stick it out in Florida, even though polls and conventional wisdom raised doubts about Obama's odds in the GOP-tilted battleground.

Just weeks before the election, the analytics team's assessment suggested a 30% to 40% chance of winning the state, Wagner said. But after the team added information about roughly 250,000 new voter registrations, the projection shifted, showing that 80% of the new registrants would vote and they would heavily support Obama.

When the computers spat out this data, indicating that Obama was likely to win in Florida, a howl went up from the Cave. A mathematician from the University of Alabama started it off with the 'Bama fighting words, "Roll Tide!"

Two days before the election, the president went to Florida to bolster that turnout — and ended up narrowly winning the state.

Days after election day, Obama campaign workers were packing up, pulling flags off the ceiling and pictures off the wall.

But the Cave still hummed with computers. The decor was still up, including the landscape of Mars, its presence explained by a printout taped next to it. In a July 2011 Wall Street Journal column, Peggy Noonan, a conservative author who wrote speeches for President Reagan, mocked an Obama campaign hiring notice for specialists in "predictive modeling/data mining."

With the Martian scene behind him, Andrew Claster, an economist and deputy chief, pored over exit polls and early vote data. Nearby, Rayid Ghani, the team's chief data scientist, tried to discern more about how to motivate people online. It's part of an ongoing effort to mine the data for future Democratic campaigns and causes.

"What we've had since '06 and especially since '08," Wagner said, "is a change in how people think about this information and how they use it."

Mitt Romney was using the same math & statistics - but it didn't work as well

Insiders Explain How Mitt Romney's Campaign Completely Fell Apart On Election Day

As conservatives search for an explanation for Mitt Romney's loss, much of the blame has been directed at the collapse of his campaign's Election Day get out the vote efforts, a massive organizational failure that resulted in lower Republican turnout than even John McCain got in 2008.

A major source of Romney's GOTV problems appears to have been the disastrous Project ORCA, an expensive technological undertaking that was supposed to provide the campaign with real-time poll monitoring that would allow Republicans to target GOTV efforts on Election Day.

In the week leading up to the election, Romney campaign spokesperson Andrea Saul told Business Insider that ORCA was "the Republican Party’s newest, most technologically advanced plan to win the 2012 election," touting it as the game-changer that would blow even the Obama campaign's sophisticated GOTV system out of the water.

But on almost all counts, ORCA failed miserably. In a fascinating piece for Ace of Spades, Romney poll-watcher John Ekdahl describes a perfect storm of technology problems that made the ORCA app unusable and left scores of Republican volunteers " wandering around confused and frustrated" on Election Day.

Worse still, Ekdahl told Business Insider that the Romney campaign failed to provide poll-watching volunteers in his region — Jacksonville, Florida, a key Republican city in a major swing state — with proper credentials and accurate voter strike lists, rendering them unable to perform their duties even if the ORCA app had worked.

In interviews with Business Insider last week, sources close to the Romney campaign confirmed Ekdahl's account, and described a technological undertaking that failed at every level. According to several of these sources, ORCA was developed by a small, isolated tech team working under Romney's political team. These sources told Business Insider that the product was never properly beta-tested, and wasn't revealed to the rest of the campaign — including the digital team — until the week of the election.

Most people on the campaign "weren't that surprised" by ORCA's failure, said one Republican communications strategist close to the Romney campaign.

"They wouldn't let anyone outside of Romney political circle in on it until basically November 6," the strategist said. "The digital strategy was so incomprehensible — they were playing Super Nintendo while Obama's people had PS3."

"Their priorities were so screwed up — [they were] hypersensitive about information security, but also wanted to use the best technology they could," the strategist continued. "In the end they got neither. They put out a laughable GOTV product."

Another Republican activist, an attorney in Hamilton County, Ohio who declined to be named for fear of "burning bridges," told Business Insider that the campaign's GOTV organization in that crucial swing county completely collapsed in the weeks leading up to the election.

In an interview last week, the attorney, one of the "Lawyers for Romney" who volunteered to help the campaign's legal team by watching the polls on Election Day, described how the Romney campaign sent its legal volunteers the wrong training information, failed to provide volunteers with information about where they were supposed to be on Election Day, and stopped responding to phone calls and emails in the final two weeks of the campaign.

"It was basically a disaster," the attorney said. "They never explained what we were supposed to be doing — where we were supposed to start, where we were supposed to end, what I was supposed to do at the end of the night — they didn't explain any of it.... A month before, you couldn't get a phone call or an email answered."

"Four out of eight of my polling places didn't have a poll observer," the attorney continued. "How you don't even get people credentialed properly is beyond my comprehension."

The Romney campaign did not respond to Business Insider's request for comment on the campaign's Election Day issues.

While we may never know what really happened inside the Romney campaign's Election Day collapse, the Ohio attorney's story, taken with the accounts from Ekdahl and people close to the Romney campaign, paint a picture of a campaign in disarray.

It appears that in its singular focus on competing technologically with the Obama campaign, the Romney team neglected to adequately account for and organize the essential human element necessary to any grassroots undertaking. Thus when its technological efforts failed, the campaign was left without a Plan B, and its volunteers were forced to fly blind at the moment the campaign needed them most.

"I think sometimes people get enamored of technology and they take people out of the mixture because its easier," Republican strategist Dave Carney told Business Insider. "I think there'll be a lot of soul-searching and review of those processes and see what really makes a difference."

Obama signs secret directive to help thwart cyberattacks

President Obama has signed a secret directive that effectively enables the military to act more aggressively to thwart cyberattacks on the nation’s web of government and private computer networks.

Presidential Policy Directive 20 establishes a broad and strict set of standards to guide the operations of federal agencies in confronting threats in cyberspace, according to several U.S. officials who have seen the classified document and are not authorized to speak on the record. The president signed it in mid-October.

The new directive is the most extensive White House effort to date to wrestle with what constitutes an “offensive” and a “defensive” action in the rapidly evolving world of cyberwar and cyberterrorism, where an attack can be launched in milliseconds by unknown assailants utilizing a circuitous route. For the first time, the directive explicitly makes a distinction between network defense and cyber operations to guide officials charged with making often rapid decisions when confronted with threats.

The policy also lays out a process to vet any operations outside government and defense networks and ensure that U.S. citizens’ and foreign allies’ data and privacy are protected and international laws of war are followed.

“What it does, really for the first time, is it explicitly talks about how we will use cyber operations,” a senior administration official said. “Network defense is what you’re doing inside your own networks. . . . Cyber operations is stuff outside that space, and recognizing that you could be doing that for what might be called defensive purposes.”

The new policy, which updates a 2004 presidential directive, is part of a wider push by the Obama administration to confront the growing cyberthreat, which officials warn may overtake terrorism as the most significant threat to the country.

“It should enable people to arrive at more effective decisions,” said a second senior administration official. “In that sense, it’s an enormous step forward.”

Legislation to protect private networks from attack by setting security standards and promoting voluntary information sharing is pending on the Hill, and the White House is also is drafting an executive order along those lines.

James A. Lewis, a cyber expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, welcomed the new directive as bolstering the government’s capability to defend against “destructive scenarios,” such as those that Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta recently outlined in a speech on cybersecurity.

“It’s clear we’re not going to be a bystander anymore to cyber attacks,” said Lewis.

The Pentagon now is expected to finalize new rules of engagement that would guide commanders when and how the military can go outside government networks to prevent a cyberattack that could cause significant destruction or casualties.

The presidential directive attempts to settle years of debate among government agencies about who is authorized to take what sorts of actions in cyberspace and with what level of permission.

An example of a defensive cyber operation that once would have been considered an offensive act, for instance, might include stopping a computer attack by severing the link between an overseas server and a targeted domestic computer.

“That was seen as something that was aggressive,” said one defense official, “particularly by some at the State Department” who often are wary of actions that might infringe on other countries’ sovereignty and undermine U.S. advocacy of Internet freedom. Intelligence agencies are wary of operations that may inhibit intelligence collection. The Pentagon, meanwhile, has defined cyberspace as another military domain — joining air, land, sea and space — and wants flexibility to operate in that realm.

But cyber operations, the officials stressed, are not an isolated tool. Rather, they are an integral part of the coordinated national security effort that includes diplomatic, economic and traditional military measures.

Offensive cyber actions, outside of war zones, would still require a higher level of scrutiny from relevant agencies and generally White House permission.

The effort to grapple with these questions dates back to the 1990s but has intensified as cyber tools and weapons become ever more sophisticated.

One of those tools was Stuxnet, a computer virus jointly developed by the United States and Israel that damaged nearly 1,000 centrifuges at an Iranian nuclear plant in 2010. If an adversary should turn a similar virus against U.S. computer systems, whether public or private, the government needs to be ready to preempt or respond, officials have said.

Since the creation of the military’s Cyber Command in 2010, its head, Gen. Keith Alexander, has forcefully argued that his hundreds of cyberwarriors at Fort Meade should be given greater latitude to stop or prevent attacks. One such cyber-ops tactic could be tricking malware by sending it “sleep” commands.

Alexander has put a particularly high priority on defending the nation’s private sector computer systems that control critical functions such as making trains run, electricity flow and water pure.

But repeated efforts by officials to ensure Cyber Command has that flexibility have met with resistance — sometimes from within the Pentagon itself — over concerns that enabling the military to move too freely outside its own networks could pose unacceptable risks. A major concern has always been concern that an action may have a harmful unintended consequence, such as shutting down a hospital generator.

Officials say they expect the directive will spur more nuanced debate over how to respond to cyber incidents. That might include a cyberattack that wipes data from tens of thousands of computers in a major industrial company, disrupting business operations, but doesn’t blow up a plant or kill people.

The new policy makes clear that the government will turn first to law enforcement or traditional network defense techniques before asking military cyber units for help or pursuing other alternatives, senior administration officials said.

“We always want to be taking the least action necessary to mitigate the threat,” said one of the senior administration officials. “We don’t want to have more consequences than we intend.”

Romney: Obama won election because of 'gifts'

In fact the Founders talked about this in the Federalist and Anti-Federalist Papers.

Mitt Romney told donors Wednesday he blamed last week’s loss to President Barack Obama in part to “gifts” the Obama administration gave to key voter blocs, including African Americans, Hispanics and young women, according to media reports.

“The president’s campaign focused on giving targeted groups a big gift — so he made a big effort on small things. Those small things, by the way, add up to trillions of dollars,” Romney said on a conference call with donors, the Los Angeles Times first reported.

The “gifts,” according to Romney, included forgiving college loan interest, free contraceptive coverage and the part of Obamacare that allows people 26 and younger to be covered under their parents’ health care plans.

“You can imagine for somebody making $25,000 or $30,000 or $35,000 a year, being told you’re now going to get free healthcare, particularly if you don’t have it, getting free healthcare worth, what, $10,000 per family, in perpetuity. I mean, this is huge,” Romney said, the New York Times reported.

“Likewise with Hispanic voters, free healthcare was a big plus,” Romney added. “But in addition with regards to Hispanic voters, the amnesty for children of illegals, the so-called Dream Act kids, was a huge plus for that voting group.”

“I’m very sorry that we didn’t win,” he said. “I know that you expected to win, we expected to win, we were disappointed with the result, we hadn’t anticipated it, and it was very close but close doesn’t count in this business.”

More on using math and statistics to win elections

I suspect if we could get 1 percent of the population to become hard core Libertarian that vote in every election the Libertarian party could easily start winning lots of elections. Again that is base on the fact that when so few people vote, the groups that get their voters to the polls will win the election even thought they usually don't represent the total population. Cops and teachers do it all the time to get their bonds passed.

“I AM not a number. I am a free man!” was the famous cry of prisoner Number Six, who could never escape his Kafkaesque village on the 1960s television show “The Prisoner.” This is a prescient cry for an era when numbers follow us everywhere. Jim Messina, the victorious Obama campaign manager, probably agrees that you are not a number. That’s because you are four numbers.

The Obama campaign assigned all potential swing-state voters one number, on a scale of 1 to 100, that represented the likelihood that they would support Mr. Obama, and another number for the prospect that they would show up at the polls. A third metric evaluated the odds that an Obama supporter who was an inconsistent voter could be nudged to the polls, and a fourth score estimated how persuadable someone was by a conversation on a particular issue (which was, of course, also determined by crunching more numbers).

Mr. Messina is understandably proud of his team, which included an unprecedented number of data analysts and social scientists. As a social scientist and a former computer programmer, I enjoy the recognition my kind are getting. But I am nervous about what these powerful tools may mean for the health of our democracy, especially since we know so little about it all.

For all the bragging on the winning side — and an explicit coveting of these methods on the losing side — there are many unanswered questions. What data, exactly, do campaigns have on voters? How exactly do they use it? What rights, if any, do voters have over this data, which may detail their online browsing habits, consumer purchases and social media footprints?

How did Mr. Obama win? The message and the candidate matter, of course; it’s easier to persuade voters if your policies are more popular and your candidate more appealing. But a modern winning campaign requires more. As Mr. Messina explained, his campaign made an “unparalleled” $100 million investment in technology, demanded “data on everything,” “measured everything” and ran 66,000 computer simulations every day. In contrast, Mitt Romney’s campaign’s data operations were lagging, buggy and nowhere as sophisticated. A senior Romney aide described the shock he experienced in seeing the Obama campaign turn out “voters they never even knew existed.” And that kind of ability matters: while Mr. Obama did win decisively, the size of his lead in four states that determined the outcome, Florida, Ohio, Virginia and Colorado, was about 400,000 votes — or about 1.2 percent of the eligible voters.

The confluence of marketing and politics goes back a long way. A blizzard of direct mail engineered by political consultants is credited with defeating President Harry S. Truman’s national health care proposal after World War II. The new methods, however, are not just better direct mail. Noxious TV ads and slick mailers are like machetes compared with the scalpels of social-science-based big-data. The crude methods may still work to soften the ground and drown out other voices, but in the end they are still very big sticks. Sometimes they kill the patient — just ask swing-state voters about the TV ads they were bombarded with.

The scalpels, on the other hand, can be precise and effective in a quiet, un-public way. They take persuasion into a private, invisible realm. Misleading TV ads can be countered and fact-checked. A misleading message sent in just the kind of e-mail you will open or ad you will click on remains hidden from challenge by the other campaign or the media. Or someone who visits evangelical Web sites might be carefully shielded from messages about gay rights, and someone who has hostile views toward environmentalism may receive messages stroking that sentiment even if the broader campaign woos the green vote elsewhere.

What I really worry about, though, is that these new methods are more effective in manipulating people. Social scientists increasingly understand that much of our decision making is irrational and emotional. For example, the Obama campaign used pictures of the president’s family at every opportunity. This was no accident. The campaign field-tested this as early as 2007 through a rigorous randomized experiment, the kind used in clinical trials for medical drugs, and settled on the winning combination of image, message and button placement. I agree that his family is wonderful and his daughters are cute. But an increasing role of “likability” factors, which we now understand better how to manipulate, is not good for democracy.

These methods will also end up empowering better-financed campaigns. The databases are expensive, the algorithms are proprietary, the results of experiments by campaigns are secret, and the analytics require special expertise. The Democrats have an early advantage partly because academics and data analysts tend to be Democrats. Money will solve that problem. This will shift power in both parties even more toward the richer campaigns and may well be the final nail in the coffin of public financing for presidential campaigns.

What is to be done? Campaigns should make public every outreach message so we at least know what they are saying. These messages can be placed in a public database like campaign contributions so the other side can be aware of, and have the right to respond to, false claims. Political access to proprietary databases should be regulated to provide an even playing field.

I’m not claiming that the Obama campaign used these methods to mislead. However, the fact that the winning campaign’s “chief data scientist” was previously employed to “maximize the efficiency of supermarket sales promotions” does not thrill me. You should be worried even if your candidate is — for the moment — better at these methods. Democracy should not just be about how to persuade people to vote for one candidate over another by any means necessary.

Zeynep Tufekci is a fellow at the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University.

Election Spurred a Move to Codify U.S. Drone Policy

WASHINGTON — Facing the possibility that President Obama might not win a second term, his administration accelerated work in the weeks before the election to develop explicit rules for the targeted killing of terrorists by unmanned drones, so that a new president would inherit clear standards and procedures, according to two administration officials.

The matter may have lost some urgency after Nov. 6. But with more than 300 drone strikes and some 2,500 people killed by the Central Intelligence Agency and the military since Mr. Obama first took office, the administration is still pushing to make the rules formal and resolve internal uncertainty and disagreement about exactly when lethal action is justified.

Mr. Obama and his advisers are still debating whether remote-control killing should be a measure of last resort against imminent threats to the United States, or a more flexible tool, available to help allied governments attack their enemies or to prevent militants from controlling territory.

Though publicly the administration presents a united front on the use of drones, behind the scenes there is longstanding tension. The Defense Department and the C.I.A. continue to press for greater latitude to carry out strikes; Justice Department and State Department officials, and the president’s counterterrorism adviser, John O. Brennan, have argued for restraint, officials involved in the discussions say.

More broadly, the administration’s legal reasoning has not persuaded many other countries that the strikes are acceptable under international law. For years before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the United States routinely condemned targeted killings of suspected terrorists by Israel, and most countries still object to such measures.

But since the first targeted killing by the United States in 2002, two administrations have taken the position that the United States is at war with Al Qaeda and its allies and can legally defend itself by striking its enemies wherever they are found.

Partly because United Nations officials know that the United States is setting a legal and ethical precedent for other countries developing armed drones, the U.N. plans to open a unit in Geneva early next year to investigate American drone strikes.

The attempt to write a formal rule book for targeted killing began last summer after news reports on the drone program, started under President George W. Bush and expanded by Mr. Obama, revealed some details of the president’s role in the shifting procedures for compiling “kill lists” and approving strikes. Though national security officials insist that the process is meticulous and lawful, the president and top aides believe it should be institutionalized, a course of action that seemed particularly urgent when it appeared that Mitt Romney might win the presidency.

“There was concern that the levers might no longer be in our hands,” said one official, speaking on condition of anonymity. With a continuing debate about the proper limits of drone strikes, Mr. Obama did not want to leave an “amorphous” program to his successor, the official said. The effort, which would have been rushed to completion by January had Mr. Romney won, will now be finished at a more leisurely pace, the official said.

Mr. Obama himself, in little-noticed remarks, has acknowledged that the legal governance of drone strikes is still a work in progress.

“One of the things we’ve got to do is put a legal architecture in place, and we need Congressional help in order to do that, to make sure that not only am I reined in but any president’s reined in terms of some of the decisions that we’re making,” Mr. Obama told Jon Stewart in an appearance on “The Daily Show” on Oct. 18.

In an interview with Mark Bowden for a new book on the killing of Osama bin Laden, “The Finish,” Mr. Obama said that “creating a legal structure, processes, with oversight checks on how we use unmanned weapons, is going to be a challenge for me and my successors for some time to come.”

The president expressed wariness of the powerful temptation drones pose to policy makers. “There’s a remoteness to it that makes it tempting to think that somehow we can, without any mess on our hands, solve vexing security problems,” he said.

Despite public remarks by Mr. Obama and his aides on the legal basis for targeted killing, the program remains officially classified. In court, fighting lawsuits filed by the American Civil Liberties Union and The New York Times seeking secret legal opinions on targeted killings, the government has refused even to acknowledge the existence of the drone program in Pakistan.

But by many accounts, there has been a significant shift in the nature of the targets. In the early years, most strikes were aimed at ranking leaders of Al Qaeda thought to be plotting to attack the United States. That is the purpose Mr. Obama has emphasized, saying in a CNN interview in September that drones were used to prevent “an operational plot against the United States” and counter “terrorist networks that target the United States.”

But for at least two years in Pakistan, partly because of the C.I.A.’s success in decimating Al Qaeda’s top ranks, most strikes have been directed at militants whose main battle is with the Pakistani authorities or who fight with the Taliban against American troops in Afghanistan.

In Yemen, some strikes apparently launched by the United States killed militants who were preparing to attack Yemeni military forces. Some of those killed were wearing suicide vests, according to Yemeni news reports.

“Unless they were about to get on a flight to New York to conduct an attack, they were not an imminent threat to the United States,” said Micah Zenko, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who is a critic of the strikes. “We don’t say that we’re the counterinsurgency air force of Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, but we are.”

Then there is the matter of strikes against people whose identities are unknown. In an online video chat in January, Mr. Obama spoke of the strikes in Pakistan as “a targeted, focused effort at people who are on a list of active terrorists.” But for several years, first in Pakistan and later in Yemen, in addition to “personality strikes” against named terrorists, the C.I.A. and the military have carried out “signature strikes” against groups of suspected, unknown militants.

Originally that term was used to suggest the specific “signature” of a known high-level terrorist, such as his vehicle parked at a meeting place. But the word evolved to mean the “signature” of militants in general — for instance, young men toting arms in an area controlled by extremist groups. Such strikes have prompted the greatest conflict inside the Obama administration, with some officials questioning whether killing unidentified fighters is legally justified or worth the local backlash.

Many people inside and outside the government have argued for far greater candor about all of the strikes, saying excessive secrecy has prevented public debate in Congress or a full explanation of their rationale. Experts say the strikes are deeply unpopular both in Pakistan and Yemen, in part because of allegations of large numbers of civilian casualties, which American officials say are exaggerated.

Gregory D. Johnsen, author of “The Last Refuge: Yemen, Al Qaeda and America’s War in Arabia,” argues that the strike strategy is backfiring in Yemen. “In Yemen, Al Qaeda is actually expanding,” Mr. Johnsen said in a recent talk at the Brookings Institution, in part because of the backlash against the strikes.

Shuja Nawaz, a Pakistan-born analyst now at the Atlantic Council in Washington, said the United States should start making public a detailed account of the results of each strike, including any collateral deaths, in part to counter propaganda from jihadist groups. “This is a grand opportunity for the Obama administration to take the drones out of the shadows and to be open about their objectives,” he said.

But the administration appears to be a long way from embracing such openness. The draft rule book for drone strikes that has been passed among agencies over the last several months is so highly classified, officials said, that it is hand-carried from office to office rather than sent by e-mail.

Obama likes his government supersized!!!

I’ve been having irresponsible thoughts. Or at least I’ve been thinking more favorably about something I have previously denounced as irresponsible: not increasing the federal debt limit.

There is no good end in sight for the non-negotiations to avoid the fiscal cliff. And the impasse goes far deeper than the question that preoccupies the public discussion about whether to increase the tax rates on the affluent.

The tax rate issue is a matter of firmly-held principle and important political symbology on both sides. But it’s not the heart of the impasse.

According to President Obama’s own budget staff, increasing the top two rates to 36 percent and 39.6 percent would only raise $442 billion over ten years, or only about a fifth of the $1.6 trillion in tax increases Obama is demanding.

Obama’s own budget actually proposes to raise significantly more -- $750 billion – through the approach proposed by Republicans in the non-negotiations: limiting the deductions of the affluent. In addition to reinstating the limits that existed prior to the Bush tax cuts, Obama’s budget proposed capping the value of all itemized deductions for the top-two tax rates at 28 percent.

So, as politically important as the rate issue is, resolving it would only reveal an even bigger – and probably irreconcilable – divide. What Obama is really trying to do is to force Republicans to finance – through higher taxes and increased borrowing – the size of the federal government Obama thinks appropriate.

And Obama likes his government supersized. Obama’s budget proposes locking in federal spending at 23 percent of Gross Domestic Product, an unprecedented level since the end of World War II. Obama has proposed no constraints that would bring spending below that level and consistently dismisses as non-starters any such proposals by others.

Obama likes to cite the Clinton economy in support of his positions. But federal spending as a percentage of GDP was just 18 percent at the end of Bill Clinton’s tenure. The difference between Obama-level spending and Clinton-level spending is more than $700 billion a year.

The Simpson-Bowles debt commission recommended that federal spending be brought down to 21 percent of GDP. The difference between Obama-level spending and Simpson-Bowles level spending is around $300 billion a year.

Republicans in the House undoubtedly won’t, and shouldn’t, agree to finance Obama-level spending. After all, they were elected in 2010 to put a brake on Obama’s spending and were returned to power this election.

But where and when to draw the line is substantively and politically dicey. Obama clearly intends to push Republicans to the edge of every cliff – the expiration of the Bush tax cuts and sequestration; maxing out the debt limit – counting on them to blink at the end.

At no point will Republicans have the upper hand politically. But blink each time, and they end up financing Obama-level spending.

So, perhaps it’s time to think about the unthinkable: not increasing the debt limit.

This does not have to mean default. Existing debt can be rolled over under the current limit. Servicing the debt only costs around $250 billion a year, which could be made a priority.

What it would mean is that ongoing spending would have to be on a pay-as-you-go basis. Spending would have to be reduced from $3.6 trillion to around $2.8 trillion.

That’s a huge cut. But spending as a percentage of GDP would be close to the 18 percent it was under Clinton. In fact, if the Clinton spending discipline of limiting growth in outlays to around 3 percent a year had been maintained during the profligate presidencies of George W. Bush and Obama, that’s about what the size of the federal budget would be today.

Not increasing the debt ceiling would be shock therapy for the country, with uncertain economic and political ramifications. A more gradual decline in spending as a percentage of GDP, such as proposed in Paul Ryan’s budget or by the Simpson-Bowles commission, would be infinitely preferable and more responsible.

But if the only choices are financing Obama-level spending or shock therapy, then at least some thought has to be given to shock therapy.

Obama's DEA thugs seem to want to keep marijuana illegal???

Just yesterday everybody was high about pot being legalized in Washington state [pun intended], but now its sounds like the Feds won't let go of their irrational, immoral and unconstitutional "war on drugs".

WASHINGTON — Senior White House and Justice Department officials are considering plans for legal action against Colorado and Washington that could undermine voter-approved initiatives to legalize the recreational use of marijuana in those states, according to several people familiar with the deliberations.

Even as marijuana legalization supporters are celebrating their victories in the two states, the Obama administration has been holding high-level meetings since the election to debate the response of federal law enforcement agencies to the decriminalization efforts.

Marijuana use in both states continues to be illegal under the federal Controlled Substances Act. One option is to sue the states on the grounds that any effort to regulate marijuana is pre-empted by federal law. Should the Justice Department prevail, it would raise the possibility of striking down the entire initiatives on the theory that voters would not have approved legalizing the drug without tight regulations and licensing similar to controls on hard alcohol.

Some law enforcement officials, alarmed at the prospect that marijuana users in both states could get used to flouting federal law openly, are said to be pushing for a stern response. But such a response would raise political complications for President Obama because marijuana legalization is popular among liberal Democrats who just turned out to re-elect him.

“It’s a sticky wicket for Obama,” said Bruce Buchanan, a political science professor at the University of Texas at Austin, saying any aggressive move on such a high-profile question would be seen as “a slap in the face to his base right after they’ve just handed him a chance to realize his presidential dreams.”

Federal officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter. Several cautioned that the issue had raised complex legal and policy considerations — including enforcement priorities, litigation strategy and the impact of international antidrug treaties — that remain unresolved, and that no decision was imminent.

The Obama administration declined to comment on the deliberations, but pointed to a statement the Justice Department issued on Wednesday — the day before the initiative took effect in Washington — in the name of the United States attorney in Seattle, Jenny A. Durkan. She warned Washington residents that the drug remained illegal.

“In enacting the Controlled Substances Act, Congress determined that marijuana is a Schedule I controlled substance,” she said. “Regardless of any changes in state law, including the change that will go into effect on December 6 in Washington State, growing, selling or possessing any amount of marijuana remains illegal under federal law.”

Ms. Durkan’s statement also hinted at the deliberations behind closed doors, saying: “The Department of Justice is reviewing the legalization initiatives recently passed in Colorado and Washington State. The department’s responsibility to enforce the Controlled Substances Act remains unchanged.”

Federal officials have relied on their more numerous state and local counterparts to handle smaller marijuana cases. In reviewing how to respond to the new gap, the interagency task force — which includes Justice Department headquarters, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the State Department and the offices of the White House Counsel and the director of National Drug Control Policy — is considering several strategies, officials said.

One option is for federal prosecutors to bring some cases against low-level marijuana users of the sort they until now have rarely bothered with, waiting for a defendant to make a motion to dismiss the case because the drug is now legal in that state. The department could then obtain a court ruling that federal law trumps the state one.

A more aggressive option is for the Justice Department to file lawsuits against the states to prevent them from setting up systems to regulate and tax marijuana, as the initiatives contemplated. If a court agrees that such regulations are pre-empted by federal ones, it will open the door to a broader ruling about whether the regulatory provisions can be “severed” from those eliminating state prohibitions — or whether the entire initiatives must be struck down.

Another potential avenue would be to cut off federal grants to the states unless their legislatures restored antimarijuana laws, said Gregory Katsas, who led the civil division of the Justice Department during the George W. Bush administration.

Mr. Katsas said he was skeptical that a pre-emption lawsuit would succeed. He said he was also skeptical that it was necessary, since the federal government could prosecute marijuana cases in those states regardless of whether the states regulated the drug.

Still, federal resources are limited. Under the Obama administration, the Justice Department issued a policy for handling states that have legalized medical marijuana. It says federal officials should generally not use their limited resources to go after small-time users, but should for large-scale trafficking organizations. The result has been more federal raids on dispensaries than many liberals had expected.

Spending $2.38 billion for a job that pays a lousy $400,000!!!

I suspect that means the system is corrupt to the core and the winner, along with the special interest groups that helped the winner get elected will easily get back the money they spent thru kickbacks and government pork contracts.

The $2.38 billion Obama and Romney spent is almost 1,500 times what the job of President pays for the 4 year term.

The Washington Post has produced a chart showing how President Barack Obama spent $1.2 billion and Mitt Romney spent $1.18 billion on the last election.

If the two of them had agreed to use $1 billion from their combined war chests for something other than smearing the other guy can you imagine the good they could have done?

I read that if you estimate the average home price in the United States at around $270,000 you could buy 3,703 houses with a billion dollars. Think how far that could go in hurricane ravaged New York.

A billion dollars represents something close to the annual income of 25,000 hardworking, middle class Americans.

Many years ago U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, in trying to describe obscenity, said, "I know it when I see it.”

Obama: I’ve got ‘bigger fish to fry’ than pot smokers

If that is true why is President Obama sending in his jackbooted DEA thugs to bust medical marijuana clinics in California???

Obama is a tyrant who supports the insane and unconstitutional drug war because the "drug war" is a jobs program for all the Federal cops, prosecutors, probation officers, prison guards and other government bureaucrats who get their big salaries from the "war on drugs"!!!

In an interview with ABC News, President Obama told Barbara Walters that recreational pot smoking in states that have legalized the drug is not a major concern for his administration.

“We’ve got bigger fish to fry,” Obama said of marijuana smokers in Colorado and Washington, the two states where recreational use is now legal.

“It would not make sense for us to see a top priority as going after recreational users in states that have determined that it’s legal,” he said.

Under Obama, the Drug Enforcement Administration has aggressively gone after medical marijuana dispensaries in California, where they are legal. In September, federal officials raided several Los Angeles shops and sent warnings to many more.

“This is a tough problem, because Congress has not yet changed the law,” Obama told Walters of the legalization in Colorado and Washington. “I head up the executive branch; we’re supposed to be carrying out laws. And so what we’re going to need to have is a conversation about, how do you reconcile a federal law that still says marijuana is a federal offense and state laws that say that it’s legal?”

Attorney General Eric Holder said in a speech Wednesday that he would announce a policy on the new state laws “relatively soon.”

The president, who smoked pot often in high school, told Walters that he does not support general legalization “at this point.” It’s the same position he’s taken throughout his political career, despite his own history.

“There are a bunch of things I did that I regret when I was a kid,” Obama told Walters. “My attitude is, substance abuse generally is not good for our kids, not good for our society.”

Obama: Feds shouldn't target recreational pot users in Colorado, Washington

WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama says federal authorities should not target recreational marijuana use in two Western states where it has been made legal given limited government resources and growing public acceptance of the controlled substance.

His first comments on the issue come weeks after Washington state and Colorado voters supported legalizing pot, or cannabis, last month in ballot measures that stand in direct opposition of federal law.

"It does not make sense from a prioritization point of view for us to focus on recreational drug users in a state that has already said that under state law that's legal," he told ABC News in part of an interview released on Friday.

"At this point (in) Washington and Colorado, you've seen the voters speak on this issue. And, as it is, the federal government has a lot to do when it comes to criminal prosecutions," Obama said.

The Department of Justice has said pot remains a federally controlled substance and states have been looking for guidance from Washington on how it will handle the conflict with state laws.

Medical use of the substance is legal in 18 U.S. states. But federal officials have still continued to crack down on some providers in those states.

Pot remains an illegal narcotic under U.S. law, but Washington and Colorado became the first states in the nation to legalize recreational marijuana use on November 6. A similar effort in Oregon failed.

Obama called the situation "a tough problem, because Congress has not yet changed the law." He told ABC that "what we're going to need to have is a conversation about" how to reconcile federal and state laws, and that he has asked U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to examine the issue.

In his 1995 memoir, "Dreams of My Father," Obama admitted to regularly smoking pot in high school. The father of two told ABC that he would not go so far as to say pot should be legalized altogether. There are also concerns about drug use in children and violence, he told ABC, according to its website.

The new measures in Washington and Colorado, which already permit medical marijuana use, allow possession of up to an ounce of the substance for private use. They also will regulate and tax sales at special stores for those aged 21 and older.

Obama won’t go after marijuana use in 2 states

When Obama first got elected he said he supported medical marijuana, but then he sent his DEA goons to raid California medical marijuana dispensaries.

I would like to think President Obama really feels this way, but he has lied to us before and I wouldn't be surprised if he is lying to us again.

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama says the federal government won’t go after recreational marijuana use in Washington state and Colorado, where voters have legalized it.

In a Barbara Walters interview airing Friday on ABC, Obama was asked whether he supports making pot legal.

“I wouldn’t go that far,” Obama replied. “But what I think is that, at this point, Washington and Colorado, you’ve seen the voters speak on this issue.”

But the president said he won’t pursue the issue in the two states where voters legalized the use of marijuana in the November elections. Marijuana remains illegal under federal law.

“… as it is, the federal government has a lot to do when it comes to criminal prosecutions,” Obama said. “It does not make sense, from a prioritization point of view, for us to focus on recreational drug users in a state that has already said that under state law, that’s legal.”

The Justice Department hasn’t targeted recreational marijuana users for decades. With limited resources, its focus has been to go after major drug traffickers instead.

Nonetheless, the Justice Department has said repeatedly in recent weeks that it is reviewing the legalization initiatives passed in Colorado and Washington state. The states have expressed concern that the federal government might sue over the issue. Department officials have said they are waiting to see what regulations the two states adopt to implement the initiatives.

In the department’s most recent statement on the issue, the U.S. attorney for Colorado said Monday that the department’s responsibility to enforce the federal Controlled Substances Act “remains unchanged.”

“Neither states nor the executive branch can nullify a statute passed by Congress,” U.S. Attorney John Walsh said. “Regardless of any changes in state law, including the change that will go into effect on Dec. 10 in Colorado, growing, selling or possessing any amount of marijuana remains illegal under federal law.”

Walsh added: “Members of the public are also advised to remember that it remains against federal law to bring any amount of marijuana onto federal property, including all federal buildings, national parks and forests, military installations, and courthouses.”

Pot proponents hopeful, wary after Obama comments

"Pot advocates say they are leery since previous statements from the administration that it wouldn’t go after individual medical marijuana users was followed by crackdowns on dispensaries and others who grew and sold the pot"

WASHINGTON — Officials and pot advocates looking for any sign of whether the Obama administration will sue to block legal pot laws in Washington state and Colorado or stand idly by as they are implemented got one from the president himself.

While they welcomed President Barack Obama’s comments that catching pot users was a low priority for his administration, they said it didn’t answer a bigger question: Will federal prosecutors and drug agents also look the other way?

Pot advocates say they are leery since previous statements from the administration that it wouldn’t go after individual medical marijuana users was followed by crackdowns on dispensaries and others who grew and sold the pot.

“There’s some signal of hope,” said Alison Holcomb, who led Washington’s legalization drive, but added that it will take more than the president to clarify the issues around legal pot. “We ultimately need a legislative resolution.”

In an interview with Barbara Walters scheduled to air on ABC on Friday, Obama said that going after “recreational users” would not be a “top priority” in the two states, where voters legalized pot use in November.

In his comments, the president didn’t specifically address how the federal government would respond to state officials in Washington and Colorado, who are beginning work on regulations for commercial pot sales.

Under the laws, possession of up to an ounce of pot is legal for adults over 21.

The Justice Department has declined to say whether it would file a lawsuit to block the laws, but has said marijuana is still illegal under federal law.

Tom Angell of the group Marijuana Majority said Obama’s comment didn’t add anything new. He said the federal government rarely goes after users and the president can do more besides passing the responsibility to Congress.

Federal prosecutors haven’t targeted users in the 18 states and Washington, D.C. that allow people to use marijuana for medical reasons. However, federal agents have still cracked down on dozens of dispensaries in some of those states.

U.S. Rep. Suzan DelBene, D-Wash., said Obama’s statements weren’t definitive but could be a sign that the federal government might be willing to work with the states to develop a new regulatory model for marijuana.

Legalization activists in Colorado were frustrated after they tried and failed to get the president to take a stand on the state’s marijuana measure during the presidential campaign in the battleground state.

“Here’s the president, an admitted marijuana user in his youth, who’s previously shown strong support for this, and then he didn’t want to touch it because it was such a close race,” said Joe Megyesy, a spokesman for a marijuana legalization group.

Megyesy said Obama’s comments were “good news,” but left unanswered many questions about how pot regulation will work.

Even if individual users aren’t charged with crimes, pot producers and sellers could be subject to prosecution and civil forfeiture and other legal roadblocks, he said.

Marijuana is a crop that can’t be insured, and federal drug law prevents banks from knowingly serving the industry, leaving it a cash-only business that’s difficult to regulate, Megyesy said.

Other states have been closely watching the developments in Colorado and Washington and how the federal government responds.

In Delaware, where a medical marijuana program has been put on hold amid concerns over fear of federal prosecutions of pot growers and distributors, Gov. Jack Markell’s spokeswoman said his administration has the same concerns about legalization.

“If the federal government is saying it won’t pursue persons with a medical need or recreational users, but it is prosecuting persons who provide that marijuana in a safe manner, then we are forcing people to obtain marijuana from the illegal market,” Cathy Rossi said.

More confusion on Obama's pot policy

Personally I suspect Obama is still lying to us. I suspect Obama says he won't bust pot smokers because he wants mainstream Americans to love him. I suspect he will also continue to support the unconstitutional war on drugs because he wants the DEA thugs that work for him to keep their high paying jobs arresting people for victimless drug war crimes.

SAN FRANCISCO -- President Barack Obama says he won't go after pot users in Colorado and Washington, two states that just legalized the drug for recreational use. But advocates argue the president said the same thing about medical marijuana -- and yet U.S. attorneys continue to force the closure of dispensaries across the U.S.

Welcome to the confusing and often conflicting policy on pot in the U.S., where medical marijuana is legal in many states, but it is increasingly difficult to grow, distribute or sell it. And at the federal level, at least officially, it is still an illegal drug everywhere.

Obama's statement Friday provided little clarity in a world where marijuana is inching ever so carefully toward legitimacy.

That conflict is perhaps the greatest in California, where the state's four U.S. Attorneys criminally prosecuted large growers and launched a coordinated crackdown on the state's medical marijuana industry last year by threatening landlords with property forfeiture actions. Hundreds of pot shops went out of business.

Steve DeAngelo, executive director of an Oakland, Calif., dispensary that claims to be the nation's largest, called for a federal policy that treats recreational and medical uses of the drug equally.

"If we're going to recognize the rights of recreational users, then we should certainly protect the rights of medical cannabis patients who legally access the medicine their doctors have recommended," he said.

The government is planning to soon release policies for dealing with marijuana in Colorado and Washington, where federal law still prohibits pot, as elsewhere in the country.

"It would be nice to get something concrete to follow," said William Osterhoudt, a San Francisco criminal defense attorney representing government officials in Mendocino County who recently received a demand from federal investigators for detailed information about a local system for licensing growers of medical marijuana.

Assemblyman Tom Ammiano said he was frustrated by Obama's comments because the federal government continues to shutter dispensaries in states with medical marijuana laws, including California.

"A good step here would be to stop raiding those legal dispensaries who are doing what they are allowed to do by law," said the San Francisco Democrat. "There's a feeling that the federal government has gone rogue on hundreds of legal, transparent medical marijuana dispensaries, so there's this feeling of them being in limbo. And it puts the patients, the businesses and the advocates in a very untenable place."

Obama, in an interview with ABC's Barbara Walters, said Friday that federal authorities have "bigger fish to fry" when it comes to targeting recreational pot smokers in Colorado and Washington.

Some advocates said the statement showed the president's willingness to allow residents of states with marijuana laws to use the drug without fear of federal prosecution.

"It's a tremendous step forward," said Joe Elford, general counsel for Americans for Safe Access. "It suggests the feds are taking seriously enough the idea that there should be a carve-out for states with marijuana laws."

Obama's statements on recreational use mirror the federal policy toward states that allow marijuana use for medical purposes.

"We are not focusing on backyard grows with small amounts of marijuana for use by seriously ill people," said Lauren Horwood, a spokeswoman for U.S. Attorney Benjamin Wagner in Sacramento. "We are targeting money-making commercial growers and distributors who use the trappings of state law as cover, but they are actually abusing state law."

Alison Holcomb, who led the legalization drive in Washington state, said she doesn't expect Obama's comment to prompt the federal government to treat recreational marijuana and medical marijuana differently.

"At this point, what the president is looking at is a response to marijuana in general. The federal government has never recognized the difference between medical and non-medical marijuana," she said. "I don't think this is the time he'd carve out separate policies. I think he's looking for a more comprehensive response."

Washington voters approved a medical marijuana law in 1998, and dispensaries have proliferated across the state in recent years.

Last year, Gov. Chris Gregoire vetoed legislation that would have created a state system for licensing medical dispensaries over concern that it would require state workers to violate the federal Controlled Substances Act.

For the most part, dispensaries in western Washington have been left alone. But federal authorities did conduct raids earlier this year on dispensaries they said were acting outside the state law, such as selling marijuana to non-patients. Warning letters have been sent to dispensaries that operate too close to schools.

"What we've seen is enforcement of civil laws and warnings, with a handful of arrests of people who were operating outside state law," said Alison Holcomb, who led Washington's legalization drive and helped write the bill that Gregoire vetoed. of

Eastern Washington has seen more raids because the U.S. attorney there is more active, Holcomb added.

Colorado's marijuana measure requires lawmakers to allow commercial pot sales, and a state task force that will begin writing those regulations meets Monday.

State officials have reached out to the Justice Department seeking help on regulating a new legal marijuana industry but haven't heard back.

DeAngelo said Friday that the Justice Department should freeze all pending enforcement actions against legal medical cannabis providers and review its policies to make sure they're consistent with the president's position. He estimated federal officials have shuttered 600 dispensaries in the state and 1,000 nationwide.

DeAngelo's Harborside Health Center is facing eviction after the U.S. attorney in San Francisco pressured his landlord to stop harboring what the government considers an illegal business.

"While it's nice to hear these sorts of positive words from the president, we are facing efforts by the Justice Department to shut us down, so it's hard for me to take them seriously," DeAngelo said.

Associated Press writers Terry Collins in San Francisco and Manuel Valdes in Seattle contributed to this report.

Obama gets another gun control opportunity!!!

20 children among 27 dead in Connecticut school shooting

I saw Obama on TV and he said something like we have to take “meaningful action” to stop future shootings, which to me is just his way of saying he has to used this event to flush the 2nd Amendment down the toilet.

While President Obama had crocodile eyes and was crying like a baby over these murders, I have never seen President Obama crying or even caring about the hundreds of innocent children the American government has murdered with bomb and drone strikes in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia and Yemen.

NEWTOWN, Conn. - A man killed his mother at home and then opened fire Friday inside the elementary school where she taught, massacring 26 people, including 20 children, as students cowered in fear to the sound of gunshots reverberating through the building and screams echoing over the intercom.

The 20-year-old killer, carrying two handguns, committed suicide at the school, bringing the death toll to 28, authorities said.

The rampage, coming less than two weeks before Christmas, was the nation’s second-deadliest school shooting, exceeded only by the Virginia Tech massacre that left 33 people dead in 2007.

“Our hearts are broken today,” said a tearful President Barack Obama, struggling to maintain his composure, at the White House. He called for “meaningful action” to prevent such shootings. “As a country, we have been through this too many times,” he said.

Police shed no light on the motive for the attack on two classrooms. The gunman, identified as Adam Lanza, was believed to suffer from a personality disorder and lived with his mother, according to a law-enforcement official who was briefed on the investigation but was not authorized to discuss it.

Panicked parents looking for their children raced to Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, a prosperous New England community of about 27,000 people, 60 miles northeast of New York City. Police told youngsters at the kindergarten-through-fourth-grade school to close their eyes as they were led from the building.

Schoolchildren — some crying, others looking frightened — were escorted through a parking lot in a line, with hands on each other’s shoulders.

Law-enforcement officials speaking on condition of anonymity said that Lanza killed his mother, Nancy Lanza, and then drove to the school in her car with three guns, including a high-powered rifle that he apparently left in the back. Authorities said he shot up two classrooms, but they gave no details on how the attack unfolded.

