Jeff Stein at CQ via TPM via Attaturk:
On many a workday lunchtime, the nominal boss of U.S. intelligence, John D. Negroponte, can be found at a private club in downtown Washington, getting a massage, taking a swim, and having lunch, followed by a good cigar and a perusal of the daily papers in the club’s library.
“He spends three hours there [every] Monday through Friday,” gripes a senior counterterrorism official, noting that the former ambassador has a security detail sitting outside all that time in chase cars. Others say they’ve seen the Director of National Intelligence at the University Club, a 100-year-old mansion-like redoubt of dark oak panels and high ceilings a few blocks from the White House, only “several” times a week....
...He’s figured out the job. Which is to say, he really doesn’t have much control over the 16 U.S. intelligence agencies.
So why not hang at the University Club?
Negroponte spokesman Carl Kroft takes serious issue with that portrayal.
“He’s the hardest working person in U.S. intelligence,” Kroft said. “He’s hard at work from the early hours of the morning to late every night. The job never ends.”
Attaturk figures Condi may be changing hats herself soon. Black Spot will fill her shoes with no Congressional friction whatsoever. Regardless of what he's involved in he's the smoothest operator in town.
Wherever Black Spot operates, chaos, confusion, and catastrophe follow. So his elevation sideways back into the international arm of government means one thing. The road is about to get appreciably rockier.
Defense Tech:
"The Bush administration is expected to announce next week a major step forward in the building of the country’s first new nuclear warhead in nearly two decades," the Times is reporting.
The $100 billion effort is called the Reliable Replacement Warhead. Back in August, our own Haninah Levine took a four-part look at the program. Go read up: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4.
Reliable Replacement Warhead. Bu$hCo names go like this: Clean Air Act, the law that lets industries toss whatever they like out of their smokestacks. And as you might expect, according to Haninah Levine, the Reliable Replacement Warhead will be none of those things, but will serve as an excuse for Bu$hCo to junk all of the nuclear test ban treaties.
Oh, and one more thing, incidently. Israel has plans to nuke Iran. Just an itty bitty one, really, from a country that officially has none. And oh, yes, it's an experimental "bunker buster" one designed to penetrate underground that nobody's used before, or even by international law should have developed, but Rumsfeld suggested a few years back. No big deal, really.
Now, seeing as the bovine fecal material is about to hit the fan in a really big radioactive way, what options does Congress really have, if it's promised to be a good bipartisan Congress and not cut off money for the party time in the Middle East or impeach Dear Leader?
Well, none whatsoever apparently. But that's what bipartisanship is all about. Date rape.
2 comments:
Mostly, Russel, 'cause Iran hasn't threatened to nuke anybody.
Nor has it invaded anyone to my knowledge.
Nor has any ability to nuke anyone within the next 10 years. Just ask Black Spot himself; as a matter of fact, one motivation for his recent move is that he an the Carlyle mainline are getting just a little uncomfortable with the level of saber rattling Dear Leader engages in. They like the war bucks, but if people start pre-emptively tossing nukes, all bets are off.
The current president of Iran is about as popular with the Iranian people as the current president of the United States is with the American people.
However, a direct attack by Israel would change all that, as would a direct and provable attack by Iran on American soil.
The president of Iran speaks for the intentions of the Iranian people to about the same extent the president of the United States speaks for the American people, or Olmert speaks for Israel.
That is to say, they each represent a minority obsessed with blood and power, that actively seek to incite war in the Middle East for their own profit.
Each actively manipulate polls and positions to maintain power to their own bases that are enriched by strife in the Middle East.
Equating secular humanism and reality based policy with Father Coughlin show the depths of delusion and disinformation under which you suffer.
By the way, how's the paid troll business doing these days?
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