A day before President Obama’s State of the Union address, we pretty much already know that the Massachusetts Senate election results seemed to have greatly influenced what the president is going to actually address.

Under mounting pressure to curb government spending, the president is to propose in his State of the Union address a three-year freeze on federal funding that is not related to national security. That being clearly a concession to public concern about government spending and which could dramatically curtail Obama’s legislative ambitions.

The freeze would take effect in October and limit the overall budget for agencies other than the military, veterans affairs, homeland security and certain international programs to $447 billion a year for the remainder of Obama’s first term.

On the surface it sounds like a step ahead, doesn’t it? But do your math. $447 billion per year, as compared to the ever-rising national debt – as of today already surpassing $13 trillion…

At the same time, when “overseas contingency operations” expenses are added to the U.S. defense budget, it comes up to $663.8 billion for 2010 alone. As a matter of fact, the real figure is even higher, reaching between $880 billion and $1.03 trillion in fiscal year 2010.

All in all the 2009 U.S. military budget is almost as much as the rest of the world’s defense spending combined and is variously calculated as being some nine times larger than the military budget of China. The United States and its close allies are responsible for about two-thirds of the world’s military spending – of which, the U.S. is responsible for the majority of the expenditures.

Understandably, this is a huge and seemingly never-ending source of income for our overbuilt defense industry. Seemingly the very appropriate warning of President Dwight Eisenhower went unheeded. Eisenhower three days before the end of his second term has warned among other things about the military/industrial complex, saying: “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the militaryindustrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”

If Eisenhower only knew how much the influence of the military/industrial complex has grown since his day…

At least it could seem to be a step in the right direction for President Obama to propose some saving measures in the State of the Union address. Unfortunately, the spending freeze will only address about 1/8 of our total budget and might actually cut into programs and operational budget of needed and necessary agencies, in many case to the detriment of us all.

Meanwhile, we still have well over 100,000 troops in Iraq, along with an even larger number of mercenaries, are beefing up our forces and spending for the most likely unwinnable war in Afghanistan and are maintaining the budgets of the Department of Homeland Security, which includes the FBI, recently made famous by the discovery that it has been collaborating with telecom companies to routinely violate federal wiretapping laws for four years, as agents got access to reporters’ and citizens’ phone records using fake emergency declarations or simply asking for them.

Let’s not forget the case of the Spanish lawmaker Gaspar Llamazares, who learned that the FBI used an online photograph of him to create an image showing what Osama bin Laden might look like today.

The image using Llamazares’ photo appeared on a wanted poster updating the U.S. government’s 1998 photo of the al Qaeda leader.

FBI spokesman Ken Hoffman acknowledged that the agency used a picture of Llamazares taken from Google Images.

Let’s hope that we are not rewarding incompetence, with ever-larger budgets.

Meanwhile, we don’t really know where more than $3 trillion in bailout money has disappeared to and whether it has done anybody – besides the people and the corporations, who have caused the crisis – any measurable good.

As the popular saying goes: “easy come, easy go”.

Technorati Tags: bailout, defense budget, military/industrial complex, money, President Obama, spending freeze, State of the Union address

Anne Applebaum wrote a very insightful op-ed piece in the Washington Post today, basically about how different events influence our policies post factum. We fully agree with the notion that such knee-jerk reactions, which are usually implemented way after the fact are too often bound to fail.

Here’s Anne Applebaum’s article:

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All of you frequent fliers out there, you know the drill. Take off your shoes, because of Richard Reid, the “shoe bomber.” Remove your hair gel from your backpack because of the bombers who targeted Heathrow using liquid hydrogen peroxide. When you get on a plane, you must also, from now on, be prepared to remove any blankets from your lap before landing – too bad if you’re asleep! – because of the Christmas Day underwear bomber.

When someone invents a way to hide explosive powder inside a toothbrush case, prepare to remove your toothbrush. And while you’re at it, throw a pinch of salt over your left shoulder as you board the plane. But never, at any moment, imagine that the rigamarole of airport security is guaranteed to make you safer – for no one knows which of these measures, if any, is actually necessary.

Worse, no one has any financial or political incentive to find out. The fact is, since the hurried and heavily politicized creation of the Department of Homeland Security and its junior partner, the Transportation Security Administration, neither their priorities nor their spending patterns has been subject to serious scrutiny. They have never been forced to make hard choices. On the contrary, both have been encouraged by their congressional funders to spend money in reaction to every perceived new threat, real or otherwise: Thus full-body scanners, unacceptable as recently as last summer, will now be rushed into use. In just a few years – under a Republican administration and mostly Republican Congresses – these institutions thus grew into vast, unruly bureaucracies, some of whose activities bear only a distant relationship to public safety.