A custodian ran through the halls, warning of a gunman on the loose, and someone switched on the intercom, alerting people in the building to the attack — and perhaps saving many lives — by letting them hear the hysteria apparently going on in the school office, a teacher said.

Teachers locked their doors and ordered children to huddle in a corner or hide in closets as shots echoed through the building.

State police Lt. Paul Vance said 28 people in all were killed, including the gunman, and a woman who worked at the school was wounded.

Lanza’s older brother, 24-year-old Ryan, of Hoboken, N.J., was being questioned, but a law-enforcement official said he was not believed to have had any role in the rampage. Investigators were searching his computers and phone records, but he told law enforcement he had not been in touch with his brother since about 2010.

The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the investigation.

At one point, a law-enforcement official mistakenly identified the gunman as Ryan Lanza. Brett Wilshe, a friend of Ryan Lanza’s, said Ryan Lanza told him the gunman may have had his identification. Ryan Lanza has a Facebook page with updates posted on Friday afternoon that read, “It wasn’t me” and “I was at work.”

Robert Licata said his 6-year-old son was in class when the gunman burst in and shot the teacher. “That’s when my son grabbed a bunch of his friends and ran out the door,” he said. “He was very brave. He waited for his friends.”

Stephen Delgiadice said his 8-year-old daughter was in the school and heard two big bangs. Teachers told her to get in a corner, he said.

“It’s alarming, especially in Newtown, Connecticut, which we always thought was the safest place in America,” he said. His daughter was uninjured.

Theodore Varga said he was in a meeting with other fourth-grade teachers when he heard the gunfire, but there was no lock on the door.

He said someone had turned on the intercom so that “you could hear people in the office. You could hear the hysteria that was going on. I think whoever did that saved a lot of people. Everyone in the school was listening to the terror that was transpiring.”

“He said, ‘Guys! Get down! Hide!’” Varga said. “So he was actually a hero.”

On Friday night, hundreds of people packed a Newtown church and stood outside in a vigil for the victims. People held hands, lit candles and sang “Silent Night” at St. Rose of Lima church.

Anthony Bloss, whose three daughters survived the shootings, said they are doing better than he is. “I’m numb. I’m completely numb,” he said at the vigil.

Mergim Bajraliu, 17, heard the gunshots echo from his home and ran to check on his 9-year-old sister at the school. He said his sister, who was uninjured, heard a scream come over the intercom. He said teachers were shaking and crying as they came out of the building.

Mary Pendergast said her 9-year-old nephew was in the school at the time of the shooting but wasn’t hurt after his music teacher helped him take cover in a closet.

Richard Wilford’s 7-year-old son, Richie, told him that he heard a noise that sounded like “cans falling.” The boy said a teacher went out to check on the noise, came back in, locked the door and had the children huddle in the corner until police arrived.

“There’s no words,” Wilford said. “It’s sheer terror, a sense of imminent danger, to get to your child and be there to protect him.”

On Friday afternoon, family members were led away from a firehouse that was being used as a staging area, some of them weeping. One man, wearing a T-shirt without a jacket, put his arms around a woman as they walked down the middle of the street, oblivious to everything around them. Another woman with tears rolling down her face walked by, carrying a car seat with a baby inside.

“Evil visited this community today and it’s too early to speak of recovery, but each parent, each sibling, each member of the family has to understand that Connecticut — we’re all in this together. We’ll do whatever we can to overcome this event,” Gov. Dannel Malloy said.

Adam Lanza and his mother lived in a well-to-do part of Newtown where neighbors are doctors or hold white-collar positions at companies such as General Electric, Pepsi and IBM.

Three guns were found — a Glock and a Sig Sauer, both pistols, inside the school, and a .223-caliber rifle in the back of a car.

The shootings instantly brought to mind such tragedies as the Columbine High School massacre that left 15 dead in 1999 and the July shootings at a movie theater in Aurora, Colo., that left 12 dead.

“You go to a movie theater in Aurora and all of a sudden your life is taken,” Columbine Principal Frank DeAngelis said. “You’re at a shopping mall in Portland, Oregon, and your life is taken. This morning, when parents kissed their kids goodbye knowing that they are going to be home to celebrate the holiday season coming up, you don’t expect this to happen.”

Obama’s comments on the tragedy amounted to one of the most outwardly emotional moments of his presidency.

“The majority of those who died were children — beautiful little kids between the ages of 5 and 10 years old,” Obama said.

He paused for several seconds to keep his composure as he teared up and wiped an eye. Nearby, two aides cried and held hands as they listened to Obama.

“They had their entire lives ahead of them — birthdays, graduations, wedding, kids of their own,” Obama continued about the victims. “Among the fallen were also teachers, men and women who devoted their lives to helping our children.”

Obama to use Connecticut murders to push gun control????

NEWTOWN, Conn.— He spoke for a nation in sorrow, but the slaughter of all those little boys and girls left President Barack Obama, like so many others, reaching for words. Alone on a spare stage after the worst single day of his presidency, the commander in chief was a parent in grief.

“I am very mindful that mere words cannot match the depth of your sorrow, nor can they heal your wounded hearts,” Obama said at an evening vigil in the grieving community of Newtown, Conn. “I can only hope that it helps for you to know that you are not alone in your grief.”

The massacre of 26 children and adults at Sandy Hook Elementary on Friday elicited horror around the world, soul-searching in the United States, fresh political debate about gun control and questions about the incomprehensible — what drove the suspect to act.

It also left a newly re-elected president openly grappling for bigger answers. Obama said that in the coming weeks, he would use “whatever power this office holds” to engage with law enforcement, mental health professionals, parents and educators in an effort to prevent more tragedies like Newtown.

“Can say that we're truly doing enough to give all the children of this country the chance they deserve to live out their lives in happiness and with purpose? I've been reflecting on this the last few days,” Obama said, somber and steady as some in the audience wept.

“If we're honest without ourselves, the answer is no. And we will have to change.”

He promised to lead a national effort, but left unclear was what it would be, and how much it would address the explosive issue of gun control.

“What choice do we have?” Obama said. “Are we really prepared to say that we're powerless in the face of such carnage, that the politics are too hard?”

As Obama read some of the names of victims early in his remarks, several people broke down, their sobs heard throughout the hall.

He closed his remarks by slowly reading the first names of each of the 26 victims.

“God has called them all home. For those of us who remain, let us find the strength to carry on and make our country worthy of their memory,” he said.

For Obama, ending his fourth year in office, it was another sorrowful visit to another community in disbelief. It is the job of the president to be there, to listen and console, to offer help even when the only thing within his grasp is a hug.

The toll: six adults. Twenty boys and girls, all of whom were just 6 or 7 years old.

Inside the vigil children held stuffed teddy bears and dogs. The smallest kids sat on their parents' laps.

There were tears and hugs, but also smiles and squeezed arms. Mixed with disbelief was a sense of a community reacquainting itself all at once. One man said it was less mournful, more familial. Some kids chatted easily with their friends. The adults embraced each other in support.

The president first met privately with families of the victims and with the emergency personnel who responded to the shootings. That meeting happened at Newtown High School, the site of Sunday night's interfaith vigil, about a mile and a half from where the shootings took place.

“We're halfway between grief and hope,” said Curt Brantl, whose fourth-grade daughter was in the library of the elementary school when the shootings occurred. She was not harmed.

Police and firefighters got hugs and standing ovations when they entered. So did Obama.

“We needed this,” said the Rev. Matt Crebbin, senior minister of the Newtown Congregational Church. “We need to be together here in this room. … We needed to be together to show that we are together and united.”

The shootings have restarted a debate in Washington about what politicians can to do help — gun control or otherwise. Obama on Friday called for leaders to agree on “meaningful action” to prevent killings.

Police say the gunman, Adam Lanza, was carrying an arsenal of ammunition big enough to kill just about every student in the school if given enough time. He shot himself in the head just as he heard police drawing near, authorities said.

A Connecticut official said the gunman's mother was found dead in her pajamas in bed, shot four times in the head with a.22-caliber rifle. The killer then went to the school with guns he took from his mother and began blasting his way through the building.

The tragedy plunged the picturesque New England town of 27,000 people into mourning.

“I know that Newtown will prevail, that we will not fall to acts of violence,” said First Selectwoman Patricia Llodra. “It is a defining moment for our town, but it does not define us.”

A White House official said Obama mainly wrote the speech himself. He worked with presidential speechwriter Cody Keenan, who helped Obama write his speech last year after shootings in Tucson, Ariz., left six dead and 13 wounded, including Rep. Gabby Giffords.

Just this past summer, Obama went to Aurora, Colo., to visit victims and families after a shooting spree at a movie theater in the Denver suburb left 12 dead.

In November 2009, Obama traveled to Fort Hood, Texas, to speak at the memorial service for 13 service members who were killed on the post by another soldier.

After the Colorado shooting in July, the White House made clear that Obama would not propose new gun restrictions in an election year and said he favored better enforcement of existing laws.

More Obama gun controls????

President Obama on Monday began the first serious push of his administration to attempt to reduce gun violence, directing Cabinet members to formulate a set of proposals that could include reinstating a ban on assault rifles.

The effort will be led by Vice President Biden, according to two people outside the government who have spoken to senior administration officials since Friday, when a gunman killed his mother and rampaged through Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., killing 20 children, six adults and himself.

The tentative steps ended a paralyzing debate within the administration over how hard to pursue gun-control legislation, which has been a politically perilous issue for many Democrats. There were signs Monday, however, that such fear was abating on the Democratic side of the aisle.

Democratic Sens. Harry M. Reid (Nev.), Joe Manchin (W.Va.) and Mark R. Warner (Va.) made clear that Congress should consider a range of options to address the issue; all three have been strong supporters of gun rights. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (Calif.) said she would introduce legislation that would reimpose the assault-rifle ban that lapsed in 2004.

“We need to accept the reality that we’re not doing enough to protect our citizens,” Reid, the Senate majority leader, said after a moment of silence on the chamber’s floor. “In the coming days and weeks, we’ll engage in a meaningful conversation and proper debate about how to change laws and culture that allow this violence to continue to grow. . . . And every idea should be on the table.”

But any significant gun legislation would require support from leading Republicans, none of whom joined Democrats on Monday in outlining specific changes they might consider.

The rising anxiety in Washington over how to respond to the Sandy Hook massacre came as a new Washington Post-ABC News poll found a shift in the way most Americans view such tragedies and the reasons behind them.

More than half of the respondents to the poll, conducted over the weekend, said the shooting in Connecticut reflected societal problems rather than the isolated action of a troubled individual. Fewer than a quarter said the same thing after the July shooting in a Aurora, Colo., movie theater, where a gunman killed 12 people and injured dozens.

Obama, who has appeared shaken by the Sandy Hook shootings, met Monday with Biden, who advocated for stricter gun-control measures during his years in the Senate. The president also spoke Monday with Education Secretary Arne Duncan, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius “to begin looking at ways the country can respond to the tragedy in Newtown,” according to a White House official who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Others involved in the new effort include White House Counsel Kathryn Ruemmler; Biden’s chief counsel, Cynthia C. Hogan; and senior adviser Valerie Jarrett, who traveled with Obama to Connecticut on Sunday to address a memorial service for the Sandy Hook victims.

Earlier in Obama’s tenure, some key advisers, including then-chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, saw gun control as an issue that would be a distraction as the president pursued health-care legislation, new Wall Street regulations and measures to improve the economy. As a House leader in 2006, Emanuel recruited pro-gun Democrats to run in conservative districts.

One person who works closely with the administration on gun-related issues referred to Emanuel and his successor as chief of staff, William Daley, as “the boys” who argued against pursuing new gun restrictions. Emanuel has since been elected the mayor of Chicago, a city battered by gun violence.

One of the key voices on the other side of the discussion has been Holder, according to the two sources outside the administration, who have been involved in the debate.

Holder was behind a 2011 Justice Department study on gun violence, conducted after a shooting in a Tucson parking lot left Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) critically wounded and six others dead. But the report, which outlined more than a dozen measures to reduce gun violence, was never acted on as Obama’s reelection campaign took shape.

“They felt that they didn’t want to take what they perceived to be a political risk and had a lot on their plates at the time,” said Mark Glaze, director of Mayors Against Illegal Guns, a group chaired by New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg (I) that represents about 750 mayors across the country. “Having done this big policy review, one imagines they have a set of options gathering dust in a file drawer that they could pull out and put the full force of the presidency behind passing.”

On Monday, White House officials said it is too early to say what measures Obama will pursue. But in the past he has supported the reinstatement of the 1994 assault-weapons ban, and White House press secretary Jay Carney said Monday that he still does.

At the memorial service Sunday, Obama said he intends to speak to law enforcement officials, mental health experts, educators and others “in the coming weeks” to come up with proposals to reduce gun violence.

By the time the process concludes, White House officials suggested, the proposals will probably include ideas to address mental illness and the violence depicted in popular culture — a strategy aimed at focusing the proposal on more than limiting gun ownership.

“Gun laws are a part of this, but they are not the only part of this, as anyone who is truly an expert on these issues will tell you,” Carney told reporters. “There is no single legislation, no single bill that’s been written, that’s been enacted and expired that alone solves this problem. And that’s why you have to take a broader approach.”

The shooting has pushed gun violence onto an already crowded White House agenda, dominated this week by negotiations to avert the automatic tax increases and spending cuts that will go into effect in the new year unless an agreement to stop them is reached.

After a family vacation in Hawaii, Obama will face preparations for his second inauguration, second-term staffing issues and his goal of pushing quickly for immigration-reform legislation. The president’s domestic-policy director, Cecilia Munoz, will help manage the search for gun-violence proposals while also serving as a point person on immigration.

The National Rifle Association, the country’s most powerful pro-gun-rights lobby, has been silent since the Newtown shooting. A spokesman for the group declined to comment Monday, saying it was not granting interviews.

As Congress convened for the first time since the shooting, a number of prominent pro-gun Democrats expressed new willingness to consider gun-control measures, including restrictions on assault weapons.

Manchin — whose support for gun rights is so strong that he once shot a copy of an environmental bill with a rifle in a campaign ad — said the massacre has made clear the need to consider new regulations.

“I don’t know anyone in the sporting or hunting arena that goes out with an assault rifle,” he said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” “I don’t know anyone that needs 30 rounds in a clip to go hunting.”

“Never before have we seen our babies slaughtered,” Manchin added. “Anybody that’s a proud gun owner, anybody that’s a proud member of the NRA, we’re also proud parents. We’re also proud grandparents.”

Warner indicated that his position had changed during conversations with his three daughters. “I’ve been a strong supporter of Second Amendment rights,” he said Monday outside the Virginia Capitol. “I’ve got an A rating from the NRA. But the status quo isn’t acceptable.’’

Chris Kofinis, a Democratic strategist and Manchin’s former chief of staff, said that “everything has changed” for lawmakers who previously opposed gun-control measures.

He said he doubts that the public will tolerate delay in passing what he called “common sense” measures, such as reinstating the ban on assault weapons.

Whether many Republicans will agree is unclear. One GOP congressional aide, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not an authorized spokesman, said, “Because it involved young kids, I think it’s gotten everybody’s attention.”

But the aide cautioned that Republicans have not had time to discuss the issue in depth and that any movement on guns would be likely to include examinations of other issues such as violent video games and movies. “It’s a three-legged stool,” he said.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) spoke extensively about his sympathy for the Connecticut victims during an address on the Senate floor Monday, but he did not mention the gun debate or any possible legislative action.

He called Obama’s Sunday address in Newtown a “very moving meditation” that reflected “on the singularity of parental love.”

Jerry Markon, Peter Wallsten, Jon Cohen and Peyton M. Craighill contributed to this report.

Emperor Obama goes into gun grabbing mode!!!!

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama on Wednesday demanded “concrete proposals” on curbing gun violence that he could send to Congress no later than January — an urgent effort to build on the growing political consensus over gun restrictions following last week’s massacre of children at a Connecticut school.

It was a tough new tone for the president, whose first four years were largely quiet on the issue amid widespread political reluctance to tackle a powerful gun-rights lobby. But emotions have been high after the gunman in Friday’s shooting used a semi-automatic rifle to kill 20 young children and six adults at the school, shooting many several times and at close range, after killing his mother at home. He then killed himself.

“This time, the words need to lead to action,” Obama said. He said he will push legislation “without delay” and urged Congress to hold votes on the bill next year.

“The fact that this problem is complex can no longer be an excuse for doing nothing,” Obama said. “The fact that we can’t prevent every act of violence doesn’t mean we can’t steadily reduce the violence.”

The president listed eight people across the country who had been killed by gun violence since Friday’s shooting.

As part of his call for “real progress, right now,” Obama pressed Congress to reinstate an assault weapons ban, which expired in 2004. He also called for stricter background checks for people who seek to purchase weapons and limited high-capacity clips.

Vice President Joe Biden, a longtime gun control advocate with decades of experience in the Senate, will lead a team that will include members of Obama’s administration and outside groups.

The administration will have to make its gun control push in the middle of tense negotiations with Congress to avoid the “fiscal cliff” of billions of dollars in tax increases and deep spending cuts that will kick in at the end of the year without a deal.

Notably, the first question asked of Obama during a press conference after his gun announcement was about the fiscal talks.

In the days since the shooting, Obama has vowed to use “whatever power this office holds” to safeguard the nation’s children after Friday’s shooting. Funerals for the victims continued Wednesday, along with the wake for the school’s beloved principal.

The shooting has prompted several congressional gun-rights supporters to consider new legislation to control firearms, and there are concerns in the administration and elsewhere that their willingness to engage could fade as the shock and sorrow over the shooting eases.

The most powerful supporter of gun owners and the gun industry, the National Rifle Association, broke its silence Tuesday, four days after the shooting. In a statement, it pledged “to help to make sure this never happens again” and has scheduled a news conference for Friday.

Obama challenged the NRA to join the broader effort to reduce gun violence, saying, “Hopefully they’ll do some self-reflection.”

With the NRA promising “meaningful contributions” and Obama vowing “meaningful action,” the challenge in Washington is to turn words into action. Ideas so far have ranged from banning people from buying more than one gun a month to arming teachers.

The challenge will be striking the right balance with protecting the 2nd Amendment right to bear arms. Firearms are in a third or more of U.S. households, and suspicion runs deep of an overbearing government whenever it proposes expanding federal authority.

Many pro-gun lawmakers also have called for a greater focus on mental health issues and the impact of violent entertainment like video games. Obama also prefers a holistic approach, with aides saying stricter gun laws alone are not the answer.

Obama said Wednesday that the U.S. needs to make access to mental health care as easy as access to a gun.

Still, much of the immediate focus is on gun control, an issue that has been dormant in Washington for years despite several mass shootings.

The policy process Obama was announcing Wednesday was expected to include input from the departments of Justice, Education, and Health and Human Services. The heads of those agencies met with Obama at the White House on Monday. The Department of Homeland Security is also expected to play a key role.

As shares in publicly traded gun manufacturers dropped, the largest firearms maker in the United States said Tuesday it was being put up for sale by its owner, private equity group Cerberus Capital Management, which called the shooting a “watershed event” in the debate over gun control. Freedom Group International makes Bushmaster rifles, the weapons thought to have been used in Friday’s killings.

In California, proposed legislation would increase the restrictions on purchasing ammunition by requiring buyers to get a permit, undergo a background check and pay a fee.

The U.S. Conference of Mayors wrote Obama and Congress calling for “stronger gun laws, a reversal of the culture of violence in this country, a commission to examine violence in the nation, and more adequate funding for the mental health system.”

The mayors asked for a ban on assault weapons and other high-capacity magazines, like those reportedly used in the school shooting; a stronger national background check system for gun purchasers; and stronger penalties for straw purchases of guns, in which legal buyers acquire weapons for other people.

Formerly pro-gun Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has said “a thoughtful debate about how to change laws” is coming soon. Republican Sen. Charles Grassley has said the debate must include guns and mental health. And NRA member Sen. Joe Manchin, a conservative Democrat, said it’s time to begin an honest discussion about gun control and said he wasn’t afraid of the political consequences.

The comments are significant. Grassley is senior Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, which probably would take the first action on any gun control legislation. Reid sets the Senate schedule.

Obama wants to take your guns!!!!!

WASHINGTON — President Obama declared on Wednesday that he would make gun control a “central issue” as he opens his second term, promising to submit broad new firearm proposals to Congress no later than January and to employ the full power of his office to overcome deep-seated political resistance.

Leading House Republicans responded to the president’s pledge in the aftermath of the Connecticut school massacre by restating their firm opposition to new limits on guns or ammunition, setting up the possibility of a bitter legislative battle and a philosophical clash over the Second Amendment soon after Mr. Obama’s inauguration.

Having avoided a politically difficult debate over guns for four years, Mr. Obama vowed to restart a national conversation about their role in American society, the need for better access to mental health services and the impact of exceedingly violent images in the nation’s culture.

He warned that the conversation — which has produced little serious change after previous mass shootings — will be a short one, followed by specific legislative proposals that he intends to campaign for, starting with his State of the Union address next month.

“This time, the words need to lead to action,” Mr. Obama said. “I will use all the powers of this office to help advance efforts aimed at preventing more tragedies like this.”

At an appearance in the White House briefing room, the president said that he had directed Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. to lead an interagency effort to develop what the White House said would be a multifaceted approach to preventing mass shootings like the one in Newtown, Conn., last week and the many other gun deaths that occur each year.

As evidence of the brutal cost of gun violence, Mr. Obama said that since Friday’s school shooting in Connecticut, guns had led to the deaths of police officers in Memphis and Topeka, Kan.; a woman in Las Vegas; three people in an Alabama hospital; and a 4-year-old in a drive-by shooting in Missouri. They are, he said, victims of “violence that we cannot accept as routine.”

Accompanied by Mr. Biden, the president signaled his support for new limits on high-capacity clips and assault weapons, as well as a desire to close regulatory loopholes affecting gun shows. He promised to confront the broad pro-gun sentiment in Congress that has for years blocked gun control measures.

That opposition shows little signs of fading away. While the death of 20 children at Sandy Hook Elementary School on Friday appears to have persuaded some Democratic lawmakers to support new gun control measures, there has been little indication that Republicans who control the House — and are in a standoff with Mr. Obama over taxes — are willing to accept such restrictions.

House Democrats urged Speaker John A. Boehner on Wednesday to bring a ban on high-capacity ammunition magazines to a vote by Saturday — a step he is highly unlikely to take.

Representative Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio, an influential conservative leader, said in a statement that “it is clear that criminals will always find ways to acquire weapons and use them to commit acts of violence.”

“Passing more restrictions on law-abiding citizens will not deter this type of crime,” he said.

Mr. Jordan and other House Republicans declined to be interviewed, saying through aides that it was time to mourn, not to debate policy.

“There will be plenty of time to have this conversation,” said Brittany Lesser, a spokeswoman for Representative Steve King, Republican of Iowa, “but it is not amidst the funerals of these brave young children and adults.”

This week, Mr. King told an Iowa radio station, KSCJ, that “political opportunists didn’t wait 24 hours before they decided they were going to go after some kind of a gun ban.” He also expressed doubt about gun control measures, saying, “We all had our cap pistols when I was growing up, and that didn’t seem to cause mass murders in the street.”

Representative Howard Coble, Republican of North Carolina, said in an interview that he thought the talk of gun control was “probably a rush to judgment” that missed the real issue.

“I think it’s more of a mental health problem than a gun problem right now,” he said. “Traditionally states that enact rigid, inflexible gun laws do not show a corresponding diminishment in crime.”

While Mr. Coble said he would want to study any proposal made by the president, he said fellow Republicans on the Judiciary Committee, which would consider any gun recommendations, probably agree with his views.

One senior Republican, Representative F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. of Wisconsin, signaled an openness to review Mr. Obama’s proposals.

“As the president said, no set of laws will prevent every future horrific act of violence or eliminate evil from our society, but we can do better,” Mr. Sensenbrenner said in an e-mailed response to questions.

Mr. Sensenbrenner noted that he had co-sponsored the Brady gun control bill in the 1990s. “Our country must also grapple with difficult questions about the identification and care of individuals with mental illnesses,” he said.

On Wednesday the president said that Mr. Biden’s group would propose new laws and actions in January, and that those would be “proposals that I then intend to push without delay.” Mr. Obama said Mr. Biden’s effort was “not some Washington commission” that would take six months and produce a report that was shelved.

“I urge the new Congress to hold votes on these new measures next year, in a timely manner,” Mr. Obama said.

White House aides said Mr. Biden would meet with law enforcement officials from across the country on Thursday, along with cabinet officials from the departments of Justice, Homeland Security, Education and Health and Human Services.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York praised Mr. Obama’s announcement and said he offered his “full support” to Mr. Biden in a phone conversation on Wednesday. But Mr. Bloomberg, a vocal advocate of tougher gun control, also urged the president to take executive actions in the meantime, including making a recess appointment of a new director for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Republicans have blocked an appointment to the post for years.

“The country needs his leadership if we are going to reduce the daily bloodshed from gun violence that we have seen for too long,” Mr. Bloomberg said of Mr. Obama.

Gun control advocates have urged the White House and lawmakers to move rapidly to enact new gun control measures before the killings in Connecticut fade from the public’s consciousness. Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, has said she intends to introduce a new ban on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines on the first day of the next Congress in January.

During his first term, Mr. Obama largely avoided the issue of gun control, even as high-powered firearms were used in several mass shootings. Asked bluntly about his lack of past action on the issue, the president appeared irritated, citing the economic crisis, the collapse of the auto industry and two wars as matters that demanded attention.

He then conceded, “All of us have to do some reflection on how we prioritize what we do here in Washington.”

Obama sold out the Mexican and Latino community

Of course that is probably something expected of politicians who will lie and say anything to get elected.

Obama also lied to and sold out the the gays, pot smokers and anti-war folks to get their votes, so it's not earth shaking news that he also lied to and sold out the Latino voters.

For the fourth year in a row, the Obama administration set a record for the number of people it deported. In 2012, the total reached 409,849.

President Obama has received a lot of support from Hispanic voters, who voted for him 71-27 percent over Republican challenger Mitt Romney in the November elections. But his deportation record has remained a major disappointment to immigrant rights groups throughout his first term.

The number of people deported under Obama has risen in each of his four years in office, culminating in the record set in fiscal year 2012.

“That’s a dubious accomplishment,” said Ali Noorani, executive director of the National Immigration Forum, which supports a pathway to citizenship for the nation’s 11million illegal immigrants. “In reality, these numbers reflect the urgency with which our government needs to create a better immigration process. Instead of spending our limited resources on deportations, we need laws that strengthen our families, our communities and our economy.”

Department of Homeland Security officials say the criticism is misguided, since they are not just increasing the number of people they deport. Over Obama’s first term, the department has increased the percentage of deportees who are convicted criminals or fall into other high-priority categories.

During President George W. Bush’s last year in office, 33 percent of the people deported by the U.S. were convicted criminals. The Obama administration has increased that percentage each year, reaching 55 percent in 2012.

In all, 96 percent of the people deported fall into Homeland Security’s priority categories, including recent border-crossers, repeat immigration violators and fugitives from immigration court.

“While the FY 2012 removals indicate that we continue to make progress in focusing resources on criminal and priority aliens, with more convicted criminals being removed from the country than ever before, we are constantly looking for ways to ensure that we are doing everything we can to utilize our resources in a way that maximizes public safety,” Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director John Morton said in a statement.

You didn't really think they would fix government did you???

Obama seeks scaled-down ‘fiscal cliff’ agreement

The thieves in Congress aren't going to reform the system that allows them to steal billions from the American public and give it to the special interest groups that helped them get elected.

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama has scaled back his ambitions for a sweeping budget bargain with Republicans. Instead, he’s calling for a limited measure sufficient to prevent the government from careening off the “fiscal cliff” in January by extending tax cuts for most taxpayers and forestalling a painful set of agency budget cuts.

In a White House appearance Friday, Obama also called on Congress to extend jobless benefits for the long-term unemployed that would otherwise be cut off for 2 million people at the end of the year.

If Obama and Congress can’t reach a deal by Dec. 31, the so-called “fiscal cliff” looms. Some $536 billion in tax increases, touching nearly all Americans would begin to take effect in January, bcause various federal tax cuts and breaks expire at year’s end. Also, about $110 billion in spending cuts divided equally between the military and most other federal departments would also be automatically triggered.

The fear is that the combination of tax increases and spending cuts would push the fragile U.S. economy back into recession.

Obama’s announcement was a recognition that chances for a larger agreement before year’s end have probably collapsed. It also suggested that any chance for a smaller deal may rest in the Senate, particularly after the collapse of a plan by Republican House Speaker John Boehner to permit tax rates to rise on million-dollar-plus incomes.

“In the next few days, I’ve asked leaders of Congress to work toward a package that prevents a tax hike on middle-class Americans, protects unemployment insurance for 2 million Americans, and lays the groundwork for further work on both growth and deficit reduction,” Obama said. “That’s an achievable goal. That can get done in 10 days.”

Maybe, maybe not. The latest plan faces uncertainty at best in the sharply divided Senate. Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, who wields great power even in the minority, called Friday for Senate action on a House bill from the summer extending the full menu of President George W. Bush-era tax cuts. He promised that it will take Republican votes for anything to clear the Senate, where 60 votes are required to advance most legislation. Democrats control 53 votes.

Boehner, giving the Republican weekly radio address, said, “Of course, hope springs eternal, and I know we have it in us to come together and do the right thing.”

Earlier, Boehner said Obama needs to give more ground to reach an agreement and that both he and Obama had indicated in a Monday telephone call that their latest offers represented their bottom lines. “How we get there,” he added, “God only knows.”

Congress shut down for Christmas and Obama flew to Hawaii with his family for the holidays. But both men indicated they’d be back in Washington, working to beat the fast-approaching Jan. 1 deadline with an agreement between Christmas and New Year’s.

Obama announced his plans after talking by phone with Boehner and meeting with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who had previously pinned his hopes on an Obama-Boehner agreement and is wary of dealing with McConnell.

At the White House, Obama projected optimism despite of weeks of failed negotiations. “Call me a hopeless optimist, but I actually still think we can get it done,” he said.

Boehner spoke in the morning, describing the increasingly tangled attempts to beat the Jan. 1 deadline and head off the perilous combination of across-the-board tax hikes and deep spending cuts.

“Because of the political divide in the country, because of the divide here in Washington, trying to bridge these differences has been difficult,” Boehner said. “If it were easy, I guarantee you this would have been done decades before.”

Obama said that in his negotiations with Boehner, he had offered to meet Republicans halfway when it came to taxes and “more than halfway” toward their target for spending cuts.

It’s clear, however, that there’s great resistance in Republican ranks to forging a bargain with Obama along the lines of a possible agreement that almost seemed at hand just a few days ago: tax hikes at or just over $1 trillion over 10 years, matched by comparable cuts to federal health care programs, Social Security benefits and across federal agency operating budgets.

Obama said he remains committed to working toward a goal of longer-term deficit reduction to reduce chronic trillion-dollar deficits while keeping tax rates in place for nearly everyone.

“Even though Democrats and Republicans are arguing about whether those rates should go up for the wealthiest individuals, all of us — every single one of us — agrees that tax rates shouldn’t go up for the other 98 percent of Americans,” Obama said, citing statistics associated with his promise to protect household income under $250,000 from higher tax rates.

Neither the House nor the Senate is expected to meet again until after Christmas. Officials in both parties said there was still time to prevent the changes from kicking in with the new year.

The week began amid optimism that Obama and Boehner had finally begun to significantly narrow their differences. Both were offering a cut in taxes for most Americans, an increase for a relative few, and cuts of roughly $1 trillion in spending over a year. Also included was a provision to scale back future cost-of-living increases for Social Security recipients — a concession by the president that inflamed many liberals..

Republican officials said some senior Republicans such as Rep. Paul Ryan, the most recent Republican vice presidential nominee, opposed the possible agreement. But No. 2 House Republican Rep. Eric Cantor of Virginia has joined arms with Boehner.

Boehner stepped back and announced what he called Plan B, legislation to let tax rates rise on incomes of $1 million or more while preventing increases for all other taxpayers.

Despite statements of confidence, he and his lieutenants decided late Thursday they were not going to be able to secure the votes needed to pass the measure in the face of opposition from conservatives unwilling to violate decades-old party orthodoxy never to raise tax rates.

The retreat came after it became clear that too many Republicans feared “the perception that somebody might accuse them of raising taxes,” Boehner said.

Boehner also said that last Monday he had told Obama he had submitted his bottom-line proposal.

“The president told me that his numbers — the $1.3 trillion in new revenues, $850 billion in spending cuts — was his bottom line, that he couldn’t go any further.”

That contradicted remarks by White House press secretary Jay Carney, who said on Thursday that Obama has “never said either in private or in public that this was his final offer. He understands that to reach a deal it would require some further negotiation. There is not much further he could go.”

Obamas arrive in Hawaii for Christmas

KAILUA, Hawaii — President Barack Obama and his family have arrived in Honolulu to spend Christmas in Hawaii, where the president was born and raised.

Air Force One touched down in Honolulu minutes after midnight local time on Saturday. The first family departed the plane and traveled quickly to their vacation house in the beach town of Kailua, a scenic, sleepy beach town on the east side of Oahu.

Kailua is roughly 12 miles from downtown Honolulu. Obama’s vacation house sits near a Marine base, on the north end of a five-mile stretch of beach popular among windsurfers and paddle surfers.

As the president and his family departed Air Force One, Obama had shed the jacket he was wearing when he left Washington and was in a dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up. The first family left Washington on Friday night.

White House officials say the president’s vacation itinerary doesn’t include any scheduled public events.

No return date has been given by the White House. Obama himself said earlier Friday that, since a deal hasn’t been reached to avert the so-called “fiscal cliff,” he would be returning to Washington after Christmas.

Obama: Gun control ‘not something I will be putting off’

President Obama reiterated his commitment to passing new gun control measures in an interview broadcast on Sunday morning, saying he would like to get such legislation done in the first year of his second term. He also expressed skepticism about a proposal to put more armed guards in schools across the country.

“The question is are we going to be able to have a national conversation and move something through Congress,” Obama said on NBC News’s “Meet The Press.” “I’d like to get it done in the first year. I will put forward a very specific proposal based on the recommendations that Joe Biden’s task force is putting together as we speak. And so this is not something that I will be putting off.”

Obama, who recently established a task force led by Vice President Biden to offer recommendations for how to best curb gun violence, also pushed back against an idea the National Rifle Association put forth following the mass shooting earlier this month at a school in Newtown, Conn. As gun control advocates called for tighter restrictions, the NRA urged that armed guards be placed in schools to deter and defend against future acts of violence.

“I am skeptical that the only answer is putting more guns in schools. And I think the vast majority of the American people are skeptical that that somehow is going to solve our problem,” Obama said.

Obama reiterated his support for a ban on military-style assault weapons and high-capacity ammunition magazines that gun control advocates in Congress have said they will be pushing for.

“Here’s the bottom line. We’re not going to get this done unless the American people decide it’s important,” Obama added.

Renditions continue under Obama, despite due-process concerns

The three European men with Somali roots were arrested on a murky pretext in August as they passed through the small African country of Djibouti. But the reason soon became clear when they were visited in their jail cells by a succession of American interrogators.

U.S. agents accused the men — two of them Swedes, the other a longtime resident of Britain — of supporting al-Shabab, an Islamist militia in Somalia that Washington considers a terrorist group. Two months after their arrest, the prisoners were secretly indicted by a federal grand jury in New York, then clandestinely taken into custody by the FBI and flown to the United States to face trial.

The secret arrests and detentions came to light Dec. 21 when the suspects made a brief appearance in a Brooklyn courtroom.

The men are the latest example of how the Obama administration has embraced rendition — the practice of holding and interrogating terrorism suspects in other countries without due process — despite widespread condemnation of the tactic in the years after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Renditions are taking on renewed significance because the administration and Congress have not reached agreement on a consistent legal pathway for apprehending terrorism suspects overseas and bringing them to justice.

Congress has thwarted President Obama’s pledge to close the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and has created barriers against trying al-Qaeda suspects in civilian courts, including new restrictions in a defense authorization bill passed last month. The White House, meanwhile, has resisted lawmakers’ efforts to hold suspects in military custody and try them before military commissions.

The impasse and lack of detention options, critics say, have led to a de facto policy under which the administration finds it easier to kill terrorism suspects, a key reason for the surge of U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. Renditions, though controversial and complex, represent one of the few alternatives.

“In a way, rendition has become even more important than before,” said Clara Gutteridge, director of the London-based Equal Justice Forum, a human rights group that investigates national security cases and that opposes the practice.

Because of the secrecy involved, it is not known how many renditions have taken place during Obama’s first term. But his administration has not disavowed the practice. In 2009, a White House task force on interrogation and detainee transfers recommended that the government be allowed to continue using renditions, but with greater oversight, so that suspects were not subject to harsh interrogation techniques, as some were during the George W. Bush administration.

The U.S. government has revealed little about the circumstances under which the three alleged al-Shabab supporters were arrested. Most court papers remain under seal.

In a statement, the FBI and federal prosecutors for the Eastern District of New York said the defendants were “apprehended in Africa by local authorities while on their way to Yemen” in early August. The statement did not spell out where they were detained or why.

The FBI made no mention of any U.S. involvement with the suspects until Oct. 18, when a federal grand jury handed up the sealed indictment. The FBI said its agents took custody of the men on Nov. 14, but the bureau did not specify where or from whom. A spokesman for federal prosecutors in the Eastern District of New York did not respond to a phone message and e-mail seeking comment.

Defense attorneys and others familiar with the case, however, said the men were arrested in Djibouti, a close ally of Washington. The tiny African country hosts a major U.S. military base, Camp Lemonnier, that serves as a combat hub for drone flights and counterterrorism operations. Djibouti also has a decade-long history of cooperating with the United States on renditions.

The Swedish Foreign Ministry confirmed that two of the men — Ali Yasin Ahmed, 23, and Mohamed Yusuf, 29 — are Swedish citizens and were detained in Djibouti in August.

Anders Jorle, a spokesman for the ministry in Stockholm, said Swedish diplomats were allowed to visit the men in Djibouti and New York to provide consular assistance.

“This does not mean that the Swedish government has taken any position on the issue of their guilt or innocence,” Jorle said in a telephone interview. “That is a question for the U.S. judicial system.”

Lawyers assigned to represent the defendants in federal court in Brooklyn said the men were interrogated for months in Djibouti even though no charges were pending against them — something that would be prohibited in the United States.

“The Djiboutians were only interested in them because the United States of America was interested in them,” said Ephraim Savitt, an attorney for Yusuf. “I don’t have to be Einstein to figure that out.”

Harry C. Batchelder Jr., an attorney for the third suspect, Mahdi Hashi, 23, concurred. “Let’s just put it this way: They were sojourning in Djibouti, and all of a sudden, after they met their friendly FBI agents and CIA agents — who didn’t identify themselves — my client found himself stateless and in a U.S. court,” said Batchelder, whose client is a native of Somalia who grew up in Britain.

The sequence described by the lawyers matches a pattern from other rendition cases in which U.S. intelligence agents have secretly interrogated suspects for months without legal oversight before handing over the prisoners to the FBI for prosecution.

In December 2011, a federal court hearing for another al-Shabab suspect, an Eritrean citizen named Mohamed Ibrahim Ahmed, revealed that he had been questioned in a Nigerian jail by what a U.S. interrogator described as a “dirty” team of American agents who ignored the suspect’s right to remain silent or have a lawyer, according to court proceedings.

Later, the Eritrean was interviewed by a “clean” team of U.S. agents who were careful to notify him of his Miranda rights and obtain confessions for trial. Once that task was completed, he was transported to U.S. federal court in Manhattan to face terrorism charges. His American attorneys sought to toss out his statements on the grounds that they were illegally coerced, but the defendant pleaded guilty before a judge could rule on that question.

A diplomatic cable released by the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks makes clear that Nigerian authorities were reluctant to detain Ahmed and held him for four months under pressure from U.S. officials.

Robin Sanders, the U.S. ambassador to Nigeria at the time, chided high-ranking officials there in a February 2010 meeting for nearly allowing Ahmed to depart on an international flight “because they did not want to hold him any longer,” according to the classified cable summarizing the meeting. He was finally handed over to FBI agents, but only after he was indicted by a U.S. grand jury.

In the more recent Djibouti rendition, defense attorneys challenged the jurisdiction of the U.S. courts, saying there is no evidence that the defendants targeted or threatened Americans or U.S. interests.

“That is the $64,000 question. I said to the assistant U.S. attorney, ‘Did he blow up an embassy? No,’ ” said Susan G. Kellman, who represents Ali Yasin Ahmed, one of the Swedish defendants. “Why are we holding them? What did they do to insult us?”

The State Department officially categorized al-Shabab as a terrorist organization in 2008, making it illegal for Americans or non-citizens to support the group. Still, Obama administration officials acknowledge that most al-Shabab fighters are merely participants in Somalia’s long-running civil war and that only a few are involved in international terrorism.

Savitt, the attorney for Yusuf, acknowledged that his client fought on behalf of al-Shabab against Somali forces backed by the United States. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “I’m not going to deny that allegation, put it that way.”

But Savitt said that was not a legitimate reason to prosecute Yusuf in the United States. “The last thing in the world we really need to do is apprehend and lock up 10,000 al-Shabab fighters or bring them into the court system,” he said.

Authorities in Sweden and Britain had monitored the three men for years as they traveled back and forth to Somalia, but neither country assembled enough evidence to press criminal charges.

“These guys are well known to Swedish security forces,” said a Swedish official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters.

Sweden’s security agencies have cooperated in the past with U.S. officials on rendition cases by sharing intelligence about targets. Mark Vadasz, a spokesman for the Swedish Security Police Service, declined to comment on whether the agency played a role in the cases involving Yusuf and Ahmed.

Last summer, before he was detained in Djibouti, British authorities notified Hashi’s family that they were taking the unusual step of stripping him of his citizenship, citing his “extremist” activities.

Hashi and his family have denied the allegation. In 2009, Hashi filed an official complaint of harassment against MI5, Britain’s domestic intelligence agency, saying agents had pressured him to become an informant.

A spokesman for Britain’s Home Office, which issued the citizenship order, declined to comment or to say whether British officials cooperated with the United States on the rendition.

Asim Qureshi, executive director of CagePrisoners, a British human rights group that has advocated on behalf of Hashi, said the case was too weak to pass muster in a European court.

“A cynic would say it’s easier to get a conviction under spurious evidence in the United States than anywhere else,” he said. “Just alleging somebody is a member of al-Shabab won’t get you very far in the U.K. A judge would just throw out the case before it even gets started.”

American occupation of Afghanistan is a failure, just like Soviet occupation.

WASHINGTON — The young president who ascended to office as a change agent decides to end the costly and unpopular war in Afghanistan. He seeks an exit with honor by pledging long-term financial support to allies in Kabul, while urging reconciliation with the insurgency. But some senior advisers lobby for a deliberately slow withdrawal, and propose leaving thousands of troops behind to train and support Afghan security forces.

This is a nearly exact description of the endgame conundrum facing President Obama as he prepares for a critical visit by Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, planned for early January.

But the account is actually drawn from declassified Soviet archives describing Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s closed-door struggles with his Politburo and army chiefs to end the Kremlin’s intervention in Afghanistan — one that began with a commando raid, coup and modest goals during Christmas week of 1979 but became, after a decade, what Mr. Gorbachev derided as “a bleeding wound.”

What mostly is remembered about the withdrawal is the Soviet Union’s humiliation, and the ensuing factional bloodletting across Afghanistan that threw the country into a vicious civil war. It ended with Taliban control and the establishment of a safe haven for Al Qaeda before the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.

But scholars who have studied the Soviet archives point out another lesson for the Obama administration as it manages the pullout of American and allied combat forces from Afghanistan by the end of 2014.

“The main thing the Soviets did right was that they continued large-scale military assistance to the regime they left behind after the final withdrawal in ’89,” said Mark N. Katz, a professor at George Mason University and author of “Leaving Without Losing: The War on Terror After Iraq and Afghanistan” (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012).

“As long as the Afghan regime received the money and the weapons, they did pretty well — and held on to power for three years,” Mr. Katz said. The combat effectiveness of Kabul’s security forces increased after the Soviet withdrawal, when the fight for survival become wholly their own.

But then the Soviet Union dissolved in December 1991, and the new Russian leader, Boris N. Yeltsin, heeded urgings of the United States and other Western powers to halt aid to the Communist leadership in Afghanistan, not just arms and money, but also food and fuel. The Kremlin-backed government in Kabul fell three months later.

To be sure, there are significant contrasts between the two interventions in Afghanistan. The Soviet invasion and occupation were condemned as illegal aggression, while the American one was embraced by the international community, including Russia, as a “just war,” one with limited goals of routing the Taliban and eliminating Al Qaeda. That war of necessity has since evolved into a war of choice, one the Obama administration is working to end as quickly as is feasible.

Despite the differences going in, both the Soviet Union and the United States soon learned that Afghanistan is a land where foreigners aspiring to create nations in their image must combat not just the Taliban but tribalism, orthodoxy, corruption and a medieval view of women. As well, Pakistan has had interests at odds with those of the neighboring government in Afghanistan, whether Kabul was an ally of Moscow or of Washington.

“The Soviet Union did not understand religious and ethnic factors sufficiently, and overestimated the capacity of Afghan society to move very fast toward a modern era, in this case socialism,” said Svetlana Savranskaya, director of Russian programs at the National Security Archive, an independent research center at George Washington University.

