Libertarian Leanings

Petraeus to Testify

Fox News reports that Former CIA Director David Petraeus has agreed to testify before the House and Senate intelligence committees about the terror attack in Benghazi, Libya in which four Americans were murdered, including Ambassador Christopher Stevens.

While Petraeus prepares to give his side, lawmakers have begun to openly question when Petraeus first knew about the investigation that uncovered his affair -- and whether it impacted his statements to Congress on Sept. 14 about the Libya terror attack. 

Petraeus briefed lawmakers that day that the attack was akin to a flash mob, and some top lawmakers noted to Fox News he seemed "wedded" to the administration's narrative that it was a demonstration spun out of control. The briefing appeared to conflict with one from the FBI and National Counterterrorism Center a day earlier in which officials said the intelligence supported an Al Qaeda or Al Qaeda-affiliated attack. 

Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., told Fox News he now questions whether Petraeus' statements -- which were in conflict with both the FBI briefing and available raw intelligence -- were in any way impacted by the knowledge the FBI was investigating his affair with Broadwell. 

Charles Krauthammer, for one, thinks Petraeus's testimony was "impacted" and in a deliberate way.

KRAUTHAMMER: Of course it was being held over Petraeus’s head, and the sword was lowered on Election Day. You don’t have to be a cynic to see that as the ultimate in cynicism. As long as they needed him to give the administration line to quote Bill, everybody was silent. And as soon as the election’s over, as soon as he can be dispensed with, the sword drops and he’s destroyed. I mean, can you imagine what it’s like to be on that pressure and to think it didn’t distort or at least in some way unconsciously influence his testimony? That’s hard to believe.

So the White House "outed" Petraeus even though there was no crime.  The FBI had kept their investigation under wraps while it was going on, and presumably they could have continued to do so after it was over.

How does the White House avoid damage from this?  The story Petraeus gave congress back in September was not true.  What's the story now?  Does the White House have anything else to hold over Petraeus's head? 

The affair was over, and the investigation was over.  David Petraeus thought he was going to keep his job, his family, and his reputation.  The job is gone, his reputation has been badly damaged, and it remains to be seen if he can keep his family together.  I can see where payback might be an attractive option at this point.

Vive La France!

France has formally recognized Libya's rebel National Transitional Council.

France became the first country to formally recognize the rebels’ newly created Interim Governing Council, saying it planned to exchange ambassadors after President Nicolas Sarkozy met with two representatives of the group based in the eastern Libyan city of Benghazi.

Though nobody expected Barack Obama to lead the way on this, I wonder if he'll have sense enough to lend American support to the cause.

Update:  The Obama administration has mustered the courage to climb onto the Libyan freedom band wagon before it trundled out of town. 

France will send an ambassador to Benghazi, the Libyan coastal city where the council is based, and the council will appoint an ambassador to Paris, a spokesman for France's President Nicolas Sarkozy said.

The U.S., meanwhile, said it was suspending relations with the Libyan embassy in Washington. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told lawmakers on Thursday that she would meet with members of Libyan rebel groups next week as part of a Middle East visit that will also include visits to Egypt and Tunisia to express the Obama administration's support for the "transition to a genuine democracy" in those countries.

It looks to me as though Obama needed to be convinced of European approval before he established contact between his adminstration and the Libyan rebels.  France's recognition of the Libyan provisional government seems to have sealed it for him.  Now I think he'll delay U.S. recognition so he can spend time looking as if he's weighing some pros and cons.  Otherwise people might think he was just waiting for somebody else to go first.  Like I do.

Update:  Kenneth Anderson is even less optimistic about the prospect of Obama administration action.

I would guess that the view in France at this moment is that the Obama administration will “lead” through multilateral organizations until the possibility that the rebels might succeed in Libya is past, and then talk a lot about how hard it is to get anything done through the UN and congratulate itself for having made such a valiant effort.  It’s a win-win for the administration; it doesn’t have to actually intervene, and it can say to its liberal interationalist wing that it has engaged through multilateral institutions.  From Ben Rhodes’ standpoint, what’s not to like?

The irony, of course, is that our closest allies — France, Japan, or Britain particularly — find this alarming.  It would be good if the US would say all those soothing multilateral nostrums — but this administration actually appears to believe them.  Or rather, it does not believe them, but has found in them a formula for walking away from its historical role.

I have to agree with Mr Anderson's take on Obama.  He's not really interested in any kind of foreign policy that doesn't involve apologies to the world for America's "imperialist" past. 

