From The Daily Show Oct. 6, 2009. Jon Stewart whacks President Obama for saying he's got too much on his plate to revoke "don't ask, don't tell".

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On This Week with George Stephanopoulus:

The Obama Administration is trying to engineer a soft-landing for the President's promise to close Guantanamo by January 22, 2010.

Friday morning White House officials told me that some detainees would still be in Gitmo after the deadline after this story broke in the Washington Post. And in our 'This Week' interview, Defense Secretary Robert Gates confirmed that "it's going to take a little longer" than promised to close the prison.

Here’s our full exchange:

STEPHANOPOULOS: A major story in "The Washington Post" suggesting that the president's deadline of January 22nd for closing Guantanamo will not be met. And White House officials tell me that at least some prisoners will still be in Guantanamo on January 22nd and beyond. How big a setback is that and how long will it take to finally close Guantanamo?

GATES: When the president elect met with his new national security team in Chicago on December 7th...

STEPHANOPOULOS: 2009.

GATES: ...last year, this issue was discussed, about closing Guantanamo and executive orders to do that and so on. And the question was, should we set a deadline? Should we pin ourselves down? I actually was one of those who said we should because I know enough from being around this town that if you don't put a deadline on something, you'll never move the bureaucracy. But I also said and then if we find we can't get it done by that time but we have a good plan, then you're in a position to say it's going to take us a little longer but we are moving in the direction of implementing the policy that the president set. And I think that's the position that we're in.

STEPHANOPOULOS: That's where we are. So the deadline of January 22nd will not be met?

GATES: It's going to be tough.

STEPHANOPOULOS: And -- and how many prisoners will be there on January 22nd, do you know?

GATES: I don't know the answer to that.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Is it -- but, as you said, it's going to be tough and likely will not be met.

GATES: We'll see.

Defending Your Life (1991)

Good morning, my fellow Little Brains. I've spent a lot of time this week thinking about fear, because we seem to be surrounded by so much of it lately: fear of the Other, fear of change, fear of the "ism" of the week--socialism, communism, etc. There are way too many frightened people out there, fearful of some intangible bogeyman keeping them from what they feel is rightfully theirs. I quote Bob Diamond from the movie:

"Fear is like a giant fog. It sits on your brain and blocks everything. Real feelings, true happiness, real joy. They can't get through that fog. But you lift it, and buddy, you are in for the ride of your life."

I don't know that truer words have ever been written. So let's lift that veil of fog for this Sunday, and refuse to accept the fear in which these bobbleheads deal. And fear is definitely on the agenda this week. The issue of Afghanistan--nine years and thousands upon thousands of deaths after our initial invasion--will be discussed. Defense Secretary Robert Gates will be on both This Week and State of the Union to talk Afghanistan, but you can bet there's going to be a little fear-mongering on Iran too. We get both Clintons--Hillary on Face the Nation and Bill on Meet the Press and your basic coterie of Republican politicos: John McCain (yes, again--more on that later), Bob Corker, Lindsey Graham, John Kyl, Kit Bond and might-as-well-be Republicans Evan Bayh and Dianne Feinstein. All of them full of doom and gloom prognostications, no doubt. Is it small of me to say that I suspect that politicians aspire to use 3% of their brain?

ABC's "This Week" - Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.

CBS' "Face the Nation" - Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C.

NBC's "Meet the Press" - Former President Bill Clinton, New York Gov. David Patterson and Sens. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., and Jim Webb, D-Va.

NBC's "The Chris Matthews Show" - Panel: Rick Stengel, Trish Regan, Kathleen Parker and Andrew Ross Sorkin. Topics: How will President Obama address the looming tower of unemployment? Could Democrats lose their majority in the House of Representatives in 2010? Was the anti-Obama venom unavoidable? YES: 6 NO: 6; Has Obama Got Command Back?
YES: 12 No: 0.

CNN's "State of the Union" - Gates, Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn. and Sen. Evan Bayh, D-Ind.

CNN's "Fareed Zakaria GPS" - With open arms Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi welcomed home a convicted terrorist. Fareed asks him why, and whether he regrets that move now. Gadhafi speaks out about his controversial UN speech, his meeting this week with families of Lockerbie victims, and why he calls President Obama "my son."

"Fox News Sunday" - Sens. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., Kit Bond, R-Mo.; Virginia Republican gubernatorial candidate Bob McDonnell; conservative filmmaker James O'Keefe.

So, what's catching your eye this morning?

From The Colbert Report:

The American government can use the defense budget to pay for health care and just turn sick people into a weapons program.

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From The Daily Show April 8, 2009. Jon wants to know on what planet is a 4% increase in military spending a huge cut? He translates for us from the Military Industrial Complex to English dictionary just what Bob Gates is asking to cut from the budget...expensive, useless pieces of s%#t. Of course Droopy Dog Lieberman isn't happy about getting rid of the useless, piece of s%#t laser planes. What a shock.