“Here I see similarities with the approach of the United States, especially with all the discussion about trying to leave behind an Afghanistan that is democratic and respects the rights of women, ideas that simply are not accepted across the broad society there,” said Ms. Savranskaya, who has written extensively on the Soviet archives.

If the Soviet experience offers any guidance to the current American withdrawal, she said, it would be to accelerate the departure of foreign combat forces — but to leave in their place a “sustained, multiyear international involvement in military training, education and civilian infrastructure projects, and maybe not focusing on building democracy as much as improving the lives of the common people.”

And she noted that the United States should already be seeking partnership with Afghan leaders beyond Mr. Karzai, who is viewed across large parts of the population as tainted by his association with the Americans.

Pentagon officials have signaled that they are hoping for an enduring military presence of 10,000 or more troops, but may have to accept fewer, to cement the progress of the years of fighting. Those troops would focus on training and supporting Afghan forces along with a counterterrorism contingent to hunt Qaeda and insurgent leaders.

In a parallel, one of Mr. Gorbachev’s closest early confidants, Eduard A. Shevardnadze, the foreign minister, advocated a slow withdrawal pace — and pressed for 10,000 to 15,000 Soviet troops to remain to support the Communist government. The Soviets left only 300 advisers.

But after losing more than 15,000 Soviet troops and billions of rubles, the Kremlin knew it had to somehow justify the invasion and occupation upon withdrawal.

Mr. Gorbachev had “to face up to a difficult problem of domestic politics which has puzzled other nations finding themselves in similar circumstances,” Rodric Braithwaite, a former British ambassador to Moscow, wrote in “Afgantsy” (Oxford University Press, 2011), his book on the Soviet intervention based on Communist Party documents.

“How could the Russians withdraw their army safely, with honor, without looking as if they were simply cutting and running, and without appearing to betray their Afghan allies or their own soldiers who had died?” Mr. Braithwaite wrote of the internal Kremlin debate, in terms resonant of the Americans’ conundrum today.

Around the time of the Soviet withdrawal, an article by Pravda, the Communist Party mouthpiece, clutched for a positive view as the Soviet Army pulled out. Read today, it bears a resemblance to the news releases churned out by the Pentagon detailing statistics on reconstruction assistance.

“Soviet soldiers in Afghanistan repaired, rebuilt and constructed hundreds of schools, technical colleges, over 30 hospitals and a similar number of nursery schools, some 400 apartment buildings and 35 mosques,” the article said. “They sank dozens of wells and dug nearly 150 kilometers of irrigation ditches and canals. They were also engaged in guarding military and civilian installations in trouble.”

The Kremlin had learned that its armies could not capture political success, but Soviet commanders made the same claims upon withdrawal that are heard from NATO officers today: not a single battlefield engagement was lost to guerrillas, and no outpost ever fell to insurgents.

That understanding seemed to animate Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta as he toured Afghanistan recently in a traditional holiday visit with the troops.

At each stop, Mr. Panetta acknowledged that significant challenges remain to an orderly withdrawal and a stable postwar Afghanistan, and not just the resilient insurgency.

He cited unreliable Afghan governance, continuing corruption and the existence of insurgent safe havens in Pakistan. None of those are likely to be fixed with American firepower.

Obama wants to take our guns

WASHINGTON — Less than a month after a horrific elementary school shooting, the White House is fighting to keep the momentum for new gun legislation amid signs it’s losing ground in Congress to other pressing issues.

Vice President Joe Biden has invited the National Rifle Association and other gun-owner groups for talks at the White House on Thursday. On Wednesday, the vice president will meet with victims’ organizations and representatives from the video game and entertainment industries. The administration’s goal is to forge consensus over proposals to curb gun violence.

President Barack Obama wants Biden to report back to him with policy proposals by the end of January. Obama has vowed to move swiftly on the recommendations, a package expected to include both legislative proposals and executive action.

“He is mindful of the need to act,” White House spokesman Jay Carney said on Tuesday.

But as the shock and sorrow over the Newtown, Conn., shooting fades, the tough fight facing the White House and gun-control backers is growing clearer. Gun-rights advocates, including the powerful NRA, are digging in against tighter legislation, conservative groups are launching pro-gun initiatives and the Senate’s top Republican has warned it could be spring before Capitol Hill begins considering any gun legislation.

“The biggest problem we have at the moment is spending and debt,” Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said on Sunday. “That’s going to dominate the Congress between now and the end of March. None of these issues will have the kind of priority as spending and debt over the next two or three months.”

Tuesday marked the second anniversary of the Tucson, Ariz., attack that killed six people and critically injured former U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. Following that shooting, Obama called for a national dialogue on gun violence. But his words were followed by little action.

Giffords took a prominent role in the gun debate on Tuesday’s anniversary. She and husband Mark Kelly, a former astronaut, wrote in an op-ed published in USA Today that their Americans for Responsible Solutions initiative would help raise money to support greater gun control efforts “to balance the influence of the gun lobby.” Kelly has indicated that he and Giffords want to become a prominent voice for gun control and hope to start a national conversation about gun violence.

There was also little national progress on curbing gun bloodshed following shootings at an Aurora, Colo., movie theater, a Texas Army base or a Sikh temple in Wisconsin, all of which occurred during Obama’s first term.

Still, the killing of 6- and 7-year-olds at Newtown’s Sandy Hook Elementary School on Dec. 14 did appear to stir a deeper reaction from the White House and Capitol Hill. Obama pushed gun control to the top of his domestic agenda for the first time and pledged to put the full weight of his presidency behind the issue. And some Republican and conservative lawmakers with strong gun rights records also took the extraordinary step of calling for a discussion on new measures.

But other gun-rights advocates have shown less flexibility. The NRA has rejected stricter gun legislation and suggested instead that the government put armed guards in every school in America as a way to curb violence. A coalition of conservative groups is also organizing a “gun appreciation day” later this month, to coincide with Obama’s inauguration.

The president hopes to announce his administration’s next steps to tackle gun violence shortly after he is sworn in for a second term on Jan. 21.

Obama wants Congress to reinstate a ban on military-style assault weapons, close loopholes that allow gun buyers to skirt background checks and restrict high-capacity magazines. Other recommendations to the Biden group include making gun trafficking a felony, getting the Justice Department to prosecute people caught lying on gun background-check forms and ordering federal agencies to send data to the National Gun Background Check Database.

Some of those steps could be taken through executive action, without the approval of Congress. White House officials say Obama will not finalize any actions until receiving Biden’s recommendations.

Gun-rights lawmakers and outside groups have also insisted that any policy response to the Newtown shooting also include an examination of mental health policies and the impact of violent movies and video games. To those people, the White House has pledged a comprehensive response.

“It is not a problem that can be solved by any specific action or single action that the government might take,” Carney said. “It’s a problem that encompasses issues of mental health, of education, as well as access to guns.”

In addition to Biden’s meetings this week, Education Secretary Arne Duncan will meet with parent and teacher groups, while Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius will meet with mental health and disability advocates.

The White House said other meetings are also scheduled with community organizations, business owners and religious leaders.

The CIA's double standard on secrecy

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.

What message did it send when George J. Tenet, its former director, refused to explain the intelligence debacle involving nonexistent weapons of mass destruction in Iraq but later got a seven-figure book contract and became a highly paid speaker? How is it that Milton Bearden, a former covert operative, got agency permission to write a book (“The Main Enemy”) with a New York Times reporter? What of the many memoirs written by ex-spooks like Robert Baer (“See No Evil,” and, with his wife, another former C.I.A. operative, “The Company We Keep”), Tony Mendez (“The Master of Disguise”), Lindsay Moran (“Blowing My Cover”), Melissa Boyle Mahle (“Denial and Deception”) and Floyd L. Paseman (“A Spy’s Journey”)?

These works help us understand the shadowy business of intelligence gathering, but collectively they may be undermining the credo of espionage: it is not a spectator sport. And how do we explain the profusion of former C.I.A. operatives who are now on-air pundits?

There was a time at the C.I.A., not so long ago, when the notion of cashing in on one’s access to secrets was considered contemptible. How, then, does one explain how Chase Brandon, a former C.I.A. covert operative, became the agency’s liaison with Hollywood (“Mission Impossible III”)? And what of the International Spy Museum, a for-profit entity in Washington headed by a former covert C.I.A. officer, Peter Earnest? (The museum gift shop’s most popular T-shirt says “Deny Everything.”)

The agency can be quite creative in evading its own strictures on secrecy. When I was researching a book on covert operatives killed in the line of duty — a book the C.I.A. tried to persuade me not to write — a senior agency employee called me. He gave me the ISBN number and part of the title of an obscure book, and advised me to find a copy. When I did, I saw what he had left out of the title: the name of a deceased covert operative. Why? So he could pass a polygraph test if asked if he had ever given a reporter the name of an operative. All that training in tradecraft, and it was used to evade the very secrecy it was designed to protect.

Now consider Mr. Rodriguez. As recently as 2005, national security reporters were told that they could not use his full name — unusual for someone at such a senior position — though he was no longer in the field and was overseeing covert operations from Washington. Under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982, even reporters can be prosecuted for unmasking operatives. So journalists complied and referred to Mr. Rodriguez simply as “Jose.” Mr. Rodriguez oversaw — and then ordered the destruction of videotapes that documented — the use of so-called enhanced interrogation techniques like waterboarding. He is now a published author and public speaker. The agency has no apparent problem with that; after all, he is defending not only his own handiwork but also the agency’s.

The confidentiality of clandestine work is and must be a core value at the C.I.A. But the agency’s arbitrary and selective application of secrecy rules threatens its already fragile credibility. If confirmed, John O. Brennan, whom President Obama has nominated to lead the C.I.A., should demand more consistent and less self-serving application of those rules.

Ted Gup is the author of “The Book of Honor: Covert Lives and Classified Deaths at the C.I.A.” and a fellow at Harvard’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics.

Court weighs warrantless blood tests in DUI cases

Sadly Emperor Obama supports the police taking these blood tests. That's the same Emperor Obama that claims he supports the people and the Bill of Rights.

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court is considering whether police must get a warrant before ordering a blood test on an unwilling drunken-driving suspect.

The justices heard arguments Wednesday in a case involving a disputed blood test from Missouri. Police stopped a speeding, swerving car and the driver, who had two previous drunken-driving convictions, refused to submit to a breath test to measure the alcohol level in his body.

The justices appeared to struggle with whether the dissipation of alcohol in the blood over time is reason enough for police to call for a blood test without first getting a warrant.

In siding with defendant Tyler McNeely, the Missouri Supreme Court said police need a warrant to take a suspect’s blood except when a delay could threaten a life or destroy potential evidence.

The state court upheld an order throwing out the results of the blood test, which showed that McNeely’s blood-alcohol content was .154 percent, well above the .08 percent legal limit.

Lawyers for Missouri and the Obama administration urged the justices to reject the state court decision and allow police to forgo a time-consuming process. In 2010, the administration said, more than 10,000 people died in crashes involving alcohol-impaired drivers, an average of one death every 51 minutes.

“Here, police are facing the certain destruction of blood-alcohol evidence,” Justice Department lawyer Nicole Saharsky said.

But several justices suggested that law enforcement officers should at least usually try to obtain a warrant. “Why shouldn’t the determination be made case to case?” Justice Antonin Scalia asked.

All 50 states have laws requiring drivers who are arrested on suspicion of driving while drunk to consent to a blood alcohol test, and refusal to submit to the test generally leads to suspension of a driver license. In addition, prosecutors can use the refusal against a defendant at trial. [So I guess that means the 4th and 5th Amendments are null and void]

In Missouri, a driver who won’t agree to either a breath or blood test can have his license suspended for a year. The American Civil Liberties Union, representing McNeely, said that the suspension is only 30 days for drivers with no previous convictions who take the test and are found to be impaired.

But McNeely may have had more reason than most to object to taking the test. Missouri said McNeely faced a felony charge with a maximum prison term of four years because of his two prior convictions.

He failed several field sobriety tests and the arresting officer, Cpl. Mark Winder of the Missouri State Highway Patrol, said McNeely’s speech was slurred and he was unsteady on his feet. [Failing a field sobriety test doesn't mean anything. Any defense attorney will tell you the tests are subjective and meaningless. In fact one public defender told us she asked the police who made DUI arrests to take the test in the courtroom and that despite being stone cold sober the cops routinely had difficulties passing their field sobriety tests]

There seemed little dispute that Winder had enough evidence to get a warrant for a blood test, but chose not to. Instead, he drove McNeely to a hospital. A technician drew blood from McNeely, who was handcuffed throughout the process. Winder’s decision set in motion the Supreme Court case.

Obama hasn't reined in Big Money

WASHINGTON — Even before Barack Obama was sworn in as president the first time, he touted his efforts to "change business as usual in Washington" by setting strict rules for his inauguration: No corporate donations were allowed; individuals could give only $50,000.

This time, Obama's inaugural committee is seeking million-dollar contributions from corporations and offering perks in return, such as tickets to the official ball. The six companies that have given so far include AT&T, Microsoft and Financial Innovations, a marketing company that received $15.7 million to produce merchandise for Obama's reelection campaign and is the official vendor for the inauguration. The committee has put no limit on how much individuals can give.

The relaxed rules reflect how Obama has largely dropped his efforts to curb the role of money in politics, a cause he once vowed to make central to his presidency.

Advisors say the White House does not plan to take up campaign finance reform any time soon, even following an election that saw more than $1 billion spent by outside groups, much of it financed with seven-figure donations from billionaires.

The gusher of money was triggered in part by the Supreme Court's 2010 Citizens United ruling, which allowed corporations to spend freely on political activity, a decision the president denounced in his State of the Union address that year.

But campaign finance reform advocates say Obama has at times even embraced the system he decries.

After railing against the political influence of outside groups funded by unlimited contributions, Obama gave his blessing to just such a group working on his behalf during his reelection. Priorities USA Action, a "super PAC" set up by two former White House aides, spent nearly $75million. Organizers of last year's Democratic National Convention vowed to produce it without corporate money, but ultimately used $5 million from a committee financed by companies such as Bank of America and Duke Energy to rent an arena in Charlotte, N.C.

"It's all headed in the wrong direction," said Fred Wertheimer, president of the finance reform advocacy group Democracy 21. "In failing to treat campaign finance issues as serious issues, President Obama has done what every other president has done during the past 40 years — and that is to do very little."

Obama advisors reject the charge, noting that he voluntarily released a list of his top fundraisers during last year's campaign, a step Republican challenger Mitt Romney declined to take.

"President Obama repeatedly and, in the case of the State of the Union, memorably advocated campaign finance reform to prevent large quantities of undisclosed money from drowning out the voices of average Americans," said White House spokesman Josh Earnest. "We're hopeful that in his second term, congressional Republicans will drop their opposition and work with the president on an issue that has traditionally earned bipartisan support."

Reform advocates say Obama needs to do more. The administration has yet to replace five members of the Federal Election Commission who are serving expired terms. The six-member panel is deeply polarized and deadlocks on most major regulatory issues.

A draft executive order requiring companies with federal contracts to disclose political spending was shelved after push back from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. And Obama has put little capital into building support for stalled legislation that would require more disclosure by politically active groups.

The third anniversary of the decision falls on Jan. 20, the same day Obama is officially sworn in for a second term. "The Big Money influence in politics is far, far worse than it was, making the absence of leadership all the more noteworthy and troubling," said Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen.

Administration officials argue that more pressing challenges topped Obama's to-do list when he took office: The economy was in free fall, the auto industry was failing and the moment seemed ripe for healthcare reform. After Citizens United, the president decided that a major legislative overhaul of the campaign finance system could not get through Congress, and the White House dropped the idea of trying to tinker around the edges.

"I cut the president some slack because there have been so many other issues on his plate," said Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), House sponsor of the Disclose Act, a measure that, among other things, would require groups to list their top donors in political ads. "But I will push to make sure this is part of the agenda in the next year. It does require presidential attention."

Obama is frequently pressed by supporters to take on the issue. On the campaign trail last year, donors at closed-door fundraisers asked what could be done to keep the other side from "buying" elections, as they often put it. The president, a constitutional lawyer by training, frequently replied that the only solution was a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United.

"Even if the amendment process falls short," Obama wrote, "it can shine a spotlight … and help apply pressure for change."

White House advisors say the remark just reflected Obama's grim analysis of what would be needed to change the system. Now that he has been reelected, his team is focused on the federal budget deficit, gun violence and immigration — not campaign finance reform.

Such thinking infuriates advocates of stricter fundraising rules. Obama's legislative agenda will not succeed without changing "a campaign finance system that puts enormous power behind special interests," said Larry Noble, former general counsel to the FEC and president of Americans for Campaign Reform.

Some of those deep-pocketed interests will have a role in the inauguration: A half-dozen corporations have donated money to the Presidential Inaugural Committee, which puts on the official parade and balls. This year, the committee aims to raise about $50million, according to fundraisers involved — similar to the $53.2 million raised for the 2009 inauguration, which drew an estimated 1.8 million people to the National Mall.

To raise the cash, party officials were reluctant to lean too heavily on the same weary major supporters who helped bring in a record $1.1 billion for Obama's reelection.

As the discussions unfolded last fall, the president's advisors agreed that taking money from a handful of corporations was palatable, especially since the donations were not linked to his reelection.

Unlike four years ago, however, the inaugural committee is not releasing details about how much donors have given, but it will have to report that to the FEC in April.

The committee's looser rules dismay campaign finance reform advocates, who had hoped Obama would renew his quest to limit the role of Big Money in Washington.

"The current system is unacceptable," Noble said. "President Obama said that at one time, and I'd like to believe the president still believes that. If so, you do something about it. You at least put up a fight."

American Presidents - Life Time Emperors???

President Barack Obama on Thursday signed into a law a measure giving him, George W. Bush and future former presidents and their spouses lifetime Secret Service protection, the White House announced.

The legislation, crafted by Republican Rep. Trey Gowdy of South Carolina, rolls back a mid-1990s law that imposed a 10-year limit on Secret Service protection for former presidents. Bush would have been the first former commander in chief affected.

At the time, lawmakers who supported the measure said it would save the government millions of dollars. They also argued that former presidents could hire private security firms (as Richard Nixon did after he decided to forgo Secret Service protection in 1985).

The bill had sailed through Congress with bipartisan support—it cleared the House of Representatives by voice vote in early December, and then it zipped through the Senate unopposed. The law also provides protection for former presidents’ kids until age 16. But “protection of a spouse shall terminate in the event of remarriage.”

The Secret Service started protecting presidents in 1901 after the assassination of William McKinley. In 1965, Congress passed a law authorizing the agency, which is now a part of the Department of Homeland Security, to protect former presidents for life.

In California, It’s U.S. vs. State Over Marijuana

Obama lied about having "bigger fish to fry" than recreational marijuana users.

STOCKTON, Calif. — Matthew R. Davies graduated from college with a master’s degree in business and a taste for enterprise, working in real estate, restaurants and mobile home parks before seizing on what he saw as uncharted territory with a vast potential for profits — medical marijuana.

He brought graduate-level business skills to a world decidedly operating in the shadows. He hired accountants, compliance lawyers, managers, a staff of 75 and a payroll firm. He paid California sales tax and filed for state and local business permits.

But in a case that highlights the growing clash between the federal government and those states that have legalized marijuana for medical or recreational use, the United States Justice Department indicted Mr. Davies six months ago on charges of cultivating marijuana, after raiding two dispensaries and a warehouse filled with nearly 2,000 marijuana plants.

The United States attorney for the Eastern District of California, Benjamin B. Wagner, a 2009 Obama appointee, wants Mr. Davies to agree to a plea that includes a mandatory minimum of five years in prison, calling the case a straightforward prosecution of “one of the most significant commercial marijuana traffickers to be prosecuted in this district.”

At the center of this federal-state collision is a round-faced 34-year-old father of two young girls. Displaying a sheaf of legal documents, Mr. Davies, who has no criminal record, insisted in an interview that he had meticulously followed California law in setting up a business in 2009 that generated $8 million in annual revenues. By all appearances, Mr. Davies’ dispensaries operated as openly as the local Krispy Kreme, albeit on decidedly more tremulous legal ground.

“To be looking at 15 years of our life, you couldn’t pay me enough to give that up,” Mr. Davies said at the dining room table in his two-story home along the San Joaquin River Delta, referring to the amount of time he could potentially serve in prison. “If I had believed for a minute this would happen, I would never have gotten into this.

“We thought, this is an industry in its infancy, it’s a heavy cash business, it’s basically being used by people who use it to cloak illegal activity. Nobody was doing it the right way. We thought we could make a model of how this should be done.”

His lawyers appealed this month to Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. to halt what they suggested was a prosecution at odds with Justice Department policies to avoid prosecutions of medical marijuana users and with President Obama’s statement that the government has “bigger fish to fry” than recreational marijuana users.

“Does this mean that the federal government will be prosecuting individuals throughout California, Washington, Colorado and elsewhere who comply with state law permitting marijuana use, or is the Davies case merely a rogue prosecutor out of step with administration and department policy?” asked Elliot R. Peters, one of his lawyers.

“This is not a case of an illicit drug ring under the guise of medical marijuana,” Mr. Peters wrote. “Here, marijuana was provided to qualified adult patients with a medical recommendation from a licensed physician. Records were kept, proceeds were tracked, payroll and sales taxes were duly paid.”

Mr. Holder’s aides declined to comment, referring a reporter to a letter from Mr. Wagner to Mr. Davies’s lawyers in which he disputed the depiction of the defendant as anything other than a major-league drug trafficker.

“Mr. Davies was not a seriously ill user of marijuana nor was he a medical caregiver — he was the major player in a very significant commercial operation that sought to make large profits from the cultivation and sale of marijuana,” the letter said. Mr. Wagner said that prosecuting such people “remains a core priority of the department.”

The case illustrates the struggle states and the federal government are now facing as they seek to deal with the changing contours of marijuana laws and public attitudes toward the drug. Colorado and Washington legalized marijuana for recreational use last year, and are among the 18 states, and the District of Columbia, that currently allow its medical use.

Two of Mr. Davies’s co-defendants are pleading guilty, agreeing to five-year minimum terms, to avoid stiffer sentences. Mr. Davies, while saying he did not “want to be a martyr,” decided to challenge the indictment with a combination of legal and public-relations measures, setting up a Web site devoted to his case and hiring Chris Lehane, a hard-hitting political consultant and former senior aide in Bill Clinton’s White House.

Among Mr. Davies’s advocates here in California are Paul I. Bonell, who was the president of the Premier Credit Union for 21 years before Mr. Davies hired him in early 2011 to oversee his businesses’ fiscal controls. After the businesses were raided in October that year, Mr. Bonell took a position as the head of the Lodi Boys and Girls Club.

“I had some reservations going in,” he said of Mr. Davies’s enterprise. “But the industry was exploding. Matt wanted to have internal controls in place. And we thought: This was a legitimate business. If the State of California deems it legitimate, we want to be the best at it.”

Mr. Davies’s accountant, David M. Silva, said he set up spreadsheets to keep track of inventories, revenues and expenses. “I’ve been a C.P.A. for 30 years,” Mr. Silva said. “What I saw was a guy who was trying to run an operation in an up-and-up way.”

The federal authorities said they stumbled across the operation after two men were spotted apparently breaking into Mr. Davies’s 30,000-square-foot Stockton warehouse. The police said they smelled marijuana plants. Federal agents conducted a raid and confiscated 1,962 plants and 200 pounds of marijuana.

Mr. Davies, who is free on $100,000 bail, greeted visitors to his gated home by asking them to speak softly while walking through the entryway so as not to awaken his sleeping infant. He called out to his wife when asked when he was indicted: “Hey, Molly — we were indicted on your birthday, right? July 18.”

Mr. Davies referred to marijuana as “medicine,” and himself as a turnaround expert.

“We were basically pharmacists for medical marijuana — everything was in full compliance with state law,” he said. “We paid our employees. We paid overtime. We had people going for unemployment if we fired them.”

“Why are they coming after me?” he asked. “If they have such a problem with California, why can’t they sue California?” [Because bullies and government tyrants prefer to pick on people that can't defend themselves. And of course the state of California has the resources to fight the Feds for decades, while Uncle Sam thugs can bankrupt Mr. Davies in a few years with legal expenses]

Stephanie Horton, 25, who went to work for Mr. Davies after going to one of his dispensaries to obtain medical marijuana to help her deal with ovarian and cervical cancer, said she was devastated by the arrest of employers she described as among the best she had ever had — not to mention the loss of her job.

“I’d go back and work there in a heartbeat,” Ms. Horton said. “I totally trusted them. We’re not criminals. I’ve never been arrested my whole life. I need that medication, and so do a whole lot of people.”

But federal prosecutors offered a much less sympathetic view of Mr. Davies. The authorities shut down the warehouse and two dispensaries but said that Mr. Davies had ties to a total of seven dispensaries in the region, which they said yielded $500,000 in annual profits. Mr. Davies’s lawyers disputed those assertions.

“Mr. Davies is being prosecuted for serious felony offenses,” Mr. Wagner wrote to Mr. Davies’s lawyers. “I understand he is facing unpleasant alternatives. Neither a meeting with me nor seeking a review in Washington will change that reality.”

This is as much a legal clash as a cultural clash. Recreational marijuana use is common across this state, and without the legal stigma attached to it in much of the country. The federal government is viewed as a distant force.

“It’s mind-boggling that there were hundreds of attorneys advising their clients that it was O.K. to do this, only to be bushwhacked by a federal system that most people in California are not even paying attention to,” said William J. Portanova, a former federal drug prosecutor and a lawyer for one of Mr. Davies’s co-defendants. “It’s tragic.”

Obama negotiated $41 in tax increases for every dollar of spending cuts

Congress is addicted to spending other people money???

That's just a polite way for saying Congress is full of crooks who steal and spend our money

And when they talk about cuts in spending it's usually double talk as in the latest "Fiscal Cliff" nonsense coming out of D.C. where President Obama negotiated $41 in tax increases for every dollar of spending cuts.

There’s no other way to put it. Congress is simply addicted to spending Other People’s Money. The latest evidence of their problem was the bill to resolve the fiscal cliff, which was stuffed with slabs of pork. That’s like sneaking drugs into your rehab counseling sessions.

The fiscal cliff was created to help restore fiscal discipline. Instead, President Obama negotiated $41 in tax increases for every dollar of spending cuts. Unable to restrain themselves at the sight of a “must pass” bill, the spending junkies snuck in subsidies for electric motorcycle manufacturers, NASCAR and Puerto Rican rum makers.

They showered $59 million on algae growers and $430 million on Hollywood producers. That last group was particularly deserving because they gave so freely of their time turning out for lavish Obama fundraising bashes.

Just days later, the bill to provide relief for hurricane Sandy victims was also spotted as a “must pass” measure not subject to normal appropriation rules. To the spenders, that means “game on.” So $23 billion of the $60 billion bill went to address the emergency damages sustained from the hurricane. The rest went to non-emergencies like upgrading the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration aircraft and grants for water and air pollution to states and tribes.

Federal subsidies for wind power provide a stark example of how difficult it is to terminate worthless spending. These handouts began 20 years ago in an effort to boost a promising energy source. They haven’t worked but the dollars keep rolling along.

In the absence of any technological breakthrough, according to the Department of Energy, average wind-power costs are actually higher in 2009 than in 1994. Moreover, wind-power sources have to be backed up by traditionally fueled plants (the wind doesn’t blow all the time, you know), which must be kept running in order to be available when needed.

Wind power is subsidized $52.48 per million watt-hours, compared to $3.10 for nuclear and $.63 for natural gas. These subsidies are so generous that wind-power producers can actually pay utilities to take their energy and still make a profit.

But in Washington, none of this matters. Each wind project is located in some congressman’s district, which means they have a fearless champion who can team with the financially clueless environmental lobbyists to keep the gravy train going. The extension of the subsidy will add $12 billion annually to the deficit. Meanwhile, Energy Sec. Chu soldiers on with plans to subsidize construction of three more offshore wind projects at $47 million each.

The ethanol mandate may be the most ludicrous federal policy of all. Although the subsidy was terminated a year ago, the mandate wreaks the same economic damage by forcing Americans to burn our food supply. Last year, our cars burned as much corn as was raised in Brazil, Mexico, Argentina and India combined.

The inevitable result was rising food costs, an especially serious matter in Third World countries facing chronic shortages. Many international relief organizations have begged the US to suspend the ethanol mandate but to no avail. Central American peasants don’t have Washington lobbyists nor do they vote in the Iowa primary, so they’re out of luck. Meanwhile, we all pay more for food and fuel and our air quality is actually worse.

Now our addicted politicians promise they’ll break that spending habit next time, when the debt ceiling is raised. But why would we believe that? The resolute spender Obama will still be president, the Senate is so incapable of decisive action they haven’t passed a budget in three years and the House may be less conservative than before. Demagogues will be on standby 24/7 to pounce on anyone brave enough to whisper a word about entitlement reform. It doesn’t look good.

This nonsense will stop only when taxpayers put as much heat on their politicians as the moochers do. Algae growers, Hollywood moguls and ethanol producers are the low hanging fruit of federal waste. If we can’t get them off the dole, we have no chance of meeting the major challenges necessary to get us back on track.

East Valley resident Tom Patterson (pattersontomc@cox.net) is a retired physician and former state senator.

Obama administration gets America involved in Mali war!!!

Of course most Presidents love war because it gives them an easy excuse to raise taxes and pass laws taking away the rights of people they rule over.

The Obama administration is considering significant military backing for France’s drive against al-Qaeda-linked militants in Mali, but its support for a major ally could test U.S. legal boundaries and stretch counterterrorism resources in a murky new conflict.

The United States is already providing surveillance and other intelligence help to France and may soon offer military support such as transport or refueling planes, according to U.S. officials, who stressed that any assistance would stop short of sending American combat forces to the volatile West African nation.

A U.S. and France-backed African force will try to prevent northern Mali from becoming another haven for jihadists.

At the same time, the administration is navigating a thicket of questions about military support and how far it could go in aiding the French without violating U.S. law or undermining policy objectives.

Direct military aid to Mali is forbidden under U.S. law because the weak rump government there seized power in a coup. U.S. moves are further complicated by uncertainty about which militants would be targeted in an assault.

The loosely affiliated web of Malian militants in the country’s north includes members of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM). But other fighters are longtime foes of the Malian government and pose no direct threat to U.S. interests.

“Our goal is to do what we can,” Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta said Tuesday during a visit to Spain. “The fundamental objective is to ensure that AQIM — al-Qaeda — never establishes a base of operations in Mali or anywhere else.”

France launched fresh airstrikes in Mali on Tuesday and said it will triple the size of its combat force there. The punishing bombing campaign has failed to stop the militants’ advance, and the additional forces suggest preparation for a ground assault.

The Obama administration is wary of deepening its involvement in the conflict. But the United States shares French concern about the militants’ territorial gains. It is also eager to help a top ally with which it has worked closely on counterterrorism issues in Africa, a senior administration official said.

On all sides, the overriding fear is that the militants will create a terrorist haven in rugged northern Mali similar to the one that fighters secured in Afghanistan before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

U.S. officials have said publicly that they are evaluating France’s requests for further assistance. But privately, they say that one of the critical requests relates to intelligence that could be used for targeting purposes, said the senior official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity about intelligence and diplomatic matters.

Evaluating the request involves “understanding what the French objectives are and really how they intend to go about them and against whom,” the official said.

The official was not specific about whether the surveillance being shared with France comes from drones or from satellites.

State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said: “They’ve asked for support with airlift. They’ve asked for support with aerial refueling. We are already providing information, and we are looking hard today at the airlift question, helping them transport forces from France and from the area into the theater, and also at the refueling question.”

The Pentagon has begun identifying transport and tanker planes that might be used, but U.S. officials cautioned that resources in the region are slim and that French requests have shifted.

“We’re not providing logistics support, whether airlift, refueling,” yet, the official said. “There is a little bit of a cold-start aspect there.”

Any additional U.S. help could go to French forces directly or to African backup forces, which are expected to begin arriving soon. The European Union said Tuesday that it will speed up a troop-training mission in Mali, which now is likely to be launched in the second half of February or in early March. The E.U. is not planning any direct combat role.

“We have limited assets in the region we can bring in for lift,” the U.S. official said. “Is it best for French troops, or should we be moving Nigerians or troops from Togo or Benin?”

The official said contingency plans for the use of armed drones were already in place and are being reevaluated. The official would not be more specific.

France, the former colonial power in Mali and neighboring Algeria, has led international efforts to confront the Islamist militants who exploited last year’s coup to co-opt a homegrown Malian ethnic conflict.

For months, French officials insisted that only African soldiers would fight. Despite early reservations, the United States backed French-led efforts to initiate an international military force backed by the United Nations. That force was to deploy later this year, but the militants have moved much faster.

“We have one objective,” French President Francois Hollande said Tuesday. “To make sure when we leave, when we end this intervention, there is security in Mali, legitimate leaders, an electoral process and the terrorists no longer threaten its territory.”

The French reinforcements will bring the total number of French troops in Mali from 800 to 2,500, according to the Associated Press.

In addition to possible logistical support, the United States wants France and its partners to lay out a strategic plan for Mali that goes beyond short-term military intervention.

The United States withdrew military support for Mali, once a promising democratic example in Africa, because of the coup. Embarrassingly for Washington, the coup leader had received military training in the United States, defense officials said.

The Obama administration is now working to hurry along the African force. Britain, Canada, Belgium, Denmark and perhaps Germany would help provide logistics for the African deployment, a French diplomat said.

The United States had always been expected to foot a large share of the bill for the African-led force, but it had hoped that the planned slow rollout of the force would allow time to attract more donors.

For now, the United States will redirect about $8 million in unused aid and will ask Congress for additional money, Nuland said.

Obama to announce expansive gun-control agenda

President Obama on Wednesday will formally announce the most aggressive and expansive national gun-control agenda in generations as he presses Congress to mandate background checks for all firearms buyers and prohibit assault weapons and high-capacity ammunition clips.

The announcement will set off a fierce confrontation with Congress over an issue that has riven American society for decades. Obama’s far-reaching firearms agenda has at best tepid support from his party leaders and puts him at loggerheads with Democratic centrists.

Days before his second inauguration, Obama is seeking to drive the gun debate in a way that contrasts with the accommodating approach he often took during his first term. In the weeks ahead, he will attempt to rally popular support to bend the will of lawmakers to vote for what he considers the ideal, not merely the possible.

“Yes, we can reduce gun violence, but it’s something we have to do together,” White House press secretary Jay Carney told reporters Tuesday. “It’s something that cannot be done by a president alone. It can’t be done by a single community alone or a mayor or a governor or by Congress alone. We all have to work together.”

Obama will begin this effort Wednesday in the presence of children who wrote him letters after last month’s mass shooting at a grade school in Newtown, Conn., and who have been invited to Washington to attend the rollout.

In addition to background checks and restrictions on military-style guns and ammunition magazines, Obama is expected to propose mental health and school safety initiatives such as more federal funding for police officers in schools, according to lawmakers and interest group leaders whom White House officials briefed on the plans.

Bruce Reed, Vice President Biden’s chief of staff, told liberal activists late Tuesday that Obama’s package would also include a federal gun trafficking measure to stop straw-man purchases and crack down on trafficking rings after a number of mayors raised the issue, said a person familiar with the plan.

Obama also is expected to present up to 19 executive actions that his administration will take, the lawmakers and advocates said. These steps include enhanced federal scientific research on gun violence and a modernized federal database system to track guns, criminals and the mentally ill.

Most of these actions are relatively narrow in scope, however, and experts have said that without accompanying legislation they will do little to curb gun violence, at least in the near term.

Asked about the constraints on Obama’s executive powers, Carney said, “It is a simple fact that there are limits on what can be done within existing law.”

After Biden led a month-long task force, Obama decided to push an expansive agenda that in many ways represents his liberal base’s wish list rather than proposals that may be more politically viable to a divided Congress.

Obama’s proposals amount to the most comprehensive federal regulations of the firearms industry since 1968, when President Lyndon B. Johnson acted in the aftermath of high-profile assassinations.

“My starting point is not to worry about the politics,” Obama said. “My starting point is to focus on what makes sense, what works, what should we be doing to make sure that our children are safe and that we’re reducing the incidents of gun violence.”

Lawmakers, he added, “are going to have to have a debate and examine their own conscience.”

Already, there are warning signs about the hurdles Obama’s agenda may face on Capitol Hill. Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) said it would be exceedingly difficult to pass an assault-weapons ban, which appears to be the most polarizing of Obama’s proposals.

“Let’s be realistic,” Reid told a Nevada PBS affiliate last week. “In the Senate, we’re going to do what we think can get through the House, and I’m not going to go through a bunch of these gyrations just to say we’ve done something.”

House Democratic Whip Steny H. Hoyer (Md.) echoed that calculation on Tuesday by acknowledging the difficulties that gun-control legislation would face in the Republican-led House.

More than half of all Americans say the Newtown shootings have made them more supportive of gun control, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll released Monday. An assault-weapons ban has the support of 58 percent of Americans, the poll shows.

In New York on Tuesday, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo (D) signed into law what he called the most comprehensive package of state gun measures in the nation. The centerpiece is an expanded ban on assault weapons that would prohibit semiautomatic pistols and rifles as well as ammunition clips holding more than seven rounds.

Congress will take up the federal proposals next week — first in the Democratic-controlled Senate and then the House.

Gun control will be only one point of friction between the White House and the Capitol. Policy fights loom over raising the nation’s debt ceiling as well as overhauling immigration laws.

Obama’s gun control proposals are sure to face stiff opposition from the National Rifle Association, which released a video Tuesday on its Web site calling Obama an “elitist hypocrite” for having the Secret Service protect his daughters at school while voicing skepticism about an NRA effort to place armed guards in all schools.

Even some of the administration’s allies on Capitol Hill, including some rural Democrats, have criticized parts of Obama’s agenda.

“An assault-weapons stand-alone ban on just guns alone, in the political reality we have, will not go anywhere,” Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) said Sunday on CNN.

Lawmakers who have been part of Biden’s discussions said the White House is well aware of the political difficulty it faces in advancing this agenda.

“I think there’s a commitment to do the big things,” said Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.). “I also think that they’re realists, and in addition to doing the big things, they want to make sure that they do as many of the effective things that we can find some level of consensus on.”

Consensus appears more possible around universal background checks and a ban on magazines capable of carrying more than 10 rounds of ammunition.

Rep. Carolyn McCarthy (D-N.Y.) said she has spoken discreetly with several Republican lawmakers who may be open to backing a ban on high-capacity clips. “What I said to them is, ‘Do your own press conference. Come out as a group. There’s power in numbers,’ ” she said.

Some gun-control advocates say universal background checks could do more to stem gun violence than an assault-weapons ban because they would keep more firearms — including handguns used in most shootings — out of the hands of criminals or those with mental illnesses.

Matt Bennett, a senior vice president at Third Way, a centrist think tank consulted by Biden’s task force, said of the assault-weapons ban: “We support it, but we don’t think it will be easy to do. And we’re not sure that it is worth the expenditure of a tremendous amount of political capital to get.”

The long-dormant debate over gun laws was revived in December after the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown.

Obama and his allies plan to pressure Congress from the outside, just as they did in the recent “fiscal cliff” negotiations that resulted in tax increases for the wealthiest Americans.

“The president can play a vital role in rallying the public support that already exists,” said Dan Gross, president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. “It’s not a question of muscling anything through. It’s a question of changing the political calculus on this issue.”

Ed O’Keefe, Rosalind S. Helderman, Sari Horwitz and Peter Wallsten contributed to this report.

NRA hits Obama over ‘hypocrisy’ of armed guards for daughters

Here is a short movie that the NRA put out on Obama's double standard on guns. It's at the bottom of this web page.

In a sign of how brutal, emotional and deeply personal the coming battle over gun violence is likely to be, the National Rifle Association on Tuesday accused President Barack Obama of hypocrisy for having the Secret Service protect his daughters even as he opposes the NRA's call for armed guards in schools.

The Web video, first obtained by The Blaze, opens with a narrator asking, “Are the president’s kids more important than yours? Then why is he skeptical about putting armed security in our schools when his kids are protected by armed guards at their school?”

The 35-second video makes no effort to hide the tension and animosity between the NRA and Obama, even stepping into the recent "fiscal cliff" debate.

The video continues, “Mr. Obama demands that the wealthy pay their fair share of taxes but he’s just another elitist hypocrite when it comes to a fair share of security” as an altered image of the president peers over a stack of dollar bills, followed by images of “Meet the Press” host David Gregory, California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Vice President Joe Biden.

A White House official declined to comment on the video. However, spokesman Jay Carney did announce that Obama would outline his administration’s plan to address gun violence on Wednesday.

Gun grabbing Obama unveils $500 million gun violence package

President Barack Obama on Wednesday launched the most sweeping effort to curb U.S. gun violence in nearly two decades, announcing a $500 million package that sets up a fight with Congress over bans on military-style assault weapons and high-capacity ammunition magazines just a month after a shooting in Connecticut killed 20 school children.

Obama also signed 23 executive actions, which require no congressional approval. But the president, speaking at the White House, acknowledged the most sweeping, effective actions must be taken by lawmakers.

“To make a real and lasting difference, Congress must act,” Obama said. “And Congress must act soon.” He added, “I’ll put everything that I’ve got into this.”

Obama was joined by children who wrote him letters about gun violence in the weeks following the Connecticut shooting. Families of the children killed in the shooting, as well as survivors, were also in the audience.

The president appealed to the nation’s conscience, but his announcement promises to set up a bitter fight with a powerful pro-gun lobby that has long warned supporters that Obama wanted to take away their guns.

The U.S. has the highest rate of gun ownership of any country in the world, and pro-gun groups see any move on gun restrictions as an offense against the right guaranteed by the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Critics counter that the country’s founding fathers never could have foreseen assault weapons more than two centuries ago, when guns were intended for the common, not individual, defense, guns were often stored in community areas and rifles fired one shot at a time.

“This is the land of the free and the home of the brave, and always will be,” Obama said, acknowledging the right to possess and bear firearms. “But we’ve also long realized … that with rights come responsibilities.”

Emotions have been high since the Connecticut shooting, which Obama has called the worst day of his presidency. He largely ignored the issue of gun violence during his first term but appears willing to stake his second term on it now. He’ll have to contend with looming fiscal issues that have threatened to push whatever he proposes aside, at least for a while.

Gun control advocates also worry that opposition from the powerful National Rifle Association and its allies in Congress will be too great to overcome. The NRA released an online video Tuesday that called Obama an “elitist hypocrite” for having armed Secret Service agents protect his daughters at school while not committing to installing armed guards in all schools. The NRA insists that the best way to prevent more mass shootings is to give more “good guys” guns.

The White House called the NRA video “repugnant and cowardly.” [What's cowardly about calling a hypocrite a hypocrite?]

The public appears receptive to stronger federal action on guns, with majorities of Americans favoring a nationwide ban on military-style rapid-fire weapons, according to a new Associated Press-GfK poll. Three-quarters of Americans said they reacted to the Connecticut shooting with deep anger, while 54 percent said they felt deeply ashamed it could happen in the United States.

The poll also shows 51 percent said they believed laws limiting gun ownership infringe on the public’s right to bear firearms.

White House officials, seeking to avoid setting the president up for failure, have emphasized that no single measure — even an assault weapons ban — would solve the scourge of gun violence. But without such a ban, or other sweeping Congress-approved measures, it’s unclear whether executive actions alone can make any noticeable difference. [It will certainly take the guns away from the good guys. Of course criminals who never do obey the law will continue to have guns!]

The president asked Congress to renew the ban on high-grade, military-style assault weapons that was first signed into law by President Bill Clinton in 1994 but expired in 2004. Obama also called for limiting ammunition magazines to 10 rounds or fewer, and he proposed a federal statute to stop purchases of guns by buyers who are acting for others.

The president also called for a focus on universal background checks. Some 40 percent of gun sales take place without background checks, including those by private sellers at gun shows or over the Internet, according to the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence.

The president’s framework is based on recommendations from Vice President Joe Biden, who led a wide-ranging task force on gun violence. Beyond the gun control measures, Biden also gave Obama suggestions for improving mental health care and addressing violent images in video games, movies and television.

States and cities have been moving against gun violence as well. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo on Tuesday signed into law the toughest gun control law in the U.S., and the first since the Connecticut shooting. The law includes a tougher assault-weapons ban and provisions to try to keep guns out of the hands of mentally ill people who make threats.

The NRA criticized the bill, saying in a statement, “These gun control schemes have failed in the past and will have no impact on public safety and crime.”

In Washington, it’s unclear how much political capital Obama will use in pressing for congressional action.

The White House and Congress will soon be consumed by three looming fiscal deadlines, each of which is expected to be contentious. And the top Republican in the Senate, Mitch McConnell, has warned the White House that it will be at least three months before the chamber considers gun legislation.

Congress, in any case, can move slowly. The chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee said Wednesday he’ll begin hearings in two weeks on gun safety proposals. Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy, a gun owner, said he envisions a series of hearings examining violence in popular media and how to keep guns safe, among other topics.

— Ordering tougher penalties for people who lie on background checks and requiring federal agencies to make relevant data available to the federal background check system.

— Ending limits that make it more difficult for the government to research gun violence, such as gathering data on guns that fall into criminal hands.

— Requiring federal law enforcement to trace guns recovered in criminal investigations.

— Giving schools flexibility to use federal grant money to improve school safety, such as by hiring school resource officers. [Wow! Looks like President Obama is going to implement the dumb NRA suggestion of putting a cop in every school - I guess Obama loves jobs programs for cops!!!!]

