John Podesta Points Out Bush Admin Only Spent 1 Hour on Afghanistan Report Before Handing Off
Well, I guess when Dick Cheney referred to Obama "dithering", he actually meant spending any time thinking about the situation at all, given how little time they spent preparing a report for the incoming administration. CAP's John Podesta points out the problem on This Week:
(Former Bush officials and Republicans) have been citing an Afghanistan strategy report they handed off to the Obama administration that clearly laid out recommendations for moving forward (to criticize Obama's decision process). From Cheney’s recent remarks to the Center for Security Policy:
In the fall of 2008, fully aware of the need to meet new challenges being posed by the Taliban, we dug into every aspect of Afghanistan policy, assembling a team that repeatedly went into the country, reviewing options and recommendations, and briefing President-elect Obama’s team. They asked us not to announce our findings publicly, and we agreed, giving them the benefit of our work and the benefit of the doubt.
Today on ABC’s This Week, Center for American Progress President and CEO John Podesta revealed that the Bush administration spent just one hour on that report:
PODESTA: [T]hey did present him with a report at the very end of the Bush administration, but I have it from reliable sources that the principals in the Bush administration spent one hour on that report before they handed it off to Obama.
Oh...I see...we're operating on the "shoot first, ask questions later" methodology of foreign policy. Yeah, that's worked so well for us so far.
Recently, Sen. Ted Kaufman (D-DE) — a former top aide to Biden and co-chair of the Vice President’s transition team — said that the Bush administration basically just “threw” the report “to the transition team as they were going out the door”:
KAUFMAN: So for him [Cheney] to come in at the end and say, “Well, we did it wrong for eight years. But then, in the end, we gave them a plan which really is what they should have used.” Let me tell you something: This administration came in. Rahm Emanuel was there. I was on the transition team on this. They started from scratch on Afghanistan. They took a blank piece of paper out and said, “What are we going to do to get this thing done?” … It was absolutely the perfect time to take a hard look at what we’re doing.
If nothing else demonstrates why the world community was happy enough with the new direction in foreign policy brought by the Obama administration that they would award him the Nobel Peace Prize, this certainly does. Imagine--taking a measured, educated and thoughtful approach as to how to deal with the mess that is Afghanistan. What a radical notion after the last eight years.
Steve Hynd at Newshoggers has a piece up on Afghanistan that focuses on why the Bush's gut reaction, no brains technique in Afghanistan has made it impossible to ever "win":
Daniel "Pentagon Papers" Ellsberg talks to Real News Network about Afghanistan. He says that he wrote McChrystal's assessment thirty years ago, only with the names changed; that counter-insurgency cannot succeed for a foreign occupier and that there can be no success that will survive after U.S. troops leave Afghanistan.
Ellsberg should be followed by reading Paul McGeogh's blistering critique of McChrystal and Obama's Afghan plan, which I noted yesterday and Andrew Sullivan picked up on today.
"If nothing else demonstrates why the world community was happy enough with the new direction in foreign policy brought by the Obama administration that they would award him the Nobel Peace Prize, this certainly does."
As a member of said "world community" I agree wholeheartedly.
Although I have reservations about Obama's recent actions on the domestic front,this administrations 180 degree move away from Cowboy Diplomacy is truly inspiring.
Of course it is the President's popularity around the World,and his winning the Nobel Prize that has FOX and the GOP in such an uncompromising and spiteful froth.They really,really hate this guy and all he stands for.
"To me, truth is not some vague, foggy notion. Truth is real. And,
at the same time, unreal. Fiction and fact and everything in between,
plus some things I can't remember, all rolled into one big "thing."
This is truth, to me. "
-Jack Handy
Ends the wars, stop the war mongering, dismantle the corporate perpetual war machine.
Cut the Defense budget by 90%.
statusquObama, change you can only pretend in
..that assumes they didn't really know what they were doing. Didn't they? Colin Powell's admission from 2007 about the Terror-Industrial Complex, Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine, and more examples from the last eight years, and w and his band of criminals got exactly what they needed to get, richer! At what cost and to whom? I'm expecting much more from President Obama on this. I hope for all of our sakes, its soon.
Mickey: "It was an epiphany. Do you know what an epipany is?"
Keoni: "NOT NOW MICKEY!"
dick cheney just can't take his hands off the wheel. he may indeed believe he's correct in his assessment of obama regarding more troops in afghanistan but i also believe he enjoys the perpetual (r) politics. this is more righteous (r) cheerleading from cheney for those who will never/ ever admit being wrong in the iraq/aghanistan quagmire. personally, i'm sick of hearing his yapper.
to spend an hour slapping together a report before they escaped, with their plundered loot, in their getaway cars.
I wonder if they left a trail of blood in their wake.
