US President Barack Obama’s choice of General David Petraeus as CIA director will bolster his national security team with a Republican favorite who is sometimes seen as a future White House aspirant.
The pick put a quick end to occasional Washington speculation that the commanding general in Afghanistan might ride to the rescue of Republicans as a White House or vice presidential candidate against Obama next year.
Petraeus, credited with turning around the war in Iraq, had denied interest in a post-military political career in recent years even while giving interviews and making speeches with the zeal of a politician during his trips home.
The imminent departure of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, a Republican holdover from former US president George W. Bush’s administration, left a need on Obama’s national security team for a reliable conservative with allies among Republicans in Congress.
“Republicans see him as a solid conservative with obviously strong ties to the military and the intelligence aspects of defense policy,” said Cal Jillson, a political scientist at Southern Methodist University in Texas.
“This is good for everybody involved. It’s good for Obama and it’s good for Petraeus,” Jillson said. “Petraeus is the leading military officer of his generation but it was not clear where he would go after Afghanistan.”
The pick drew applause from Republican lawmakers.
“Without question, General David Petraeus is a national treasure,” Republican Senator Lindsey Graham said. “I believe his talents will be well utilized as the new director of the CIA.”
The appointment of Petraeus is part of a restructuring of Obama’s national security team that includes naming CIA Director Leon Panetta to be the new defense secretary and trouble-shooting diplomat Ryan Crocker, the former ambassador in Iraq and Pakistan, being named ambassador to Afghanistan.
Not every Republican praised the choices, however, with one consultant questioning why the experienced Petraeus, Panetta and Crocker were being rotated again into important national security jobs.
“There are 310 million Americans and Obama keeps choosing the same guys over and over,” Republican strategist Rich Galen said. “Is there nobody else?”
AFGHAN CHILD: A court battle is ongoing over if the toddler can stay with Joshua Mast and his wife, who wanted ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ for her Major Joshua Mast, a US Marine whose adoption of an Afghan war orphan has spurred a years-long legal battle, is to remain on active duty after a three-member panel of Marines on Tuesday found that while he acted in a way unbecoming of an officer to bring home the baby girl, it did not warrant his separation from the military. Lawyers for the Marine Corps argued that Mast abused his position, disregarded orders of his superiors, mishandled classified information and improperly used a government computer in his fight over the child who was found orphaned on the battlefield in rural Afghanistan
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
STOPOVERS: As organized crime groups in Asia and the Americas move drugs via places such as Tonga, methamphetamine use has reached levels called ‘epidemic’ A surge of drugs is engulfing the South Pacific as cartels and triads use far-flung island nations to channel narcotics across the globe, top police and UN officials told reporters. Pacific island nations such as Fiji and Tonga sit at the crossroads of largely unpatrolled ocean trafficking routes used to shift cocaine from Latin America, and methamphetamine and opioids from Asia. This illicit cargo is increasingly spilling over into local hands, feeding drug addiction in communities where serious crime had been rare. “We’re a victim of our geographical location. An ideal transit point for vessels crossing the Pacific,” Tonga Police Commissioner Shane McLennan
RSS