— Giving communities grants to institute programs to keep guns away from people who shouldn’t have them.

New NRA ad denounces Obama as a hypocrite

By Morgan Little and Melanie Mason This post has been updated. See below for details.

WASHINGTON -- Denouncing President Obama as an “elitist hypocrite,” the National Rifle Assn. released a new video attacking the president for opposing universal armed guards in schools while his own daughters are protected by the Secret Service.

“Are the president’s kids more important than yours?” the ad asks, “Then why is he skeptical of putting armed security in schools, when his kids are protected by armed guards in their school?”

NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre, during the organization’s controversial response to the shootings in Newtown, Conn., called for armed guards to protect students in schools nationwide, and previewed the organization’s line of attack against the president.

“We care about our president, so we protect him with armed Secret Service agents. Members of Congress work in offices surrounded by Capitol police officers,” LaPierre said in December. “Yet when it comes to our most beloved, innocent and vulnerable members of the American family, our children, we as a society leave them every day utterly defenseless. And the monsters and the predators of the world know it and exploit it. That must change now.”

Obama had previously declared his skepticism over the NRA’s idea during an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press” in December.

“I am skeptical that the only answer is putting more guns in schools, and I think the vast majority of the American people are skeptical that that somehow is going to solve our problem,” he said.

[Updated, 9:02 a.m. PST Jan. 16: The ad was roundly critiqued Wednesday morning, with former Obama press secretary Robert Gibbs calling it “stupid” and “disgusting” on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”

“This reminds me of an ad that somebody made about 2 o'clock in the morning,” he said.

And David Frum, a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush, said the ad falls “beyond the pale.”

"Generally speaking, a president’s family should not be subject to political criticism," he said.

"Most Americans agree that a president’s children should not be used as pawns in a political fight,” White House press secretary Jay Carney said in a statement. "But to go so far as to make the safety of the president’s children the subject of an attack ad is repugnant and cowardly."]

NRA spokesman Andrew Arulanandam said that those criticizing the commercial for pulling Sasha and Malia Obama into the political debate are “completely missing the point” and that the ad is about ”keeping our children safe.”

“There is a double standard when the president said that he’s skeptical about having policemen in school yet his family is the beneficiary of multiple armed law enforcement officers,” Arulanandam said.

Arulanandam said the ad is currently running on the Sportsman Channel, as well as on its online site NRAstandandfight.org. He said the ad foreshadows an increased television presence from the NRA as the debate over gun laws moves over to Capitol Hill.

On the other side of the debate, Americans for Responsible Solutions, a group established by former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and her husband Mark Kelly to counteract the NRA’s well-documented influence in Washington, is looking to comb supporters for possible solutions to the country’s gun violence.

President Obama’s 23 gun grabbing policy

You will have to click here to view the actions, because it's a PDF file and I can't include it here.

President Obama declared Wednesday 23 executive actions his administration would be taking in response to a series of shooting sprees over the past year. Included in the list are broader background checks on gun buyers, the nomination of a new ATF director and more.

NRA begins pushback with Web ad criticizing Obama

WASHINGTON — In a sharp pushback against any new gun regulations, the National Rifle Association posted a Web video that labels President Barack Obama an “elitist hypocrite” for allowing his daughters to be protected by armed Secret Service agents while not embracing armed guards for schools. [Oddly one of Obama's proposals is to fund armed police officers for schools like the NRA suggested. Of course I think that is a really dumb idea.]

“Are the president’s kids more important than yours?” a male narrator asks in the video. “Then why is he skeptical of putting armed security in schools, when his kids are protected by armed guards in their school?” [Again one of Obama's proposals is to fund armed police officers for schools like the NRA suggested]

The spot, posted even before Obama unveiled his gun policy proposals on Wednesday, drew an indignant response from the White House.

“Most Americans agree that a president’s children should not be used as pawns in a political fight,” White House press secretary Jay Carney said in a statement. “But to go so far as to make the safety of the president’s children the subject of an attack ad is repugnant and cowardly.” [What's the problem??? Obama is clearly a hypocrite on this issue. He has armed Secret Service police officers guard his children, while he wants to take away our guns]

The group’s confrontational video bore the hallmarks of a conventional political attack ad. It uses grainy, unflattering visuals of Obama, has a grim-sounding narrator and ominous music. It also invokes a seemingly unrelated issue, Obama’s insistence on a tax increase for the wealthiest Americans, as it argues that Obama is hypocritical because he’s expressed skepticism about putting armed guards in schools in response to the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. [For the third time one of Obama's proposals is to fund armed police officers for schools like the NRA suggested]

The ad equates Secret Service protection provided to Obama and his family with a proposal by NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre to put armed guards in schools after the Newtown shootings. LaPierre suggested that would have prevented the shootings that ended 26 lives.

“Protection for their kids,” the narrator says, “and gun-free zones for ours.”

The video is part of what’s expected to be an aggressive NRA lobbying push to thwart new gun regulations. The group has been raising money in response to the outcry for new gun laws. The Washington Post reported on Wednesday that a fresh fundraising appeal, circulated this week by LaPierre to the group’s membership, calls the current debate “the fight of the century.”

“I warned you this day was coming and now it’s here,” LaPierre wrote. “This is the fight of the century and I need you on board with NRA now more than ever. My strength, and the strength of our entire NRA organization, comes from you and your strong commitment to our membership. I need you in our corner TODAY.”

The group’s formal response to Obama’s announcement of legislative proposals and executive actions on Wednesday was more muted but still skeptical. “The NRA will continue to focus on keeping our children safe and securing our schools, fixing our broken mental health system, and prosecuting violent criminals to the fullest extent of the law,” the statement said.

“We look forward to working with Congress on a bipartisan basis to find real solutions to protecting America’s most valuable asset - our children,” it said. “Attacking firearms and ignoring children is not a solution to the crisis we face as a nation. Only honest, law-abiding gun owners will be affected and our children will remain vulnerable to the inevitability of more tragedy.”

Obama takes on gun extremists

In this editorial the author labels people that believe in the Second Amendment as "gun extremists" in an effort to paint them as nut jobs.

I wonder would he think it was unreasonable to require journalists who want to exercise their First Amendment right of free speech to first buy a $200 First Amendment permit, like people that want to exercise their Second Amendment right of owning a machine gun have to??

President Obama went big in offering a remarkably comprehensive plan to curb gun violence, and good for him. But his announcement Wednesday is only the beginning of a protracted struggle for national sanity on firearms. Extremists have controlled the debate on guns for many years. They will do all they can to preserve a bloody status quo. The irrationality of their approach must be exposed and their power broken.

Far from acting as if his work was now done, the president made clear that he is fully invested in seeing his agenda realized — and fully prepared to lead a national movement to loosen the grip of resignation and cynicism in the face of brutality and carnage. Gun violence is not some “boutique” issue, as it is occasionally called. We are in danger of having mass shootings define us as a nation. As a people, we must rise up against this obscenity.

This fight is especially challenging for many who view themselves as “moderates” or “centrists.” Moderation is a thoroughly honorable disposition, and Obama’s proposals are moderation incarnate. By international standards, they are very cautious. The president did not call for registering all guns or confiscating assault weapons. He strongly endorsed the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the Second Amendment right to bear arms. He is operating within a broad consensus about what is possible and what can work.

An assault-weapons ban received 38 Republican votes in the House in 1994 and is backed by 58 percent of Americans, according to a Washington Post/ABC News poll. Were those Republicans outside the mainstream? And what about that 58 percent of Americans? The poll also found that 65 percent favored a ban on high-capacity magazines, another part of the Obama plan, and 86 percent favored closing the gun-show loophole, part of the effort to make sure there are background checks for all gun purchases.

But the lobbies that purport to speak for gun owners (while actually representing the interests of gun manufacturers) don’t care what the public thinks. They tried to pretend the president’s ideas are radical. And it shows how perverse our national conversation can become when those who speak in the name of civility, reason and bipartisanship give in to timidity.

Too often, moderation has become a synonym for cowardice. Too often, moderates lack the guts to define the sensible middle of the road themselves — as Obama has done on the gun issue — and then to defend it. Instead, they yield to the temptation to calibrate where everyone else stands before deciding what they believe. This allows extremists who lack any shame to drag our discourse off the road entirely, into a ditch of unreason, fear and invective.

After the NRA’s vile new advertisement that uses Secret Service protection for the president’s daughters to make a small-minded political point, can anyone take the organization’s arguments seriously again? Aren’t politicians who continue to bow low before the NRA complicit with a crowd that lacks any sense of decency?

It tells us all we need to know, that the gun lobby is deeply afraid of the facts and the evidence. This is why one of the most important actions the president took was to end the ban on research into gun violence by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which the weapons lobby had forced through a compliant Congress.

Yet Obama and Vice President Biden also worked hard to find middle ground in their anti-violence program in drawing on concerns raised since the Sandy Hook tragedy by gun rights advocates. Obama thus addressed not only firearms issues but also the imperative to improve school security and our mental health system, as well as the need to know more about the impact of violent video games.

Most heartening of all was the tone the president took. He did not cast himself as an evenhanded umpire far above the fray, handing down ideas that all people of good will would inevitably accept. He acknowledged that the battle ahead would be difficult. He predicted he would have to fight the lie that his plan constituted “a tyrannical assault on liberty.” And he sought to mobilize a new effort to counteract the entrenched power of those who have dictated submissiveness in the face of bloodshed.

“Enough,” Obama declared, insisting that change would come only “if the American people demand it.”

Read more from E.J. Dionne’s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook.

Obama’s far-reaching gun-proposals face uncertain fate in divided Congress

The gun-control agenda that President Obama unveiled with urgency on Wednesday now faces an uncertain fate in a bitterly divided Congress, where Republican opposition hardened and centrist Democrats remained noncommittal after a month of feverish public debate.

By pursuing an expansive overhaul of the nation’s gun laws, Obama is wagering that public opinion has evolved enough after a string of mass shootings to force passage of politically contentious measures that Congress has long stymied.

Yet there was no indication on Wednesday that the mood on Capitol Hill has changed much. Within hours of Obama’s formal policy rollout at the White House, Republicans who had previously said they were open to a discussion about gun violence condemned his agenda as violating the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms.

“I’m confident there will be bipartisan opposition to his proposal,” Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) said in a statement.

The Senate plans to begin taking up Obama’s proposals next week, with the House waiting to see what the Democrat-controlled Senate passes first, congressional aides said. The Senate is likely to take a piecemeal approach, eventually holding up-or-down votes on the individual elements of Obama’s plan rather than trying to muscle through a single comprehensive bill, aides said.

Obama, in an emotional White House ceremony, outlined four major legislative proposals aimed at curbing what he called “the epidemic of gun violence in this country”: universal background checks for all gun buyers, a crackdown on gun trafficking, a ban on military-style assault weapons and a ban on ammunition magazines holding more than 10 bullets.

Obama also signed paperwork initiating 23 executive actions that include steps to strengthen the existing background-check system, promote research on gun violence and provide training in “active shooter situations.” He also nominated Todd Jones, acting director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, to become the agency’s permanent director.

As important as the executive actions are, Obama said, “they are in no way a substitute” for the legislative proposals he sent to Congress.

“We have to examine ourselves in our hearts and ask yourselves: What is important?” Obama said. He added, “If parents and teachers, police officers and pastors, if hunters and sportsmen, if responsible gun owners, if Americans of every background stand up and say, enough, we’ve suffered too much pain and care too much about our children to allow this to continue, then change will — change will come.”

But on Capitol Hill, where two decades of gun-control efforts have landed in the political graveyard, leaders of Obama’s own party do not necessarily share his views.

Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) stopped short of embracing Obama’s proposals, calling them “thoughtful recommendations” and saying that he would “consider legislation that addresses gun violence and other aspects of violence in our society early this year.”

In contrast with his role in the major policy debates during Obama’s first term, Reid is likely to step back on guns, according to Senate Democratic aides. He will leave it to Sens. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) and Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.) to shepherd the legislation, at least for now.

Reid is concerned about the potential political impact on fellow Democrats representing rural or conservative states, and he believes gun control could become a significant issue for at least 10 of the 23 Democratic Senate seats up for grabs in 2014, aides said.

The four measures Obama presented — which, taken together, rank among the most ambitious legislative projects of his presidency — appear to have varying levels of support in Congress.

The White House and Democratic lawmakers have calculated that the assault-weapons ban — a version of which passed in 1994 but expired a decade later — has the toughest odds, according to gun-control advocates in regular contact with administration officials. Also in jeopardy, they said, is the proposal to prohibit high-capacity magazines.

But a broad consensus seems more likely to build around universal background checks, which senior administration officials said is Obama’s top priority. Schumer said the idea is “at the sweet spot” of what is politically possible.

The gun trafficking proposal, which would impose new penalties on those who buy multiple firearms and hand them off to criminals, also could find majority support.

“If you are left in a position of having to oppose universal background checks and a firearms trafficking statute, that’s tough for responsible Republicans,” said Matt Bennett, a senior vice president at Third Way, a centrist think tank.

House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) adopted a wait-and-see approach Wednesday. His spokesman, Michael Steel, said House committees will consider Obama’s proposals and “if the Senate passes a bill, we will also take a look at that.”

But the statements from many other Republicans at both ends of the Capitol were far tougher. Rep. Steve Stockman (R-Tex.), who has threatened to initiate impeachment proceedings against Obama, condemned what he described as Obama’s “anti-gun sneak attack” and promised a legislative battle to protect “the God-given right to keep and bear arms.”

A potential presidential candidate, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), said: “President Obama is targeting the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding citizens instead of seriously addressing the real underlying causes of such violence.”

And Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), who last week said he would be open to some form of gun control, said on Wednesday that Obama’s executive actions amounted to a “power grab” to “poke holes in the Second Amendment.”

No Republican lawmakers attended Wednesday’s White House ceremony. The only vestige of bipartisanship came when Obama invoked former president Ronald Reagan. He noted that Reagan, “one of the staunchest defenders of the Second Amendment,” wrote to Congress in 1994 to urge support for the assault-weapons ban.

Obama acknowledged that getting his proposals through Congress “will be difficult,” making a veiled reference to powerful lobbying groups such as the National Rifle Association.

“There will be pundits and politicians and special-interest lobbyists publicly warning of a tyrannical, all-out assault on liberty — not because that’s true, but because they want to gin up fear or higher ratings or revenue for themselves,” Obama predicted. “And behind the scenes, they’ll do everything they can to block any common-sense reform and make sure nothing changes whatsoever.”

In its official response, the NRA adopted a more muted tone than it has in recent weeks, saying it would work with Congress “on a bipartisan basis” to develop solutions that secure the nation’s schools and fix broken mental health systems. The statement did not specifically address Obama’s proposals, which include a $150 million school-safety initiative to help communities hire 1,000 new school resource officers.

But at a huge annual gun show in Las Vegas, the NRA said its opposition to Obama’s plans was “the fight of the century.”

“I warned you this day was coming, and now it’s here,” NRA executive vice president Wayne LaPierre wrote in a fundraising letter circulated at the trade show. “It’s not about protecting your children. It’s not about stopping crime. It’s about banning your guns . . . PERIOD!”

Gun-control advocates say their strategy will be to highlight popular support for most of Obama’s proposals and rally voters across the country to press their representatives in Congress to act.

“There’s an extraordinary disconnect between what the American public wants — including gun owners and NRA members — and what our elected officials are doing about it,” said Dan Gross, president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. “It is going to be up to us, the American public, to close that disconnect.”

Obama vowed Wednesday to “put everything I’ve got into this.” In a moving event one month and two days after a gunman killed 20 small children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., Obama was flanked by children who wrote him letters in the days after the massacre, pleading with him to do something to curb gun violence.

The president urged Americans to put pressure on their members of Congress and “get them on record” on whether they support universal background checks on gun buyers and renewal of the bans on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines.

“And if they say no, ask them why not,” Obama said. “Ask them what’s more important: Doing whatever it takes to get an ‘A’ grade from the gun lobby that funds their campaigns, or giving parents some peace of mind when they drop their child off to first grade?”

Vice President Biden, who headed the task force that developed Wednesday’s proposals, said “we have a moral obligation” to reduce the chances that tragedies such as the one in Newtown could happen again.

“I have no illusions about what we’re up against,” Biden said. But he added: “The world has changed, and it’s demanding action.”

Sari Horwitz in Las Vegas and William Branigin, Scott Wilson and Lyndsey Layton in Washington contributed to this report.

I Went After Guns. Obama Can, Too.

It is for Americans and their elected representatives to determine the right response to President Obama’s proposals on gun control. I wouldn’t presume to lecture Americans on the subject. I can, however, describe what I, as prime minister of Australia, did to curb gun violence following a horrific massacre 17 years ago in the hope that it will contribute constructively to the debate in the United States.

I was elected prime minister in early 1996, leading a center-right coalition. Virtually every nonurban electoral district in the country — where gun ownership was higher than elsewhere — sent a member of my coalition to Parliament.

Six weeks later, on April 28, 1996, Martin Bryant, a psychologically disturbed man, used a semiautomatic Armalite rifle and a semiautomatic SKS assault weapon to kill 35 people in a murderous rampage in Port Arthur, Tasmania.

After this wanton slaughter, I knew that I had to use the authority of my office to curb the possession and use of the type of weapons that killed 35 innocent people. I also knew it wouldn’t be easy.

Our challenges were different from America’s. Australia is an even more intensely urban society, with close to 60 percent of our people living in large cities. Our gun lobby isn’t as powerful or well-financed as the National Rifle Association in the United States. Australia, correctly in my view, does not have a Bill of Rights, so our legislatures have more say than America’s over many issues of individual rights, and our courts have less control. Also, we have no constitutional right to bear arms. (After all, the British granted us nationhood peacefully; the United States had to fight for it.)

Because Australia is a federation of states, the national government has no control over gun ownership, sale or use, beyond controlling imports. Given our decentralized system of government, I could reduce the number of dangerous firearms only by persuading the states to enact uniform laws totally prohibiting the ownership, possession and sale of all automatic and semiautomatic weapons while the national government banned the importation of such weapons.

To make this plan work, there had to be a federally financed gun buyback scheme. Ultimately, the cost of the buyback was met by a special one-off tax imposed on all Australians. This required new legislation and was widely accepted across the political spectrum. Almost 700,000 guns were bought back and destroyed — the equivalent of 40 million guns in the United States.

City dwellers supported our plan, but there was strong resistance by some in rural Australia. Many farmers resented being told to surrender weapons they had used safely all of their lives. Penalizing decent, law-abiding citizens because of the criminal behavior of others seemed unfair. Many of them had been lifelong supporters of my coalition and felt bewildered and betrayed by these new laws. I understood their misgivings. Yet I felt there was no alternative.

The fundamental problem was the ready availability of high-powered weapons, which enabled people to convert their murderous impulses into mass killing. Certainly, shortcomings in treating mental illness and the harmful influence of violent video games and movies may have played a role. But nothing trumps easy access to a gun. It is easier to kill 10 people with a gun than with a knife.

Passing gun-control laws was a major challenge for my coalition partner: the rural, conservative National Party. All of its members held seats in nonurban areas. It was also very hard for the state government of Queensland, in Australia’s northeast, where the National Party was dominant, and where the majority of the population was rural.

The leaders of the National Party, as well as the premier of Queensland, courageously supported my government’s decision, despite the electoral pain it caused them. Within a year, a new populist and conservative political party, the One Nation Party, emerged and took many votes from our coalition in subsequent state and federal elections; one of its key policies was the reversal of the gun laws.

For a time, it seemed that certain states might refuse to enact the ban. But I made clear that my government was willing to hold a nationwide referendum to alter the Australian Constitution and give the federal government constitutional power over guns. Such a referendum would have been expensive and divisive, but it would have passed. And all state governments knew this.

In the end, we won the battle to change gun laws because there was majority support across Australia for banning certain weapons. And today, there is a wide consensus that our 1996 reforms not only reduced the gun-related homicide rate, but also the suicide rate. [He conveniently forgot to say if the gun control laws reduced crime. I read that crime actually increased] The Australian Institute of Criminology found that gun-related murders and suicides fell sharply after 1996. The American Journal of Law and Economics found that our gun buyback scheme cut firearm suicides by 74 percent. In the 18 years before the 1996 reforms, Australia suffered 13 gun massacres — each with more than four victims — causing a total of 102 deaths. There has not been a single massacre in that category since 1996.

Few Australians would deny that their country is safer today as a consequence of gun control.

Who Says You Can Kill Americans, Mr. President?

Gun control won't stop Obama from committing more drone murders!!!!

PRESIDENT OBAMA has refused to tell Congress or the American people why he believes the Constitution gives, or fails to deny, him the authority to secretly target and kill American citizens who he suspects are involved in terrorist activities overseas. So far he has killed three that we know of.

Presidents had never before, to our knowledge, targeted specific Americans for military strikes. There are no court decisions that tell us if he is acting lawfully. Mr. Obama tells us not to worry, though, because his lawyers say it is fine, because experts guide the decisions and because his advisers have set up a careful process to help him decide whom he should kill.

The three Americans known to have been killed, in two drone strikes in Yemen in the fall of 2011, are Anwar al-Awlaki, a radical Muslim cleric who was born in New Mexico; Samir Khan, a naturalized American citizen who had lived in New York and North Carolina, and was killed alongside Mr. Awlaki; and, in a strike two weeks later, Mr. Awlaki’s 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, who was born in Colorado.

Most of us think these people were probably terrorists anyway. So the president’s reassurances have been enough to keep criticism at an acceptable level for the White House. Democrats in Congress and in the press have only gingerly questioned the claims by a Democratic president that he is right about the law and careful when he orders drone attacks on our citizens. And Republicans, who favor aggressive national security powers for the executive branch, look forward to the day when one of their own can wield them again.

But a few of our representatives have spoken up — sort of. Several months ago, Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont and chairman of the Judiciary Committee, began limply requesting the Department of Justice memorandums that justify the targeted killing program. At a committee hearing, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., reminded of the request, demurred and shared a rueful chuckle with the senator. Mr. Leahy did not want to be rude, it seems — though some of us remember him being harder on former President George W. Bush’s attorney general, Alberto R. Gonzales, in 2005.

So, even though Congress has the absolute power under the Constitution to receive these documents, the Democratic-controlled Senate has not fought this president to get them. If the senators did, and the president held fast to his refusal, they could go to court and demand them, and I believe they would win. Perhaps even better, they could skip getting the legal memos and go right to the meat of the matter — using oversight and perhaps legislating to control the president’s killing powers. That isn’t happening either.

Thank goodness we have another branch of government to step into the fray. It is the job of the federal courts to interpret the Constitution and laws, and thus to define the boundaries of the powers of the branches of government, including their own.

In reining in the branches, the courts have been toughest on themselves, however. A long line of Supreme Court cases require that judges wait for cases to come to them. They can take cases only from plaintiffs who have a personal stake in the outcome; they cannot decide political questions; they cannot rule on an issue not squarely before them.

Because of these and other limitations, no case has made it far enough in federal court for a judge to rule on the merits of the basic constitutional questions at stake here. A pending case filed in July by the families of the three dead Americans does raise Fourth and Fifth Amendment challenges to the president’s killings of their relatives. We will see if the judge agrees to consider the constitutional questions or dismisses the case, citing limitations on his own power.

In another case, decided two weeks ago, a federal judge in Manhattan, Colleen McMahon, ruled, grudgingly, that the American Civil Liberties Union and two New York Times reporters could not get access, under the Freedom of Information Act, to classified legal memorandums that were relied on to justify the targeted killing program. In her opinion, she expressed serious reservations about the president’s interpretation of the constitutional questions. But the merits of the program were not before her, just access to the Justice Department memos, so her opinion was, in effect, nothing but an interesting read.

So at the moment, the legislature and the courts are flummoxed by, or don’t care about, how or whether to take on this aggressive program. But Mr. Obama, a former constitutional law professor, should know, of all people, what needs to be done. He was highly critical when Mr. Bush applied new constitutional theories to justify warrantless wiretapping and “enhanced interrogation.” In his 2008 campaign, Mr. Obama demanded transparency, and after taking office, he released legal memos that the Bush administration had kept secret. Once the self-serving constitutional analysis that the Bush team had used was revealed, legal scholars from across the spectrum studied and denounced it.

While Mr. Obama has criticized his predecessor, he has also worried about his successors. Last fall, when the election’s outcome was still in doubt, Mr. Obama talked about drone strikes in general and said Congress and the courts should in some manner “rein in” presidents by putting a “legal architecture in place.” His comments seemed to reflect concern that future presidents should perhaps not wield alone such awesome and unchecked power over life and death — of anyone, not just Americans. Oddly, under current law, Congress and the courts are involved when presidents eavesdrop on Americans, detain them or harshly interrogate them — but not when they kill them.

It is not just the most recent president, this one and the next whom we need to worry about when it comes to improper exercise of power. It is every president. Mr. Obama should declassify and release, to Congress, the press and the public, documents that set forth the detailed constitutional and statutory analysis he relies on for targeting and killing American citizens.

Perhaps Mr. Obama still believes that, in a democracy, the people have a right to know the legal theories upon which the president executes his great powers. Certainly, we can hope so. After all, his interpretation might be wrong.

Vicki Divoll is a former general counsel to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and former deputy legal adviser to the C.I.A.’s Counterterrorism Center.

Gun-friendly Arizona may feel bigger impact than other states

If Obama really wants to make America safer he should ban cars, not guns

In 2011 32,367 people died in auto accidents. Almost all of those deaths were accidental and could have been prevented.

In 2010 31,672 people died from guns. I suspect only a few of those deaths were accidental and preventable.

If President Barack Obama’s proposed gun-control measures are enacted by Congress, the impact on firearms access and public safety may be more pronounced in Arizona than almost anywhere else in America, say experts on both sides of the debate.

The Grand Canyon State is among the nation’s worst or best when it comes to firearms regulation, depending on where one stands on the polarizing issue.

Put simply, Arizonans can buy, own and carry guns with few limitations, whether the weapons are concealed or not.

Obama’s 23-point plan outlined Wednesday calls on Congress to adopt measures that already exist in some states — but not in Arizona.

Among the key proposals: mandatory background checks on all firearms purchases, a ban on military-style assault weapons and a limit on high-capacity magazines.

The prospects for passage are uncertain, but reaction in the state made famous by Wyatt Earp’s gunfight at the O.K. Corral was predictably passionate.

Charles Heller, co-founder of the Tucson-based Arizona Citizens Defense League, said Obama is trying to undermine a fundamental right to bear arms.

“The idea of the Second Amendment was so we could shoot the cops and the soldiers ... who are trying to overthrow the U.S. Constitution,” Heller said. “The Founding Fathers wanted the citizens to be armed with the same equipment as the government.”

Mari Bailey, president of the Greater Phoenix Million Mom March, which is affiliated with the national Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, said Arizona and the nation must reflect on the damage done because of unfettered access to assault-style weapons.

“We’ve already seen that allowing these things isn’t working,” said Bailey, whose 21-year-old son was slain by a gunman in 2004. “I know it will make a difference. ... It will show a decline in mass shootings.”

Arizonans for Gun Safety President Hildy Saizow, who met with Vice President Joe Biden last week to discuss the public-safety plan, said Obama’s proposals are “fabulous.”

“His plan mirrors the recommendations I gave to Vice President Biden,” Saizow added. “He’s taking a very comprehensive approach by looking at not only the mass shootings and what we can do to prevent those, but what we can do to reduce gun violence generally.”

The National Rifle Association does not maintain a ranking list for states, but its website shows Arizona conforming to nearly every NRA barometer for Second Amendment support.

On Wednesday, the nation’s largest gun lobby responded to Obama’s plan with a news release that said: “Attacking firearms and ignoring children is not a solution to the crisis we face as a nation. Only honest, law-abiding gun owners will be affected, and our children will remain vulnerable to the inevitability of more tragedy.”

Heller, the Tucson gun-rights advocate, said he sees little chance of Obama’s firearms legislation passing congressional muster. He scoffed at the idea of limiting magazines to 10 rounds of ammunition when some can hold three times that number. “Are they saying it’s moral to shoot 10 people but not 30?” he asked.

The California-based Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence gave Arizona an F for firearms-safety regulation. “Out of 50 states, Arizona came in 49th behind only South Dakota,” said Lindsay Nichols, an attorney who worked on the report card. “It has some of the weakest gun laws in the country.”

Nichols noted that Arizona does not require background checks for private or gun-show transactions and the state does not limit certain semiautomatic weapons. When asked if a federal law mandating those regulations would affect firearm accessibility and lethality more in Arizona than other states, she said, “Yes, and it might cause a larger reduction in the number of gun deaths.”

An online scorecard issued by the Brady Campaign ranks Arizona last (with Utah and Alaska) for firearms-safety provisions. The state received a “0” score.

Bailey said it seems absurd that Americans need licenses to drive cars and buy prescriptions for drugs, but they can walk into Walmart and purchase an assault-style gun with the groceries. [Wrong!!! To buy a gun at Walmart you need a government issued photo ID, like a driver's license to start the process and then you need to pass a Brady Bill check.]

“We’ve done nothing as a gun-culture nation for long enough,” she added. “Let’s try something.”

Randy Gardner, a Tucson man who was shot in the foot during gunman Jared Loughner’s shooting spree two years ago, said Obama came up with reasonable policies that don’t jeopardize Second Amendment rights.

“Why can’t we make an attempt to have a safer society?” asked Gardner, 62. “It’s all common-sense stuff for those of us who were involved in gunplay here.”

There are more than 10,000 firearms homicides in the United States annually, and Gardner said a reduction of even 10 percent would be significant.

“No one is naive enough to think this will be the end of mass slayings,” he added. “But just one person being killed tears at the fabric of a whole family, and then it goes out to friends. We’re talking millions of people affected.” [If you really want to make America safer make cars illegal!!! In 2011 32,367 people died in auto accidents. In 2010 31,672 people died from guns.]

Arizona’s congressional delegation responded to the president’s plan along predictably partisan lines.

Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., said he will consider “common-sense legislation” to keep guns away from criminals, but Obama’s plan “goes too far.”

Rep. Paul Gosar, R-Ariz., said the president launched an “attack on personal gun ownership, the Second Amendment and our God-given rights.”

Rep. Ed Pastor, D-Ariz., said Obama came up with a common-sense plan to combat violence, especially in schools. “This is the right thing to do, now more than ever,” he added.

At the Republican-controlled Legislature in Phoenix, Obama’s ideas present a dramatic contrast to gun-rights bills enacted in recent years.

Sen. Don Shooter, R-Yuma, criticized Obama for using executive orders in a quest to increase firearms regulation.

“He’s governing like Caesar Augustus or Adolf Hitler,” Shooter said. “This is just more insanity and tyranny from Washington, when what we need to be doing is taking a real, hard look at our mental-health system.”

House Speaker Andy Tobin, R-Paulden, said in a news release that Obama has “shown his unwillingness to develop real solutions to ensure the safety of our children and has instead opted to infringe on the constitutional rights of law-abiding citizens for his own political aggrandizement.”

Democrats in the Legislature, meanwhile, welcomed Obama’s public-safety initiative as a plan that includes mental-health initiatives and school protections along with gun control.

Sen. Robert Meza of Phoenix said he plans state legislation to complement the plan by outlawing the possession of an unregistered firearm.

House Minority Leader Chad Campbell, who introduced a bill last week with proposals similar to Obama’s, applauded the presidential initiative.

Reporters Alia Beard Rau, Erin Kelly and Mary K. Reinhart contributed to this article.

Phoenix Mayor Greg Stanton and Mesa Mayor Scott Smith are a gun grabbers???

The Second Amendment was created to allow the PEOPLE to violently overthrow the government should the government become tyrannical. And of course any tyrannical government is going to use a background check as a way of keeping their enemies from having guns.

WASHINGTON -- If Congress wants to find consensus on reducing gun violence, universal background checks on everyone who wants to buy a firearm may be the best place to start, the mayors of Phoenix and Mesa said Thursday.

Phoenix Mayor Greg Stanton, a Democrat, and Mesa Mayor Scott Smith, a Republican, disagree on many of President Barack Obama’s proposed gun-control measures but agree on the need for better background checks to keep guns from criminals and the mentally ill.

The two addressed the issue while attending the annual winter meeting of the U.S. Conference of Mayors here.

Stanton supports the president’s wide-ranging approach, which includes a ban on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines. Smith says he believes such bans infringe on Americans’ Second Amendment rights.

But both support the idea of ensuring that everyone who buys a gun should undergo a background check. Currently, those checks aren’t done on buyers who purchase firearms at gun shows and other private sales. The president’s plan, unveiled Tuesday, would change that.

Smith said he wants more details about how the background checks would work, but supports the general idea.

“There is wide support among gun owners — of which I am one — to make sure guns don’t end up in the hands of the wrong people,” said Smith, who is vice president of the mayors’ group. “I think most everyone can agree that convicted criminals and people with serious mental illness should not have guns.”

David Keene, president of the National Rifle Association said Thursday on “CBS This Morning” that the organization is “generally supportive” of strong background checks.

Stanton said passing legislation to require universal background checks is the least that Congress can do in the wake of last month’s mass shooting at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn.

“I think America is saying it’s time to take reasonable measures to reduce gun violence,” Stanton said. “If we can deal with the issue of background checks, that’s part of a good consensus approach.”

While the issue of gun violence dominated the news coverage of the first day of the mayors’ three-day meeting, Stanton and Smith said the federal fiscal crisis still tops their list of concerns.

When Congress reached a last-minute deal on New Year’s Day to stop middle-class tax increases from taking effect, lawmakers postponed for two months a decision on what to do about $1.2 trillion in automatic, across-the-board cuts in federal spending on defense and domestic programs.

Arizona stands to lose 50,000 jobs if Congress does not stop the cuts from taking effect on March 1, Stanton said.

“It’s not acceptable that we’re still facing this looming threat,” he said. “We understand that some federal budget cuts are coming, but this is too much. This would throw us back into recession.”

Smith agreed, calling the automatic cuts “a dumb idea.” He said he is especially concerned that some lawmakers are talking about eliminating the tax-exempt status of municipal bonds.

“Those bonds are our lifeblood for financing our local projects,” Smith said.

With gun violence and fiscal issues dominating Washington, Stanton also said he fears that comprehensive immigration reform will once again be pushed aside by Congress.

“Congress should be able to multi-task and address gun violence and immigration at the same time,” Stanton said.

Senator Dennis DeConcini is a gun grabber???

One of the driving forces behind the last federal ban on “assault weapons” and high-capacity magazines believes President Barack Obama and gun-control allies have a chance at getting an updated version passed in the wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in Newtown, Conn.

Former Sen. Dennis DeConcini, D-Ariz., acknowledged that Second Amendment advocates and the gun lobby are poised to put up fierce opposition, just as they did nearly 20 years ago, when Congress adopted similar curbs after a hard-fought and politically costly battle on Capitol Hill.

As a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, DeConcini took up the cause against assault weapons in 1989, after one of the guns was used to shoot children during a schoolyard killing spree in Stockton, Calif. Back home in Arizona, critics organized a short-lived recall effort against him.

“The reality is it takes a lot of courage,” said DeConcini, who sat on the joint House-Senate conference committee that considered the 1994 ban. “It wasn’t telling people they can’t own guns. It was just restricting some guns.” [And that is nothing more then double talk saying I was telling people they can't own guns!!!]

However, the legislation banning the manufacturing, transport and possession of certain types of guns, which was included as part of a sweeping anti-crime bill, contained loopholes that allowed gunmakers to sidestep the law by changing some of the physical features of the weapons. The 10-year ban expired without congressional reauthorization in 2004.

DeConcini previously had sponsored assault-weapon legislation that passed the Senate but couldn’t get out of the House. He credits development of the ban to then-Judiciary Committee aide Dennis Burke, the future U.S. attorney for Arizona who years later was at the center of the “Operation Fast and Furious” gun-trafficking scandal.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., took the lead on the issue in 1994 because the three-term DeConcini was preparing to retire. Even though Democrats controlled the House at the time, conservative Democrats such as powerful House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jack Brooks, D-Texas, were antagonistic toward gun-control legislation. The 10-year sunset clause was included as part of a deal to win support from skeptics such as Brooks, DeConcini said.

“That was the compromise — the only way you could have passed it,” DeConcini told The Arizona Republic on Wednesday, hours after President Barack Obama unveiled his plan.

Brooks, who died Dec. 4, lost his House seat in the 1994 election as part of a backlash to the assault-weapons ban that is believed to have contributed to that year’s “Republican Revolution.”

Other political casualties included one-term Rep. Karan English, D-Ariz., whose vote for the ban likely was a factor in her loss to GOP challenger J.D. Hayworth. English’s district included part of rural Arizona, where many voters cherish gun rights.

Ten years later, there was little political interest in renewing the ban or in pursuing any new gun-control measures in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

The 1994 ban’s definition of assault weapons also proved problematic in practice. In addition to targeting specific types of guns such as AK-47s, AR-15s and TEC-9s, the measure extended the definition of “assault weapons” to semiautomatic rifles with detachable magazines in conjunction with at least two other features such as a pistol grip, a bayonet mount or a flash suppressor.

Semiautomatic pistols also could be assault weapons if the guns had a certain combination of features. Gun manufacturers started making cosmetic alterations to get around the ban.

“On one of them, they changed the grip, and it qualified as a different weapon,” DeConcini recalled.

Assault weapons manufactured before 1994 were exempt, which caused some to question the ban’s effectiveness. Pre-ban models remained in circulation and could still be sold. In 1997, Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s posse attracted national criticism for offering one such pre-ban semiautomatic AR-15 rifle as a raffle prize.

“There were loopholes that obviously mitigated some (of the impact) of the ban,” said veteran Rep. Ed Pastor, D-Ariz., who voted for the 1994 legislation and would support a 2013 version, although he is pessimistic one could pass.

Although gun control has more momentum than it has had in years, another political expert agreed that a new assault-weapons ban is unlikely to make it out of the Republican-run House.

“It seems to me right now that the politics of this issue are just really, really difficult,” said William Dixon, a professor of political science at the University of Arizona.

Obama's gun grabbing won't prevent crime???

Let’s assume everything President Obama has proposed regarding gun violence were adopted. How much would it reduce the likelihood of future mass killings such as at Newtown?

This is not an argument that gun control cannot be effective. If the United States adopted Australian-style gun control, in which guns were not only banned but confiscated, the incidence of gun violence in the United States might very well go down.

But the United States is not going to discuss, much less implement, Australian-style gun control. There’s virtually no political support for it and it would require amending the U.S. Constitution.

So, Obama is proposing a prospective ban on the sale of some rapid-fire rifles and high-capacity magazines. The United States had such a ban for ten years, beginning in 1994. The incidence of gun violence generally and mass killings specifically did not subside materially.

A prospective ban leaves an ample supply of such weapons in circulation. And if the ban were left in place for a longer period of time, it would primarily fuel a black market in such weapons. Current owners are unlikely to simply accept the federal government rendering their property worthless in terms of resale.

And even what Obama proposes is politically unlikely. Senate Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid says he doesn’t want to force his members to vote on gun control measures that won’t be passed by the House. Republican House Speaker John Boehner says he will be happy to consider gun control measures that pass the Senate. You can read between the lines.

Even the proposal for which there is widest support – universal background checks – is likely to run into political difficulty once people start concentrating on the details.

A large portion of gun sales are between individuals. A hunk of them occur during organized gun shows but a hunk of them are truly private transactions.

There are only two options for implementing a universal background check. Either everyone with Internet access is given the ability to check the eligibility of any other resident of the United States to purchase a gun; or private guns sales have to be essentially outlawed and all gun purchases required to go through federally licensed dealers. Both options will have political problems.

Other than the gun control components, the president’s plan consists of small-scale federal initiatives that won’t make much of a difference. This is best illustrated by the proposal regarding school resource officers and counselors.

Obama proposes that the federal government spend $150 million to put 1,000 cops or counselors in American schools. But there are 100,000 schools in the United States. So, the initiative would reach about 1 percent of all schools.

The Obama plan is stuffed with similar proposals of highly limited reach. The federal government is not only broke, it is dangerously broke – broke in a way that endangers the U.S. economy. This is not a time to be throwing federal money at problems so that politicians can say that they are doing something.

In reality, meaningful initiatives regarding school safety and mental health screening will have to take place at the state and local level. But even there, what is being proposed is more about doing something than about accomplishing something that will actually make a difference.

Mass killings are rare and highly random events. Since 1980, there have been about 20 such incidents a year in the United States, resulting in an average of about 100 deaths each year.

The pace of such incidents has not been increasing, nor has the homicide rate generally. In fact, the homicide rate in the United States today is not materially different than it was in 1900.

What is different is the saturation media coverage mass killings receive. And that changes the political dynamic.

I understand it. The Newtown massacre, and similar slaughters, stun the senses and stir the soul. The desire to do something to stop them is universal. And politicians have to respond.

It’s just sad that we are going to have such a wrenching and emotional political fight over things that aren’t really going to make much of a difference, if any at all.

Australia's gun control: Success or failure?

After a mass shooting in 1996, Australia enacted a sweeping package of gun restrictions far more ambitious than anything plausible here -- including a total ban on semiautomatic weapons, a mandatory gun buyback, and strict limits on who could own a firearm. John Howard, who was prime minister at the time, wrote the other day that his country "is safer today as a consequence of gun control."

You would think such dramatic new restrictions were bound to help. But the striking thing is how little effect they had on gun deaths.

It's true the homicide rate fell after the law took effect -- but it had also been falling long before that. A study published by the liberal Brookings Institution noted that the decline didn't accelerate after 1996. Same for lethal accidents. Suicide didn't budge. At most, they conclude "there may" -- may -- "have been a modest effect on homicide rates."

Researchers at the University of Melbourne, however, found no such improvement as a result of the new system. "There is little evidence to suggest that it had any significant effects on firearm homicides or suicides," they wrote.

Howard says the country has had no mass shootings since 1996. But mass shootings are such a tiny share of all homicides that any connection may be purely a matter of chance.

We learned from the 1994 assault weapons ban that modest gun control measures don't work. What Australia suggests is that even if radical ones could be passed, they wouldn't work either.

Court rules Obama's appointments unconstitutional

(AP) -- In an embarrassing setback for President Barack Obama, a federal appeals court panel ruled Friday that he violated the Constitution in making certain recess appointments and moved to curtail a chief executive's ability in the future to circumvent the Senate in such scenarios.

A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit said that Mr. Obama did not have the power to make three recess appointments last year to the National Labor Relations Board because the Senate was officially in session—and not in recess—at the time. If the decision stands, it could invalidate hundreds of board decisions.

The court said the president could only fill vacancies with the recess appointment procedure if the openings arise when the Senate is in an official recess, which it defined as the break between sessions of Congress.

The ruling threw into question Mr. Obama's recess appointment of Richard Cordray to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Mr. Cordray's appointment, also made at the same time, has been challenged in a separate case.

Mr. Obama made the recess appointments on Jan. 4, 2012, after Senate Republicans spent months blocking his choices for an agency they contended was biased in favor of unions. Mr. Obama claims he acted properly because the Senate was away for the holidays on a 20-day recess. The Constitution allows for such appointments without Senate approval when Congress is in recess.

But during that time, GOP lawmakers argued, the Senate technically had stayed in session because it was gaveled in and out every few days for so-called "pro forma" sessions.

GOP lawmakers used the tactic—as Democrats had done in the past—specifically to prevent the president from using his recess power to install members to the labor board. They had also vigorously opposed the nomination of Mr. Cordray. The White House argued that the pro forma sessions—some lasting less than a minute—were a sham.

The three-judge panel, all appointed by Republican presidents, ruled that during one of those pro forma sessions on Jan. 3, the Senate officially convened its second session of the 112th Congress, as required by the Constitution.

"Either the Senate is in session, or it is in recess," Chief Judge David Sentelle wrote in the 46-page ruling. "If it has broken for three days within an ongoing session, it is not in "the Recess" described in the Constitution."

Simply taking a break of an evening or a weekend during a regular working session cannot count, he said. Mr. Sentelle said that otherwise "the president could make appointments any time the Senate so much as broke for lunch."

The judge rejected arguments from the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, which claimed the president has discretion to decide that the Senate is unavailable to perform its advice and consent function.

"Allowing the president to define the scope of his own appointment power would eviscerate the Constitution's separation of powers," Mr. Sentelle wrote.

Mr. Sentelle was joined in the ruling by Judge Thomas Griffith, appointed to the court by President George W. Bush, and Karen LeCraft Henderson, who was appointed by President George H.W. Bush.

The Obama administration is expected to appeal the decision to the U.S. Supreme Court. But if the ruling stands, it means that hundreds of decisions issued by the board over more than a year would be invalid. It also would leave the five-member labor board with just one validly appointed member, effectively shutting it down. The board is allowed to issue decisions only when it has at least three sitting members.

Mr. Obama used the recess appointment to appoint Deputy Labor Secretary Sharon Block, union lawyer Richard Griffin and NLRB counsel Terence Flynn to fill vacancies on the NLRB, giving it a full contingent for the first time in more than a year. Ms. Block and Mr. Griffin are Democrats, while Mr. Flynn is a Republican. Mr. Flynn stepped down from the board last year.

The court's decision is a victory for Republicans and business groups that have been attacking the labor board for issuing a series of decisions and rules that make it easier for the nation's labor unions to organize new members.