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Defense Secretary Robert Gates told Fox's Chris Wallace that this is the wrong time to make changes to the military controversial 'Don't ask, don't tell' policy. "I think the president and I feel like we've got a lot on our plates right now, and let's push that one down the road a little bit," he said.

In January, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs didn't give a time frame when he told reporters that President Obama planned to end the 'Don't ask, don't tell' policy. Gates indicated that he would follow the law when it is changed. "We will follow the law whatever it is," said Gates.

It's got to be done, and using someone like Gates to do it is a smart plan. But we can expect defense contractors to throw a lot of political muscle and money into the fight:

WASHINGTON - As the Bush administration was drawing to a close, Robert M. Gates, whose two years as defense secretary had been devoted to wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, felt compelled to warn his successor of a crisis closer to home.

The United States "cannot expect to eliminate national security risks through higher defense budgets, to do everything and buy everything," Gates said. The next defense secretary, he warned, would have to eliminate some costly hardware and invest in new tools for fighting insurgents.

What Gates didn't know was that he would be that successor.

Now, as the only Bush Cabinet member to remain under President Obama, Gates is preparing the most far-reaching changes in the Pentagon's weapons portfolio since the end of the Cold War, according to aides.

Two defense officials who were not authorized to speak publicly said Gates will announce up to a half-dozen major weapons cancellations later this month. Candidates include a new Navy destroyer, the Air Force's F-22 fighter jet, and Army ground-combat vehicles, the officials said.

More cuts are planned for later this year after a review that could lead to reductions in programs such as aircraft carriers and nuclear arms, the officials said.

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On Fox News Sunday Nov. 30, 2008. Chris Wallace talks to Lindsey Graham and Clair McCaskill about the pick of Robert Gates to continue as Secretary of Defense. First up is Lindsey Graham and after expressing his approval of the pick of Gates and the others on Obama's future National Security team and managing to put in one more plug for how well the surge supposedly has worked in Iraq, Graham plays concern troll for Obama and says he hopes he listens to Gen. Petraeus. I'm sorry but I thought Gen. Petraeus said that he would follow the orders of the new President and not the other way around. But then Petraeus is one of those very "serious" people that the GOP has practically anointed to sainthood, so why should we expect anything different from Graham?

Wallace moves on to Clair McCaskill and wants to know why even though McCaskill was critical of Gates that he is now the right man to pull our forces out of Iraq. McCaskill reminds Wallace that an important part of the SOFA agreement is that it embraces the kind of time table that Barack Obama made a foundation of his campaign. She tells Wallace that at least Gates is no ideologue and that Obama wants the best and the brightest for his Cabinet and not just those that supported him.

Then Wallace throws out this doozie:

Sen. McCaskill, are you concerned about the fact and yes the Status of Forces Agreement says that all the troops have to be out by 2011, but Mr. Obama's time table is much quicker than that, it's the middle of 2010 and he wants a firm deadline for pulling them out. Bob Gates has talked about doing it based on conditions. Are you satisfied that Secretary Gates will follow Barack Obama's orders?

How utterly ridiculous. Can anyone imagine the Villagers asking this of a Republican President-elect? Of John McCain had he won? Of Bush? After McCaskill responds that of course Gates will follow orders Wallace asks Graham the same question and they blather on about whether Obama will listen to Gates or Petraeus and Wallace asks if the pick of Gates means that Obama might modify his time line.

Chris Wallace, no one knows what Obama is going to do once he takes office but the one thing we know he won't be doing is taking orders from Bob Gates or David Petraeus, or skipping out like our current Commander in Chief and letting his Vice-President run a shadow Presidency while he clears brush at the ranch.

OMG, another leak.

Seeking experience in a time of war, President-elect Barack Obama will keep Defense Secretary Robert Gates in that job — if only temporarily — and he has chosen a retired Marine general to be his national security adviser, officials said Tuesday. Gates and retired Gen. James Jones bring years of experience to the Cabinet of a 47-year-old commander in chief with a relatively thin foreign policy resume.

Obama, who rolled out the key components of his economic team this week, plans to announce his foreign policy braintrust after the Thanksgiving holiday.

Gates, who has served as President George W. Bush's defense chief for two years, will remain in the Cabinet for some time, probably a year, according to an official familiar with discussions between the two men. A Democratic official said Jones was Obama's pick to head the National Security Council, the part of the White House structure that deals with foreign policy.

The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because Obama has not authorized anybody to discuss the deliberations.