...hmmm....an hour, eh? Sounds like a lot more time than what he spent checking out that August 6, 2001 PDB........
Most of the al-Qaeda "suspects" renditioned by the CIA were sent to Uzbekistan to be tortured.
The US and UK involvement in Uzbekistan has everything to do with Afghanistan.
Former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan Murray quit his post when he discovered what was happening.
Uzbek terror and the UK/USA
Democracy is too important to be entrusted to politicians.
Rise Up!
Protest!
I loved the very last minute of it.
What a great man!
how much of that hour was DUHbya coloring in the countries on the map attached to the report.
....that was just Georgie boy having one of his "gut feeling" minutes. Must have been the bad chile from the WH chef!!
If the Bushies were all simmering in prison, they would have time to reflect on what they have done. They wouldn't be so eager to blame somebody else.
"Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob"
-= Franklin Delano Roosevelt =-
them that for example, Al-Quaida was a made up name by western intel agencies. Because Osama and his band of merry muslin whackos were so ineffective and disorganized that they did not even have a name for themselves.
In fact, chances are that if left to their own devices, Osama's organization (of which he is just a figurehead because some of the other nut jobs told him he got to play big honcho as long as he kept paying for their toys) would have imploded and self destroyed, just like the nut jobs of the groups that developed from the Islamic Brotherhood did in Algeria et al.
In other words, there was never a real threat in Afghanistan. I find it interesting, how well the politics of fear from Bush et al worked, because nobody was asking how come we were having the luxury of dicking around completely ignoring the organization which just a couple of years earlier it was about to come over and take our precious white babies in our sleep.
Here's the deal:
They give us heroin, hash and pomegranates, we stop blowing up their weddings.
maybe a pipeline or two.
The Ellsberg interview linked from The Real News is interesting, too. He draws many parallels between Viet Nam and our intervention in Afghanistan - has a notion that one reason the military wants to stay is to prove they can do now, what they couldn't in Nam - beat back an insurgency.
He points out that the Taliban was hated by the Afghans and was mostly defeated/run out until we arrived. The Afghans hate and will fight against us - the foreign occupiers - even more so than the Taliban.
It might be a good idea for Barack to invite Daniel to Camp David for a weekend soon - maybe it would help him clarify his new strategy.... which should be ...get the hell out of there.
"Egotism is the anesthetic that dulls the pain of Stupidity" - Frank Leahy
We could reduce and eventually get rid of the heroin and hash. Converting their cash crop to Pomegranates would go a very very long way to solving a lot of their problems. I guess that's why we aren't pursuing that angle very strongly.Makes too much sense. And speaking of the time line on the report...I'm surprised. I would have thought they spent 15 minutes tops.
Even if I partially agree with any of these dimwits' points, I still hate them. They sit around discussing this stuff like it's a parlor game. As if lives aren't being destroyed and public money being looted to support all this.
Let's hear one of these pundit asshats bring up the idea of ending all of the wars immediately and completely.
Cheney, Will, Stephanopolous, Podesta - it doesn't matter what color jersey they're wearing. They're all part of the same cancer.
exactly. They add nothing to anything except noise.
And then it's the same noise over and over. Political noise.
FOX corp. should be required to follow the rules for political entities when it comes to their programming. There must be a fair way to save democracy from this 24/7/365 political advertisement that is FOX news.
does anyone know?
"Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob"
-= Franklin Delano Roosevelt =-
last week.
Repeated
if this is true about the report, Dick Cheney is one of the most traitorous, lowlife scumbags to ever hold that high of an office.
It's never been about his country, it's always been about Dick because he has "other priorities".
He is a two bit conman who made a big score.
Absolutely he seems like a two bit con. But, is is just me or does Dick Cheney seem desperate these days? He seems like a con man whose scheme is falling apart and he is scrambling to cover his a**.
Ever notice how irons have a setting for permanent press? I don't get it.
Steven Wright
Would that be the reason Bush is so quiet...I mean, obviously even he knows he can't keep a story straight without Dick holding his hand and filling in the 'blank' spots.......Too many people speaking out tends to mess up the story lines...
(aka: their... ahem... 'testimony' in front of - behind closed doors, not under oath - the 9/11 whitewash committee....)
flav1 is correct when he says
"Dick Cheney is one of the most traitorous, lowlife scumbags to ever hold that high of an office."
So why on earth won't Holder and Obama prosecute Cheney for the obvious crime of Conspiracy To Torture?
It is a Federal Capital Crime. Push them to do their job.
SIGN the PETITION
calling for Prosecution
http://ANGRYVOTERS.org
.
about afghanistan was to get into Iraq!
Everything else was just so much fart gas to them.
Now that it didn't go so well they start to look for ways to save their own necks!
Typical, republicanism/conservatism is a mental illness!
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