Obama appoints war monger Chuck Hagel for Secretary of Defense

At Confirmation Hearing, Hagel Offers Forceful Endorsement of U.S. Military Power

WASHINGTON — Chuck Hagel, President Obama’s nominee to be secretary of defense, on Thursday morning said that the United States must lead other nations in confronting threats, use all tools of American power in protecting its people and “maintain the strongest military in the world.”

In an opening statement at his Senate confirmation hearing, Mr. Hagel presented a broad, forceful endorsement of American military power aimed at answering critics who say he would weaken the United States. He offered strong support for Israel, said he was fully committed to the president’s goal of preventing Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons and said he would keep up pressure — through Special Operations forces and drones — on terrorist groups in Yemen, Somalia and North Africa.

“I believe, and always have, that America must engage — not retreat — in the world,” Mr. Hagel told members of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

On Afghanistan, which Mr. Hagel called “the longest war in America’s history,” Mr. Hagel, a Republican and former senator from Nebraska, said he agreed with the president that there would only be two functions for the small number of American forces in Afghanistan after 2014: hunting down Al Qaeda and its affiliates and training and advising Afghan security forces.

Mr. Hagel’s opening statement frequently echoed the policies of the departing defense secretary, Leon E. Panetta, and at several points used identical phrasing. Like Mr. Panetta, Mr. Hagel said that the United States “always will be a Pacific power” and that the Defense Department was “rebalancing its resources toward the Asia-Pacific region.”

But although he said he shared Mr. Panetta’s “serious concern” about impending defense budget cuts, called sequestration, he did not sound the same cataclysmic alarm that Mr. Panetta has at times in the past.

Before he even made his opening statement, Mr. Hagel faced a blast of objections from the ranking Republican on the committee, Senator James M. Inhofe of Oklahoma, who told Mr. Hagel that he would not vote for him because of his position of “appeasing” America’s adversaries.

“His record demonstrates what I view as a steadfast opposition to policies that diminish U.S. power and influence throughout the world, as well as a recent trend of policy reversals that seem based on political expediency rather than on core beliefs,” Mr. Inhofe said.

But even a reliable yes vote, Senator Carl Levin, the Michigan Democrat who serves as the committee’s chairman, said in his opening statement that Mr. Hagel had made “troubling” statements about Israel and had expressed a willingness to negotiated on Iran on issues that Mr. Levin viewed as nonnegotiable. Mr. Levin said he expected Mr. Hagel to address those issues during the hearing.

The hearing occurred in a packed room in the Dirksen Senate Office Building, where a protester shouted that Mr. Hagel had to provide equal military benefits to gay couples while the men of America’s defense establishment, including former Senator Sam Nunn and James Jones, a former national security adviser, turned up to lend support. Mr. Nunn, who has been considered over the years for defense secretary, introduced Mr. Hagel to the committee.

Mr. Hagel, who has gone through three “murder boards,” or mock hearings, in preparation for the real one, has met with nearly 60 members of the Senate. He has spent the past three weeks working out of a modest transition office down the hall from the office of Mr. Panetta, in the Pentagon E-ring, the corridor with sweeping views of the Potomac River and Washington.

With the help of a transition staff led by Marcel J. Lettre, Mr. Panetta’s deputy chief of staff, Mr. Hagel has received voluminous Pentagon briefings, met with Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and spoken with the deputy defense secretary, Ashton B. Carter, who will remain in the job.

Mr. Hagel, 66, a decorated Vietnam veteran and a senator from Nebraska, has also worked closely with Mr. Obama’s aides on what has become a major White House offensive to counter criticism from Jewish and conservative groups and some Democrats that Mr. Hagel is too hard on Israel and too soft on Iran.

As part of an aggressive effort to support Mr. Hagel, the White House arranged for him to meet this month with major Jewish groups as well as Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, who objected to a statement Mr. Hagel made in 2006: “The Jewish lobby intimidates a lot of people up here.”

He was referring to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or Aipac, which advocates for Israel. Critics took issue with the implication that members of Congress are bullied and with his use of the word “Jewish” rather than “Israel,” which some said suggested that all advocates for Israel are Jewish.

Mr. Hagel’s past opposition to unilateral American sanctions against Iran, which he viewed as ineffective, has also become an issue. His view was out of step with current Obama administration policy, which has imposed on Iran tough unilateral sanctions as well as sanctions worked out with a coalition of other countries.

Mr. Schumer, the most influential Jewish member of the Senate, endorsed Mr. Hagel after the meeting with him, paving the way for other Democrats to do the same. The White House subsequently arranged another meeting between Mr. Hagel and representatives of major Jewish groups, including Aipac, the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Congress. Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. stopped by. Although the Jewish groups did not endorse Mr. Hagel afterward, they have remained publicly silent and have not moved against him.

But some new political groups financed by anonymous donors continue to wage a media campaign against Mr. Hagel. One calling itself Americans for a Strong Defense is urging Democratic senators in five states to vote against him, saying he would make the United States “a weaker country.” Another, Use Your Mandate, which presents itself as a liberal gay rights group but buys its television time through a prominent Republican firm, is attacking Mr. Hagel in ads and mailers as “antigay,” “anti-woman” and “anti-Israel.”

The antigay charge stems from disparaging comments he made in 1997 objecting to an “openly, aggressively gay” nominee for a top diplomatic post. Mr. Hagel has since apologized for the remarks.

White House officials said they expected support from some of the 12 Republicans on the 26-member Armed Services Committee, including potentially from Senator John McCain of Arizona, who was once a close friend of Mr. Hagel’s but broke with him on the Iraq war. Both men initially supported the American invasion in 2003, but Mr. Hagel became an early critic of the George W. Bush administration’s handling of the war.

Mr. Hagel, who would be the first former enlisted soldier to become secretary of defense, has, like Mr. Obama, been wary of American military involvement overseas. Last year, recalling his service in Vietnam, where he and his brother Tom were serving in the same infantry squad when both were severely wounded, he said: “I’m not a pacifist — I believe in using force, but only after following a very careful decision-making process. The night Tom and I were medevaced out of that village in April 1968, I told myself: If I ever get out of this and I’m ever in a position to influence policy, I will do everything I can to avoid needless, senseless war.”

Obama loves HIS guns????

The only people that rulers like Obama, Hitler, Stalin and Mao don't want to have guns are the serfs they rule over.

On his 51st birthday last August, President Obama hit the links with a group of buddies and then flew by helicopter to Camp David. There, he changed into jeans and picked up a shotgun. And then, before it got too dark, he started a round of clay target shooting.

You’d be forgiven if you didn’t think this was headline-worthy news. But on Saturday morning, the White House released and promoted a photograph of Obama shooting skeet at the presidential retreat in Maryland.

White House aides were trying to end a growing distraction just as the president plans to make a fresh push to rally public support behind his ambitious agenda to tighten gun laws, traveling to Minnesota on Monday.

The photo, taken by White House photographer Pete Souza, depicts a sunglasses-wearing Obama firing what appears to be a Browning Citori 725, the shotgun wedged against his left shoulder, a pillow of white smoke emerging from the barrel.

The photo was published a week after Obama claimed in an interview with the New Republic that he routinely shoots skeet at Camp David. The surprising assertion — Obama’s golfing and basketball hobbies are far better known — instantly stirred the political zeitgeist.

Jay Carney, Obama’s press secretary, was asked for evidence in the White House briefing room. “The Daily Show’s” Jon Stewart poked fun at the president’s apparent hobby. Gun-rights activists dismissed it, and some were skeptical that Obama was a routine skeet shooter.

“I’m sure they released the photo because there were folks raising questions about his answer, and those questions are a silly distraction in the midst of a serious debate,” David Axelrod, a longtime adviser to Obama, said in an e-mail.

“I know him pretty well. He doesn’t embellish,” Axelrod added. “If he says he’s done some shooting up there on occasion, I’m sure he has. He’s not a hunter or marksman and doesn’t pretend to be.”

In the interview with the New Republic, Obama was asked if he had ever shot a gun.

“Yes, in fact, up at Camp David, we do skeet shooting all the time,” he said.

Asked if his whole family goes shooting, Obama replied: “Not the girls, but oftentimes guests of mine go up there. And I have a profound respect for the traditions of hunting that trace back in this country for generations. And I think those who dismiss that out of hand make a big mistake.”

But while the White House made clear Saturday that the president has shot skeet at least once, the release of the photo seemed more likely to inflame passions around the issue than douse them.

Current and former advisers to Obama compared skeptics of Obama’s skeet-shooting prowess to a group of conservatives, known as birthers, who cast doubt on whether Obama was born in the United States and kept exerting pressure until the president released a long-form birth certificate showing he was born in Hawaii.

“Attn skeet birthers. Make our day — let the photoshop conspiracies begin!” David Plouffe, Obama’s senior adviser until last week, wrote on Twitter early Saturday. Later in the day, he wrote, “Day made. The skeet birthers are out in full force in response to POTUS pic. Makes for most excellent, delusional reading.”

Dan Pfeiffer, Obama’s senior adviser, coined a term for those who didn’t believe Obama had gone shooting: “skeeters.”

On the other side, Obama’s critics in the gun-rights community were not impressed by the photo.

“One picture does not erase a lifetime of supporting every gun ban and every gun-control scheme imaginable,” said Andrew Arulanandam, a spokesman for the National Rifle Association.

Ladd Everitt, a spokesman for the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, regarded the whole episode as a sideshow.

“If that’s something the president enjoys doing, God bless him,” he said. “I’m no more offended by this photo than by one showing him throwing a Frisbee.”

The White House would not confirm what firearm Obama used. But gun dealers and enthusiasts said that from the picture, it appeared to be a Browning Citori, a model popular among those involved in the sport.

The “over and under” design features two barrels, one on top of the other, allowing the gun to hold and fire two shotgun shells.

The smoke in the photo is emanating from air vents in the barrel, a feature known as “porting” that reduces recoil shock and allows for steadier aim.

Gun dealers said the shotgun appeared to be a stock model of the Browning, which retails for $2,000 to $3,000. According to the Browning Web site, some of the Citori models are made in a left-handed version, with a slight bend near the butt — though it was not apparent from the photo whether the left-handed president was using one of those.

“It looked like he was shooting regular American skeet,” said Michael Hampton Jr., head of the National Sporting Clays Association. “It’s a gun that is used for this discipline — a good middle-of-the-road gun, very functional and very standard.”

The sport originated early in the 20th century when hunters were looking for ways to practice and improve their marksmanship.

Over time, the activity developed as a sport of its own. There are several variations, all involving a shooter attempting to down a roughly three-ounce clay disk that has been launched from a spring-loaded machine.

In skeet shooting — the activity the White House said Obama was pursuing at Camp David — the clay targets are launched at different heights and travel across the shooter’s field of vision.

Hampton said that even novices can get quick satisfaction. In a 100-target session, he said even beginners will hit 25 or 30 targets and quickly develop 50-50 proficiency.

Justice Dept justifies killing Americans if they pose ‘imminent threat

Of course you have to remember that MSNBC reports the news as objectively and unbiased as the FOX network reports it so you have to take that with a grain of salt.

Justice Dept. document justifies killing Americans overseas if they pose ‘imminent threat’

The United States can lawfully kill a U.S. citizen overseas if it determines the target is a “senior, operational leader” of al-Qaeda or an associated group and poses an imminent threat to the United States, according to a Justice Department document published late Monday by NBC News. [http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/i/msnbc/sections/news/020413_DOJ_White_Paper.pdf ]

The document defines “imminent threat” expansively, saying it does not have to be based on intelligence about a specific attack since such actions are being “continually” planned by al-Qaeda. “In this context,” it says, “imminence must incorporate considerations of the relevant window of opportunity” as well as possible collateral damage to civilians.

Guiding the evolving U.S. counterterrorism policies: White House counterterrorism adviser John O. Brennan is compiling a “playbook” that will lay out the administration’s evolving procedures for the targeted killings that have come to define its fight against al-Qaeda and its affiliates.

The memos outline the case for the targeted killing of U.S. citizens in counterterror operations overseas.

It says that such determinations can be made by an “informed, high-level official of the U.S. government.”

NBC said the document was provided by the Obama administration last summer to members of the Senate Intelligence and Judiciary committees as a summary of a classified memo on targeted killings of U.S. citizens prepared by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel.

The memo was written months prior to a September 2011 drone strike in Yemen that killed Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S.-born Muslim cleric accused of helping al-Qaeda’s Yemeni affiliate plan attacks against the United States. Three other Americans, including Awlaki’s 16-year-old son, have also been killed in U.S. strikes in Yemen.

The Obama administration, in decisions upheld in federal court rulings, has repeatedly denied demands by lawmakers, civil rights groups and the media to release the memo and other information on targeted killings — or even to acknowledge their existence. Senators are expected to closely question John O. Brennan, President Obama’s chief counterterrorism adviser, on drone strikes, the memo and the Awlaki killing during Brennan’s confirmation hearing Thursday on his nomination to become Obama’s new CIA director.

Justice officials could not be reached for comment on the document, which NBC posted on its Web site. The 16-page document is titled “Lawfulness of a Lethal Operation Directed Against a U.S. Citizen Who Is a Senior Operational Leader of al-Qaeda or An Associated Force.”

In announcing Awlaki’s death, Obama described him as the leader of “external affairs” of Yemen-based al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.

The American Civil Liberties Union on Monday night called the document a “profoundly disturbing” summary of “a stunning overreach of executive authority — the claimed power to declare Americans a threat and kill them far from a recognized battlefield and without any judicial involvement before or after the fact.”

The ACLU sought the original Justice Department memo as part of a case dismissed last month by a federal judge in New York. Last Friday, the ACLU filed a notice of appeal in that case.

The U.S. Justice Department finds it legal to target American citizens with drone strikes under certain circumstances, according to a memo that just surfaced.

The undated memo, titled “Lawfulness of a Lethal Operation Directed Against a U.S. Citizen who is a Senior Operation Leader of al Qaeda or An Associated Force,” was obtained by NBC News. The memo defines as legal drone attacks on U.S. citizens who were involved in violent attacks, according to United Press International. [ The memo can be viewed here http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/i/msnbc/sections/news/020413_DOJ_White_Paper.pdf ]

Specifically, the memo states: “The condition that an operational leader present an ‘imminent’ threat of violent attack against the United States does not require the United States to have clear evidence that a specific attack on U.S. persons and interests will take place in the immediate future,” according to UPI. Citizens who present such “imminent threats” were defined as those who participated in violent acts — and maintained the views that led to their violent acts, according to UPI.

In those instances, a fatal drone attack would be considered a “legitimate act of national self-defense that would not violate the assassination ban,” according to the memo.

The memo was distributed to various members of Senate and House intelligence committees.

Drone strikes on Americans on U.S. soil are LEGAL, says confidential Justice Department memo

The U.S. government can order the killing of American citizens if they are believed to be ‘senior operational leaders’ of the Islamic terrorist organization Al Qaeda or ‘an associated force,’ according to a confidential Justice Department memo leaked on Monday.

The U.S. government can do so even if there is no clear evidence that the American targeted is engaged in an active plot to attack the U.S.

The news was first reported by NBC’s Open Channel, which obtained a copy of the 16-page document and released it to the public.

The undated memo, which is not an official legal document, sheds new light on the reasoning behind a reported increase in the number of drone strikes used against Al Qaeda suspects in recent years -- including those aimed at American citizens -- under the Obama administration.

The memo, ‘Lawfulness of a Lethal Operation Directed Against a U.S. Citizen who is a Senior Operational Leader of Al Qa’ida or An Associated Force,’ was reportedly provided to members of the Senate Intelligence and Judiciary committees in June by unnamed administration officials.

It was provided on the condition that authorities keep the memo confidential and not discuss its contents publicly, according to NBC.

‘The condition that an operational leader present an “imminent” threat of violent attack against the United States does not require the United States to have clear evidence that a specific attack on U.S. persons and interests will take place in the immediate future,’ the memo states.

Insight: The document sheds new light on the legal reasoning behind a reported increase in the number of drone strikes used against al-Qaida suspects in recent years, including those aimed at American citizens

The Obama administration has remained relatively hush about reports of increased drone strikes carried out since 2008.

The Long War Journal reports that the U.S. has been conducting a covert program to target and kill Al Qaeda and Taliban commanders in Pakistan's northwest region.

‘The US ramped up the number of strikes in July 2008, and has continued to regularly hit at Taliban and Al Qaeda targets inside Pakistan,’ the non-profit news outlet writes.

‘There have been 332 strikes total since the program began in 2004; 322 of those strikes have taken place since January 2008.’

The New York Times reported in November that the Obama administration had been mapping out a strategy weeks before the presidential election to develop definitive rules for the targeted killing of terrorists by drones, so that a new president would ‘inherit clear standards and procedures’ if Obama was not re-elected.

The secrecy surrounding such strikes may soon be unraveled, as indicated by the release of the 16-page Justice Department memo.

Proponent: John Brennan, Obama's pick for CIA director, has called drone strikes 'consistent with our inherent right of national self-defense'

John Brennan, a White House counter-terrorism adviser, one of the leading architects behind the government’s drone policy and Obama’s pick to become the country’s new CIA director, is expected to face tough questions about his involvement in Obama’s drone program during his Senate confirmation hearing on Thursday.

Brennan was the first administration official to formally acknowledge drone strikes in a speech he gave at the Woodrow Wilson Center in April 2012, calling drone strikes ‘consistent with our inherent right of national self-defense.’

A bipartisan group of 11 senators wrote a letter to Obama on Monday asking his administration to provide its legal justification for its use of drone strikes over the past four years.

‘We ask that you direct the Justice Department to provide Congress, specifically the Judiciary and Intelligence Committees, with any and all legal opinions that lay out the executive branch's official understanding of the President's authority to deliberately kill American citizens,’ the senators lead by Democrat Ron Wyden of Oregon wrote in their letter.

Political blogger Marcy Wheeler, who says she has closely tracked the group’s repeated requests, writes that it was at least the 12th time Congress had asked for those documents.

Among the overseas attacks that have killed U.S. citizens with terrorist ties on Obama's watch, a September 2011 missile strike in Yemen took out alleged Al Qaeda members Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan.

Both men were U.S. citizens who had never been indicted by the U.S. government or charged with any specific crimes.

U.S. counterterrorism efforts in Africa defined by a decade of missteps

When you read articles like this it makes you realize that the American Empire is a real Empire, that the sun never sets on just like the British Empire.

The U.S. military was closely tracking a one-eyed bandit across the Sahara in 2003 when it confronted a hard choice that is still reverberating a decade later. Should it try to kill or capture the target, an Algerian jihadist named Mokhtar Belmokhtar, or let him go?

Belmokhtar had trained at militant camps in Afghanistan in the 1990s, returned home to join a bloody revolt and was about to be blacklisted by the United Nations for supporting the Taliban and al-Qaeda. But he hadn’t yet attacked Americans and did not appear to pose a threat outside his nomadic range in the badlands of northern Mali and southern Algeria.

U.S. military commanders planned airstrikes against Belmokhtar and a band of Arab militants they had under surveillance in the Malian desert, according to three current and former American officials familiar with the episode. But the U.S. ambassador to Mali at the time vetoed the plan, saying a strike was too risky and could stir a backlash against Americans.

Since then, Belmokhtar has gradually helped build an al-Qaeda-branded network while expanding his exploits as a serial kidnapper, smuggler and arms dealer. Last month, his group, Signatories in Blood, took dozens of people hostage at a natural gas complex in Algeria. At least 37 foreign captives were killed, including three Americans.

In addition to raising his global profile, the attack turned Belmokhtar into a symbol of how the United States over the past 10 years has bungled an ambitious strategy to prevent al-Qaeda from gaining a foothold in North and West Africa.

The U.S. government has invested heavily in counterterrorism programs in the region, spending more than $1 billion since 2005 to train security forces, secure borders, promote democracy, reduce poverty and spread propaganda.

The strategy was portrayed as a sobering lesson from the costly invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. The goal of stabilizing weak African countries was to keep al-Qaeda out and obviate the need to send U.S. combat forces into the Sahara.

Despite those efforts, Belmokhtar’s group and a hazy array of other jihadist factions and rebellious tribesmen seized control of northern Mali last year. In March, a U.S.-trained Malian officer carried out a coup, further plunging the country into chaos.

“We had this great program, and we put hundreds of millions of dollars into it, and it failed. Why did it fail?” said a member of the U.S. Special Operations forces who worked in Africa until he retired last year. “Fundamentally, we missed the boat.”

Todd Moss, who was deputy assistant secretary of state for African affairs from 2007 to 2008, blamed “a wholly inadequate policy response.” He said U.S. officials placed their faith in a flawed model to promote development and build institutions, especially in northern Mali, a Texas-size territory with little government presence.

“There was no consensus on the size or seriousness of the threat,” Moss added. “We were looking through both civilian and military rose-colored glasses. And that should give us pause as we try to figure out how to move forward.”

By 2003, U.S. officials were becoming alarmed about the potential for Islamist extremists to establish a haven in North or West Africa.

Radicals who failed to topple the Algerian government in the 1990s had moved deep into the Sahara, hiding in the hinterlands of impoverished countries such as Mali, Mauritania and Niger, where they turned to smuggling and other criminal rackets.

Among them was a former paratrooper known as Abderrazak al-Para, who kidnapped 32 Europeans and collected $6 million in ransom.

The kidnapping did not involve any American hostages, but it drew the attention of commanders at the U.S. European Command in Stuttgart, Germany.

Using satellite imagery and other sources, the U.S. military tracked al-Para and shared the intelligence with African governments, which pursued him across the desert. After an epic chase, he was captured in Chad.

Around the same time, the U.S. military also started to track Belmokhtar and floated a plan to fire missiles at an Arab militant camp in northern Mali. Vicki Huddleston, the U.S. ambassador to Mali at the time, said she blocked the operation. It was unclear whether Belmokhtar was actually present at the camp, she recalled in an interview, adding that he was considered a minor figure.

“I said no. First, you don’t know who these people are, and second, it’s a bad idea,” she said. “We had a big fight over this.”

The four-star Air Force general in charge of the operation, Charles F. Wald, who has since retired, acknowledged that he wanted to capture Belmokhtar but insisted that airstrikes were not a serious option. He said that the U.S. military wanted to share intelligence and gear with Algeria and Mali so they could arrest or kill Belmokhtar but that civilian U.S. leaders refused. “The answer at that time was, ‘Not our business,’ ” he said.

Wald is still angry at what he sees as a missed opportunity, saying the military had “about a thousand” chances to get the bandit. “We allowed Belmokhtar to become larger than life,” the general said in an interview. “He was well within reach,” he added. “It would have been easy.”

Ten years later, Wald and the ambassador still disagree about whether they should have seized that chance to eliminate Belmokhtar. But they concur that the dispute foreshadowed flaws in the forthcoming U.S. strategy to prevent al-Qaeda from planting roots in the region.

“I’m really frustrated right now because I think we blew it,” Wald said, speaking in general about U.S. counterterrorism policy in Africa. “We’ve gone backwards, frankly.”

President Obama later appointed Huddleston as the top Africa policy official in the Pentagon, where she earned a reputation among her former diplomatic colleagues as a zealous hawk on security matters.

She said the U.S. government never overcame divisions over how aggressively it should respond to the emergence of al- Qaeda’s North African affiliate. The Pentagon was often too eager to take direct military action, she added, while the State Department was too willing to tolerate al-Qaeda’s presence.

“The issue has come up again and again,” said Huddleston, who retired from the Pentagon at the end of 2011. “The Defense Department wanted to help the countries in the region to confront the threat, and State wanted to contain.”

The failure to keep Islamist extremists from taking over northern Mali was not because of lack of money or attention from Washington.

In 2005, the U.S. government started the Trans-Sahara Counterterrorism Partnership — an innovative, $1 billion collection of programs designed to prevent the spread of radicalism. It delivered humanitarian aid and security assistance to 10 countries in North and West Africa, drawing on the combined resources of the military, the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development.

The partnership was dogged by problems from the outset, however, as U.S. agencies squabbled internally and struggled to understand an unfamiliar cultural and political terrain.

In 2007, the George W. Bush administration created a separate Africa Command to oversee military activity on the continent, fueling fears among Africans that the United States was militarizing its foreign policy and looking to construct new bases. Facing a backlash, the Pentagon was forced to call off its search for an Africa headquarters for the command. It remained in Germany, instead.

The new command was largely a paper institution, with no regular troops assigned to it. Wald, the retired general, said the whole approach was misguided.

“The Africans didn’t want us there in the first place, so they started out behind the power curve to start with,” he said. “We can’t lead them around condescendingly.”

In 2008, the Government Accountability Office criticized the Pentagon, State Department and USAID for lacking a “comprehensive, integrated strategy” for the Trans-Saharan Counterterrorism Partnership. The investigative arm of Congress found that the agencies did not collaborate well and could not measure whether the aid was doing any good.

A senior State Department official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to talk candidly about the $1 billion Sahara counterterrorism strategy, acknowledged that it was difficult to measure the program’s effectiveness. “To be very honest with you, we’re not very good at quantifying it,” the official said.

The program focused heavily on Mali, a landlocked, famine-prone country that American officials worried was vulnerable to Islamist extremists coming south from Algeria.

The U.S. military engaged the Malians in annual regional military exercises, code-named Flintlock. U.S. Special Forces also spent years training specialized Malian units, known as ETIAs. But the challenges were evident.

In 2009, after a graduation ceremony for one ETIA unit that had received five weeks of instruction from U.S. troops, the ambassador to Mali at the time, Gillian Milovanovic, expressed shock at the bedraggled appearance of the Malian soldiers.

In a classified diplomatic cable later made public by the anti- secrecy Web site WikiLeaks, Milovanovic described how a U.S. Army captain introduced her to “one, rather unimpressive soldier, an older, rail thin man with a scraggly beard and bloodshot eyes who had been lounging against a motorbike in a dirty T-shirt inside a warehouse. [The captain] explained that in spite of appearances, this was one of the ETIA’s best men, noting that he had been one of the few survivors of a July 4 ambush of a Malian Army patrol by Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.”

The ambassador also observed how the Malians were poorly clothed and equipped, even though the U.S. government had bought boots, desert fatigues, radios and Toyota Land Cruisers for the entire 160-man unit.

Many of the soldiers were black-skinned Malians from the south who had little familiarity with the Arab and Tuareg tribes that populate the north. In hindsight, U.S. officials said, they should have recognized that the black troops would clash with the Tuaregs, who have a long history of grievances against the Malian central government, instead of al-Qaeda. But few of the U.S. Special Forces instructors were conversant in local culture or native languages, and they didn’t pick up the cues.

“That’s the key ingredient that was always missing in this and is only now coming to light — would they really fight?” said Rudolph Atallah, director of Africa counterterrorism programs at the Pentagon from 2003 to 2009. “There was no thought about taking the cultural piece a little bit deeper.”

There were also clear signs that the Malian government had little interest in fighting al-Qaeda. Suspicions abounded among U.S. officials and other diplomats that Malian leaders were pocketing a portion of the ransoms that Belmokhtar and other jihadists collected from their kidnapping schemes.

“We made a big effort to build the political will in Mali, and it never succeeded,” said a senior Obama administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “They always told us what they thought we wanted to hear, but they never followed it up with actions.”

Military leaders in Mauritania and Niger — two countries that bookend Mali — toppled their governments in coups, forcing the Pentagon to cut off military training.

That left the United States more dependent on Mali to spearhead its anti-terrorism programs, even as it was becoming clear that Malian troops weren’t up to the task.

“It was an awful, stupid strategy we had by then,” Huddleston said. “You obviously couldn’t fight terrorism with one weak army that didn’t want to fight in the north.”

The Obama administration made things tougher by restricting intelligence-sharing with France and Algeria, key allies against al-Qaeda, according to former U.S. officials.

American military officers chafed at the restrictions but often failed to earn the trust of U.S. ambassadors in the region, said the former Special Operations forces member.

“Quite frankly, we weren’t used to dealing with the Department of State and other agencies,” he said. “When we get on the ground, they run the show, and that’s what we struggled with.”

By 2011, Mali’s security was visibly deteriorating as Tuareg mercenaries and Islamist extremists flooded into the north and domestic political strife came to a boil. After the March coup, Washington severed all security aid to the Malian military.

Even now, disagreement persists inside the Obama administration over whether the threat posed by Belmokhtar and other al-Qaeda loyalists in northern Mali warrants a more forceful response by the U.S. military. The White House has ruled out sending combat troops to Mali, but the Pentagon is making plans for a Predator drone base next door.

“Nobody’s arguing that they should be left unmolested,” the senior State Department official said. “But if they’re stuck in the middle of Mali’s northern mountains, that in itself doesn’t matter.”

Secret drone strikes simplify Obama Doctrine

For years, scholars and journalists have struggled without much success to define the Obama Doctrine — the president's foreign policy principles.

As a Democratic candidate, Barack Obama couldn't even define his own doctrine as he sought to succeed outgoing Republican President George W. Bush.

In a debate in 2007, back when he was Sen. Civil Liberties and the darling of the left that hated Bush for leading the war party into Afghanistan and Iraq, Mr. Obama said the world was too complicated for him to formalize his doctrine.

"Well, I think one of the things about the Obama Doctrine is it's not going to be as doctrinaire as the Bush Doctrine because the world is complicated," the senator from Chicago said. "And I think part of the problem we've had is that ideology has overridden facts and reality."

But now President Obama has finally stripped away those complications to define the Obama Doctrine this way:

He can assassinate American citizens abroad without trial if they're suspected terrorists.

Drones are politically antiseptic weapons of death, almost like a video game, except that real blood and tissue is blown against the walls. And it's all being done in secret. The White House won't publicly release the rationale explaining how the Obama administration has shredded the Constitution and taped the bits back together again.

Two things are astounding here: The lack of Democratic outrage over Obama's convoluted policy, and the ease with which Republicans and Democrats have brought us to this point.

Just think about what the president's assassination campaign means. Not for the terrorists, who deserve their fate. But for the rest of us. A president has put it in writing: He can kill you if he finds that you're a threat.

Many of us — and to my shame I include myself — bought into many Bush Republican policies after al-Qaida killed thousands of our countrymen on Sept. 11, 2001. And then came more cameras watching us, and more eavesdropping, and a steady erosion of American privacy.

It came in the name of efficiently thwarting the terrorists. Now the supreme efficiency is offered by a president who campaigned in opposition to waterboarding terrorists for information to find Osama bin Laden.

The president's drone strikes against American citizens overseas "are legal, they are ethical and they are wise," said White House press secretary Jay Carney. He added that such drone strikes are "fully consistent with our Constitution."

Carney must be talking about some other little booklet. He can't mean our American Constitution. If he actually believes that the Constitution allows the president to kill Americans without trial, someone should lead him by the nose to a loony bin.

Not all Republicans are for this. But many establishment Republicans just love it, like Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, an Obama critic and friend of defense contracts.

He stopped thwacking Obama for a day or so to support the president in the assassination doctrine.

"Every member of Congress needs to get on board," Graham said. "It's not fair to the president to let him, leave him out there alone quite frankly. He's getting hit from libertarians and from the left."

Some on the port side are angry, including the severe high priestess of the political left, MSNBC's Rachel Maddow. Unconfirmed reports had her hair smoldering the other evening.

But she's not an elected official. Where was Democratic outrage? You'd think Sen. Dick Durbin would scream. He made plenty of loud public demonstrations during the Bush years, and I almost expected him to start yanking his burning hair from the roots while referencing storm troopers and gulags and such.

Sadly, Durbin and other Democratic pols are rather church-mousian about Obama's drones. With their own guy on the throne, they're worried about damaging the dignity of the presidency.

To his credit, Durbin quietly signed his name to a letter from 11 senators of both parties asking Obama to make public the White House rationale allowing assassinations.

But they won't hound Obama. Expect them instead to shake their jowls angrily at John Brennan.

Brennan is the career CIA officer and supporter of drones and "enhanced interrogation techniques" who was nominated by Obama to run the CIA. He is scheduled to testify Thursday at a Senate confirmation hearing .

There is a big difference between intelligence officers and politicians. Obama seemed to understand this once, when the world was complicated for him. Intelligence officers do what's necessary, and once the work is done and the threat removed, they're often thrown under the bus by politicians.

But politicians? They change the rules to justify what they want to do. And in so doing, they make the future far more dangerous and far less free.

"Who'd we get today?" was the famous question asked repeatedly by Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, when he was the pro-drone Obama White House chief of staff, according to Bob Woodward's book "Obama's Wars."

Emanuel's was a gleeful question, full of bureaucratic malice, asked by a man with his loafers on safe White House carpets. Those same carpets still caress Obama's shoes.

The president once opposed "enhanced interrogation" of terrorism suspects. But now he claims constitutional protection to kill them without trial, if they're Americans overseas.

U.S. drone use could set dangerous example for rogue powers

Imagine if North Korea or Iran or Venezuela deployed thousands of unmanned surveillance aircraft in search of earthbound enemies, a swarm of robotic hunters armed with lethal weaponry and their governments’ go-ahead to exterminate targets.

It’s a frightening scenario but far from an unimaginable one, given that dozens of nations now build, program and deploy their own drones.

Newly disclosed U.S. guidelines on drone warfare appear to authorize a more permissive practice of targeted killings in the global fight against terrorism than previously articulated. And the Obama administration’s embrace of a right to strike those it has identified as threats to U.S. security has prompted warnings from rights advocates and international security experts that the White House is setting a dangerous precedent that rogue nations could follow.

The U.S. military and intelligence communities have increasingly turned to drones for precision strikes against terrorism suspects in Pakistan and Yemen, executing more than 300 remote-controlled attacks during President Obama’s first term. That is a sixfold increase from the Bush administration’s use of drones, according to the British nonprofit Bureau of Investigative Journalism.

Muting any serious debate on the morality and legality of targeted killings is the U.S. public’s positive response to the arm's-length attacks that eliminate terrorism suspects without putting troops at risk in a more conventional offensive. More than 80% of Americans expressed support for the administration’s drone policy in a Washington Post-ABC News poll a year ago. A Pew Research Center survey in June showed similarly high regard among Americans questioned but majority disapproval among respondents in 19 other countries surveyed.

Escalating U.S. drone use in counter-terrorism is both hurting the country’s image and raising the stakes in what promises to be a protracted war to defeat the global network of militants bent on doing America harm, security and legal experts argue.

“Technological capabilities are developing far faster than the laws and international frameworks to regulate their use,” said Amy Zegart, a senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution and former National Security Council staffer under President Clinton.

Drone use was a rare and almost exclusively U.S. military capability a decade ago, Zegart said, yet today at least 70 countries have unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, as drones are called in security parlance. Although most of that use is aimed at reducing the costs and risks of intelligence-gathering and search-and-rescue missions, the increasingly affordable and versatile aircraft can be programmed for combat as easily as for peaceful civilian uses.

Despite a credible threat of spreading drone warfare, there is little interest among the nations employing the devices to yield to any agreed rules of engagement, Zegart said.

“The question is, can the United States lead by example? Can we realistically put forward policies and ideas” that would establish permissible uses and prevent a perilous free-for-all, she said, intimating that such self-imposed restraint is unlikely.

Avner Cohen, a professor of nonproliferation policy at the Monterey Institute of International Studies, agrees there is little incentive for countries making the most aggressive use of drones -- the United States and Israel first among them -- to impose restrictions on themselves.

He points to what he sees as “seductive” elements of drone use as a danger for both international security and thoughtful decision-making.

Israeli drone surveillance pinpointed Hamas militia leader Ahmed Jabari in the Gaza Strip in November, encouraging the Israeli leadership to order a targeted killing in a likely streamlined analysis of potential consequences, Cohen recalled. Jabari’s death set off eight days of fighting between Israel and the Palestinian enclave that ended with a cease-fire seen as having strengthened Hamas and Palestinian cohesion.

“The temptation to use it is so high that it can obscure and overpower all kinds of other considerations,” Cohen said of drones’ offensive capabilities.

Human rights and international law advocates have expressed growing concern that Washington’s expanding use of targeted killings by drones violates its obligations to treaties guaranteeing protection of civilian life and prohibiting extrajudicial killings off the battlefield.

Ben Emmerson, the U.N. special rapporteur on counter-terrorism and human rights, announced two weeks ago that he was investigating U.S. strikes on suspected terrorists to evaluate their compliance with human rights treaties and the international law of armed conflict.

Rights groups contend the U.S. actions stray far beyond the limited circumstances under which international accords allow the use of preemptive lethal force.

“When the U.S. government violates international law, that sets a precedent and provides an excuse for the rest of the world to do the same,” said Zeke Johnson, director of Amnesty International USA’s Security with Human Rights Campaign.

“We have now seen, under two administrations, the emergence of a claimed global war framework in which the U.S. tries to treat the whole world as a battlefield, to the exclusion of human rights law,” Johnson said.

“I sincerely doubt most members of the U.S. government would be happy with China or Russia or North Korea using drones and lethal force the way the U.S. government is doing, which is outside the bounds of international law,” said Johnson.

“Everyone should be concerned by the idea that any government can basically deny its human rights obligations,” he warned. “That puts all of us at greater risk in the long run.”

Obama doesn't get that First Amendment thing???

The annual National Prayer Breakfast bills itself as a celebration of faith and togetherness. Unfortunately, President Barack Obama noted, that spirit doesn't last much past the coffee.

During his speech at the breakfast Thursday morning at the Washington Hilton, where he spoke before community and religious leaders as well as some lawmakers, the president lamented the current tone in Washington.

"I do worry sometimes that as soon as we leave the prayer breakfast, everything we've been talking about the whole time at the prayer breakfast seems to be forgotten. On the same day of the prayer breakfast," Obama said, and paused as the attendees laughed. "I mean, you'd like to think the shelf life wasn't so short. I go back to the Oval Office and I start watching the cable news networks, and it's like we didn't pray."

Obama used his speech to call for the country's most powerful lawmakers, including himself, to conduct themselves with humility to God, and for all citizens and lawmakers to strive to find common ground. Obama noted fights over the deficit, taxes and education.

"This morning I want to summon the resolve that comes from our common faith," Obama said, speaking of the country at large.

More...Obama also used Thursday's speech to reflect on the Bibles he used during his inauguration last month: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s traveling Bible and the one President Abraham Lincoln used for his swearing-in in 1861. He noted the adversity and challenges they each faced and their desire for guidance from God.

Obama also reflected on his personal faith and his use of the scripture, saying, "As president I sometimes have to search for the words to console the inconsolable. Sometimes I search scripture to determine how best to balance life as a president and as a husband and as a father. I often search for scripture to figure out how I can be a better man as well as a better president."

Obama and the death of federalism

President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address illustrated what a dead letter federalism is among Democrats. Not that further illustration was necessary.

Federalism holds that the national government should limit itself to things of truly national scope. Things that are primarily of local concern should be left to state and local governments.

Federalism was a big deal to the founders. They wanted an energetic national government, but one that was confined to enumerated national functions. The founders also envisioned a bright line between the federal and state governments, each sovereign within their own spheres.

We are a long way from that. Today, the Democratic Party sees virtually nothing as outside the purview of the federal government. The Republican Party talks a good game about federalism, but usually ends up undermining the principle when it acquires national power.

Today, the lines between the federal government and state and local governments are hopelessly blurred. The federal government spends over $600 billion a year on grants to state and local governments. Arizona state government receives more in federal funds than it raises in general fund taxes.

Today, state governments operate principally as service delivery mechanisms for federal social welfare programs. This means that there is no real political accountability for the programs, which is why they grow and function like a blob.

If Medicaid costs are spinning out of control, who’s to blame and who should do something about it? The federal government that provides most of the funding and sets up the basic rules, or the state governments that actually administer the program? The food stamp program has grown astronomically of late. [For years 1 out of every 10 Americans received food stamps, now that number has increased to 1 out of every 7] Purely a function of a bad economy, or is there something else going on? Whose job is it to figure that out?

President Ronald Reagan wanted to sort out the blob with his new federalism initiative, clearly making some functions, such as Medicaid, fully federal, while making other functions, including most welfare programs, fully state and local. There were some Democratic governors at the time, including Arizona’s Bruce Babbitt, who were also interested in a sorting out of responsibilities.

But agreement was never reached, nothing of significance happened. So, the blob endured and grew.

Obama proposes to feed it even more. The federal government should establish manufacturing innovation institutes in economically distressed areas and provide incentive grants to states to increase the energy efficiency of homes and businesses.

The federal government should fix 70,000 bridges and create a federal fund to modernize ports and pipelines. The federal government should have a new grant program to get high school graduates better ready for high-tech jobs. And, according to Obama, the federal government should make sure that every kid has access to high-quality preschool.

The federal government, however, does not have a greater interest in the recovery of economically distressed areas than the states in which they are located, or greater insight into how to turn them around. Every bridge in America is located in a state and local community that has a greater interest in its condition than the federal government.

Every port and pipeline in the United States is located in a state and local community. If there are gains to be had from modernizing them, local governments have a greater incentive to get it done and done right than the federal government.

Every kid in America lives in a state and local community that is more interested in his education and workplace preparedness than the federal government. What do we really have to show for the increased federal involvement in education, under George W. Bush or Obama?

The federal government is broke, and broke in a way that threatens the American economy. Proposals that it do even more are surreal, even if they are supposedly paid for. If there’s loose change to be had, the federal government should use it to reduce the deficit, not further expand its reach.

It’s nowhere on the horizon, but a revival of Reagan’s new federalism discussion is badly needed.

Drones Kill

Remember that President Barak Obama's favorite murder weapon are Air Force drones.

It's pretty easy to get away with murder when you are having an Air Force drone pilot in Las Vegas, Nevada at Nellis Air Force Base murder innocent women and children in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Liberal in domestic issues, Obama hawk on terror

Remember John McCain's "Bomb, Bomb, Iran"??? Obama has pretty much been singing that tune since he got elected.

WASHINGTON — For all of his liberal positions on the environment, taxes and health care, President Barack Obama is a hawk when it comes to the war on terror. From deadly drones to secret interrogations to withholding evidence in terror lawsuits, Obama’s Democratic White House has followed the path of his predecessor, Republican President George W. Bush. The U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, remains open, despite Obama’s pledge to close it, and his administration has pursued leaks of classified information to reporters even more aggressively than Bush’s.

“They have maintained momentum in a lot of important areas that we were focused on, and they’ve continued to build in those areas,” said Ken Wainstein, the White House homeland security adviser and a top Justice Department lawyer under Bush. “You can see an appreciation for the severity of the threat, the need to stand up to it, and the need to go on offense at times.” John Brennan’s confirmation hearing this week to be CIA director showed just how much Washington — and especially Democrats — has come to accept the same counterterrorism policies that drew such furor in the first years after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Brennan refused to call waterboarding a form of torture but called it “reprehensible” and, if CIA director, said he would not allow it. He also said he didn’t know whether any valuable information was gleaned as a result. His more than three hours of testimony was received by a mostly friendly panel of senators, and his confirmation is expected to move forward soon.

In October 2007, by contrast, Bush’s attorney general nominee, Judge Michael Mukasey, called waterboarding “repugnant” but also refused to say whether it was torture. His confirmation was delayed for three weeks and nearly derailed. No one expects Brennan not to be confirmed.

White House spokesman Tommy Vietor said Obama has stopped or softened a number of Bush’s security tactics, including ending harsh interrogations, closing secret prisons and, overall, trying to be more transparent about counterterror policy. But he noted that Obama has delivered on his campaign promises to kill or capture Osama bin Laden, take the battle to al-Qaida in Pakistan in Yemen before its members can attack the U.S., and to end the war in Iraq.

“Yes, we’re still fighting al-Qaida, but I think there are very few people who would take issue with that,” Vietor said Friday. “This president does what he says he’s going to do, and I think that’s noticed around the world.”

Obama’s embrace of many of Bush’s counterterror policies did not hurt him in his re-election bid last year. In one key rejection of Bush’s legacy, Obama repeatedly has said he believes waterboarding — the interrogation tactic that simulates drowning — is torture and illegal and that it will not be used under his watch. But Brennan, a career CIA officer who has served as Obama’s top counterterrorism official since 2009, told the Senate Intelligence Committee on Thursday that because he was not a lawyer he could not answer whether he personally believes waterboarding is torture. The CIA waterboarded at least three al-Qaida detainees before the tactic was banned in 2006.

The parallels between Obama’s and Bush’s security policies were on sharp display in the run-up to Brennan’s hearing over the use of deadly drones to kill suspected terrorists, including U.S. citizens, overseas.

A newly surfaced Justice Department memo from 2012 outlined the Obama administration’s decision to kill al-Qaida suspects without evidence that specific and imminent plots were being planned against the United States. At Thursday’s hearing, Brennan defended the missile strikes by the unmanned drones, saying they are used only against people who are considered active threats to the U.S. — and never as retribution for earlier attacks.

In a way that Bush did not, Obama has sought congressional approval of laws that he then uses as the basis of many of the counterterror policies he has carried over from his Republican predecessor. He successfully lobbied Congress three times to renew the controversial USA Patriot Act, the 2001 law that lets the government put roving wiretaps on U.S. citizens’ phones with a secret court order and obtain other personal and financial records with no judicial approval at all.

White House spokesman Jay Carney defended the deadly strikes as legal under a 2001 law authorizing the use of military force against al-Qaida. CIA drones also have been used in attacks, including the 2011 killing in Yemen of U.S. citizen Anwar al-Awlaki, a cleric with suspected ties to at least three attacks planned or carried out on U.S. soil: the Fort Hood, Texas, shooting that claimed 13 lives in 2009, a failed attempt to down a Detroit-bound airliner the same year and a thwarted plot to bomb cargo planes in 2010.