So customary has it become to repeat old, familiar lists of ludicrous public projects that readers who cannot bear to read the litany one more time might want to skip to the next paragraph. For yes, it is true: Having started with 13 employees in January 2002, the TSA now employs 60,000, and in the process of its expansion the organization found it had money for all kinds of extras. As I wrote in 2005, some $350,000 of its $6 billion budget once was spent on a gym; $500,000 was spent on artwork and silk plants, and untold millions are annually spent in overhiring, since determining when there will be long security lines at an airport has never been the sort of thing at which the federal government excels.

As for the DHS, its 2010 budget came in at $55 billion, some of which (according to the economist Veronique de Rugy, writing in 2006) will invariably be spent on things like the $63,000 decontamination unit in rural Washington, where no one was trained to use it, more biochemical suits for Grand Forks, Nev., than the town has police officers to wear them and $557,400 worth of rescue and communications equipment for some 1,500 residents of the town of North Pole, Alaska. Not to mention what is spent on the “needs” of the constituents of other important members of Congress.

It is not actually DHS or TSA employees who are at fault for these kinds of decisions. From the very beginning, security experts and even the agencies’ own inspectors general have pointed to the absurdity of TSA and DHS spending patterns, many of which are driven by the latest scare story (I wish I’d been at the celebratory New Year’s Eve party undoubtedly thrown by the manufacturers of those full-body scanners). And from the very beginning, Congress has fought back against critics, repeatedly allocating funds to unnecessary local projects, reacting to sensational news stories, spending money in ways that suit its members and then declaring itself shocked – shocked! – to discover that our multibillion-dollar homeland security apparatus was unable to stop a clearly disturbed Nigerian from boarding a Detroit-bound plane.

Imagine if the TSA’s vast budget were dedicated to the creation of a cutting-edge computer network that could have made security officers in Amsterdam instantly aware of the warning from the Detroit bombing suspect’s father. Imagine that, instead of relying on full-body X-ray scanners or long-haul flight-blanket deprivation, we had highly paid and trained consular officers in places such as Nigeria. Even then security would not be perfect (and I’m not sure that airborne terrorism is even the worst thing we have to worry about). But it would make sense to have a smaller, less expensive and less wasteful system. It would make sense to have a system based on real risks and priorities, instead of the stories featured on cable news. It would make sense to fight the next battle, for once, instead of the last one. “Sense,” though, is not the criterion by which public money is spent in this country – and hasn’t been for a long time.

Technorati Tags: airline security, Anne Applebaum, knee jerk reactions

The “Independent” senator from Connecticut has already stated, quoting as he says, a U.S.  official:“…if we don’t act preemptively, Yemen will be tomorrow’s war”.

At the same time, there are some still unanswered questions about Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s failed attempt to destroy Northwest Airlines flight 253.

According to some passengers of flight 253, there were some pretty suspicious things going on both before the boarding of the plane in Amsterdam and during the flight itself.

Take a look at this video.

No proof as yet, but the whole thing looks mighty fishy…again.

At the same time, new rules imposed by the Transportation Security Administration limit on-board activities by passengers and crew in U.S. airspace. Apparently, during the final hour of flight passengers must remain seated. They won’t be allowed access to carry-on baggage or to have any items on their laps.

Sounds like still another great idea. We suppose that somebody “in the know”, must know something, such as that a potential, or real terrorist will only perform his, or her dirty deeds ONLY in the last hour of the flight.

This could be great material for a show such as Saturday Night Live, or the Colbert Report, or maybe even for a third installment of the movie Airplane.

Just think of a terrorist, who is determined enough to kill himself, along with everyone on board, waiting for the last hour of the flight to do it…geez…

Technorati Tags: Events, Flight 253, Lieberman, nigerian, suspicious, Terrorism, Yemen

We finally have the first, concrete step in the direction of closing the now infamous Guantanamo Bay prison.

The news reports say, “President Barack Obama has ordered the federal government to acquire an underused state prison”, the Thomson Correctional Center in rural Illinois.

According to the Illinois Department of Corrections’ website, Thomson is not so much “underused”, as empty.