I think most of us expected this pick. He's got his Republican now. Hopefully, Gates will be replaced once Obama is comfortably settled in as President. And don't be fooled by the conservative talking heads that cheer on his moves. It's all designed to tweak us and I bet behind the scenes all the David Brooks types are laughing, trying so desperate to be relevant again.

Meanwhile:

John Brennan won't be CIA Director or DNI

This is really exceptional news on multiple levels -- the best political news I've heard since the election:

This whole thing was a plot by Cheney to start a new cold war conflict with Russia to replace "the war on terror" if Obama wins the White House. And if McCain wins then they just have another national security issue to hammer us with. This statement by Gates is a joke:

Defense Secretary Robert Gates warned Thursday that if Russia doesn't pull back from its fighting in Georgia it could hurt Moscow-Washington relations "for years to come."
Speaking at his first Pentagon news conference since the fighting started, Gates also said he does not see "any prospect" for the use of U.S. military force there.
"The United States spent 45 years working very hard to avoid a military confrontation with Russia," said Gates. "I see no reason to change that approach today."
But Gates said Russia must face retribution for a military assault on Georgia that appears aimed at punishing the small nation for "daring to try to integrate with the West economically, and politically, and in security arrangements."

Michael Ware said on CNN this Russian action was really provoked by the US and Americans don't understand that aspect of this story. Oh, some of us do. Where are we getting the troops?

Digby says:

That sense of betrayal is going to be used by the neocons as a rallying cry for their revitalized cold war cause. And they will be agitating and pushing the debate and coercing anyone who disagrees on the basis of a myth that the US abandoned a Democratic ally because it refused to confront an evil enemy. It's their most successful theme.

I fully expect to see a Committee To Liberate Georgia and a Washington Lobby formed by this time next year with a full blown push for a Georgia Liberation Act following not far behind. (I suspect they will also hope that an Obama administration will be too smart or too practical not to do what they want, the better to gain domestic political leverage as they refurbish the conservative image.)

After lauding Oliver North for his new book that apparently has more pictures than it does pages (No doubt North's picture-book tells a much different story than the truth-laid-bare photos and accounts from an award-winning unembedded photojournalist like Dahr Jamail, but I digress), Sean Hannity asks North for his opinion on whether the President was right to compare the want to hold diplomatic talks with Iran to the appeasement of Nazis in the 1930’s.

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Oliver North: As you know, I’m the history guy at Fox News Channel, right? I’ve done this WWII series – 52 of our episodes about WWII. Had it not been for Chamberlain going to sit down with Adolf Hitler and try to cut a deal in Munich, WWII might never have happened, but it emboldened the dictator. That’s what the President said yesterday in Jerusalem. And a little reminder today, a shot across the bow here at the NRA, when John McCain got up and said, 'You cannot have these kinds of unconditional, no preconditions discussions, with despots and dictators' - dead on the mark.

For someone who was lucky not to have spent the better part of the last two decades making license plates, he's got some nerve touching this topic. This is the guy who oversaw the arms for hostages deal with Iran in 1985 (among other crimes), right in the middle of the Iran-Iraq war in which the US was actively and openly arming and supporting Saddam Hussein. Ollie North didn't just talk with Iran at a time they were our enemy in a proxy-war, he actually helped to arm them, bypassing Congress by violating the Boland Amendment to help fund an illegal war in Nicaragua.

Lacking even a shred of credibility, Fox News' "history guy" is to the truth in the historical record what Dick Cheney is to gun safety. He shouldn't be allowed anywhere near the subject, and anyone who believes a word of what he says about it is a fool.

Negotiation is not appeasement and there are zero parallels between simply opening up a diplomatic dialogue with Iran and the capitulation to Adolf Hitler in the Munich Agreement. It's a ridiculous assertion, especially considering that the Bush administration itself has negotiated with Libya and North Korea, yet Iran's previous offers to put everything, including its nuclear program, on the table and peacefully negotiate have been completely ignored even after Iran had been an important ally of the coalition against al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Oliver North, just like John McCain and other conservatives, don't even have a clue what they are talking about. Apparently no one in this administration ever thought to ask Bush's own Sec. of Defense, Neville Chamberlain Robert Gates, for his opinion:

We need to figure out a way to develop some leverage with respect to the Iranians and then sit down and talk with them. If there's going to be a discussion, then they need something, too. We can't go to a discussion and be completely the demander with them not feeling that they need anything from us.

Exactly.

Last month on Fox News, Ret. Gen. Thomas McInerney, one of the Pentagon's propaganda team of military analysts exposed by David Barstow in the NYT, openly called for the US to begin committing "tit-for-tat" terrorist attacks by proxy inside Iran.