So: We’ve got lots of problems in Wisconsin and Ohio and California and New Jersey and Indiana, and just so we’re clear, here’s the deal.  If we agree that the UN is the place to deal with all your funny and hard to figure out and frankly not very relevant or interesting foreigner stuff, will you all just sod off and let us get on with figuring out our new VAT tax and our grandchildren’s interest payment schedule to China?

Obama's focus is on transformation at the home front.  All this foreign stuff is a distraction.  He believes the world will be so much better off when America is unable, if not unwilling, to butt in where it pleases.

Obama Strong And True

Perhaps the silence of President Obama is its own statement of his devotion to ideology.  By speaking not a word, once again Obama aligns himself with the autocrat. 

During an appearance in Cleveland on Tuesday, Obama kept his comments focused on the economy and did not mention the events in North Africa, which appear to threaten the regime of Libyan dictator Muammar Gadhafi, who has ruled that country since 1969.

On Monday, Senators Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) and Mark Kirk (R-Ill.) released a joint statement calling on Obama to take a firmer public line.

"The United States should not remain silent in the face of Gadhafi's egregious violations of human rights," the Republican senators wrote. "We urge the President to speak out clearly in support of the Libyan people in their struggle against the Gadhafi dictatorship."

Obama has a penchant for sucking up to anti-American governments and their thuggish dictators.  Protesters shot down in the streets of Tehran and Tripoli get nothing from Obama when they should be getting material support.  Sacrifice and death might get them a UN resolution.

So what does the Obama Administration mean to do at this moment of crisis and decision? It's talking things over at the U.N. Security Council. Maybe Russia and China—whose authoritarian political systems have much in common with Gadhafi's—will agree to a resolution condemning the regime's use of force. But suspending Libya from its seat on the U.N.'s Human Rights Council is probably a bridge too far.

We suspect this isn't the kind of international assistance the Libyan people desperately want right now. Wounded civilians in the country's liberated cities need access to medical supplies only the West can provide. Opposition forces need to be able to communicate with each other and the outside world without having their signals jammed, and here too the U.S. can help. And while the U.S. and its allies may not be prepared to intervene militarily, merely the threat of destroying the Libyan air force if it continues to bombard civilians might persuade its airmen to defect to the opposition, thereby hastening the regime's demise and bringing the killing to a halt.

None of that will be accomplished through a feckless U.N. resolution. On the contrary, the Administration's resort to diplomacy only compounds the impression in Arab minds that President Obama refuses to take sides against a despot even as Libyans are dying for their freedom. This from the President whose stated aim for U.S. policy in the Middle East is to win over Arab hearts and minds.

Bill Kristol said it best:  Pathetic.

Advanced Warheads on the Black Market

A front page story in today's Washington Post says that A.Q. Khan's black market smuggling ring may have sold the blueprints for an advanced nuclear warhead.

An international smuggling ring that sold bomb-related parts to Libya, Iran and North Korea also managed to acquire blueprints for an advanced nuclear weapon, according to a draft report by a former top U.N. arms inspector that suggests the plans could have been shared secretly with any number of countries or rogue groups.

The drawings, discovered in 2006 on computers owned by Swiss businessmen, included essential details for building a compact nuclear device that could be fitted on a type of ballistic missile used by Iran and more than a dozen developing countries, the report states.

The computer contents -- among more than 1,000 gigabytes of data seized -- were recently destroyed by Swiss authorities under the supervision of the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency, which is investigating the now-defunct smuggling ring previously led by Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan.

But U.N. officials cannot rule out the possibility that the blueprints were shared with others before their discovery, said the report's author, David Albright, a prominent nuclear weapons expert who spent four years researching the smuggling network.

According to the Post, former CIA director George Tenet's 2007 memoir claimed that the agency had been extensively involved in tracking the Khan network for over a decade. That would mean that by 1997 the CIA was already aware of Khan's activities, but how much the agency knew is apparently open to question.

The extent of Khan's operation was not revealed until Libya decided to renounce its nuclear weapons program in December of 2003 and to invite U.N. inspectors in to oversee its decommissioning.  That let the cat out of the bag.  In January of 2004 A.Q. Khan was sacked from his position presidential adviser, and in February 2004 he made a televised confession to the Pakistani people about his nuclear black market dealings.

In light of these new revelations, I have to wonder at the continued insistence by Democrats that Saddam Hussein was not a threat that had to be addressed.  In many large projects a key decision is whether to build or to buy.  To insist that Saddam was not really a threat because the weapon stockpiles that we expected to find weren't there is to promote a false sense of security.  Saddam could very well have been planning to buy the technology once the U.N. sanctions were lifted.  It would have made more sense for him to do it that way.