But Congress has grown increasingly uneasy with at least some of the authorities. Democratic Rep. Barbara Lee of California, a staunch Obama supporter, calls the military force law “overly broad” and has been seeking to overturn it for years.

“He’s got to end that,” Lee said. She described a “huge difference in policies” between Obama and Bush but added: “I respectfully disagree on some, including the use of that (use of force) resolution, and that would not matter who was president. That resolution is there until we repeal it, and I want it repealed if we’re going to end this state of perpetual war.”

Lee is among the dovish Democrats who also are displeased with Obama’s decisions to surge U.S. troops to Afghanistan in 2009 and lead NATO military airstrikes at the height of the Libyan crisis in 2011. But, in a testament to his case-by-case deliberations on foreign policy and national security, Obama refused to similarly intervene or arm rebels in Syria and opposes a near-term military strike on Iran. He also ended the U.S. war in Iraq by withdrawing all Americans troops by the end of 2011 as promised.

Still, Obama’s hawkish counterterror bona fides are undeniable. Determined to not bring any terror detainees to Guantanamo Bay, the government has begun interrogating suspects on Navy warships before they are given a chance to speak to a lawyer. The information gleaned from those interrogations, including in the case of al-Shabab operative Ahmed Abdulkadir Warsame, is not allowed to be used in court but it can be used to pursue others. And the FBI can later question the terror suspects. Al-Shabab is a Somali-based terror group that has been linked to al-Qaida.

The Obama administration also has fought for, and won, the right to withhold evidence in terror lawsuits that it says could threaten U.S. security. The use of the so-called state secrets privilege gives the president limitless power to keep information from becoming public and hampers court oversight in cases that could be embarrassing to the government.

Critics say Obama’s use of the state secrets privilege represents a surprising reversal by the constitutional lawyer-turned-president and threatens American civil liberties. Last month, a federal judge in New York chided the Obama administration for refusing to turn over documents in a case relating to al-Alwaki’s killing but said she had no authority to order them disclosed.

More than any other president in U.S. history, Obama has invoked the Espionage Act to prosecute government officials accused of leaking classified information to reporters. His administration has used the law six times in leak investigations since 2009 — compared with three since it was enacted in 1917.

“There has been a disturbing amount of continuity between this administration and the former one,” said Elizabeth Goitein, co-director of the Brennan Center Justice’s Liberty and National Security Program. The center is a civil liberties program at the New York University law school.

“There’s been way more continuity than I think anyone expected, and certainly than candidate Obama had led anyone to expect,” Goitein said. “I just think he put his tail between his legs — the national security establishment has become so huge and powerful that he’s probably gotten somewhat co-opted despite himself and despite his better judgments and inclinations.”

She noted that some of the most powerful players in Obama’s national security circle were holdovers from Bush’s administration, including Robert Gates, who served as defense secretary, FBI Director Robert S. Mueller and Brennan, who was a top CIA official until he retired in 2005. In his closing remarks at Thursday’s hearing, Brennan somewhat emotionally described himself as someone who is neither Republican nor Democrat — but “who really understands that the value of intelligence, the importance of this intelligence, is not to tell the president what he wants to hear, not to tell this committee what it wants to hear, but to tell the policymakers, the congressional overseers what they need to hear.”

“It would be my intention to make sure I did everything possible to live up to the trust, confidence that this Congress, this Senate and this president might place in me,” Brennan said.

Barack Obama has become the killer drone president

It is certainly not what he hoped or intended, but one of President Obama’s biggest legacies in foreign affairs may prove to be the proliferation of drones as tools of war, assassination and terror.

Obama is not the first to use drones to strike enemy targets, but the 300 attacks that have occurred on his watch are six times the number carried out under President George W. Bush. A new set of guidelines that give the president broad discretion in approving execution by drones, coupled with the current congressional hearings on the nomination of John Brennan as CIA director, have brought the drone debate front and center.

Civil libertarians and activists on the left see the use of missile-firing drones to take out suspected terrorists as a threat to the rule of law. They are particularly concerned that American citizens, such as Al Qaeda propagandist Anwar Awlaki, have been killed in drone strikes without a finding of guilt and sentencing in a U.S. court. At the opening of his confirmation hearing on Thursday, Brennan -- who, as Obama’s counterterrorism advisor, has managed the deadly drone missions for four years -- was met by protesters shouting, “Assassination is against the Constitution! You are betraying democracy!”

Opponents of the drone attacks are making a principled point. A government free to kill citizens at will is truly the worst kind of Big Government nightmare. But few of the usual anti-government folks on the right are concerned about the drone hits. They consider the remote control killing of Al Qaeda operatives as completely justified, the equivalent of doing battle in a declared war, and any American who has joined the other side is merely getting what he deserves.

About 80% of Americans agree with that view and plenty of them are liberals and Democrats. Many see drone attacks as an improvement over commando raids and bombing runs. Drones do not put American soldiers directly at risk and they are far more precise than big bombs dropped from the sky, thus minimizing the collateral deaths of innocent bystanders. Those are pretty good debating points -- probably winning points.

It is easy to see how this will play out. Concerned parties in Congress -- such as Sen. Ron Wyden, the Oregon Democrat who has threatened to filibuster Brennan’s confirmation unless the Obama administration provides more information about the drone program -- will demand more limits on who can be targeted and who can approve the killings. Promises will be made, guidelines will be revised and safeguards made a little safer, but the United States will not stop using unmanned drones to deal with perceived threats. In a twilight war with no front lines and elusive enemies who hide themselves amid the flow of unsuspecting humanity, drones are an unusually effective and politically popular weapon. What president could resist pulling such an appealing trigger?

A wise president would know, however, that there will be blowback. Drones may be precise, but intelligence agencies are fallible. There will be mistakes that lead to the death of innocent people and those who survive will have good reason to hate America. The question may be, can we kill terrorists as fast as we create them? In some parts of the world, the symbol of America is no longer the Statue of Liberty, it is the killer drone.

A wise president would also anticipate the day when this technologically marvelous weapon is turned against us. A decade ago, the United States had a near monopoly on drones; now they are in the hands of dozens of countries. It is likely that some enterprising terrorist is, even now, thinking there is no reason to pack a bomb in the underpants of some aspiring martyr when it would be simpler to get hold of a cheap hobbyist’s drone, wire it up with explosives and send it on a short flight to the nearest airport. This genie is out of the bottle. Drones are in our world to stay. Presidents, both wise and foolish, will employ them -- probably too easily and often -- and America’s enemies will find a way to reciprocate.

Original source: John Brennan's killer drones are new symbol of America in the world on Los Angeles Times Exclusive

Lawmakers test legal waters for regulating drones

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Lawmakers are considering whether Congress should set up a special court to decide when drones can kill American al-Qaida suspects overseas, much as a secret court now grants permission for surveillance. The effort, after CIA Director-designate John Brennan's vigorous defense of a drone attack that killed U.S. citizens, reflects a philosophical struggle in government over remote warfare.

The chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Dianne Feinstein of California, spelled it out at the start of Brennan's confirmation hearing on Thursday. She declared that she intended to review proposals for "legislation to ensure that drone strikes are carried out in a manner consistent with our values and the proposal to create an analogue of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to review the conduct of such strikes."

And Sen. Angus King Jr., in a letter Friday to senior leaders of the panel, suggested an "independent process - similar to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court - to provide an appropriate check on the executive branch's procedure for determining whether using lethal force in a foreign country against a U.S. citizen would be lawful."

In FISA proceedings, 11 federal judges review wiretap applications that enable the FBI and other agencies to gather evidence to build cases. Suspects have no lawyers present, as they would in other U.S. courts, and the proceedings are secret. The government presents its case to a judge, who issues a warrant or not.

The notion of something similar for drone strikes drew immediate criticism from human rights and legal groups, which contend that such a court must allow the accused to mount a defense.

"It's not about evidence gathering, it's about punishment to the point of execution," said Mary Ellen O'Connell, professor of international law at the University of Notre Dame and a critic of the government's drone program. "We have never thought people could be executed without some kind of trial."

"I think it is reasonable to ask the question under what circumstances the president can use lethal force against a U.S. citizen overseas," said Jeff Smith, former general counsel of the CIA. "It's a frightening power, and I think we need to think very, very carefully about how that power is used and whether some judicial review is warranted."

"But I certainly don't think judicial review or congressional review is needed to strike al-Qaida or other terrorists organizations," he said.

The idea is also so preliminary that lawmakers can't yet say exactly how a new process would work. In fact, most of those interviewed said the current system run by the White House works well. Brennan pioneered the current process to determine which targets are dangerous enough to be placed on one of two hit lists for killing or capture -- one held by the CIA and the other by the military's Joint Special Operations Command. Many of the names on the lists overlap, and the agency that goes after the target depends on where the suspect appears. That process was described in a legal memo made public this week, and the White House shared classified details with select lawmakers.

The new notion is drawing concern from some in Congress who fear special courts would slow down the drone strikes -- considered by some, including Brennan, as one of the most effective weapons in the war against al-Qaida.

But many lawmakers say an update is needed in the law, passed in 2001 after the Sept. 11 attacks, that gives the president sweeping powers to pursue al-Qaida. They say that al-Qaida has grown far beyond the war zones and technology has improved, too, enabling a Predator drone operator in the United States to track and kill a target thousands of miles away with great accuracy.

Drone strikes have expanded dramatically in the Obama administration. Fewer than 50 took place during the Bush administration, while more than 360 strikes have been launched under Obama, according to the website The Long War Journal, which tracks the operations. The strikes have been credited with killing more than 70 senior al-Qaida and Taliban commanders in Pakistan alone since they began in 2004.

In Thursday's hearing, Brennan defended strikes as necessary, saying they are taken only as a "last resort," but he said he had no qualms about the strike that killed U.S. born cleric Anwar al- Awlaki, because of his roles in several terror attacks.

"The decisions that are made are to take action so that we prevent a future action, so we protect American lives," Brennan said. "That is an inherently executive branch function to determine, and the commander in chief ... has the responsibility to protect the welfare, wellbeing of American citizens.

Still, he said the White House, too, had considered the concept of the special courts, and he said he would be open to discussing it because "American citizens by definition are due much greater due process than anybody else by dint of their citizenship."

The White House did not offer further comment Friday, and the CIA declined to comment. Brennan said people are never killed by CIA or military strikes if there is a way to capture them. Feinstein said at Thursday's hearing that she believed the CIA was open with lawmakers about its part of the program.

"We have provided a lot of oversight over the Predator," she said. "There's a staff team goes out regularly that is at Langley that does look at the intelligence on a regular basis," making more than 30 visits to review strikes and the intelligence leading up to them.

But she said she and senators including Democrats Dick Durbin of Illinois and Pat Leahy of Vermont and Republican Chuck Grassley of Iowa are all looking at the concept of how to regulate the strikes.

On Friday, Republicans were circumspect, with prominent members such as House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers of Michigan declining to comment, or reserving judgment until they can see more details.

"I don't know that we can take that exact model and apply it to every tough policy decision that confronts the federal government," said Mac Thornberry of Texas, a member of the House committee.

"If someone is shooting at you, you can't go to a court and ask them to shoot back," he said. Many Democrats were more comfortable with the notion.

"A layer of judicial review could ensure additional checks on the designation of targeted individuals and determine whether sufficient evidence has been produced," said Sen. Mark Udall, D- Colo.

Said Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif.: "I don't have in mind to redefine the circumstances in the memo" describing the legal rationale behind the strikes "but rather set up a process for prospective or retrospective analysis of how drone strikes are made,"

The White House allowed lawmakers on the Senate and House intelligence committees to see the classified advice to the president describing the legal rationale behind drone strikes ahead of the Brennan confirmation hearing -- a pre-emptive effort meant to answer increasing questions from lawmakers about the program, and also to head off threatened holds on the Brennan nomination.

But that release has produced further demands for access and information. The intelligence committee members want their staff to read the documents, and the congressional Judiciary committees are also demanding access.

President Obama, did or did you not kill Anwar al-Awlaki?

David Cole teaches constitutional law at Georgetown University and is the legal affairs correspondent for the Nation. He is the author of “The Torture Memos: Rationalizing the Unthinkable.”

There are plenty of problems with President Obama’s targeted killings in the war against terrorism: The policy remains secret in most aspects, involves no judicial review, has resulted in the deaths of innocent civilians, has been employed far from any battlefield and has sparked deep anti-

American resentment in countries where we can ill afford it. But when it comes to the particular legal issue raised in a recently leaked “white paper” from the Justice Department — namely, whether it is legal to kill Americans with drones — one problem looms largest: The policy permits the government to kill its citizens in secret while refusing to acknowledge, even after the fact, that it has done so.

There may be extraordinary occasions when killing a citizen is permissible, but it should never be acceptable for the government to refuse to acknowledge the act. How can we be free if our government has the power to kill us in secret? And how can a sovereign authority be accountable to the people if the sovereign can refuse to own up to its actions?

When Argentina’s military junta secretly abducted and killed its citizens during that country’s “dirty war” in the 1970s, the world labeled these acts “disappearances” and condemned them as violations of human rights. A disappearance is not just an abduction or killing, but an unacknowledged abduction or killing. To “disappear” citizens not only deprives them of their liberty or life without fair process but is deeply corrosive of democratic politics, casting a shadow of fear over all.

The late senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said that if he had to choose between a country with the right to vote but no habeas corpus, or a country that had habeas corpus but no right to vote, he’d choose the country with habeas corpus every time. His point was that if the government has the power to lock up its citizens without having to justify its actions to a court, as habeas corpus requires, all other rights are meaningless. If that’s true of detention without judicial review, it is even more true with respect to unacknowledged executive killing. We may think we are free to say what we want, exercise our religion and enjoy the protections of privacy, but none of those guarantees really exists if the president can order us killed in secret.

Killing is not like torture. Torture is never justified, even in wartime. But killing is an integral, if unfortunate, aspect of war. Targeted killing is therefore not inherently illegal; after all, it beats the tragically untargeted killing used in the World War II bombings of Dresden,

Nor is it always forbidden to kill an American. If a U.S. citizen were fighting alongside al-Qaeda on an Afghan battlefield, would anyone question the right of U.S. troops to shoot and kill him? And

President Abraham Lincoln violated no constitutional guarantee by authorizing Union troops to fire on American citizens fighting for the Confederacy.

The government can also legally kill Americans in some non-wartime circumstances. The Supreme Court has held, for example, that the Fourth Amendment permits a police officer to use deadly force against a fleeing felon if the felon poses “a significant threat of death or serious physical injury to the officer or others.” The FBI team that on Monday killed an Alabama man who had held a 5-year-old boy hostage for nearly a week certainly did not act unconstitutionally.

But since when is it constitutional for the president to deliberately kill an American while refusing to admit that he has done so? Due process forbids the taking of life or liberty without fair procedures and prohibits any official action that “shocks the conscience,” as the Supreme Court has stated. If secret killing does not shock the conscience, then nothing does.

Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen, was killed by a drone strike in Yemen on Sept. 30, 2011. Awlaki is reported to have been an operational leader of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, an organization the administration considers an “associated force” of al-Qaeda. White House officials reportedly say he was involved in planning at least two failed terrorist attacks against the United States.

I say “reportedly” because the Obama administration never charged Awlaki with any crime and has never even acknowledged that it sent the drone that killed him. There is no doubt that the man was killed by a drone. That fact has been reported on the front pages of the nation’s newspapers. Obama himself held a news conference to announce that Awlaki “was killed,” but he very consciously used the passive voice, not admitting any U.S. responsibility.

The administration initially treated the drone killing program as covert, refusing to speak about it. Over time, various Obama administration officials have given public speeches defending the legality of targeted killing in general. But the administration has not admitted killing anyone specific outside Afghanistan with a drone.

The unacknowledged killing of foreign nationals during wartime is disturbing enough, though there may be circumstances in which it is warranted. But in our democracy, it can never be permissible for the president to identify an American citizen for extinction, place him on a “kill list,” authorize a CIA agent or military officer to kill him — and then refuse to admit that it was done.

Whether the killing is legal or not, accountability is impossible absent a public statement of responsibility for the act.

Indeed, the Obama administration is opposing lawsuits that challenge Awlaki’s killing and seek disclosure of the documents related to it, in part on the grounds that its role in the killing has never been, and cannot be, acknowledged. If a government of the people and under law means anything, it must mean that the government cannot kill its people in secret and then avoid legal scrutiny by disavowing responsibility.

Administration insiders have hinted that Washington cannot admit that it is directing the drones, even if the world knows it is doing so, because other countries have consented to drone strikes in their territory only on the condition that they go officially unacknowledged. Using lethal force inside another nation’s borders, absent that nation’s consent, is generally a violation of international law, so there is good reason to seek consent. But can an agreement with a foreign country override the president’s constitutional obligation to take American lives only in a publicly acknowledged and legally accountable way?

Obama’s nominee to head the CIA, John Brennan, has put it well: “I think the rule should be that if we’re going to take actions overseas that result in the deaths of people, the United States should take responsibility for that,” he said last fall.

Debating a Court to Vet Drone Strikes

WASHINGTON — Since 1978, a secret court in Washington has approved national security eavesdropping on American soil — operations that for decades had been conducted based on presidential authority alone.

Now, in response to broad dissatisfaction with the hidden bureaucracy directing lethal drone strikes, there is an interest in applying the model of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court — created by Congress so that surveillance had to be justified to a federal judge — to the targeted killing of suspected terrorists, or at least of American suspects.

“We’ve gone from people scoffing at this to it becoming a fit subject for polite conversation,” said Robert M. Chesney, a law professor at the University of Texas. He said court approval for adding names to a counterterrorism kill list — at least for American citizens abroad — “is no longer beyond the realm of political possibility.”

A drone court would face constitutional, political and practical obstacles, and might well prove unworkable, according to several legal scholars and terrorism experts. But with the war in Afghanistan winding down, Al Qaeda fragmenting into hard-to-read offshoots and the 2001 terrorist attacks receding into the past, they said, it is time to consider how to forge a new, trustworthy and transparent system to govern lethal counterterrorism operations.

“People in Washington need to wake up and realize the legal foundations are crumbling by the day,” Mr. Chesney said. That realization seemed evident at Thursday’s confirmation hearing for John O. Brennan as C.I.A. director, which became a raucous forum for complaints about the expansion of counterterrorist strikes and the procedures for deciding who should die.

Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, was one of those who complained that he could not get the administration to even list the countries where lethal strikes had been carried out. Among Republicans, Senator Saxby Chambliss of Georgia said he thought that killing had become a dubious substitute for capture. A program that began in the shadows was dragged for the first time into the spotlight of Congressional debate.

Today, with Al Qaeda’s core in Pakistan hugely diminished and Osama bin Laden dead, the terrorist threat is far more diffuse than it was a decade ago. Most drone-fired missiles now kill not high- level terrorists plotting to attack the United States, but a mixed bag of midlevel militants and foot soldiers whose focus is often more on the Pakistani or Yemeni authorities than on the United States. And since a September 2011 drone strike deliberately killed an American citizen, Anwar al- Awlaki, who had joined Al Qaeda in Yemen, the legal and moral rationale for such strikes has been hotly debated.

Even if they are glad Mr. Awlaki is dead, many Americans are uneasy that a president can use secret evidence to label a citizen a terrorist and order his execution without a trial or judge’s ruling. Hence the idea of court oversight for targeted killing, which on Thursday, unexpectedly, got serious discussion from senators and Mr. Brennan.

First, Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, who is chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said she would review proposals for establishing such a court. Her remark got a strong second from Senator Angus King of Maine, an independent.

“Having the executive being the prosecutor, the judge, the jury and the executioner all in one is very contrary to the traditions and the laws of this country,” he said.

Mr. Brennan then made a striking disclosure: The Obama administration had held internal talks on the feasibility of such a court. “I think it’s certainly worthy of discussion,” Mr. Brennan said.

“What’s that appropriate balance between the executive, legislative and judicial branch responsibilities in this area?”

An administration official who spoke of the White House deliberations on the condition of anonymity said President Obama had asked his security and legal advisers a year ago “to see how you could have an independent review” of planned strikes. “That includes possible judicial review.”

“People on the national security staff and the legal side took a hard look at it, and the discussions are still going on,” the official said. “There are a lot of complexities. You’d need legislation and probably a new judicial body.”

The FISA court was created by Congress in 1978 after revelations of widespread eavesdropping on Americans by the National Security Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation convinced Congress that the executive branch had proved incapable of properly policing itself.

Eleven judges from around the country sit on the court, but one is on duty at a time, hearing cases in a special high-security courtroom added to Washington’s federal courthouse in 2009. In 2011, according to the most recent statistics, the court approved 1,745 orders for electronic surveillance or physical searches, rejecting none outright but altering 30.

A drone court would have the same appeal, bringing in an independent arbiter. But it is likely there would be serious limitations to its jurisdiction. Most experts say judges do not have the alacrity or expertise to rule on a frantic call from the C.I.A. every time a terrorism suspect is in its sights. A better approach would be to have the court rule on whether the government had enough evidence against a suspect to place him on the kill list.

But if the court’s jurisdiction extended to every foreign terrorism suspect, even some proponents believe, it might infringe on the president’s constitutional role as commander in chief. Senator King, for instance, said he thought the court would pass constitutional muster only if it were limited to cases involving American citizens.

With such limits, however, a drone court would not address many of the most pressing concerns, including decisions on which foreign militants should be targeted; how to avoid civilian deaths; and how to provide more public information about strike rules and procedures. “In terms of the politics and the optics, aren’t you in the same position that you are now?” said William C. Banks, a national security law expert at Syracuse University. “It’s still secret. The target wouldn’t be represented. It’s a mechanism that wouldn’t satisfy critics or advance the due process cause much.”

Indeed, Hina Shamsi, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s national security project, said that a drone court would be a step backward, and that extradition and criminal prosecution of suspected terrorists was a better answer. “I strongly agree that judicial review is crucial,” she said. “But judicial review in a new secret court is both unnecessary and un-American.”

Nor are judges clamoring to take up the challenge. At an American Bar Association meeting in November, a retired FISA judge, James Robertson, rejected the idea that judges should approve “death warrants.”

“My answer is, that’s not the business of judges,” Mr. Robertson said, “to decide without an adversary party to sign a death warrant for somebody.”

Drones Kill

President Obama lies in his State of Union speech

OK, it's still a lie, but most people never find out the President is a liar!!!!

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama did some cherry-picking Tuesday night in defense of his record on jobs and laid out a conditional path to citizenship for illegal immigrants that may be less onerous than he made it sound.

A look at some of the claims in his State of the Union speech, a glance at the Republican counterargument and how they fit with the facts:

OBAMA: "After years of grueling recession, our businesses have created over 6 million new jobs."

THE FACTS: That's in the ballpark, as far as it goes. But Obama starts his count not when he took office, but from the point in his first term when job losses were the highest. In doing so, he ignores the 5 million or so jobs that were lost on his watch, up to that point.

Private sector jobs have grown by 6.1 million since February 2010. But since he became president, the gain is a more modest 1.9 million.

And when losses in public sector employment are added to the mix, his overall jobs record is a gain of 1.2 million.

Under a deal the Obama administration reached with automakers in 2011, vehicles will have a corporate average fuel economy of 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025, twice the 27 miles per gallon, on average, that cars and trucks get today. Automobile manufacturers won't start making changes to achieve the new fuel economy standards until model year 2017. Not all cars will double their gas mileage, since the standard is based on an average of a manufacturers' fleet.

OBAMA: "Already the Affordable Care Act is helping to reduce the growth of health care costs."

THE FACTS: The jury is still out on whether Obama's health care overhaul will reduce the growth of health care costs. It's true that cost increases have eased, but many experts say that's due to the sluggish economy, not to the health care law, whose main provisions are not yet fully in effect.

OBAMA: "Real reform means establishing a responsible pathway to earned citizenship — a path that includes passing a background check, paying taxes and a meaningful penalty, learning English and going to the back of the line behind the folks trying to come here legally."

THE FACTS: The seemingly stern admonition that illegal immigrants must go to the back of the line, often heard from the president, doesn't appear to have much practical effect except in the most obvious sense. Everyone who joins a line, whether for a movie, a coffee or citizenship, starts at the back of that particular line. It's not clear he is saying anything more than that illegal immigrants won't get to cut in line for citizenship once they've obtained provisional legal status.

Like those living abroad who have applied to come to the U.S. legally, illegal immigrants who qualify for Obama's proposed path to citizenship will surely face long waits to be processed. But during that time, they are already in the U.S. and will get to stay, work and travel in the country under their new status as provisional immigrants, while those outside the U.S. simply have to wait.

Sending illegal immigrants to the "back of the line" is something of a distinction without a difference for some legal immigrants who dutifully followed all the rules before coming to the United States.

For instance, some legal immigrants who are in the U.S. on an employer-sponsored visa can't easily change jobs, or in some cases take a promotion, without jeopardizing their place in line to get a green card. In other cases, would-be legal immigrants in other countries wait for years to be able to settle in the U.S.

Obama is using "back of the line" somewhat figuratively, because there are multiple lines depending on the applicant's relationship with family already in the U.S. or with an employer. Generally, a foreign-born spouse of a U.S. citizen or someone with needed skills and a job offer will be accepted more quickly than many others.

But even as a figurative point, his assertion may cloak the fact that people who came to the U.S. illegally and win provisional status have the great advantage over applicants abroad of already being where they all want to go.

OBAMA: "Study after study shows that the sooner a child begins learning, the better he or she does down the road. ... And for poor kids who need help the most, this lack of access to preschool education can shadow them for the rest of their lives. ... Every dollar we invest in high-quality early education can save more than $7 later on — by boosting graduation rates, reducing teen pregnancy, even reducing violent crime."

THE FACTS: Dozens of studies have shown Head Start graduates are more likely to complete high school than their at-risk peers who don't participate in the program. But a study last year by the Department of Health and Human Services that found big vocabulary and social development gains for at-risk students in pre-kindergarten programs also found those effects largely faded by the time pupils reached third grade. The report didn't explain why the kids saw a drop-off in performance or predict how they would fare as they aged.

OBAMA: "I urge this Congress to pursue a bipartisan, market-based solution to climate change, like the one John McCain and Joe Lieberman worked on together a few years ago. But if Congress won't act soon to protect future generations, I will. I will direct my Cabinet to come up with executive actions we can take, now and in the future, to reduce pollution, prepare our communities for the consequences of climate change and speed the transition to more sustainable sources of energy."

THE FACTS: Obama failed to get a global warming bill through Congress when both Houses were controlled by Democrats in 2010. With Republicans in control of the House, the chances of a bill to limit the gases blamed for global warming and to create a market for businesses to trade pollution credits are close to zero. The Obama administration has already acted to control greenhouse gases through existing law. It has boosted fuel-efficiency standards and proposed rules to control heat-trapping emissions from new power plants. And while there are still other ways to address climate change without Congress, it's questionable regulation alone can achieve the reductions needed to start curbing global warming.

FLORIDA SEN. MARCO RUBIO, in the Republican response: "The real cause of our debt is that our government has been spending $1 trillion more than it takes in every year. That's why we need a balanced-budget amendment."

THE FACTS: That statement may reflect the math behind recent debt, but it doesn't get directly to the cause — the worst recession since the Depression and its aftereffects. The deficit is not only caused by spending, but by reduced tax revenues. And during the recession, revenues from both individual and corporate taxes fell markedly.

The steep increases in debt and the measures that should be taken to ease the burden are central to the debate in Washington. But there is no serious move afoot to amend the Constitution to prohibit deficit spending.

The ability to take on debt has been used by governments worldwide and through U.S. history to shelter people from the ravages of a down economy, wage war and achieve many other ends. An effort to amend the Constitution for any purpose faces daunting odds; this would be no exception. Most state constitutions demand a balanced budget, but states lack some big obligations of the federal government, including national defense. And Washington's ability to go deeper into debt provides states with at least a minimal safety net in times of high unemployment.

Associated Press writers Tom Raum, Dina Cappiello, Andrew Taylor, Christopher S. Rugaber, Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar, Alicia A. Caldwell and Philip Elliott contributed to this report.

EDITOR'S NOTE _ An occasional look at political claims that take shortcuts with the facts or don't tell the full story.

Brennan defends drone strikes, even on Americans

CIA Director-designate John Brennan strongly defended anti-terror attacks by unmanned drones Thursday under close questioning at a protest-disrupted confirmation hearing. On a second controversial topic, he said that after reading a classified intelligence report on harsh interrogation techniques, he does not know if waterboarding has yielded useful information.

Despite what he called a public misimpression, Brennan told the Senate Intelligence Committee that drone strikes are used only against targets planning to carry out attacks against the United States, never as retribution for an earlier one. "Nothing could be further from the truth," he declared.

Referring to one American citizen killed by a drone in Yemen in 2011, he said the man, Anwar al-Alawki, had ties to at least three attacks planned or carried out on U.S. soil. They included the Fort Hood, Texas, shooting that claimed 13 lives in 2009, a failed attempt to down a Detroit-bound airliner the same year and a thwarted plot to bomb cargo planes in 2010.

"He was intimately involved in activities to kill innocent men women and children, mostly Americans," Brennan said.

In a sign that the hearing had focused intense scrutiny on the drone program, Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., told reporters after the hearing that she thinks it may be time to lift the secrecy off the program so that U.S. officials can acknowledge the strikes and correct what she said were exaggerated reports of civilian casualties.

Feinstein said she and a number of other senators are considering writing legislation to set up a special court system to regulate drone strikes, similar to the one that signs off on government surveillance in espionage and terror cases.

Speaking with uncharacteristic openness about the classified program, Feinstein said the CIA had allowed her staff to make more than 30 visits to the CIA's Langley, Va., headquarters to monitor strikes, but that the transparency needed to be widened.

"I think the process set up internally is a solid process," Feinstein said, but added: "I think there's an absence of knowing exactly who is responsible for what decision. So I think we need to look at this whole process and figure a way to make it transparent and identifiable."

In a long afternoon in the witness chair, Brennan declined to say if he believes waterboarding amounts to torture, but he said firmly it is "something that is reprehensible and should never be done again."

Brennan, 57 and President Barack Obama's top anti-terrorism aide, won praise from several members of the committee as the day's proceedings drew to a close, a clear indication that barring an unexpected development, his confirmation as the nation's next head of the CIA is on track.

"I think you're the guy for the job, and the only guy for the job," said Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va.

The panel will meet in closed session next week to permit discussion of classified material.

Brennan bristled once during the day, when Sen. James Risch, R-Idaho, accused him of having leaked classified information in a telephone call with former government officials who were preparing to make television appearances.

Brennan made repeated general pledges to increase the flow of information to members of the Senate panel, but he was less specific when it came to individual cases. Asked at one point whether he would provide a list of countries where the CIA has used lethal authority, he replied, "It would be my intention to do everything possible" to comply.

He said he had no second thoughts about having opposed a planned strike against Osama bin Laden in 1998, a few months before the bombings of two U.S. embassies. The plan was not "well-grounded," he said, adding that other intelligence officials also recommended against proceeding. Brennan was at the CIA at the time.

Brennan was questioned extensively about leaks to the media about an al-Qaida plot to detonate a new type of underwear bomb on a Western airline. He acknowledged trying to limit the damage to national security from the disclosures.

On May 7 of last year, The Associated Press reported that the CIA thwarted an ambitious plot by al-Qaida's affiliate in Yemen to destroy a U.S.-bound airliner, using a bomb with a sophisticated new design around the one-year anniversary of the killing of Osama bin Laden. The next day, the Los Angeles Times reported that the would-be bomber was cooperating with U.S. authorities.

During Thursday's hearing, Risch and Sen. Dan Coats of Indiana were among those who contended Brennan had inadvertently revealed that the U.S. had a spy inside Yemen's al-Qaida branch when, hours after the first AP report appeared, he told a group of media consultants that "there was no active threat during the bin Laden anniversary because ... we had inside control of the plot."

The hearing was interrupted repeatedly at its outset, including once before it had begun. Eventually, Feinstein briefly ordered the proceedings halted and the room cleared of anyone except staffers and credentialed media.

Brennan is a veteran of more than three decades in intelligence work, and is currently serving as Obama's top counter-terrorism adviser in the White House. Any thought he had of becoming CIA director four years ago vanished amid questions about the role he played at the CIA when the Bush administration approved waterboarding and other forms of "enhanced interrogation" of suspected terrorists.

On the question of waterboarding, Brennan said that while serving as a deputy manager at the CIA during the Bush administration, he was told such interrogation methods produced "valuable information." Now, after reading a 300-page summary of a 6,000-page report on CIA interrogation and detention policies, he said he does "not know what the truth is."

The shouted protests centered on CIA drone strikes that have killed three American citizens and an unknown number of foreigners overseas.

It was a topic very much on the mind of the committee members who eventually will vote on Brennan's confirmation.

In the hours before the hearing began, Obama ordered that a classified paper outlining the legal rationale for striking at U.S. citizens abroad be made available for members of the House and Senate intelligence panels to read.

It was an attempt to clear the way for Brennan's approval, given hints from some lawmakers that they might hold up confirmation unless they had access to the material.

Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., said he was encouraged when Obama called him on the telephone to inform him of his decision. But he said that when he went to read the material he became concerned the Department of Justice "is not following through" on the presidential commitment. Prodded to look into the matter, Brennan said he would.

Wyden made the drone strikes the main focus of his time to question Brennan, asking at one point what could be done "so that the American people are brought into this debate and have a full understanding of what rules" are for their use.

Brennan said the day's hearings were part of that effort, and he said he backs speeches by officials as a way to explain counter-terrorism programs. He said there is a "misimpression by the American people" who believe drone strikes are aimed at suspects in past attacks. Instead, he said, "we only take such actions as a last resort to save lives" when there is no other alternative in what officials believe is an imminent threat.

Fewer than 50 strikes took place during the Bush administration, while more than 360 strikes have been launched under Obama, according to the website The Long War Journal, which tracks the operations.

The full text of the white paper on the killing of U.S. citizens abroad

This week, NBC News published a confidential Justice Department memo presenting the Obama administration's case for the lawful killing of U.S. citizens abroad who are involved with al-Qaida, reigniting a debate over presidential power that raged during much of the George W. Bush administration. NBC released a PDF of the 16-page white paper liberally embossed with watermarks of the outlet's logo on each page.

Given the extreme gravity of the subject, Yahoo News retyped the portions of the documents that could not be digitized automatically due to the watermarks, presented below. Information for how to contribute corrections is included at the bottom of the article.

DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE WHITE PAPER

This white paper sets forth a legal framework for considering the circumstances in which the U.S. government could use lethal force in a foreign country outside the area of active hostilities against a U.S. citizen who is a senior operational leader of al-Qa'ida or an associated force of al-Qa'ida—that is, an al-Qa'ida leader actively engaged in planning operations to kill Americans. The paper does not attempt to determine the minimum requirements necessary to render such an operation lawful; nor does it assess what might be required to render a lethal operation against a U.S. citizen lawful in other circumstances, including an operation against enemy forces on a traditional battlefield or an operation against a U.S. citizen who is not a senior operational leader of such forces. Here the Department of Justice concludes only that where the following three conditions are met, a U.S. operation using lethal force in a foreign country against a U.S. citizen who is a senior operational leader of al-Qa'ida or an associated force would be lawful:

an informed, high-level official of the U.S. government has determined that the targeted individual poses an imminent threat of violent attack against the United States;
capture is infeasible, and the United States continues to monitor whether capture becomes feasible; and
the operation would be conducted in a manner consistent with applicable law of war principles.

This conclusion is reached with recognition of the extraordinary seriousness of a lethal operation by the United States against a U.S. citizen, and also of the extraordinary seriousness of the threat posed by senior operational al- Qa'ida members and the loss of life that would result were their operations successful.

The President has authority to respond to the imminent threat posed by al-Qa'ida and its associated forces, arising from his constitutional responsibility to protect the country, the inherent right of the United States to national self defense under international law, Congress's authorization of the use of all necessary and appropriate military force against this enemy, and the existence of an armed conflict with al-Qa'ida under international law. Based on these authorities, the President may use force against al-Qa'ida and its associated forces. As detailed in this white paper, in defined circumstances, a targeted killing of a U.S. citizen who has joined al-Qa'ida or its associated forces would be lawful under U.S. and international law. Targeting a member of an enemy force who poses an imminent threat of violent attack to the United States is not unlawful. It is a lawful act of national self defense. Nor would it violate otherwise applicable federal laws barring unlawful killings in Title 18 or the assassination ban in Executive Order No. 12333. Moreover, a lethal operation in a foreign nation would be consistent with international legal principles of sovereignty and neutrality if it were conducted, for example, with the consent of the host nation's government or after a determination that the host nation is unable or unwilling to suppress the threat posed by the individual targeted.

Were the target of a lethal operation a U.S. citizen who may have rights under the Due Process Clause and the Fourth Amendment, that individual's citizenship would not immunize him from a lethal operation. Under the traditional due process balancing analysis of Mathews v. Eldridge, we recognize that there is no private interest more weighty than a person's interest in his life. But that interest must be balanced against the United States' interest in forestalling the threat of violence and death to other Americans that arises from an individual who is a senior operational leader of al-Qa'ida or an associated force of al-Qa'ida and who is engaged in plotting against the United States.

The paper begins with a brief summary of the authority for the use of force in the situation described here, including the authority to target a U.S. citizen having the characteristics described above with lethal force outside the area of active hostilities. It continues with the constitutional questions, considering first whether a lethal operation against such a U.S. citizen would be consistent with the Fifth Amendment's Due Process Clause, U.S. Const. amend. V. As part of the due process analysis, the paper explains the concepts of "imminence," feasibility of capture, and compliance with applicable law of war principles. The paper then discusses whether such an operation would be consistent with the Fourth Amendment's prohibition on unreasonable seizures, U.S. Const. amend. IV. It concludes that where certain conditions are met, a lethal operation against a U.S. citizen who is a senior operational leader of al-Qa'ida or its associated forces—a terrorist organization engaged in constant plotting against the United States, as well as an enemy force with which the United States is in a congressionally authorized armed conflict—and who himself poses an imminent threat of violent attack against the United States, would not violate the Constitution. The paper also includes an analysis concluding that such an operation would not violate certain criminal provisions prohibiting the killing of U.S. nationals outside the United States; nor would it constitute either the commission of a war crime or an assassination prohibited by Executive Order 12333.

The United States is in an armed conflict with al-Qa'ida and its associated forces, and Congress has authorized the President to use all necessary and appropriate force against those entities. See Authorization for Use of Military Force ("AUMF"), Pub. L. No. 107-40, S 2(a), 115 Stat. 224, 224 (2001). In addition to the authority arising from the AUMF, the President's use of force against al-Qa'ida and associated forces is lawful under other principles of U.S. and international law, including the President's constitutional responsibility to protect the nation and the inherent right to national self defense recognized in international law (see, e.g., U.N. Charter art. 51). It was on these bases that the United States responded to the attacks of September 11, 2001, and "[t]hese domestic and international legal authorities continue to this day." Harold Hongju Koh, Legal Adviser, U.S. Department of State, Address to the Annual Meeting of the American Society of International Law: The Obama Administration and International Law (Mar. 25, 2010) ("2010 Koh ASIL Speech").

Any operation of the sort discussed here would be conducted in a foreign country against a senior operational leader of al-Qa'ida or its associated forces who poses an imminent threat of violent attack against the United States. A use of force under such circumstances would be justified as an act of national self-defense. In addition, such a person would be within the core of individuals against whom Congress has authorized the use of necessary and appropriate force. The fact that such a person would also be a U.S. citizen would not alter this conclusion. The Supreme Court has held that the military may constitutionally use force against a U.S. citizen who is a part of enemy forces. See Hamdi, 542 U.S. 507, 518 (2004) (plurality opinion); id. at 58?, 59? (Thomas, J., dissenting); Ex Parte Quirin, 317 U.S. at 37-38. Like the imposition of military detention, the use of lethal force against such enemy forces is an "important incident of war." Hamdi, 542 U.S. at 518 (2004) (plurality opinion) (quotation omitted). See, e.g., General Orders No. 100: Instructions for the Government of Armies of the United States in the Field P 15 (Apr. 24, 1863) ("[m]ilitary necessity admits of all direct destruction of life or limb of armed enemies") (emphasis omitted); International Committee of the Red Cross, Commentary on the Additional Protocols of 8 June 1977 on the Geneva Conventions of 12 Aug. 1949 and Relating to the Protection of Victims of Non-International Armed Conflicts (Additional Protocol II) S 4789 (1987) ("Those who belong to armed forces or armed groups may be attacked at any time."); Yoram Dinstein, The Conduct of Hostilities Under the Law of International Armed Conflict 94 (2004) ("When a person takes up arms or merely dons a uniform as a member of the armed forces, he automatically exposes himself to enemy attack.") Accordingly, the Department does not believe that U.S. citizenship would immunize a senior operational leader of al-Qa'ida or its associated forces from a use of force abroad authorized by the AUMF or in national self-defense.

In addition, the United States retains its authority to use force against al-Qa'ida and associated forces outside the area of active hostilities when it targets a senior operational leader of the enemy forces who is actively engaged in planning operations to kill Americans. The United States is currently in a non-international armed conflict with al-Qa'ida and its associated forces. See Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, 548 U.S. 557, 628-31 (2006) (holding that a conflict between a nation and a transnational non-state actor, occurring outside the nation's territory, is an armed conflict "not of an international character" (quoting Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions) because it is not a "clash between nations"). Any U.S. operation would be part of this non-international armed conflict, even if it were to take place away from the zone of active hostilities. See John O. Brennan, Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, Remarks at the Program on Law and Security, Harvard Law School: Strengthening Our Security by Adhering to Our Values and Laws (Sept. 16, 2011) ("The United States does not view our authority to use military force against Al-Qa'ida as being restricted solely to 'hot' battlefields like Afghanistan."). For example, the AUMF itself does not set forth an express geographic limitation on the use of force it authorizes. See Hamdan, 548 U.S. at 631 (Kennedy, J., concurring) (what makes a non-international armed conflict distinct from an international armed conflict is "the legal status of the entities opposing each other"). None of the three branches of the U.S. Government has identified a strict geographical limit on the permissible scope of the AUMP's authorization. See, e.g., Letter for the Speaker of the House of Representatives and the President Pro Tempore of the Senate from the President (June 15, 2010) (reporting that the armed forces, with the assistance of numerous international partners, continue to conduct operations "against al- Qa'ida terrorists," and that the United States has "deployed combat-equipped forces to a number of locations in the U.S. Central ... Command area[] of operation in support of those [overseas counterterrorist] operations"); Bensayah v. Obama, 610 F.3d 718, 720, 724-25, 727 (D.C. Cir. 2010) (concluding that an individual turned over to the United States in Bosnia could be detained if the government demonstrates he was part of al- Qa'ida); al-Adahi v. Obama, 613 F.3d 1102, 1003, 1111 (D.C. Cir. 2010) (noting authority under AUMF to detain individual apprehended by Pakistani authorities in Pakistan and then transferred to U.S. custody).

Claiming that for purposes of international law, an armed conflict generally exists only when there is "protracted armed violence between governmental authorities and organized armed groups," Prosecutor v. Tadic, Case No. IT-94-1 AR72, Decision on the Defence Motion for Interlocutory Appeal on Jurisdiction, P 70 (Int'l Crim. Trib. for the Former Yugoslavia, App. Chamber Oct. 2, 1995), some commenters have suggested that the conflict between the United States and al-Qa'ida cannot lawfully extend to nations outside Afghanistan in which the level of hostilities is less intense or prolonged than in Afghanistan itself. See, e.g., Mary Ellen O'Connell, Combatants and the Combat Zone, 43 U. Rich. L. Rev. 845, 857-59 (2009). There is little judicial or other authoritative precedent that speaks directly to the question of the geographic scope of a non- international armed conflict in which one of the parties is a transnational, non-state actor and where the principal theater of operations is not within the territory of the nation that is a party to the conflict. Thus, in considering this potential issue, the Department looks to principles and statements from analogous contexts.

The Department has not found any authority for the proposition that when one of the parties to an armed conflict plans and executes operations from a base in a new nation, an operation to engage the enemy in that location cannot be part of the original armed conflict, and thus the subject to the laws of war governing that conflict, unless the hostilities become sufficiently intense and protracted in the new location. That does not appear to be the rule of the historical practice, for instance, even in a traditional international conflict, See John R. Stevenson, Legal Adviser, Department of State, United States Military Action in Cambodia: Questions of International Law, Address before the Hammarskjold Forum of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York (May 28, 1970), in 3 The Vietnam War and International Law: The Widening Context 23, 28-30 (Richard A. Falk, ed. 1972) (arguing that in an international armed conflict, if a neutral state has been unable for any reason to prevent violations of its neutrality by the troops of one belligerent using its territory as a base of operations, the other belligerent has historically been justified in attacking those enemy forces in that state). Particularly in a non-international armed conflict, where terrorist organizations may move their base of operations from one country to another, the determination of whether a particular operation would be part of an ongoing armed conflict would require consideration of the particular facts and circumstances in each case, including the fact that transnational non- state organizations such as al-Qa'ida may have no single site serving as their base of operations. See also, e.g., Geoffrey S. Corn & Eric Albot Jensen, Untying the Gordian Knot: A Proposal for Determining Applicability of the Laws of War to the War on Terror, 81 Temp. L. Rev. 787, 799 (2008) ("If ... the ultimate purpose of the drafters of the Geneva Conventions was to prevent 'law avoidance' by developing de facto law triggers—a purpose consistent with the humanitarian foundation of the treaties— then the myopic focus on the geographic nature of an armed conflict in the context of transnational counterterrorist combat operations serves to frustrate that purpose.") [2]

If an operation of the kind discussed in this paper were to occur in a location where al-Qa'ida or an associated force has a significant and organized presence and from which al-Qa'ida or an associated force, including its senior operational leaders, plan attacks against U.S. persons and and interests, the operation would be part of the non-international armed conflict between the United States and al-Qa'ida that the Supreme Court recognized in Hamdan. Moreover, such an operation would be consistent with international legal principles of sovereignty and neutrality if it were conducted, for example, with the consent of the host nation's government or after a determination that the host nation is unable or unwilling to suppress the threat posed by the individual targeted. In such circumstances, targeting a U.S. citizen of the kind described in this paper would be authorized under the AUMF and the inherent right to national self-defense. Given this authority, the question becomes whether and what further restrictions may limit its exercise.

