Didn't he lose the general election?
"Senator Kerry’s closeness to Obama draws fire" June 24, 2012|Bryan Bender
WASHINGTON — Since he was elevated to the leading foreign policy position in Congress three years ago, John F. Kerry has been on the road a lot. He has brokered runoff elections in Afghanistan, shuttled between warring factions in Africa, and patiently sat through marathon tea-drinking sessions with recalcitrant Middle East dictators, all to advance the Obama administration’s top foreign policy goals....
Yet Kerry’s frenetic pace of travel on behalf of the administration is stoking a lively debate.
Just wondering what the carbon footprint on tha.... sigh. Ooops, I exhaled global-warming gases.
Some foreign policy specialists question whether the Massachusetts Democrat has his eye on the secretary of state’s job if Obama is reelected and, as a result, has been too lenient on oversight of the administration’s policies, the chairman’s primary role.
The fiercest criticism is directed at his committee’s oversight of the war in Afghanistan and the administration’s use of lethal force, including the expansion of drone strikes in Pakistan and elsewhere.
“Times of war is when the need for oversight is at its zenith,” said Bruce Fein, a constitutional lawyer and former top Justice Department official in the Reagan administration. “That’s where the checks and balances are needed. Kerry is doing the opposite. He seems to be running for secretary of state and has not had serious oversight of the conduct of wars that are more endless than Vietnam.’’
No one down there does because they are all in it together. It's the War Party with two factions, folks. Sorry to burst your bubble, 'murkn. Btw, Fein called for impeachment of Bush.
Peter Singer, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, expressed concern over a lack of questions asked about the drone strikes that have killed suspected terrorists across the world, operations he generally supports. Such a strategy is “one of the biggest changes in American foreign policy in the last 10 years,’’ he said. “It has huge ramifications for US foreign policy and should involve [the Foreign Relations Committee]. But Congress has been largely absent of any engagement on these issues.’’
Well, many people have correctly concluded the U.S. war machine has been a dictatorship for a long time. Obama only continuing the tradition in Libya and Syria.
Kerry strongly challenges any suggestion that he has allowed his relationship with Obama or any future ambitions to affect his stewardship of the committee, where he first came to prominence as a Vietnam veteran-turned-war protester in 1971, famously testifying, “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?”
Here's how:
“I think that in the next days, the government of Afghanistan’s response to anticorruption efforts are a key test of its ability to regain the confidence of the.... American people [who] are prepared to support with hard-earned tax dollars and with most importantly, with the treasure of our country — the lives of young American men and women.... and say, ‘Hey, that’s something worth dying for.’ ’’
Related: How Do You Ask a Man to Be the Last to Die For a Lie, Senator?
What the hell happened to you, $enator?
In an interview, he said his critics are simply ill informed....
Playing the elite stereotype to the hilt, 'eh?
The Senate panel Kerry chairs has been, since it was established in 1816, one of the most influential in the Senate, reviewing the foreign aid budget, shaping policy through legislation, and voting on the president’s ambassadorial appointments and international treaties before presenting them to the full body.
Some modern chairmen, however, also used the perch to confront the administration in power on a range of policies, whether the president was from the opposing political party or not, according to historians and congressional scholars.
In the 1960s, for example, Senator William Fulbright, a Democrat, used public hearings to try to end US involvement in the Vietnam War, under Democratic and Republican presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, respectively. In the 1980s, Senators Charles Percy and Richard Lugar, both Republicans, confronted Ronald Reagan’s sale of arms to the Middle East and Central America and the more conservative direction of his foreign policy.
Ah, yes, the Iran-Contra scandal that is fallen down the MSM memory hole.
More recently, Lugar and Biden challenged President George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq....
Kerry did not. And if I recall correctly, Biden and Luger still voted for it. So did Hillary. Some "challenge," 'eh?
This at a time when I was awakening to truth and KNEW BEFOREHAND that the Iraq WMD stuff was a LIE!!
Yet, some observers contend the Afghanistan hearings have not been rigorous. “Kerry needs to get every scrap of paper and review the official story,” Fein said. “They need to subpoena the underlying documents. The hearings now consist of what we have already read in the newspapers.
Saints preserve us!
“Real oversight is putting the critics before the committee there right next to the officials from the administration.”
Danielle Brian, executive director of the watchdog group Project on Government Oversight, concurs.
The committee “has been particularly weak in conducting even the most basic oversight of official claims of progress in the war,” Brian said.
From the man who would have been president had not George W. Bush stolen the 2004 election.
Of course, the weak oversight is because he supports the policies and doesn't want to embarrass the U.S. government or its military machine.
She said she wrote to Kerry in February urging him to convene a hearing to take testimony from a military whistleblower, Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Davis, who has made statements about battlefield successes against the Taliban and efforts to train Afghan security forces, “which appear to vary greatly from the statements to Congress by senior military officials.”