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McInerney: Here's what I would suggest to you. Number one, we take the National Council for Resistance to Iran off the terrorist list that the Clinton Administration put them on as well as the Mujahedin-e Khalq at the Camp Ashraf in Iraq. Then I would start a tit-for-tat strategy which I wrote up in the Wall Street Journal a year ago: For every EFP that goes off and kills Americans, two go off in Iran. No questions asked. People don't have to know how it was done. It's a covert action. They become the most unlucky country in the world. ...

Media Matters' exhaustive research into the NYT story shows that McInerney appeared on Fox News 144 times since Jan 2002, and according to this bio from last year's "Intelligence Summit," McInerney is on the Board of Directors for several companies with defense-related contracts that would seem to benefit from his pro-war propaganda. For example, Alloy Surfaces Company (ASC), whose contracts for "ammunition and explosives" with the Department of Defense appear to have grown from $15 million in 2002 to more than $169 million in 2006. A conflict of interest, perhaps?

The tactic that McInerney advocates of using Iranian opposition terrorist groups to carry out acts of terrorism inside Iran is not new, nor far-fetched. A little digging turned up numerous articles alleging that the pentagon had already been using the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK) and other groups in cross-border operations into Iran, at least until shortly after Sec Gates took over (Some news reports of attacks in Iran here, here, here, here, here. Iranian news video here).

The MEK (aka MKO, NLA, PMOI, NCRI) is a terrorist group, as designated still by the State Dept, that has killed US troops and civilians before back in the 1970s. Even Bush's first deputy secretary of state, Richard Armitage, said of the MEK, "I lived there [in Iran] for a year, and it was during that time that our people were killed by the MEK, assassinated. ... So from my point of view they were terrorists." David Ignatius wrote in the WaPo that back in 2003 the US actually rejected a deal with Iran to exchange MEK captives for several top al-Qaeda leaders.

Continue reading »

 Gates made an appearance on MTP Sunday and parroted the same propaganda line that O'Hanlon and Kristol are using---it's just that he can't deliver them quite as effectively. As Timmeh notes, everything this administration and their puppet propagandists have feed the American people about the war has been WRONG---so why should we trust you now? He dryly replies that everybody loves Gen Petraeus and the wooden wonder Ambassador Crocker.

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MR. RUSSERT:  You mentioned that we misunderestimated some of the divisions between the factions of the government, the Shiites and the Sunnis.  Mr. Secretary, for Americans watching today, many are saying to themselves, “The administration was wrong about weapons of mass destruction, wrong about the size of the force necessary to occupy Iraq, wrong about the costs of the war, wrong about Shiite and Sunni division.  Why should we have any confidence in anything they say about the future of Iraq?”

SEC’Y GATES:  Well, I think that what we should have confidence in is the evaluation that Ambassador Crocker and General Petraeus are going to make in early September. These men have been on the ground for quite some time now. They are the best of our professionals.  They will look at this.  Their report—certainly General Petraeus’ part of it—will be examined by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, sent to me and then to the president.  So it, it won’t be entirely General Petraeus; it’ll be mostly General Petraeus.  But what we’re trying to do is get an honest an evaluation of this situation as we possibly can so that the president and the Congress can decide how to move forward.

I seem to remember a certain General that wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post right before the '04 election about how great the Iraq military was stepping up...Who was it again? Oh, right...Army lieutenant General Petraeus

Nonetheless, there are reasons for optimism. Today approximately 164,000 Iraqi police and soldiers (of which about 100,000 are trained and equipped) and an additional 74,000 facility protection forces are performing a wide variety of security missions. Equipment is being delivered. Training is on track and increasing in capacity. Infrastructure is being repaired. Command and control structures and institutions are being reestablished.

Most important, Iraqi security forces are in the fight -- so much so that they are suffering substantial casualties as they take on more and more of the burdens to achieve security in their country. Since Jan. 1 more than 700 Iraqi security force members have been killed, and hundreds of Iraqis seeking to volunteer for the police and military have been killed as well...read on

This week, perhaps more than any in months, the White House its allies have claimed the momentum on the debate. It looks like the Defense Secretary didn't get the memo.

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said Thursday that he was discouraged by the resignation of the Sunnis from Iraq’s cabinet and that the Bush administration might have misjudged the difficulty of achieving reconciliation between Iraq’s sectarian factions.

In one of his bluntest assessments of the progress of the administration’s Iraq strategy, Mr. Gates said, “I think the developments on the political side are somewhat discouraging at the national level.” He said that despite the Sunni withdrawal, “my hope is that it can all be patched back together.”

First, Mr. Secretary, hope is not a plan. Second, so much the administration's "momentum."

(thanks to Heather for vid)

Gen. Wesley Clark talks with Keith Olbermann about Defense Secretary Robert Gates' response to Sen. Hillary Clinton, the games the Pentagon is playing with Congress's attempts of oversight, ostensibly on the say-so of the White House and the tragic story unfolding surrounding Pat Tillman's death.