II.

The Department assumes that the rights afforded by Fifth Amendment's Due Process Clause, as well as the Fourth Amendment, attach to a U.S. citizen even while he is abroad. See Reid v. Covert, 354 U.S. 1, 5-6 (1957) (plurality opinion); United States v. Verdugo-Urquidez, 494 U.S. 259, 269-70 (1990); see also In re Terrorist Bombings of U.S. Embassies in East Africa, 552 F.3d 157, 170 n.7 (2d Cir. 2008). The U.S. citizenship of a leader of al-Qa'ida or its associated forces, however, does not give that person constitutional immunity from attack. This paper next considers whether and in what circumstances a lethal operation would violate any possible constitutional protections of a U.S. citizen.

The Due Process Clause would not prohibit a lethal operation of the sort contemplated here. In Hamdi, a plurality of the Supreme Court used the Mathews v. Eldridge balancing test to analyze the Fifth Amendment due process rights of a U.S. citizen who had been captured on the battlefield in Afghanistan and detained in the United States, and who wished to challenge the government's assertion that he was part of enemy forces. The Court explained that the "process due in any given instance is determined by weighing 'the private interest that will be affected by the official action' against the Government's asserted interest, 'including the function involved' and the burdens the Government would face in providing great process." Hamdi, 542 U.S. at 529 (plurality opinion) (quoting Mathews v. Eldridge, 424 U.S. 319, 335 (1976)). The due process balancing analysis applied to determine the Fifth Amendment rights of a U.S. citizen with respect to law-of-war detention supplies the framework for assessing the process due a U.S. citizen who is a senior operational leader of an enemy force planning violent attacks against Americans before he is subjected to lethal targeting.

In the circumstances considered here, the interests on both sides would be weighty. See Hamdi, 542 U.S. at 529 (plurality opinion) ("It is beyond question that substantial interests lie on both sides of the scale in this case."). An individual's interest in avoiding erroneous deprivation of his life is "uniquely compelling." See Ake v. Oklahoma, 470 U.S. 68, 178 (1985) ("The private interest in the accuracy of a criminal proceeding that places an individual's life or liberty at risk is almost uniquely compelling."). No private interest is more substantial. At the same time, the government's interest in waging war, protecting its citizens, and removing the threat posed by members of enemy forces is also compelling. Cf. Hamdi, 543 U.S. at 531 (plurality opinion) ("On the other side of the scale are the weighty and sensitive governmental interests in ensuring that those who have in fact fought with the enemy during a war do not return to battle against the United States."). As the Hamdi plurality observed, in the "circumstances of war," "the risk of erroneous deprivation of a citizen's liberty in the absence of sufficient process . . . is very real," id. at 530 (plurality opinion), and, of course, the risk of an erroneous deprivation of a citizen's life is even more significant. But, "the realities of combat" render certain uses of force "necessary and appropriate," including force against U.S. citizens who have joined enemy forces in the armed conflict against the United States and whose activities pose an imminent threat of violent attack against the United States—and "due process analysis need not blink at those realities." Id. at 531 (plurality opinion). These same realities must also be considered in assessing "the burdens the Government would face in providing greater process" to a member of enemy forces. Id. at 529, 531 (plurality opinion).

In view of these interests and practical considerations, the United States would be able to use lethal force against a U.S. citizen, who is located outside the United States and is an operational leader continually planning attacks against U.S. persons and interests, in at least the following circumstances:

where an informed, high-level official of the U.S. government has determined that the targeted individual poses an imminent threat of violent attack against the United States;
where a capture operation would be infeasible—and where those conducting the operation continue to monitor whether capture becomes feasible; and
where such an operation would be conducted consistent with applicable law of war principles.

In these circumstances, the "realities" of the conflict and the weight of the government's interest in protecting its citizens from an imminent attack are such that the Constitution would not require the government to provide further process to such a U.S. citizen before using lethal force. Cf Hamdi, 542 U.S. at 535 (plurality opinion) (noting that the Court "accord[s] the greatest respect and consideration to the judgments of military authorities in matters relating to the actual prosecution of war, and . . . the scope of that discretion necessarily is wide"); id. at 534 (plurality opinion) ("The parties agree that initial captures on the battlefield need not receive the process we have discussed here; that process is due only when the determination is made to continue to hold those who have been seized.") (emphasis omitted).

Certain aspects of this legal framework require additional explication. First, the condition that an operational leader present an "imminent" threat of violent attack against the United States does not require the United States to have clear evidence that a specific attack on U.S. persons and interests will take place in the immediate future. Given the nature of, for example, the terrorist attacks on September 11, in which civilian airliners were hijacked to strike the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, this definition of imminence, which would require the United States to refrain from action until preparations for an attack are concluded, would not allow the United States sufficient time to defend itself. The defensive options available to the United States may be reduced or eliminated if al-Qa'ida operatives disappear and cannot be found when the time of their attack approaches. Consequently, with respect to al-Qa'ida leaders who are continually planning attacks, the United States is likely to have only a limited window of opportunity within which to defend Americans in a manner that has both a high likelihood of success and sufficiently reduces the probabilities of civilian causalities. See Michael N. Schmitt, State Sponsored Assassination in International and Domestic Law, l7 Yale J. Int'l L. 609, 648 (l992). Furthermore, a "terrorist 'war' does not consist of a massive attack across an international border, nor does it consist of one isolated incident that occurs and is then past. It is a drawn out, patient, sporadic pattern of attacks. It is very difficult to know when or where the next incident will occur." Gregory M. Travalio, Terrorism, International Law, and the Use of Military Force, 18 Wis. Int'l L.J. 145, 173 (2000); see also Testimony of Attorney-General Lord Goldsmith, 660 Hansard. H.L. (April 21. 2004) 370 (U.K.), (what constitutes an imminent threat "Will develop to meet new circumstances and new threats . . . . It must be right that states are able to act in self-defense in circumstances Where there is evidence of further imminent attacks by terrorist groups, even if there is no specific evidence of where such an attack will take place or of the precise nature of the attack."). Delaying action against individuals continually planning to kill Americans until some theoretical end stage of the planning for a particular plot would create an unacceptably high risk that the action would fail and that American casualties would result.

By its nature, therefore, the threat posed by al-Qa'ida and its associated forces demands a broader concept of imminence in judging when a person continually planning terror attacks presents an imminent threat, making the use of force appropriate. In this context, imminence must incorporate considerations of the relevant window of opportunity, the possibility of reducing collateral damage to civilians, and the likelihood of heading off future disastrous attacks on Americans. Thus, a decision maker determining whether an al-Qa'ida operational leader presents an imminent threat of violent attack against the United States must take into account that certain members of al- Qa'ida (including any potential target of lethal force) are continually plotting attacks against the United States; that al-Qa'ida would engage in such attacks regularly to the extent it were able to do so; that the U.S, government may not be aware of all al-Qa'ida plots as they are developing and thus cannot be confident that none is about to occur; and that, in light of these predicates, the nation may have a limited window of opportunity within which to strike in a manner that both has a high likelihood of success and reduces the probability of American casualties.

With this understanding, a high-level official could conclude, for example, that an individual poses an "imminent threat" of violent attack against the United States where he is an operational leader of al-Qa'ida or an associated force and is personally and continually involved in planning terrorist attacks against the United States. Moreover, where the al-Qa'ida member in question has recently been involved in activities posing an imminent threat of violent attack against the United States, and there is no evidence suggesting that he has renounced or abandoned such activities, that member's involvement in al-Qa'ida's continuing terrorist campaign against the United States would support the conclusion that the member poses an imminent threat.

Second, regarding the feasibility of capture, capture would not be feasible if it could not be physically effectuated during the relevant window of opportunity or if the relevant country were to decline to consent to a capture operation. Other factors such as undue risk to U.S. personnel conducting a potential capture operation also could be relevant. Feasibility would be a highly fact-specific and potentially time-sensitive inquiry.

Third, it is a premise here that any such lethal operation by the United States would comply with the four fundamental law-of-war principles governing the use of force: necessity, distinction, proportionality, and humanity (the avoidance of unnecessary suffering). See, e.g., United States Air Force, Targeting, Air Force Doctrine Document 2-1.9, at 88 (June 3, 2006); Dinstein, Conduct of Hostilities at 16-20, l 15-16, l 19-23; see also 2010 Koh ASIL Speech. For example, it would not be consistent with those principles to continue an operation if anticipated civilian casualties would be excessive in relation to the anticipated military advantage. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Instruction 5810.01D, Implementation of the DoD Law of War Program P 4.a, at 1 (Apr. 30, 2010). An operation consistent with the laws of war could not violate the prohibitions against treachery and perfidy, which address a breach of confidence by the assailant. See, e.g., Hague Convention IB, Annex, art. 23(b), Oct. 18, 1907, 36 Stat. 2277, 2301-02 ("[I]t is especially forbidden .... [t]o kill or wound treacherously individuals belonging to the hostile nation or army . . . ."). These prohibitions do not, however, categorically forbid the use of stealth or surprise, nor forbid attacks on identified individual soldiers or officers. See U.S. Army Field Manual 2?-10, The Law of Land Warfare, 31 (1956) (article 23(b) of the Annex to the Hague Convention IV does not "preclude attacks on individual soldiers or officers of the enemy whether in the zone of hostilities, occupied territory, or elsewhere"). And the Department is not aware of any other law-of-war grounds precluding use of such tactics. See Dinstein, Conduct of Hosrilfries at 94-95, 199; Abraham D. Sofaer, Terrorism, the Law, and the National Defense, 126 Mil. L. Rev. 89, 120-21 (1989). Relatedly, "there is no prohibition under the laws of war on the use of technologically advanced weapons systems in armed conflict—such as pilotless aircraft or so-called smart bombs—so long as they are employed in conformity with applicable laws of war." 2010 Koh ASIL Speech. Further, under this framework, the United States would also be required to accept a surrender if it were feasible to do so.

In sum, an operation in the circumstances and under the constraints described above would not result in a violation of any due process rights.

Similarly, assuming that a lethal operation targeting a U.S. citizen abroad who is planning attacks against the United States would result in a "seizure" under the Fourth Amendment, such an operation would not violate that Amendment in the circumstances posited here. The Supreme Court has made clear that the constitutionality of a seizure is determined by "balanc[ing] the nature and quality of the intrusion on the individual's Fourth Amendment interests against the importance of the governmental interest alleged to justify the intrusion." Tennessee v. Garner, 471 US. 1, 8 (1985) (internal quotation marks omitted); accord Scott v. Harris, 550 U.S. 372, 383 (2007). Even in domestic law enforcement operations, the Court has noted that "[w]here the officer has probable cause to believe that the suspect poses a threat of serious physical harm, either to the officer or to others, it is not constitutionally unreasonable to prevent escape by using deadly force." Garner, 471 U.S. at 11. Thus, "if the suspect threatens the officer with a weapon or there is probable cause to believe that he has committed a crime involving the infliction or threatened infliction of serious physical harm, deadly force may be used if necessary to prevent escape, and if, where feasible, some warning has been given." Id. at 11-12.

The Fourth Amendment "reasonableness" test is situation dependent. Cf. Scott, 550 U.S. at 382 ("Garner did not establish a magical on/off switch that triggers rigid preconditions whenever an officer's actions constitute 'deadly force.'"). What would constitute a reasonable use of lethal force for purposes of domestic law enforcement operations differs substantially from what would be reasonable in the situation and circumstances discussed in this white paper. But at least in circumstances where the targeted person is an operational leader of an enemy force and an informed, high-level government official has determined that he poses an imminent threat of violent attack against the United States, and those conducting the operation would carry out the operation only if capture were infeasible, the use of lethal force would not violate the Fourth Amendment. Under such circumstances, the intrusion on any Fourth Amendment interests would be outweighed by the "importance of the governmental interests [that] justify the intrusion," Garner, 471 U.S. at Sr»-the interests in protecting the lives of Americans.

Finally, the Department notes that under the circumstances described in this paper, there exists no appropriate judicial forum to evaluate these constitutional considerations. It is well-established that "[m]atters intimately related to foreign policy and national security are rarely proper subjects for judicial intervention," Haig v. Agee, 453 U.S. 280, 292 (1931), because such matters "frequently turn on standards that defy judicial application," or "involve the exercise of a discretion demonstrably committed to the executive or legislature," Baker v. Carr, 369 U.S. 186, 211 (1962). Were a court to intervene here, it might be required inappropriately to issue an ex ante command to the President and officials responsible for operations with respect to their specific tactical judgment to mount a potential lethal operation against a senior operational leader of al- Qa'ida or its associated forces. And judicial enforcement of such orders would require the Court to supervise inherently predictive judgments by the President and his national security advisors as to when and how to use force against a member of an enemy force against which Congress has authorized the use of force.

III.

Section 1119(b) of title 18 provides that a "person who, being a national of the United States, kills or attempts to kill a national of the United States while such national is outside the United States but within the jurisdiction of another country shall be punished as provided under sections 1111, 1112, and 1113." 18 U.S.C. § 1119(b) (2006).[3] Because the person who would be the target of the kind of operation discussed here would be a U.S. citizen, it might be suggested that section 1119(b) would prohibit such an operation. Section 1119, however, incorporates the federal murder and manslaughter statutes, and thus its prohibition extends only to "unlawful killing[s]," 18 U.S.C. 1111(a), 1112(a) (2006). Section 1119 is best construed to incorporate the "public authority" justification, which renders lethal action carried out by a government official lawful in some circumstances. As this paper explains below, a lethal operation of the kind discussed here would fall within the public authority exception under the circumstances and conditions posited because it would be conducted in a manner consistent with applicable law of war principles governing the non-international conflict between the United States and al-Qa'ida and its associated forces. It therefore would not result in an unlawful killing.[4]

Although section 1119(b) refers only to the "punish[ments]" provided under sections 1111, 1112, and 1113, courts have geld that section 1119(b) incorporates the substantive elements of those cross-referenced provisions of title 18. See, e.g., United States v. Wharton, 320 F.3d 526, 533 (5th Cir. 2003); United States v. White, 51 F. Supp. 2d 1008, 1013-14 (E.D. Cal. 1997). Section 1111 of title 18 sets forth criminal penalties for "murder", and provides that "[m]urder is the unlawful killing of a human being with malice aforethought." 18 U.S.C. S 1111(a). Section 1112 similarly provides criminal sanctions for "[m]anslaughter," and states that "[m]anslaughter is the unlawful killing of a human being without malice." Id. S 1112(a). Section 1113 provides criminal penalties for "attempts to commit murder or manslaughter." Id. S. 1113. It is therefore clear that section 11119(b) bars only "unlawful killing."

Guidance as to the meaning of the phrase "unlawful killing" in sections 1111 and 1112—and thus for purposes of section 1119(b)—be found in the historical understandings of murder and manslaughter. That history shows that states have long recognized justifications and excuses to statutes criminalizing "unlawful" killings.[5] One state court, for example, in construing that state's murder statute, explained that "the word 'unlawful' is a term of art" that "connotes a homicide with the absence of factors of excuse or justification." People v. Frye, 10 Cal. Rptr. 2d 217, 221 (Cal. Ct. App. 1992). That court further explained that the factors of excuse or justification in question include those that have traditionally been recognized. Id. at 221 n.2. Other authorities support the same conclusion. See, e.g., Mullaney v. Wilbur, 421 U.S. 684, 685 (1975) (requirement of "unlawful" killing in Maine murder statute meant that killing was "neither justifiable nor excusable"); cf also Rollin M. Perkins & Ronald N. Boyce, Criminal Law 56 (3d ed. 1982) ("Innocent homicide is of two kinds, (l) justifiable and (2) excusable."). Accordingly, section 1119 does not proscribe killings covered by a justification traditionally recognized under the common law or state and federal murder statutes. "Congress did not intend [section 1119] to criminalize justifiable or excusable killings." White, 51 F. Supp. 2d at 1013.

The public authority justification is well-accepted, and it may be available even in cases where the particular criminal statute at issue does not expressly refer to a public authority justification. Prosecutions where such a "public authority" justification is invoked are understandably rare, see American Law Institute Model Penal Code and Commentaries S 3.03 Comment 1, at 23-24 (1985); cf Visa Fraud Investigation, 8 Op. O.L.C. 284, 285 n.2, 286 (1984), and thus there is little case law in which courts have analyzed the scope of the justification with respect to the conduct of government officials. Nonetheless, discussions in the leading treatises and in the Model Panel Code demonstrate its legitimacy. See 2 Wayne R. LaFave, Substantive Criminal Law S 10.2(b), at 135 (2d ed. 2003); Perkins & Boyce, Criminal Law at 1093 ("Deeds which otherwise would be criminal, such as taking or destroying property, taking hold of a person by force and against his will, placing him in confinement, or even taking his life, are not crimes if done with proper public authority."); see also Model Penal Code S 3.03(1)(a), (d), (e) at 22023 (proposing codification of justification where conduct is "required or authorized by," inter alia, "the law defining the duties or functions of a public officer," "the law governing the armed services or the lawful conduct of war," or "any other provision of law imposing a public duty"); National Commission on Reform of Federal Criminal Laws, A Proposed New Federal Criminal Code S 602(1) (1971) ("Conduct engaged in by a public servant in the course of his official duties is justified when it is required or authorized by law."). And the Department's Office of Legal Counsel ("OLC") has invoked analogous rationales when it has analyzed whether Congress intended a particular criminal statute to prohibit specific conduct that otherwise falls within a government agency's authorities. See, e.g., Visa Fraud Investigation, 8 Op. O.L.C. at 287-88 (concluding that a civil statute prohibiting issuance of visa to an alien known to be ineligible did not prohibit State Department from issuing such a visa where "necessary" to facilitate an important Immigration and Naturalization Service undercover operation carried out in a "reasonable" fashion).

The public authority justification would not excuse all conduct of public officials from all criminal prohibitions. Or the legislature may design some criminal prohibitions to place bounds on the kinds of governmental conduct that can be authorized by the Executive. Or the legislature may enact a criminal prohibition in order to limit the scope of the conduct that the legislature has otherwise authorized the Executive to undertake pursuant to another statute. See, e.g., Nardone v. United States, 302 U.S. 379, 384 (1937) (federal statute proscribed government wiretapping). But the generally recognized public authority justification reflects that it would not make sense to attribute to Congress the intent to criminalize all covered activities undertaken by public officials in the legitimate exercise of their otherwise lawful authorities, even if Congress clearly intends to make those same actions a crime when committed by persons not acting pursuant to public authority. In some instances, therefore, the best interpretation of a criminal prohibition is that Congress intended to distinguish persons who are acting pursuant to public authority from those who are not, even if the statute does not make that distinction express. Cf. id. at 384 (federal criminal statutes should be construed to exclude authorized conduct of public officers where such a reading "would work obvious absurdity as, for example, the application of a speed law to a policeman pursuing a criminal or the driver of a fire engine responding to an alarm"). [6]

The touchstone for the analysis whether section 1119 incorporates not only justifications generally, but also the public authority justification in particular, is the legislative intent underlying this statute. Here, the statute should be read to exclude from its prohibitory scope killings that are encompassed by traditional justification, which include the public authority justification. The statutory incorporation of two other criminal statutes expressly referencing "unlawful" killings is one indication. See supra at 10-11. Moreover, there are no indications that Congress had a contrary intention. Nothing in the text or legislative history of sections 1111-1113 of title 18 suggests that Congress intended to exclude the established public authority justification from those justifications that Congress otherwise must be understood to have imported through the use of the modifier "unlawful" in those statutes. Nor is there anything in the text or legislative history of section 1119 itself to suggest that Congress intended to abrogate or otherwise affect the availability of this traditional justification for killings. On the contrary, the relevant legislative materials indicate that, in enacting section 1119, Congress was merely closing a gap in a field dealing with entirely different kinds of conduct from that at issue here.[7]

The Department thus concludes that section 1119 incorporates the public authority justification.[8] This paper turns next to the question whether a lethal operation could be encompassed by that justification and, in particular, whether that justification would apply when the target is a U.S. citizen. The analysis here leads to the conclusion that it would.

A lethal operation against an enemy leader undertaken in national self-defense or during an armed conflict that is authorized by an informed, high-level official and carried out in a manner that accords with applicable law of war principles would fall within a well established variant of the public authority justification and therefore would not be murder. See, e.g., 2 Paul H. Robinson, Criminal Law Defenses S 148(a), at 208 (1984) (conduct that would violate a criminal statute is justified and thus not unlawful "[w]here the exercise of military authority relies upon the law governing the armed forces or upon the conduct of war"); 2 LaFave, Substantive Criminal Law S 10.2(c) at 136 ("another aspect of the public duty defense is where the conduct was required or authorized by 'the law governing the armed services or the lawful conduct of war); Perkins & Boyce, Criminal Law at 1093 (noting that a "typical instance[] in which even the extreme act of taking human life is done by public authority" involves "the killing of an enemy as an act of war and within the rules of war").[9]

The United States is currently in the midst of a congressionally authorized armed conflict with al-Qa'ida and associated forces, and may act in national self-defense to protect U.S. persons and interests who are under continual threat of violent attack by certain al-Q'aida operatives planning operations against them. The public authority justification would apply to a lethal operation of the kind discussed in this paper if it were conducted in accord with applicable law of war principles. As one legal commentator has explained, "if a soldier intentionally kills an enemy combatant in time of war and within the rules of warfare, he is not guilty of murder," whereas, for example, if that soldier intentionally kills a prisoner of war—a violation of the laws of war—"then he commits murder." 2 LaFave, Substantive Criminal Laws S 10.2(c), at 136; see also State v. Gut, 13 Minn. 341, 357 (1868) ("That it is legal to kill an alien enemy in the heat and exercise of war, is undeniable; but to kill such an enemy after he has laid down his arms, and especially when he is confined in prison, is murder."); Perkins & Boyce, Criminal Law at 1093 ("Even in time of War an alien enemy may not be killed needlessly after he has been disarmed and securely imprisoned."). Moreover, without invoking the public authority justification by its terms, this Department's OLC has relied on the same notion in an opinion addressing the intended scope of a federal criminal statute that concerned the use of potentially lethal force. See United States Assistance to Countries that Shoot Down Civil Aircraft Involved in Drug Trafficking, 18 Op. O.L.C. 148, 164 (1994) (concluding that the Aircraft Sabotage Act of 1984, 18 U.S.C. § 32(1))(2) (2006), which prohibits the willful destruction of a civil aircraft: and otherwise applies to U.S. government conduct, should not be construed to have "the surprising and almost certainly unintended effect of criminalizing actions by military personnel that are lawful under international law and the laws of almed conflict").

The fact that an operation may target a U.S. citizen does not alter this conclusion. As explained above, see supra at 3, the Supreme Court has held that the military may constitutionally use force against a U.S. citizen who is part of enemy forces. See Hamdi, 542 U.S. at 518 (plurality opinion); id. at 587, 597 (Thomas, J., dissenting); Ex parte Quirin, 317 U.S. at 37-38 ("Citizens who associate themselves with the military arm of the enemy government, and with its aid, guidance and direction enter [the United States] bent on hostile acts," may be treated as "enemy belligerents" under the law of war). Similarly, under the Constitution and the inherent right to national self-defense recognized in international law, the President may authorize the use of force against a U.S. citizen who is a member of al-Qa'ida or its associated forces and who poses an imminent threat of violent attack against the United States.

In light of these precedents, the Department believes that the use of lethal force addressed in this white paper would constitute a lawful killing under the public authority doctrine if conducted in a manner consistent with the fundamental law of war principles governing the use of force in a non-international armed conflict. Such an operation would not violate the assassination ban in Executive Order No. 12333. Section 2.11 of Executive Order No. 12333 provides that "[n]o person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassination." 46 Fed. Reg. 59,941, 59, 952 (Dec. 4, 1981). A lawful killing in self-defense is not an assassination. In the Department's view, a lethal operation conducted against a U.S. citizen whose conduct poses an imminent threat of violent attack against the United States would be a legitimate act of national self-defense that would not violate the assassination ban. Similarly, the use of lethal force, consistent with the laws of war, against an individual who is a legitimate military target would be lawful and would not violate the assassination ban.

We are grateful for any and all corrections to this transcription. Please email errors to cewilson@yahoo-inc.com with the approximate location of the fix.

Why the ‘threat’ on Bob Woodward matters

Is Obama going to bust the kneecaps of Bob Woodward???

To the world beyond the Beltway, it might not mean much that Bob Woodward of the famed Watergate duo went public with his recent White House run-in.

It also may not mean much that the White House press corps got teed off when they weren’t allowed access to President Obama as he played golf with Tiger Woods. This, too, would be an oversight.

Though not comparable — one appeared to be a veiled threat aimed at one of the nation’s most respected journalists and the other a minor blip in the scheme of things — both are part of a pattern of behavior by the Obama administration that suggests not just thin skin but a disregard for the role of the press and a gradual slide toward a state media.

Understandably, everyday Americans may find this discussion too inside baseball to pay much mind. Why can’t the president play a little golf without a press gaggle watching? As for Woodward, it’s not as though the White House was threatening to bust his kneecaps.

Add to these likely sentiments the fact that Americans increasingly dislike the so-called mainstream media, sometimes for good reason. Distrust of media, encouraged by alternative media seeking to enhance their own standing, has become a tool useful to the very powers the Fourth Estate was constitutionally endowed to monitor. When the president can bypass reporters to reach the public, it is not far-fetched to imagine a time — perhaps now? — when the state controls the message.

To recap: Woodward recently wrote a commentary for The Post that placed the sequester debacle on Obama’s desk and accused the president of “moving the goal posts” by asking for more tax increases.

Before his piece was published, Woodward called the White House to tell officials it was coming. A shouting match ensued between Woodward and Gene Sperling, Obama’s economic adviser, followed by an e-mail in which Sperling said that Woodward “will regret staking out that claim.”

Though the tone was conciliatory and Sperling apologized for raising his voice, the message nonetheless caused Woodward to bristle.

Again, Woodward’s kneecaps are probably safe, but the challenge to his facts, and therefore to his character, was unusual, given Woodward’s stature. And, how, by the way, might Woodward come to regret it? Sperling’s words, though measured, could be read as: “You’ll never set foot in this White House again.”

When reporters lose access to the White House, it isn’t about being invited to the annual holiday party. It’s about having access to the most powerful people on the planet as they execute the nation’s business.

Inarguably, Woodward has had greater access to the White House than any other journalist in town. Also inarguably, he would survive without it. He has filled a library shelf with books about the inner workings of this and other administrations, the fact of which makes current events so remarkable.

Woodward, almost 70, is Washington’s Reporter Emeritus. His facts stand up to scrutiny. His motivations withstand the test of objectivity. Sperling obviously assumed that Woodward wouldn’t take offense at the suggestion that he not only was wrong but was also endangering his valuable proximity to power.

He assumed, in other words, that Woodward would not do his job. This was an oversight.

This is no tempest in a teapot but rather the leak in the dike. Drip by drip, the Obama administration has demonstrated its intolerance for dissent and its contempt for any who stray from the White House script. Yes, all administrations are sensitive to criticism, and all push back when such criticism is deemed unfair or inaccurate. But no president since Richard Nixon has demonstrated such overt contempt for the messenger. And, thanks to technological advances in social media, Obama has been able to bypass traditional watchdogs as no other president has.

More to the point, the Obama White House is, to put it politely, fudging as it tries to place the onus of the sequester on Congress. And, as has become customary, officials are using the Woodward spat to distract attention. As Woodward put it: “This is the old trick . . . of making the press . . . the issue, rather than what the White House has done here.”

Killing the messenger is a time-honored method of controlling the message, but we have already spilled that blood. And the First Amendment’s protection of a free press, the purpose of which is to check power and constrain government’s ability to dictate the lives of private citizens, was no accident.

Read more from Kathleen Parker’s archive, follow her on Twitter or find her on Facebook.

Why Obama must make the sequestration sky fall

"Sequester" its just a dog and pony show Obama and Congress are putting on for us.

WASHINGTON -- "The worst-case scenario for us," a leading anti-budget-cuts lobbyist told The Washington Post, "is the sequester hits and nothing bad really happens."

Think about that. Worst case? That a government drowning in debt should cut back by 2.2 percent -- and the country survives. That a government now borrowing 35 cents of every dollar it spends reduces that borrowing by two cents "and nothing bad really happens." Oh, the humanity!

A normal citizen might think this a good thing. For reactionary liberalism, however, whatever sum our ever-inflating government happens to spend today (now double what Bill Clinton spent in his last year) is the Platonic ideal -- the reduction of which, however minuscule, is a national calamity.

Or damn well should be. Otherwise, people might get the idea that we can shrink government, and live on.

Hence the president's message. If the "sequestration" -- automatic spending cuts -- goes into effect, the skies will fall. Plane travel jeopardized, carrier groups beached, teachers furloughed.

The administration has every incentive to make the sky fall, lest we suffer that terrible calamity -- cuts the nation survives. Are they threatening to pare back consultants, conferences, travel and other nonessential fluff? Hardly. It shall be air-traffic control. Meat inspection. Weather forecasting.

A 2011 GAO report gave a sampling of the vastness of what could be cut, consolidated and rationalized in Washington: 44 overlapping job training programs, 18 for nutrition assistance, 82 (!) on teacher quality, 56 dealing with financial literacy, more than 20 for homelessness, etc. Total annual cost: $100 billion-$200 billion, about two to five times the entire domestic sequester.

Are these on the chopping block? No sir. It's firemen first. That's the phrase coined in 1976 by legendary Washington Monthly editor Charlie Peters to describe the way government functionaries beat back budget cuts. Dare suggest a nick in the city budget and the mayor immediately shuts down the firehouse.

The DMV back office stacked with nepotistic incompetents remains intact. Shrink it and no one would notice. Sell the firetruck -- the people scream and the city council falls silent about any future cuts.

After all, the sequester is just one-half of 1 percent of GDP. It amounts to 1.4 cents on the dollar of nondefense spending, 2 cents overall.

Because of this year's payroll tax increase, millions of American workers have had to tighten their belts by precisely 2 percent. They found a way. Washington, spending $3.8 trillion, cannot? If so, we might as well declare bankruptcy now and save the attorneys' fees.

The problem with sequestration, of course, is that the cuts are across the board and do not allow money to move between accounts. It's dumb because it doesn't discriminate.

Fine. Then change the law. That's why we have a Congress. Discriminate. Prioritize. That's why we have budgets. Except that the Democratic Senate hasn't passed one in four years. And the White House, which proposed the sequester in the first place, had 18 months to establish rational priorities among accounts -- and did nothing.

When the GOP House passed an alternative that cut where the real money is -- entitlement spending -- President Obama threatened a veto. Meaning, he would have insisted that the sequester go into effect -- the very same sequester he now tells us will bring on Armageddon.

Good grief. The entire sequester would have reduced last year's deficit from $1.33 trillion to $1.24 trillion. A fraction of a fraction. Nonetheless, insists Obama, such a cut is intolerable. It has to be "balanced" -- i.e., largely replaced -- by yet more taxes.

Which demonstrates that, for Obama, this is not about deficit reduction, which interests him not at all. The purpose is purely political: to complete his Election Day victory by breaking the Republican opposition.

At the fiscal cliff, Obama broke -- and split -- the Republicans on taxes. With the sequester, he intends to break them on spending. Make the cuts as painful as possible, and watch the Republicans come crawling for a "balanced" (i.e., tax hiking) deal.

In the past two years, House Republicans stopped cold Obama's left-liberal agenda. Break them now and the road is open to resume enactment of the expansive, entitlement-state liberalism that Obama proclaimed in his second inaugural address.

But he cannot win if "nothing bad really happens." Indeed, he'd look both foolish and cynical for having cried wolf. His incentive to deliberately make the most painful and socially disruptive cuts possible (say, oh, releasing illegal immigrants from detention) is enormous. And alarming.

Congress gave the President the power to murder anybody he wants???

A new generation of al-Qaeda offshoots is forcing the Obama administration to examine whether the legal basis for its targeted killing program can be extended to militant groups with little or no connection to the organization responsible for the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, U.S. officials said.

The Authorization for Use of Military Force, a joint resolution passed by Congress three days after the strikes on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, has served as the legal foundation for U.S. counterterrorism operations against al-Qaeda over the past decade, including ongoing drone campaigns in Pakistan and Yemen that have killed thousands of people.

Optimism gives way to realism as diplomats ponder long odds of reaching agreement with country.

But U.S. officials said administration lawyers are increasingly concerned that the law is being stretched to its legal breaking point, just as new threats are emerging in countries including Syria, Libya and Mali.

“The farther we get away from 9/11 and what this legislation was initially focused upon,” a senior Obama administration official said, “we can see from both a theoretical but also a practical standpoint that groups that have arisen or morphed become more difficult to fit in.”

The waning relevance of the 2001 law, the official said, is “requiring a whole policy and legal look.” The official, like most others interviewed for this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal administration deliberations.

The authorization law has already been expanded by federal courts beyond its original scope to apply to “associated forces” of al-Qaeda. But officials said legal advisers at the White House, the State Department, the Pentagon and intelligence agencies are now weighing whether the law can be stretched to cover what one former official called “associates of associates.”

The debate has been driven by the emergence of groups in North Africa and the Middle East that may embrace aspects of al-Qaeda’s agenda but have no meaningful ties to its crumbling leadership base in Pakistan. Among them are the al-Nusra Front in Syria and Ansar al-Sharia, which was linked to the September attack on a U.S. diplomatic post in Benghazi, Libya. They could be exposed to drone strikes and kill-or-capture missions involving U.S. troops.

Officials said they have not ruled out seeking an updated authorization from Congress or relying on the president’s constitutional powers to protect the country. But they said those are unappealing alternatives.

The debate comes as the administration seeks to turn counterterrorism policies adopted as emergency measures after the 2001 attacks into more permanent procedures that can sustain the campaign against al-Qaeda and its affiliates, as well as other current and future threats.

The AUMF, as the 2001 measure is known, has been so central to U.S. efforts that counterterrorism officials said deliberations over whom to put on the list for drone strikes routinely start with the question of whether a proposed target is “AUMF-able.”

The outcome of the debate could determine when and how the war on terrorism — at least as defined by Congress after the Sept. 11 attacks — comes to a close.

“You can’t end the war if you keep adding people to the enemy who are not actually part of the original enemy,” said a person who participated in the administration’s deliberations on the issue.

Administration officials acknowledged that they could be forced to seek new legal cover if the president decides that strikes are necessary against nascent groups that don’t have direct al-Qaeda links. Some outside legal experts said that step is all but inevitable because the authorization has already been stretched to the limit of its intended scope.

Optimism gives way to realism as diplomats ponder long odds of reaching agreement with country.

“The AUMF is becoming increasingly obsolete because the groups that are threatening us are harder and harder to tie to the original A.Q. organization,” said Jack Goldsmith, an expert on national security law at Harvard University and a former senior Justice Department official.

He said extending the AUMF to groups more loosely tied to al-Qaeda would be “a major interpretive leap” that could eliminate the need for a link between the targeted organization and core al-Qaeda.

The United States has not launched strikes against any of the new groups, and U.S. officials have not indicated that there is any immediate plan to do so. In Libya, for example, the United States has sought to work with the new government to apprehend suspects in the Benghazi attack.

Still, the administration has taken recent steps — including building a drone base in the African country of Niger — that have moved the United States closer to being able to launch lethal strikes if regional allies are unable to contain emerging threats.

The administration official cited Ansar al-Sharia as an example of the “conundrum” that counterterrorism officials face.

The group has little if any established connection to al-Qaeda’s leadership core in Pakistan. But intercepted communications during and after the attack in Benghazi indicated that some members have ties to al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, the terrorist network’s main associate in North Africa.

“Certainly there are individuals who have an affiliation from a policy, if not legal, perspective,” the official said. “But does that mean the whole group?”

Other groups of concern include the al-Nusra Front, which is backed by al-Qaeda in Iraq and has used suicide bombings to emerge as a potent force in the Syrian civil war, and a splinter group in North Africa that carried out a deadly assault in January on a natural-gas complex in Algeria.

The debate centers on a piece of legislation that spans a single page and was drafted in a few days to give President George W. Bush authority to “use all necessary and appropriate force” against al-Qaeda.

The law placed no geographic limits on that power but did not envision a drawn-out conflict that would eventually encompass groups with no ties to the Sept. 11 strikes. Instead, it authorized the president to take action “against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks.”

The authorization makes no mention of “associated forces,” a term that emerged only in subsequent interpretations of the text. But even that elastic phrase has become increasingly difficult to employ.

In a speech last year at Yale University, Jeh Johnson, who served as general counsel at the Defense Department during Obama’s first term, outlined the limits of the AUMF.

“An ‘associated force’ is not any terrorist group in the world that merely embraces the al-Qaeda ideology,” Johnson said. Instead, it has to be both “an organized, armed group that has entered the fight alongside al-Qaeda” and a “co-belligerent with al-Qaeda in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners.”

Optimism gives way to realism as diplomats ponder long odds of reaching agreement with country.

U.S. officials said evaluating whether a proposed target is eligible under the AUMF is only one step. Names aren’t added to kill or capture lists, officials said, unless they also meet more elaborate policy criteria set by Obama.

If a proposed a target doesn’t clear the legal hurdle, the senior administration official said, one option is to collect additional intelligence to try to meet the threshhold.

Officials stressed that the stakes of the debate go beyond the drone program. The same authorities are required for capture operations, which have been far less frequent. The AUMF is also the legal basis for the CIA’s drone campaign in Pakistan, although the agency compiles its own kill list in that operation with little involvement from other agencies.

The uncertainty surrounding the AUMF has already shaped the U.S. response to problems in North Africa and the Middle East. Counterterrorism officials concluded last year that Mokhtar Belmokhtar, a militant leader in Algeria and Mali, could not be targeted under the AUMF, in part because he had had a falling out with al-Qaeda’s leadership and was no longer regarded as part of an associated group.

Belmokhtar was later identified as the orchestrator of the gas-plant attack in Algeria in which dozens of workers, including three Americans, were killed.

Obama’s decision to provide limited assistance to French air attacks against Islamist militants in Mali this year was delayed for weeks, officials said, amid questions over whether doing so would require compliance with the AUMF rules.

Some options beyond the 2001 authorization are problematic for Obama. For instance, he has been reluctant to rely on his constitutional authority to use military force to protect the country, which bypasses Congress and might expose him to criticism for abuse of executive power.

Working with Congress to update the AUMF is another option. The Senate Intelligence Committee has already begun considering ways to accomplish that. But Obama, who has claimed credit for winding down two wars, is seen as reluctant to have the legislative expansion of another be added to his legacy.

“This is an ongoing discussion, which we’ll probably continue to engage on the Hill,” the senior administration official said. “But I don’t know that there’s a giant desire to have ‘Son of AUMF’ now.”

Dope smugglers are targets on Obamas drone murder list???

THE Senate confirmed John O. Brennan as director of the Central Intelligence Agency on Thursday after a nearly 13-hour filibuster by the libertarian senator Rand Paul, who before the vote received a somewhat odd letter from the attorney general.

“It has come to my attention that you have now asked an additional question: ‘Does the President have the authority to use a weaponized drone to kill an American not engaged in combat on American soil?’ ” the attorney general, Eric H. Holder Jr., wrote to Mr. Paul. “The answer to that question is no.”

The senator, whose filibuster had become a social-media sensation, elating Tea Party members, human-rights groups and pacifists alike, said he was “quite happy with the answer.” But Mr. Holder’s letter raises more questions than it answers — and, indeed, more important and more serious questions than the senator posed.

What, exactly, does the Obama administration mean by “engaged in combat”? The extraordinary secrecy of this White House makes the answer difficult to know. We have some clues, and they are troubling.

If you put together the pieces of publicly available information, it seems that the Obama administration, like the Bush administration before it, has acted with an overly broad definition of what it means to be engaged in combat. Back in 2004, the Pentagon released a list of the types of people it was holding at Guantánamo Bay as “enemy combatants” — a list that included people who were “involved in terrorist financing.”

One could argue that that definition applied solely to prolonged detention, not to targeting for a drone strike. But who’s to say if the administration believes in such a distinction?

American generals in Afghanistan said the laws of war “have been interpreted to allow” American forces to include “drug traffickers with proven links to the insurgency on a kill list,” according to a report released in 2009 by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, then led by John Kerry, now the secretary of state.

The report went on to say that there were about 50 major traffickers “who contribute funds to the insurgency on the target list.” The Pentagon later said that it was “important to clarify that we are targeting terrorists with links to the drug trade, rather than targeting drug traffickers with links to terrorism.”

That statement, however, was not very clarifying, and did not seem to appease NATO allies who raised serious legal concerns about the American targeting program. The explanation soon gave way to more clues, and this time it was not simply a question of who had been placed on a list.

In a 2010 Fox News interview, under pressure to explain whether the Obama administration was any closer to capturing or killing Osama bin Laden, Mr. Kerry’s predecessor, Hillary Rodham Clinton, said that “we have gotten closer because we have been able to kill a number of their trainers, their operational people, their financiers.” That revelation — killing financiers — appears not to have been noticed very widely.

As I have written, sweeping financiers into the group of people who can be killed in armed conflict stretches the laws of war beyond recognition. But this is not the only stretch the Obama administration seems to have made. The administration still hasn’t disavowed its stance, disclosed last May in a New York Times article, that military-age males killed in a strike zone are counted as combatants absent explicit posthumous evidence proving otherwise.

Mr. Holder’s one-word answer — “no” — is not a step toward the greater transparency that President Obama pledged when he came into office, but has not delivered, in the realm of national security.

By declining to specify what it means to be “engaged in combat,” the letter does not foreclose the possible scenario — however hypothetical — of a military drone strike, against a United States citizen, on American soil. It also raises anew questions about the standards the administration has used in deciding to use drone strikes to kill Americans suspected of terrorist involvement overseas — notably Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born cleric who was killed in a drone strike in Yemen in 2011.

Is there any reason to believe that military drones will soon be hovering over Manhattan, aiming to kill Americans believed to be involved in terrorist financing? No.

But is it well past time for the United States government to specify, precisely, its views on whom it thinks it can kill in the struggle against Al Qaeda and other terrorist forces? The answer is yes.

The Obama administration’s continued refusal to do so should alarm any American concerned about the constitutional right of our citizens — no matter what evil they may or may not be engaged in — to due process under the law. For those Americans, Mr. Holder’s seemingly simple but maddeningly vague letter offers no reassurance.

Ryan Goodman is a professor of law and co-chairman of the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at New York University.

Richard Nixon wished for total handgun ban

Of course the reason the Founders created the Second Amendment was to protect us from tyrants like Nixon, Bush and Obama.

WASHINGTON — Few presidents in modern times have been as interested in gun control as Richard Nixon, of all people. He proposed ridding the market of Saturday night specials, contemplated banning handguns altogether and refused to pander to gun owners by feigning interest in their weapons.

Several previously unreported Oval Office recordings and White House memos from the Nixon years show a conservative president who at times appeared willing to take on the National Rifle Association, a powerful gun lobby then as now, even as his aides worried about the political ramifications.

“I don’t know why any individual should have a right to have a revolver in his house,” Nixon said in a taped conversation with aides. “The kids usually kill themselves with it and so forth.” He asked why “can’t we go after handguns, period?”

Nixon went on: “I know the rifle association will be against it, the gun makers will be against it.” But “people should not have handguns.” He laced his comments with obscenities, as was typical.

Nixon made his remarks in the Oval Office on May 16, 1972, the day after a would-be assassin shot and paralyzed segregationist presidential candidate George Wallace. As president, Nixon never publicly called for a ban on all handguns. Instead, he urged Congress to pass more modest legislation banning Saturday night specials, which were cheaply made, easily concealed and often used by criminals.

Not all of the president’s men appeared to share his passion on the issue. The recordings and memos show that Nixon administration officials saw gun control as a political loser.

Nixon, a Republican, did say publicly that if Congress passed a ban on Saturday night specials, he would sign it. But in a sign of how potent the NRA was even 40 years ago, this narrow piece of legislation never made it to his desk, and there is no sign that he ever sent a draft bill to Capitol Hill.

Today, President Barack Obama faces similar hurdles in trying to ban assault weapons and large-capacity ammunition magazines. Gun control advocates say no one needs such powerful weapons to kill an intruder or take down an animal. In Nixon’s time, the argument of such advocates was that Saturday night specials were too poorly made to be relied on for self-defense or hunting.

