That’s what Robert Gibbs suggested in his press conference today when asked about the House Armed Services Committee’s move to block the Defense Department from purchasing the Illinois prison, a necessary step in President Obama’s plan to close Guantanamo Bay.
I will say that we have always maintained that
The Obama administration’s longstanding pledge to close the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay just hit a major obstacle in the House, creating doubts over whether the detention facility can be closed this year — if at all.
Last night the House Armed Services Committee finished this year’s bill authorizing $567 More…
Title XIV of H.R. 5136, the House bill authorizing next year’s Defense Department money, doesn’t look like it carries a major legacy item for President Obama. It’s the banal-appearing 15-part section of the bill that authorizes “ADDITIONAL APPROPRIATIONS FOR OVERSEAS CONTINGENCY OPERATIONS FOR FISCAL YEAR 2011,” a bureaucratic euphemism More…
Below is the Pentagon’s presentation of the long-term budget picture. Why’s it going from Fiscal 2001 to Fiscal 2015? I don’t presume to know for sure. But the effect is clear: It’s immediately obvious that President Obama is proposing spending more, consistently, on defense — excluding the cost of the More…
So the budget is out. But where’s the roughly $150 million needed for the Obama administration to buy the Thomson Correction Center from Illinois? That’s the necessary step for closing Guantanamo Bay this year, as the administration desires: Without the money to buy Thomson, the government has nowhere to More…
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 More…
Defense Secretary Bob Gates and Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, are before the Senate Armed Services Committee to defend their defense budget in the face of GOP criticism over its program cuts. (Comptroller Robert Hale is in there too.) Their opening statements are careful More…
Congratulations to Michele Flournoy, whom the Senate just confirmed as the new undersecretary of defense for policy; Jeh Charles Johnson, whom the Senate just confirmed as Pentagon general counsel; and Robert Hale, whom the Senate just confirmed as Pentagon comptroller. All of these newly-minted senior Pentagon officials testified together in More…
A trusted defense source emails me a report from the subscription-only Inside The Pentagon newsletter that seems to herald the first defense-budget chicanery of the Obama administration. The piece, by Christopher J. Castelli, is about how the services are starting to think that the forthcoming Fiscal Year 2010 defense budget, More…
Kate’s last post about Eric Holder brings up something that struck me kind of funny, as Bruce Springsteen would say.
Notwithstanding Holder’s language about whether we’ve been at war since before 9/11, Kate tells me she hasn’t heard Holder use the phrase “war on terror” or “war on terrorism” in More…
rss