Posts by Spencer Ackerman

Last week, Sarah Palin made a strange comment defending Israeli settlement construction by warning that “more and more Jewish people will be flocking to Israel in the days and weeks and months ahead.” Since worldwide Jewry is unaware of such an imminent threat that would prompt mass immigration to Israel — and certainly not immigration [...]

The Los Angeles Times earns your readership this morning by running a great piece digging into differing cost estimates between the White House and the Pentagon over how much a troop increase in Afghanistan will cost. The White House says it wants a thorough accounting; the Pentagon appears to be worried that such a thing [...]

Don’t miss this mammoth USA Today investigation into retired generals and admirals receiving heaps of Pentagon cash for occasional “mentoring” work to their previous service branches — usually while they’re receiving not only their duly-earned pensions, but also generous military contractor dollars. Tom Ricks, who thinks the piece ought to contend for a Pulitzer, puts [...]

Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) might have postponed this week’s planned Senate Armed Services Committee briefing on the Fort Hood shooting after President Obama asked Congress to await the results of ongoing Army and FBI inquiries. But today the committee will go forward with a closed-door briefing on Fort Hood, held at the Russell office building [...]

Despite Hasan’s reported contacts with an al-Qaeda-connected cleric in Yemen, the U.S. Army’s Criminal Investigation Division and FBI will handle the probe.

Because The New York Times is reporting that Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is now the Obama administration’s indispensable interlocutor with Afghan President Hamid Karzai. Lots of gauzy quotes:
“It is critical Obama develops a channel to Karzai where hard messages can go both ways,” said Bruce O. Riedel, who helped the administration formulate its [...]

On a blogger conference call this afternoon, Sen. Arlen Specter (D-Pa.) announced he can’t support a potential addition of U.S. troops in Afghanistan. “We ought not to add troops in Afghanistan,” Specter said, adding that he questioned “even staying” in Afghanistan unless the administration demonstrates that continuing the war is “indispensable to our fight against [...]

Sometimes I think President Obama is making policy just to be easy on national-security reporters. Josh Rogin reports:

The Obama administration won’t announce its new comprehensive strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan until after Thanksgiving, a White House official confirms to The Cable, and observers and experts close to the discussions see it as the White [...]

If there were a healthy or coherent relationship between civilian and military efforts in war zones or weak states or post-conflict environments, there wouldn’t be any need for, say, Stuart Bowen to propose a new U.S. Office of Contingency Operations. Instead there’s ad-hoc and personality-driven relationships and operational incoherence. This, for instance, is what Secretary [...]

That would be former Sen. Fred Thompson (R-Tenn.).
Via Ben Smith, Thompson says the problem with the Afghanistan war isn’t the seven years that the Bush administration presided over its deep and thorough decline, but the seven weeks that the Obama administration has taken to review how to reverse the Bush administration’s errors. It’s a mystery [...]