“Let me ask you,” Nixon said to Attorney General John Mitchell in June 1971, “there is only one thing you are checking on, that’s the manufacture of those $20 guns? We should probably stop that.” Saturday night specials sold for $10 to $30 at the time. Mitchell responded that banning those guns would be “pretty difficult, actually,” because of the gun lobby.

“No, but the gun lobby’s against any incursion into the elimination of firearms,” said Mitchell.

The term Saturday night special originated in Detroit, where police observed the frequency with which the guns were used to commit weekend mayhem. Lynyrd Skynyrd memorialized the weapon in its 1975 song, “Saturday Night Special,” in which the Southern rock band sang: “Ain’t good for nothin’/But put a man six feet in a hole.”

Nixon’s private comments were not always supportive of gun control, particularly measures that would go beyond handguns. For example, in a taped conversation just a few days after saying that people shouldn’t have handguns, the president asked rhetorically, “What do they want to do, just disarm the populace? Disarm the good folks and leave the arms in the hands of criminals?”

But most of his comments on the tapes, available at the websites of the National Archives and of the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, were in favor of stronger gun control.

At a June 29, 1972, news conference, about six weeks after Wallace’s shooting, Nixon said he’d sign legislation banning Saturday night specials. Later that year, the Senate did pass such a bill, but the House never acted on the legislation.

The bill’s sponsor, Indiana Democrat Birch Bayh, said in a recent interview that the NRA helped prevent his bill from getting through Congress. The Nixon administration supported an unsuccessful Republican alternative Senate bill on Saturday night specials that had a definition the NRA preferred.

The shooting of another politician put gun control back on the radar the following year. On Jan. 30, 1973, two robbers shot Sen. John Stennis, D-Miss., and surgeons initially thought he would die. Stennis survived and lived until 1995.

The day of the shooting, Nixon told White House special counsel Charles Colson, “At least I hope that Saturday night special legislation, at least we’re supporting that, you know. We’re not for gun control generally, but we are for that. God damn it that ought to be passed. Or was it passed?”

When Colson told him it hadn’t, Nixon instructed his counsel, “We better damn well be for it now, huh?”

At a news conference the next day, the president repeated his call to ban Saturday night specials. He also volunteered a comment that few national politicians would make today: “Let me say, personally, I have never hunted in my life. I have no interest in guns and so forth.”

By March 1973, aide John Ehrlichman was telling Nixon that gun control was a “loser issue for us.”

“You’ve got a highly mobilized lobby,” he told the president. “I think what we have to do is carve out a little piece of it, and Saturday night specials, of course, has been our tactic.”

Other White House officials also argued against doing much, including Tom C. Korologos, a White House deputy assistant for legislative affairs who later was an outside lobbyist for the NRA and ambassador to Belgium under President George W. Bush.

“The thing that worries me is that the president’s hard-core support comes from the gun-folk and obviously we need support these days,” Korologos wrote in an Aug. 31, 1973 memo, referring to the Watergate scandal that would undo Nixon’s presidency.

“Lurking in the background is the president’s personal statement: ‘I’m a liberal on gun control,’” Korologos said. Nixon might have made this statement privately; there is no record of him saying it publicly.

Korologos’ conclusion: “I vote for a ‘talk’ meeting and then ‘tough it out’ by doing nothing and hope nobody gets shot in the next three years.”

The effort to ban Saturday night specials receded in recent decades as the focus of gun control advocates shifted to rein in more powerful weapons.

In June 1972, a little over a month after his chat about banning handguns, Nixon had a recorded conversation that showed him trying to get the FBI to stop investigating the break-in at Democratic offices at the Watergate office building by burglars tied to his re-election committee.

Few remember the tapes about handguns. History forever remembers the tape that gave Nixon’s Watergate pursuers their “smoking gun.”

Google says the FBI is spying on some of you

For millions of Americans, Google is the fabric that weaves the various threads of our digital lives together: Gmail, Gchat, Google Voice, search queries, YouTube, Maps, Chrome — you name it. So it shouldn't really come as a surprise that the Federal Bureau of Investigation has repeatedly tapped the tech company for otherwise-private information concerning a small percentage of Google's users.

In a new Transparency Report announced in an official blog post, Google has released previously unseen information about the number of National Security Letters (NSLs) it has received from the FBI in the past couple of years. According to Wired, these letters "allow the government to get detailed information on Americans' finances and communications without oversight from a judge." Needless to say, the FBI sends NSLs out all the time — hundreds of thousands of them, in fact — to internet service providers, banks, credit companies, and other businesses. Unsurprisingly, organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union have accused the FBI of abusing the letters' power post-9/11.

Until recently, it's been unlawful for a company to disclose when it has received an NSL. Now, thanks to a new deal with the Obama administration, Google is able to publish a broad range of instances in which it has received such FBI requests.

The table below provides a range of how many National Security Letters (NSLs) we've received and a range of how many of the uers/accounts were specified each year since 2009. For more information about NSLs, please refer to our FAQ. These ranges are not included in the total sum of user data requests that we report biannually

As you can see, Google says it receives between 0 and 999 NSLs from the government each year. In 2009, those letters contained requests asking for information concerning between 1,000 and 1,999 users/accounts. In 2010, the FBI was slightly busier — 2,000 to 2,999 different users/accounts were requested. Then in 2011 and 2012, that range dipped back down.

The search giant doesn't comply with every NSL it receives, and claims to carefully vet each request. "We review it carefully and only provide information within the scope and authority of the request," writes Google. "We may refuse to produce information or try to narrow the request in some cases." Google also says that the standard practice is to notify users when an NSL has been received concerning them, although the FBI has the power to nullify the disclosure if it may result in "a danger to the national security of the United States, interference with a criminal, counterterrorism, or counterintelligence investigation, interference with diplomatic relations, or danger to the life or physical safety of any person."

And it's worth remembering: The FBI and other government agencies can still access your email without a warrant as long as the information been stored on a third-party server for 180 days or more (per a convoluted and terribly antiquated 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act). A new email and phone tracking bill introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives yesterday seeks to make it harder for authorities to snoop around without a judge's order.

AG Holder - Obama OK to murder Americans with drones!!!!!

WASHINGTON — Can the president legally order a drone strike to kill an American on U.S. soil?

Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. wrote this week in a letter to Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) that he could envision "an extraordinary circumstance in which it would be necessary and appropriate" to use such lethal force.

Those words touched off a heated debate Wednesday in the Senate over when and where the president can order the killing of U.S. citizens designated as "enemy combatants."

President Obama and his aides have said that targeted killings of Americans must be governed by some due process. But they have resisted public disclosure of their rules. Until this week, the administration had refused to allow even members of the Senate Intelligence Committee to read most of the legal opinions that justified the one known drone killing of an American, the attack on Anwar Awlaki in 2011 in Yemen.

The debate burst into public view on Capitol Hill. On the Senate floor, Paul filibustered the nomination of John Brennan to be the new director of the CIA, imploring colleagues to join him in criticizing Obama for refusing to rule out the use of lethal force against terrorism suspects in this country. Brennan has been a chief architect and defender of the administration's drone program.

"Are we so complacent with our rights that we would allow a president to say he might kill Americans?" Paul asked. "No one person, no one politician should be allowed … to judge the guilt of an individual and to execute an individual. It goes against everything we fundamentally believe in our country."

Paul showed no sign of giving up, holding the floor for more than eight hours and continuing to talk into the night. He demanded a public promise from the White House to never target drones against Americans in the United States. Paul said that he was not objecting to the use of lethal force to repel an attack, but that the administration was claiming a far broader power.

"Do we want martial law in this country?" Paul asked, mocking the claim that the entire world could be considered a battlefield in the war against Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups. "The hell this is a battlefield! This is our country."

"If there was an ounce of courage in this body, I would be joined by others in telling the president that no president has the authority to kill Americans without trial," Paul declared to a near-empty chamber. As the afternoon wore on, his words appeared to have had an effect, as several Republican colleagues and Democrat Ron Wyden of Oregon joined the filibuster, delaying a final vote on Brennan's nomination at least until Thursday.

Simultaneously, Holder was testifying to the Senate Judiciary Committee, where senators tried to pin him down about the limits of the power the government was claiming.

In his letter, Holder had said he hoped "no president will ever have to confront" the need to order the killing of an American on U.S. soil.

But, he added, "it is possible, I suppose, to imagine an extraordinary circumstance in which it would be necessary and appropriate under the Constitution and applicable laws for the president to authorize the military to use lethal force within the territory of the United States." He mentioned the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001, as a possible example.

That explanation did not satisfy several members of the committee. The letter "raises many questions for citizens on when the government can kill them," said Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa). Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) demanded to know what in the Constitution gives the president or anyone else the power to kill an American terrorist suspect "sitting quietly in a cafe in the U.S." who at that time is not posing an immediate threat.

After initially saying only that killing a suspect in that sort of circumstance would not be "appropriate," Holder eventually told Cruz that such an attack would not be constitutional. He also said that he expected Obama to speak more publicly about the issue soon. "I think there is a greater need for transparency —a greater need for appropriately sharing information — and we are struggling with how to do that, but it is something that the president feels strongly about," he said.

Although Republicans asked most of the questions, the issue did not break down cleanly on partisan lines.

Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) applauded the administration's drones policy. "In every war we've had, unfortunately, American citizens have sided with the enemy. They've been few in number, but that does happen," he said.

A battery of Patriot missiles now guards the U.S. Capitol against attack, he noted. "Let's go back in time," he said. "What would we all give to have those Patriot missile batteries available" on Sept. 11?

Using them to blow up one of the airliners aimed at the World Trade Center or the Pentagon "would have meant that we would have lost a planeload of American citizens, but we'd save thousands more. That's the world in which we live in," Graham said.

"I want to stand by you and the president to make sure that we don't criminalize the war and that the commander in chief continues to have the authority to protect us all," he told Holder. "And I've got a lot of my colleagues who are well-meaning, but there is only one commander in chief in our Constitution."

Holder, appearing uncomfortable before the committee, repeatedly told its members that his letter merely dealt with the unlikely possibility of an extreme event. He emphasized that there was no plan to broaden the administration's drone program to aim at targets inside the U.S.

Finding and isolating terrorists abroad is much harder than in the U.S., often making capturing a suspect impractical, he said. In the U.S. many law enforcement tools exist that allow officials to capture suspects without killing them.

"Thus the use of drones is entirely, entirely hypothetical" for this country, he said.

Holder added, "The government has no intention to carry out any drone strikes in the United States."

US citing security to censor more public records

The U.S. government, led by the Pentagon and CIA, censored in the name of national security files that the public requested last year under the Freedom of Information Act more often than at any time since President Barack Obama took office, according to a new analysis by The Associated Press.

Overall, the Obama administration last year answered its highest number of requests so far for copies of government documents, emails, photographs and more, and it slightly reduced its backlog of requests from previous years. But it more often cited legal provisions allowing the government to keep records or parts of its records secret, especially a rule intended to protect national security.

The AP's analysis showed the government released all or portions of the information that citizens, journalists, businesses and others sought at about the same rate as the previous three years. It turned over all or parts of the records in about 65 percent of requests. It fully rejected more than one-third of requests, a slight increase over 2011, including cases when it couldn't find records, a person refused to pay for copies or the request was determined to be improper.

The government's responsiveness under the FOIA is widely viewed as a barometer of the federal offices' transparency. Under the law, citizens and foreigners can compel the government to turn over copies of federal records for zero or little cost. Anyone who seeks information through the law is generally supposed to get it unless disclosure would hurt national security, violate personal privacy or expose business secrets or confidential decision-making in certain areas.

The AP's review comes at the start of the second term for Obama, who promised during his first week in office that the nation's signature open-records law would be "administered with a clear presumption: In the face of doubt, openness prevails." The review examined figures from the largest federal departments and agencies. Sunday was the start of Sunshine Week, when news organizations promote open government and freedom of information.

White House spokesman Eric Schultz said in a statement that during the past year, the government "processed more requests, decreased the backlog, improved average processing times and disclosed more information pro-actively." Schultz said the improvements "represent the efforts of agencies across the government to meet the president's commitment to openness. While there is more work to be done, this past year demonstrates that agencies are responding to the president's call for greater transparency."

In a year of intense public interest over deadly U.S. drones, the raid that killed Usama bin Laden, terror threats and more, the government cited national security to withhold information at least 5,223 times — a jump over 4,243 such cases in 2011 and 3,805 cases in Obama's first year in office. The secretive CIA last year became even more secretive: Nearly 60 percent of 3,586 requests for files were withheld or censored for that reason last year, compared with 49 percent a year earlier.

Other federal agencies that invoked the national security exception included the Pentagon, Director of National Intelligence, NASA, Office of Management and Budget, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, Federal Communications Commission and the departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Energy, Homeland Security, Justice, State, Transportation, Treasury and Veterans Affairs.

U.S. courts are loath to overrule the administration whenever it cites national security. A federal judge, Colleen McMahon of New York, in January ruled against The New York Times and the American Civil Liberties Union to see records about the government's legal justification for drone attacks and other methods it has used to kill terrorism suspects overseas, including American citizens. She cited an "Alice in Wonderland" predicament in which she was expected to determine what information should be revealed but unable to challenge the government's secrecy claim. Part of her ruling was sealed and made available only to the government's lawyers.

"I find myself stuck in a paradoxical situation in which I cannot solve a problem because of contradictory constraints and rules — a veritable Catch-22," the judge wrote. "I can find no way around the thicket of laws and precedents that effectively allow the executive branch of our government to proclaim as perfectly lawful certain actions that seem on their face incompatible with our Constitution and laws, while keeping the reasons for their conclusion a secret."

The AP could not determine whether the administration was abusing the national security exemption or whether the public was asking for more documents about sensitive subjects. Nearly half the Pentagon's 2,390 denials last year under that clause came from the National Security Agency, which monitors Internet traffic and phone calls worldwide.

"FOIA is an imperfect law, and I don't think that's changed over the last four years since Obama took office," said Alexander Abdo, an ACLU staff attorney for its national security project. "We've seen a meteoric rise in the number of claims to protect secret law, the government's interpretations of laws or its understanding of its own authority. In some ways, the Obama administration is actually even more aggressive on secrecy than the Bush administration."

The Obama administration also more frequently invoked the law's "deliberative process" exception to withhold records describing decision-making behind the scenes. Obama had directed agencies to use it less often, but the number of such cases had surged after his first year in office to more than 71,000. After back-to-back years when figures steadily declined, the government cited that reason 66,353 times last year to keep records or parts of records secret.

Even as the Obama administration continued increasing its efforts answering FOIA requests, people submitted more than 590,000 requests for information in fiscal 2012 — an increase of less than 1 percent over the previous year. Including leftover requests from previous years, the government responded to more requests than ever in 2012 — more than 603,000 — a 5 percent increase for the second consecutive year.

The Homeland Security Department, which includes offices that deal with immigration files, received more than twice as many requests for records — 190,589 new requests last year — as any other agency, and it answered significantly more requests than it did in 2011. Other agencies, including the State Department, National Transportation Safety Board and Nuclear Regulatory Commission performed worse last year. The State Department, for example, answered only 57 percent of its requests, down from 75 percent a year earlier.

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services drove a dramatic increase in the number of times DHS censored immigration records under exceptions to police files containing personal information and law enforcement techniques. The agency invoked those exemptions more than 136,000 times in 2012, compared with more than 75,000 a year earlier. Even though USCIS is not a law-enforcement agency, officials used the exceptions specifically reserved for law enforcement.

The AP's analysis also found that the government generally took longer to answer requests. Some agencies, such as the Health and Human Services Department, took less time than the previous year to turn over files. But at the State Department, for example, even urgent requests submitted under a fast-track system covering breaking news or events when a person's life was at stake took an average two years to wait for files.

Journalists and others who need information quickly to report breaking news, for example, fared worse last year. The rate at which the government granted so-called expedited processing, which moves an urgent request to the front of the line for a speedy answer, fell from 24 percent in 2011 to 17 percent last year. The CIA denied every such request last year.

Under increased budget pressure across the government, agencies more often insisted that people pay search and copying fees. It waived costs in 59 percent of requests, generally when the amount was negligible or the release of the information is in the public interest, a decline from 64 percent of cases a year earlier. At the Treasury Department, which faced questions about its role in auto bailouts and stimulus programs during Obama's first term, only one in five requests were processed at no charge. A year earlier, it granted more than 75 percent of fee waivers. The CIA denied every request last year to waive fees.

The 33 agencies that AP examined were: Agency for International Development, CIA, Agriculture Department, Commerce Department, Consumer Product Safety Commission, Defense Department, Education Department, Energy Department, Department of Health and Human Services, Department of Homeland Security, Department of Housing and Urban Development, Interior Department, Justice Department, Labor Department, State Department, Transportation Department, Treasury Department, Department of Veterans Affairs, Environmental Protection Agency, Federal Communications Commission, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, Federal Election Commission, Federal Trade Commission, NASA, National Science Foundation, National Transportation Safety Board, Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Office of Management and Budget, Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Securities and Exchange Commission, Small Business Administration, the Social Security Administration and the U.S. Postal Service.

Four agencies that were included in AP's previous analysis of FOIA performance did not publicly release their 2012 reports. They included the Office of National Drug Control Policy, the Office of Science and Technology Policy, the Council on Environmental Quality and the Office of Personnel Management.

White House censors more public records, citing security concerns

The Obama administration is citing security concerns more often as a reason to keep the public in the dark, according to a new analysis by The Associated Press, Federal News Radio reports.

The Pentagon, intelligence community, NASA, Office of Management and Budget and several other agencies invoked the national security exemption last year in rejecting Freedom of Information Act requests.

The government is answering more open-records requests overall, having released two-thirds of the documents requested by the public last year. The other third included cases where agencies couldn't find records, a person refused to pay for copies or the request was improper.

Media blackout: Obama censors more documents, citing national security

Amid intense public interest over drones, the Osama bin Laden raid and other terrorism-related news, the U.S. government cited national security as its reason for refusing to release documents requested by the public last year more often than in any year since President Obama took office, according to a study released Monday.

The Associated Press reviewed and analyzed the Obama administration’s level of responsiveness to Freedom of Information Act requests, giving the administration credit for answering its highest number of requests for copies of government files and slightly reducing the backlog of requests from previous years.

But the survey also faulted government agencies, led by the Pentagon and the CIA, for increasing the number of times they invoked legal reasons to keep records secret or redact them.

According to the AP analysis, the U.S. government last year turned over all or parts of the records requested in roughly 65 percent of requests, while rejecting more than one-third of requests, a slight increase over 2011. Over the last fiscal year, the government cited national security to withhold information at least 5,223 times — an increase over 4,243 such cases in 2011 and 3,805 cases in 2010.

Not surprisingly, the CIA was the most secretive agency. It denied 60 percent of 3,586 requests for information, compared to 49 percent a year earlier.

The stepped-up secrecy flies in the face of Mr. Obama’s pledge during his first week in office to run the “most transparent government in history.” He promised at the time that the nation’s open-records law would be “administered with a clear presumption — in the face of doubt, openness prevails.”

Watchdogs organizations and others who regularly make FOIA requests offered some praise for the Obama administration’s progress on open-government issues, but they say government agencies still have an abysmal record when it comes to responding to public requests for information.

Tom Blanton of the National Security Archive at George Washington University said Mr. Obama has declassified such items as the national intelligence budget, the so-called “torture memos” and information about the Justice Department’s warrantless wiretapping program. But the openness on big issues has not filtered down to the agencies dealing with FOIA requests.

“We have just not seen the agencies respond to the Obama and [Attorney General] Eric Holder presumption of disclosure. … You see a real hangover of regular bureaucratic behavior,” he said.

Others point to a growing trend among government agencies to refuse to waive the costs of responding to request, even for those applicants whose eligibility for a public-interest fee waiver seems clear.

The Obama administration “has been responsible for a growing trend in which agencies issue baseless denials of public-interest fee waiver requests,” said Julie Murray, an attorney at the watchdog group Public Citizen.

Melanie Ann Pustay, who heads the Justice Department’s Office of Information Policy, on Monday defended the administration’s record on transparency.

Even though agencies received more requests than in previous years, Ms. Pustay said, government officials “rose to the challenge” and processed more requests than ever before. The government as a whole processed more than 665,000 request in fiscal year 2012, which is 34,000 more than they processed in fiscal year 2011 and 65,000 more than they processed two years ago.

As a result, the government reduced its backlog of pending requests by 14 percent over the last fiscal year and 45 percent since Mr. Obama took office, she said.

The military's Chicken Littles want you to think the sky is falling

Of course instead of being a jobs program for generals the "War on Drugs" is a jobs program for cops, prosecutors, defense attorneys, probation officers and prison guards.

In addition to be a government welfare program for the same companies in the military industrial complex, the "War on Drugs" is also a government welfare program for the corporations that build prisons and for drug testing companies.

The military's Chicken Littles want you to think the sky is falling. Don't believe them: America has never been safer.

Just the opposite. The Pentagon, as former U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates derisively pointed out, has a bad case of "next-war-itis." With Iraq now ancient history and Afghanistan winding down, all four of the major U.S. military services today prefer to imagine distant, future, high-tech shoot-'em-ups against China (er, well-equipped adversaries) over dealing with the world as we find it, which is still full of those nasty little wars. As Marine Corps general and outgoing Central Command boss James Mattis once told me, "I find it intellectually embarrassing that people want to hug the Chinese [and exclaim], 'Oh, thank God we have another peer competitor at last! Now we can go back to building the weapons that we always wanted to build.'"

Some of these efforts can verge on the ridiculous. I recently sat through an Air Force briefing during which super-empowered individuals were portrayed as thiiiiiis close to being able to wipe out humanity with a genetic weapon or to kill off -- get this -- more than half the U.S. population through electromagnetic-pulse attacks that send us collectively back to subsistence farming (think of the TV drama Revolution). Another scenario posited a "one-machine" future when, naturally, the "beast" starts thinking for itself and can turn on humanity (here, take your pick of Terminator's Skynet or the Matrix trilogy). That's the beautiful thing about Armageddon-like future wars: They could happen tomorrow, or they could never happen. The only thing we know for sure is that we're totally unprepared!

If you thought all these plotlines portray a Pentagon in search of the right justifying villain, then you'd be right. But remember, amid all this institutional angst, what's really being fought over are slices of a $530 billion budgetary pie that many experts think should be shrunk by one-fifth over the rest of this decade.

The first services to be infected were "Big War Blue" -- the Navy and Air Force -- as both felt slighted in the post-9/11 long war against radical terrorist networks, seeing in its unfolding an existential threat: a long-term emphasis on "Small Wars Green" involving mainly the Army, the Marine Corps, and special operators like SEAL Team 6. Now, however, even the Army and the Marine Corps are beginning to catch the fever. So while the Navy and Air Force have been fighting harder for longer because they've gotten the short end of the stick for the last decade, the Army and Marine Corps are now running hard from the long war too, looking to make sure they don't get discarded like Iraq and Afghanistan.

After years of acting like it was on top of everything, the U.S. military is back in Chicken Little mode and, man, is that sky ever fallin'. According to Andrew Krepinevich, a longtime advisor to the Pentagon, America either stands up militarily to the Chinese now or risks a "latter-day Chinese Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere of Influence." How does the Pentagon find those dollars? Krepinevich is blunt: "The big bill payer here is the ground forces."

All those gripes aside, next-war-itis is a good thing. After all, no American interests are served by having the U.S. military be the last to wake up to a genuine national security threat. And because these crystal-ball exercises are far more art than science, a certain number of bad bets will be placed. But those cost a great deal less than wars the military is ill-prepared to fight -- which is why the Pentagon is always fighting the wars yet to come, and the wars that will never be.

Not anymore. Or at least not for the foreseeable future. The two-wars concept, on some level, echoes World War II's European and Pacific theaters. During the Cold War, it became a matter of keeping the Soviets boxed in on both ends, lest the dominoes fall (as the United States feared in Southeast Asia). When the Reds went away, the Pentagon started calling them "major regional contingencies," but everyone soon realized that was just a bureaucratic euphemism for North Korea and Iraq (then later Iran) -- not exactly your daddy's world war.

So why has this Cold War artifact lasted so long inside the Pentagon? It created a force-sizing principle -- America needs X many troops/ships/aircraft/etc. -- that could be presented to Congress to justify a defense budget "floor" once the all-mighty Soviets were no more. Until the 9/11 attacks, it was just a theory. Now, after the United States just spent the better part of a decade waging two modest-sized wars and saw how they burned out the force, neither Congress nor the American people is in the mood to entertain the fantasy of simultaneously toppling Iran's mullahs in the Persian Gulf and duking it out with the Chinese in East Asia. So consider this one dead and buried until the United States reaches some semblance of fiscal order.

America's "pivot" from Southwest Asia (so long, Iraq and Afghanistan!) to East Asia (hello, China!) represents more than just Barack Obama's strategic rationale for tying off his predecessor's military adventures. In concluding two land wars that enlarged his two armies -- the Army and the Marine Corps -- the president can reduce their superexpensive manpower (keeping just one soldier in Afghanistan costs roughly $1 million a year) even as he shifts U.S. military and diplomatic efforts toward the Pacific.

All that "supplemental" spending on the Army and the far smaller Marine Corps to fund Iraq and Afghanistan depressed the Navy and Air Force shares of the procurement budget throughout the 2000s. For example, the Air Force's share of the defense budget across the 1990s averaged 31 to 32 percent. Now it stands just above 27 percent. Meanwhile, the Army picked up almost 2 percentage points that it's now sure to lose. For the services, the "pivot" has a wholly different meaning.

Plus, slotting in still-reddish Beijing for the old Red Menace is a stone that kills two birds: A Democratic administration avoids the "weak-on-defense" charge (see, we're standing up to those dastardly Chinese!) while sidestepping any serious military responsibility for what remains of, or is still to come from, the so-called Arab Spring (Syria, anyone?).

Obama's new secretaries of state and defense -- both Vietnam War veterans turned anti-war senators -- could not send a clearer signal in this regard: America doesn't do land wars (read: quagmires) anymore. Instead, the country returns to what scholars call "offshore balancing" and occasionally striking from a safe distance. "And how many troops/ships/aircraft/etc. does that take?" asks Congress. "Ah," says the Pentagon, "have we briefed you recently on Chinese military developments?"

Of course, the Pentagon will never admit exactly what is going on. No, that would be perceived as giving a green light to Antagonist B if America ever tussled with Antagonist A. Check out the recent tap dance by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin Dempsey, over the White House's 2013 budget submission:

There's been much made -- and I'm sure will be made -- about whether this strategy moves away from a force structure explicitly designed to fight and win two wars simultaneously. Fundamentally, our strategy has always been about our ability to respond to global contingencies wherever and whenever they occur. This won't change.… We can and will always be able to do more than one thing at a time. More importantly, wherever we are confronted and in whatever sequence, we will win.

Not necessarily. Yes, the U.S. Navy has dwindled greatly from the Reagan-era dream of a "600-ship navy," but its slow slide to today's approximately 290 "battle-force ships" is no cause for alarm -- even with all that talk about the future of American power being in the South China Sea. To paraphrase Obama's election-debate comeback, "This ain't your grandfather's 1917 navy." The combined agility, firepower, and operational reach of today's seaborne force dwarf anything America enjoyed in the last century. Military expert John Pike notes that current U.S. aircraft carriers are 10 times more powerful than they were just two decades ago, thanks to precision munitions.

So, yeah, when you can deliver that much force that accurately -- and from such incredible distances -- the notion of steaming into some rogue regime's inner harbor to teach it some manners is excruciatingly quaint. And if Beijing wants to stockpile budget-draining capital ships -- even aircraft carriers -- then Mao bless 'em, because the U.S. Navy is already evolving past last century's paradigm toward this century's version of the many, the cheap(er), and the unmanned.

The Navy's latest vision of war, concocted with the help of D.C. think tanks and the Air Force, is the Air-Sea Battle concept. It says, in so many words, that the Navy won't let China's military prevent it from accessing some future East Asian crisis or war. So when China starts fielding its first aircraft carrier (a Soviet retread built in the 1980s) and its superscary carrier-killing missiles, the U.S. Navy starts testing its first carrier-capable unmanned combat aircraft (what else to call it when it sports an F-16's engine?). And if China forces the Navy into a standoff posture, then guess what? America comes up with a technological breakthrough that turns every carrier-launched strike force into another Doolittle raid -- as in, No pilots? No return? No problem. We'll become the kamikazes, only there won't be any "we" inside our "suicide" drones.

As for the Navy's pitch in recent years about needing to police the "global commons," let's be honest and say that bad-actor behavior on the high seas doesn't amount to much. Heck, put two former special-ops snipers fore and aft of a cargo ship, and that's all the security you need to handle your average Somali pirate crew -- as in, bang, bang, you're dead.

I didn't say that. Yes, deep inside the Pentagon, some 50-pound brains are dreaming up the Terminator-style wars of tomorrowland (typically waged against the Chinese hoards … of robots and unmanned vehicles). And yes, drones increasingly rule the skies. But seriously, think about that for a minute. What exactly do such forces fight over -- decisively -- in this rock 'em, sock 'em manner? Other than just blowing up each other's high-tech toys? If, at the end of the day, there's something truly valuable to contest, a country's manned forces still need to occupy and control it; otherwise, nothing is achieved. Wake me up when drones can set up local government elections in Afghanistan or reconfigure Mali's judicial system.

So, yes, drones are spectacular for finding and targeting bad actors (and other drones, eventually), but if your robot war requires a no man's land to unfold (say, the tribal regions of Pakistan), then all you can "control" in this manner are no man's lands -- or patches of ocean. If you really want to get your hands on what lies below (hydrocarbons, minerals, arable land), you still have to send in some bodies -- eventually. That's why they call it blood and treasure.

That's not to say all these new aerial drones don't strike fear into the hearts of America's enemies, not to mention the U.S. Air Force. I mean, you couldn't even squeeze a pilot in many of the newest drones, some of which are so slight they can be launched with a flick of the wrist. And with the Army now proposing a 5-pound bullet of a drone (the Lethal Miniature Aerial Munition System) to shoot individual enemy soldiers from half a dozen miles away, the youngest of the four services correctly spots an existential threat amid all those toggling joysticks. Indeed, four years ago, the Air Force published a report that suggested the service could eventually get rid of two-thirds (or more) of its 13,250 pilots. No wonder the Air Force is talking so much about its indispensable role combating the hazards of space and cyberwar these days.

Hold on there, soldier! The Marines go into survival mode just about every other decade, all the way back to when they lost their jobs as snipers lodged in the masts of ships after the Civil War. Troop numbers were decimated after World War I, and the Marine Corps was almost swallowed whole by the Army after World War II. Then came the post-Vietnam funk and the relegation to a mere amphibious feint in the Army's lightning-fast liberation of Kuwait in 1991's Operation Desert Storm. So no, the Marines' latest bout of angst is nothing new. Sure, there wasn't really any difference between how the United States deployed Marine Corps and Army units in Iraq and Afghanistan, the clearest evidence being their frequent relief of one another. And with the special-ops community stealing a good chunk of the Marines' thunder recently, it's only natural to wonder whether America's most iconic service has reached its own Zero Dark Something.

First of all, no other service can match the Marine Corps' outsized reputation (hell, mystique) or its connections on Capitol Hill. Americans simply expect that there will always be a Marine Corps. Logic doesn't enter into it.

Plus, an essential division of labor has settled in since 9/11: While the special operators handle the low end of the spectrum (killing bad guys discretely) and the Army stands ready for the Big One, the Marine Corps, which alone among the services is back up to its Cold War fighting strength (of 200,000), exists to respond to everything in between -- at the drop of a helmet. That's why it was the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit that swooped into Japan after the big 2011 earthquake and tsunami, not the 1st Armored Division. So, no, forget about furloughing America's global emergency-response force, because -- unlike in Armageddon -- bad things happen to good people(s) all the time.

If the Marine Corps is reaching for a new combat image, it's best captured in the emerging Navy concept of the Single Naval Battle -- a ship or two, a few good men, and something to fight over on the water, like an oil rig. Yes, that sounds like it's ripped from today's headlines (e.g., China and Japan's ongoing tussle over islets in the East China Sea), but toss in a future ice-free Arctic Ocean, where one-fifth of the world's known hydrocarbon reserves lie largely unexploited, and who knows? A British firm just announced that it's launching Britain's first private navy in two centuries to fight those nasty Somali pirates, so maybe the Marines' new survival strategy makes sense, even if -- again -- the overall market likely remains small.

Bingo. Today's Army declares that it exists to win land wars in a decisive fashion. The key word is "decisive": While Army generals don't advertise it anymore, that means occupying the defeated power and overseeing its stabilization and reconstruction for a significant period of time. But let's get real: Does anyone really think the American people will tolerate another Iraq or Afghanistan?

Compared with the past, today's wars are waged decidedly faster and thus are dramatically shorter. (Yes, by that I mean America should stop calling its subsequent military occupations and counterinsurgency campaigns "wars.") They're also far less lethal thanks to smarter bombs and better emergency care. Point being: America doesn't need today's Army if the next Iraq war is a Vietnam syndrome away from happening. The U.S. government is simply too broke.

At roughly 560,000 men and women, the Army is bigger than it has been since 1994, when it was still crashing from its Reagan-era Cold War heights of 780,000. Later in the 1990s, the Army bottomed out at 480,000, and there's no reason it can't go back to that level, given that none of the fabulously high-tech wars being dreamed up by Pentagon planners calls for multiyear occupations of distant California-size countries.

The Army's just-issued "Capstone Concept" -- its vision of how it sees the wars of the future and the Army's role in them -- tried its best to be coy on this subject. But come on: When the first serious scenario mentioned is the "implosion" of the North Korean regime, then, buddy, that is one bare cupboard. After the steep cuts of the 1970s and 1990s (and before that the demobilizations following World War I and World War II), the Army should be used to this budgetary sine wave by now. The republic will survive.

You bet. That is, at least as far as D.C.'s Beltway bandits are concerned. There is only one great growth area in the U.S. defense budget today -- besides health care, which now eats up roughly 10 percent of the Pentagon's spending each year. Spending on cyberweapons and network defense has been skyrocketing for years. Over the next five years, the Pentagon alone is set to spend $18 billion on cyber (it requested $3.4 billion for fiscal year 2013), and the Obama administration's 2009 decision to set up U.S. Cyber Command sanctified that emerging "war-fighting domain" and its budgetary standing. Washington's small army of IT contractors couldn't be happier.

But is this a good use of taxpayer money? There's no question that the U.S. government and national security establishment in general are pretty bad at network security, and by that I mean both fall far below the standards of the world's best corporations and banks. Most Silicon Valley experts will tell you that, but you'll never hear it from D.C.'s many contractors or the national security cyber offices they serve in parasitic symbiosis. As far as they are concerned, it's the private sector that's light-years behind.

As for cyber serving as a stand-alone war-fighting domain, there you'll find the debates no less theological in their intensity. After serving as senior managing director for half a dozen years at a software firm that specializes in securing supply chains, I'm deeply skeptical. Given the uncontrollable nature of cyberweapons (see: Stuxnet's many permutations), I view them as the 21st century's version of chemical weapons -- nice to have, but hard to use. Another way to look at it is to simply call a spade a spade: Cyberwarfare is nothing more than espionage and sabotage updated for the digital era. Whatever cyberwar turns out to be in the national security realm, it will always be dwarfed by the industrial variants -- think cyberthieves, not cyberwarriors. But you wouldn't know it from the panicky warnings from former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and the generals about the imminent threat of a "cyber Pearl Harbor."

Please remember amid all this frenetic scaremongering that the Pentagon is never more frightened about our collective future than when it's desperately uncertain about its own. Given the rising health-care costs associated with America's aging population and the never-ending dysfunction in Washington, we should expect to be bombarded with frightening scenarios of planetary doom for the next decade or two. None of this bureaucratic chattering will bear any resemblance to global trends, which demonstrate that wars have grown increasingly infrequent, shorter in duration, and diminished in lethality. But you won't hear that from the next-warriors on the Potomac.

N. Korea ready to nuke the United States????

WASHINGTON — The Pentagon announced Friday it will spend $1 billion to add 14 interceptors to a West Coast-based missile defense system, responding to what it called faster-than-anticipated North Korean progress on nuclear weapons and missiles.

In announcing the decision, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said he is determined to ensure protection of the U.S. homeland and stay ahead of the North Korean missile threat. He acknowledged that the interceptors already in place to defend against potential North Korean missile launches have had poor test performances.

“We will strengthen our homeland defense, maintain our commitment to our allies and partners, and make clear to the world that the United States stands firm against aggression,” Hagel told a Pentagon news conference.

The Pentagon intends to add the 14 interceptors to 26 already in place at Fort Greely, Alaska. That will expand the system’s ability to shoot down long-range missiles in flight before they could reach U.S. territory. In addition to those at Greely, the U.S. also has four missile interceptors at Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif.

Hagel said the 14 extras should be in place by September 2017 but will not be deployed until they have been adequately tested.

James Miller, the undersecretary of defense for policy, said the project would cost about $1 billion.

Miller and Hagel said the U.S. will conduct environmental studies on three additional potential locations for interceptors in the United States, including on the East Coast, as required by Congress. Hagel said no decision on a particular site has been made, but the studies would shorten the timeline should a decision be made.

Miller said that would provide options for building an interceptor base on the East Coast or adding more interceptors in Alaska, should either approach become necessary due to further future increases in the threat from Iran and North Korea.

The threat of a missile strike from North Korea was the rationale for building the missile defense sites in Alaska and California during the administration of President George W. Bush. Technical difficulties with the interceptors slowed the pace at which they were installed at Greely and Vandenberg.

“Our policy is to stay ahead of the threat — and to continue to ensure that we are ahead of any potential future Iranian or North Korean ICBM (intercontinental ballistic missile) capability,” Miller said in a speech Tuesday at the Atlantic Council.

Miller noted that last December, North Korea launched a satellite into space, demonstrating its mastery of some of the same technologies required for development of an intercontinental ballistic missile.

“Our concern about Pyongyang’s potential ICBM capability is compounded by the regime’s focus on developing nuclear weapons,” he said. “North Korea’s third nuclear test last month is obviously a serious concern for all nations.”

North Korea recently threatened to reduce Seoul to a “sea of fire” and stage pre-emptive nuclear attacks on Washington.

“North Korea’s shrill public pronouncements underscore the need for the U.S. to continue to take prudent steps to defeat any future North Korean ICBM,” Miller said in his speech Tuesday.

A facade shields Obama

During my working career, I sometimes conferred with consultants in an effort to solve building-construction problems. On occasion, I interviewed people who pronounced that they could solve all the problems that I faced.

These consultants could talk very well, but in reality, they provided very few good solutions.

The one constant that some of these consultants had was a way with words, a golden tongue, so to speak. I am constantly reminded of this type of person whenever I hear President Barack Obama speak. He talks a good game but doesn’t produce anything worthwhile.

His everyday solution to our country’s problems is to spend more money. Hell, anybody can do that. That’s a crutch, not a solution.

President Obama has a facade. He speaks extremely well, but his intelligence leaves a lot to be desired.

Unfortunately, he has pulled the wool over many Americans’ eyes much as many consultants have attempted to do to me in my business career.

Was the war worth it?

I thought the Iraq war ended on May 1, 2003 when George W. Bush landed a fighter plane on the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln and declared the end of major combat operations in Iraq.

Should it be? Shouldn’t there at least be a discussion, an argument, something that answers the question: Was it worth it?

There are no official commemorations planned in Washington, D.C. None in Baghdad, either. On Tuesday, President Barack Obama issued a two-paragraph press release on the 10th anniversary of the start of the U.S. war in Iraq.

“As we mark the 10th anniversary of the beginning of the Iraq war, Michelle and I join our fellow Americans in paying tribute to all who served and sacrificed in one of our nation’s longest wars. We salute the courage and resolve of more than 1.5 million service members and civilians who during multiple tours wrote one of the most extraordinary chapters in military service. We honor the memory of the nearly 4,500 Americans who made the ultimate sacrifice to give the Iraqi people an opportunity to forge their own future after many years of hardship. And we express our gratitude to our extraordinary military families who sacrificed on the home front, especially our Gold Star families who remain in our prayers.

“The last of our troops left Iraq with their heads held high in 2011, and the United States continues to work with our Iraqi partners to advance our shared interest in security and peace. Here at home, our obligations to those who served endure. We must ensure that the more than 30,000 Americans wounded in Iraq receive the care and benefits they deserve and that we continue to improve treatment for traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder. With a strong Post 9/11 GI Bill, we must help our newest veterans pursue their education and find jobs worthy of their incredible talents. And all Americans can continue to support and honor our military families who are pillars of so many of our communities. On this solemn anniversary, we draw strength and inspiration from these American patriots who exemplify the values of courage, selflessness and teamwork that define our Armed Forces and keep our nation great.”

It’s good to honor the dead and to take care of the wounded. It’s important to acknowledge the sacrifice of those who risked so much, lost so much.

News reports said that bombings on Tuesday’s anniversary killed nearly 60 people in Baghdad and injured 221 others.

Which leaves us with a question we don’t really seem willing, or able, to answer.

In Sunday’s New York Times former Times reporter Abdulrazzaq Al-Saiedi, an Iraqi, wrote in part, “We thought the trauma of war would be over when Hussein was deposed in 2003, but it extends past the execution of a thug. Ten years ago, I called the Iraq war the right war, but now, I cannot say that such a thing exists.”

Following World War II the great journalist and author John Hersey wrote a New Yorker magazine article that became a book called “Hiroshima.” It describes what happened to six people who were in the Japanese city when the atomic bomb was dropped.

At the end of Hersey’s book, one of the survivors, a German priest named Wilhelm Kleinsorge says, “The crux of the matter is whether total war in its present form is justifiable, even when it serves a just purpose. Does it not have material and spiritual evil as its consequences which far exceed whatever good might result? When will our moralists give us a clear answer to this question?”

the America Emperor

the President of the United States of America

Four more years of Emperor Obama

4 more years of Emperor Obama

Dow loses 313 in post-election sell-off

Stocks turn lower on Wall Street

Using statistics to win elections??

Obama campaign's investment in data crunching paid off

Mitt Romney was using the same math & statistics - but it didn't work as well

Obama signs secret directive to help thwart cyberattacks

Romney: Obama won election because of 'gifts'

More on using math and statistics to win elections

Election Spurred a Move to Codify U.S. Drone Policy

Obama likes his government supersized!!!

Obama's DEA thugs seem to want to keep marijuana illegal???

Spending $2.38 billion for a job that pays a lousy $400,000!!!

Obama: I’ve got ‘bigger fish to fry’ than pot smokers

Obama: Feds shouldn't target recreational pot users in Colorado, Washington

Obama won’t go after marijuana use in 2 states

Pot proponents hopeful, wary after Obama comments

More confusion on Obama's pot policy

Obama gets another gun control opportunity!!!

20 children among 27 dead in Connecticut school shooting

Obama to use Connecticut murders to push gun control????

More Obama gun controls????

Emperor Obama goes into gun grabbing mode!!!!

Obama wants to take your guns!!!!!

Obama sold out the Mexican and Latino community

You didn't really think they would fix government did you???

Obama seeks scaled-down ‘fiscal cliff’ agreement

Obamas arrive in Hawaii for Christmas

Obama: Gun control ‘not something I will be putting off’

Renditions continue under Obama, despite due-process concerns

Obama wants to take our guns

Court weighs warrantless blood tests in DUI cases

Obama hasn't reined in Big Money

American Presidents - Life Time Emperors???

In California, It’s U.S. vs. State Over Marijuana

Obama lied about having "bigger fish to fry" than recreational marijuana users.

Obama negotiated $41 in tax increases for every dollar of spending cuts

Congress is addicted to spending other people money???

Obama administration gets America involved in Mali war!!!

Obama to announce expansive gun-control agenda

Gun grabbing Obama unveils $500 million gun violence package

New NRA ad denounces Obama as a hypocrite

President Obama’s 23 gun grabbing policy

Obama takes on gun extremists

They always claim to have good intentions when they take your guns!!!!

Who Says You Can Kill Americans, Mr. President?

Gun control won't stop Obama from committing more drone murders!!!!

Gun-friendly Arizona may feel bigger impact than other states

If Obama really wants to make America safer he should ban cars, not guns

Phoenix Mayor Greg Stanton and Mesa Mayor Scott Smith are a gun grabbers???

Senator Dennis DeConcini is a gun grabber???

Obama's gun grabbing won't prevent crime???

Australia's gun control: Success or failure?

Court rules Obama's appointments unconstitutional

Obama appoints war monger Chuck Hagel for Secretary of Defense

Obama loves HIS guns????

Justice Dept justifies killing Americans if they pose ‘imminent threat

U.S. counterterrorism efforts in Africa defined by a decade of missteps

Secret drone strikes simplify Obama Doctrine

U.S. drone use could set dangerous example for rogue powers

Obama doesn't get that First Amendment thing???

Obama and the death of federalism

Drones Kill

Liberal in domestic issues, Obama hawk on terror

Barack Obama has become the killer drone president

Lawmakers test legal waters for regulating drones

President Obama, did or did you not kill Anwar al-Awlaki?

Debating a Court to Vet Drone Strikes

Drones Kill

President Obama lies in his State of Union speech

Brennan defends drone strikes, even on Americans

The full text of the white paper on the killing of U.S. citizens abroad

The full text of the white paper on the killing of U.S. citizens abroad

DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE WHITE PAPER

Why the ‘threat’ on Bob Woodward matters

Is Obama going to bust the kneecaps of Bob Woodward???

Why Obama must make the sequestration sky fall