See: Active-Duty Army Whistleblower Lt. Col. Daniel Davis: U.S. Deceiving Public on Afghan War
With the help of my papers because this is the first I've seen of this chap.
“Credible challenges to the Pentagon’s party line have been made,” she wrote. “As the US commits another year of funding to the war in Afghanistan, the public and Congress deserve an accurate assessment of the effort.”
The Foreign Relations panel says it has no plans to hold such a hearing to hear testimony from Davis, whose detailed analysis of the conduct of the war made headlines earlier this year.
All I have to say is thank the Good Lord that John Kerry is keeping an eye on things.
“This is about oversight, which we do on a daily basis,” the committee said in a statement. “It’s not about providing platforms.”
Is that unbelievable or what? Remember all the Bush administration officials that went up and testified on the danger from Iraq and Hussein? Not a platform, though.
Not all of the committee’s oversight has been conducted in public. Kerry’s staff wrote a confidential paper last fall that aides said was highly critical of how the Obama administration has been funneling humanitarian aid to Pakistan, using legislation that Kerry championed to provide $7.5 billion in nonmilitary aid over five years.
The report, according to Kerry aides, concluded that the Obama administration’s handling of the program suffered from a series of failings, including “unclear strategy, repeated changes in direction, excessive bureaucracy, and ineffective communications,” as well as a lack of consultation with Congress.
The rebuke was not made public at the time, they said, because Kerry believed doing so privately would be more effective.
Is that a middle finger he just gave the American people?
“We are trying to be helpful without beating people over the head on the front page,” said Bill Danvers, the committee’s staff director....
Pfffffffffttt!
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Obama listening to the wrong people.
"Joe Biden memo warned Obama on flawed war plans" June 26, 2012
WASHINGTON — As President Obama considered adding as many as 40,000 US forces to a backsliding war in Afghanistan in 2009, Vice President Joe Biden warned him that the military rationale for doing so was flawed, a new book about Obama’s expansion of the conflict says.
The book, ‘‘Little America: The War Within the War for Afghanistan,’’ also says that in planning the drawdown of troops two years later, the White House intentionally sidelined the CIA.
Obama purposely did not read a grim CIA assessment of Afghanistan that found little measurable benefit from the 30,000 ‘‘surge’’ forces Obama eventually approved, the book quotes a US official as saying.
Actually, there was a mea$urable benefit, and it is found in the money-laundering accounts of drug dealers and and bank accounts of war-profiteers.
The book by Washington Post correspondent Rajiv Chandrasekaran will be released Tuesday.
A previously undisclosed Biden memo to Obama in November 2009 reflects his view that military commanders were asking Obama to take a leap by adding tens of thousands of forces whose role was poorly defined.
Although Biden’s doubts have become well known, the new book details how Biden used a months-long White House review of the war to question the basic premise that the same ‘‘counterinsurgency’’ strategy that had apparently worked in Iraq could be applied to Afghanistan....
To work, the counterinsurgency or ‘‘COIN’’ doctrine requires military gains to be paired with advances in government services, a ‘‘credible’’ Afghan government, and Afghan security services that can take over, Biden’s memo said.
Although the US military could accomplish any technical assignment related to the new strategy, such as sweeping insurgents from a village, ‘‘no one can tell you with conviction when, and even if, we can produce the flip sides of COIN,’’ Biden wrote. He supported a buildup of 20,000, half the number requested by then-war commander General Stanley McChrystal.
The memo echoed a secret message to Washington from the US ambassador at the time, Karl Eikenberry, that had called President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan an unreliable partner for the proposed surge.
Eikenberry, a former top Army general who had served in Afghanistan, said more forces would only delay the time when Afghans would take over responsibility for their own security.
The Eikenberry memo was leaked shortly after he sent it and confirmed by US officials. Biden was presumed to agree with it, but he stayed mum at the time.
Obama’s compromise — 30,000 additional forces and a deadline to begin bringing them home — was intended to blunt the momentum of a resurgent Taliban insurgency without committing Obama to an open-ended war.
It is open-ended because we aren't leaving. It's all this arm-flailing bulls***.
The classified CIA assessment found that Afghanistan was ‘‘trending to stalemate’’ in mid-2011, just ahead of the long-planned date when Obama would begin bringing the additional forces home.
And yet we have been told week after week, month after month, year after year, we are winning.
Although many of Obama’s advisers had also concluded that the surge strategy had not worked, a White House official is quoted as saying aides initially rebuffed the CIA analysis because it could undercut Obama’s argument for withdrawing forces on schedule.
Is it just me, or do you FIND ALL THIS INSIDE the BELTWAY BASEBALL OFFENSIVE when YOUNG MEN and WOMEN are DYING?!!
In a separate development, an Afghan official said a roadside bombing in southern Afghanistan has six police officers over the weekend....
The Italian Defense Ministry said an Italian soldier was killed and two others were wounded in an explosion Monday in western Afghanistan....
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Thank you for listening to me, readers.