According to a letter to Illinois Governor Pat Quinn signed by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, Attorney General Eric Holder and Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair Thomson will be upgraded and transformed into a facility that exceeds “supermax standards.”

The real question is whether the Guantanamo inmates will actually be charged with crimes and whether they will be properly tried, according to our law, or will Thomson simply become an extension of Gitmo, this time on U.S. territory?

U.S. officials said military tribunals for potential detainees would be held at Thomson. They also said that the facility could house detainees whom the president determines must be held indefinitely but can’t be tried.

Thomson will not solve all the administration’s Guantanamo-related problems. There still will be dozens of detainees not relocated to Thomson, myriad legal issues and potential resistance from Congress.

Technorati Tags: congress, guantanamo, military tribunals, obama, Prison, Thompson

It’s been many years since the 9/11 attacks and America’s favorite boogieman Osama bin Laden is apparently still out there…Or is he? Nobody seems to know for sure, it seems.

U.S. National Security Adviser, James Jones, says bin Laden, believed hiding mainly in a rugged area of western Pakistan, may be periodically slipping back into Afghanistan as well. At the same time, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, says the U.S. has lacked good intelligence on bin Laden for a long time – “I think it has been years” – and did not confirm that he’d slipped into Afghanistan.

The failed hunt for bin Laden has been one of the signature elements of the global “war on terror” that George W. Bush launched after the Sept. 11 attacks. The principal explanations given by both the Bush and Obama administrations for not getting bin Laden is that they simply don’t know where he is.
“If we did, we’d go get him,” Gates said.

Jones, a retired Marine general, stressed the urgency of targeting bin Laden, and spoke of a renewed campaign to capture or kill him. Bin Laden had been allowed to operate in Afghanistan by his Taliban allies while allegedly plotting the Sept. 11 attacks. When U.S. forces ousted the Taliban from power in late 2001, bin Laden reportedly fled into Pakistan from what was generally described as a complex of caves in the Tora Bora area.

Asked whether the administration has reliable intelligence on bin Laden’s whereabouts, James Jones replied, “The best estimate is that he is somewhere in North Waziristan, sometimes on the Pakistani side of the border, sometimes on the Afghan side of the border.” He did not elaborate on the intelligence behind that estimate, nor did he cite a time period or describe more specifically bin Laden’s apparent border crossings.

Robert Gates in turn, said: that “we don’t know for a fact where Osama bin Laden is,” although he agreed that his likely hideout is in North Waziristan.

The U.S. has targeted North Waziristan and other areas on the Pakistani side of the border with drone-launched missile strikes, killing a number of militants as well as Pakistani civilians. The Pakistani army has undertaken an offensive against the Taliban in South Waziristan but it has not expanded it into North Waziristan.

Obama administration officials have often asserted, as did the Bush administration, that they believe bin Laden is being sheltered on the Pakistani side of the border, along with other senior al-Qaida leaders. But Jones’s assertion that al-Qaida chief may have slipped back into Afghanistan puts a new twist on the issue.

Senator John McCain said: “that knowledgeable people have told him that bin Laden ‘moves back and forth.’”
McCain did not elaborate, except to say that although bin Laden is not currently able to establish bases for training and equipping terrorists who would attack the United States, “I think it’s important to get him.”

Gates said he does not blame a lack of Pakistani cooperation for the absence of intelligence on bin Laden. “No, I think it’s because if, as we suspect, he is in North Waziristan, it is an area that the Pakistani government has not had a presence in, in quite some time,” he said.

During a visit to Pakistan in October, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton caused a stir by chiding Pakistani officials for failing to press the hunt for al-Qaida inside their borders. She said she found it “hard to believe” that no one in Islamabad knows where the al-Qaida leaders are hiding and couldn’t get them “if they really wanted to.”

A recent Senate report said bin Laden was unquestionably within reach of U.S. troops in the mountains of Tora Bora only three months after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, when American military leaders made the crucial decision not to pursue him with massive force.

Some Pakistanis believe that Osama bin Laden is actually a CIA agent.

Take a look at this video:

So, it appears that we are as much in the dark about bin Laden’s whereabouts, as we seem to be about what really and truly transpired on September 11, 2001. Lets just hope that our intelligence regarding both Afghan and Pakistani Taliban is more accurate, since nobody in his right mind wants the Afghan war to drag on forever.

Technorati Tags: afghanistan, al-qaida, bin laden, cia, clinton, gates, jones, Pakistan, Terrorism, US