Author: Spencer Ackerman

Below is the Pentagon’s presentation of the long-term budget picture. Why’s it going from Fiscal 2001 to Fiscal 2015? I don’t presume to know for sure. But the effect is clear: It’s immediately obvious that President Obama is proposing spending more, consistently, on defense — excluding the cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars — than did President Bush. That’s the blue bar — how much the Pentagon and the military services need outside of combat funding. If we’re just looking at the blue bar under the Obama era, you can see it continue its slight glide path upward.

The gray bar is for combat funding — Iraq and Afghanistan together. Robert Hale, the Pentagon comptroller, told a press conference that starting next fiscal year, the Pentagon is presuming for budgeting purposes that the wars will cost $50 billion, thanks to the Iraq drawdown. So if that’s the case, then it’ll take a grand total of four more budgets for the Obama Pentagon budget to outspend the final two Bush budgets when the big big costs of sustaining the 2007-8 Iraq surge is factored into the equation. It may be unfair to Obama to compare base budget growth to base-budget-growth-plus-war funding, but that’s the only way for Congressional Republicans to actually argue that Obama is cutting defense — and you know that’s an inevitable line of criticism. So when they say that, you can refer to this chart and know that the only way that line of argument can possibly be true is for us to continue pouring money down the sinkhole of Iraq. Because any way you slice it, that blue baseline funding bar is rising and rising.

So the budget is out. But where’s the roughly $150 million needed for the Obama administration to buy the Thomson Correction Center from Illinois? That’s the necessary step for closing Guantanamo Bay this year, as the administration desires: Without the money to buy Thomson, the government has nowhere to transfer the remaining Guantanamo detainees, so the prison stays open and everyone’s unhappy except for conservatives who want to keep the place running. But for the first time in this very flawed process, the Obama administration is showing signs of playing hardball. The money to close the facility is in next year’s Afghanistan war supplemental.

Robert Hale, the Pentagon comptroller, just made that announcement in a budget briefing that’s still going on. Basically, the fiscal 2011 budget request for the costs of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars — that’s $159.3 billion, by the way, total — contains a $350 million “transfer” fund that would allow the administration all aspects of shuttering the detention facility in Cuba, Hale said, including the purchase of Thomson. And, repeating a call made by Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Hale called on Congress to pass the supplemental “by spring — so we can meet all the needs of our troops.”

That amounts to a dare to congressional Republicans. If you try to filibuster money for closing Guantanamo, you’ll be denying the troops in the field with the money they need to succeed in Afghanistan. The Bush administration repeatedly denounced budgetary obstructionism on the war by congressional Democrats — especially during the summer of 2007 when they tried to stop the Iraq surge — as a slight to the troops. Gates was in his same chair for some of that, and now he’s basically saying he’s not afraid to say the same thing to the GOP. Their move.

Robert Gates repeated at his Pentagon press conference that he wants to give troops at war at least two years’ time at home for every year deployed. But there’s a new surge going on in Afghanistan, and accordingly, the plan takes a back seat to that. So when does it happen? Vice Adm. Steven Stanley, the Pentagon’s director for force structuring, doesn’t know either. But he said troops returning from Iraq will be the first to reap the benefits.

In response to a question at a Pentagon briefing just now, Stanley said the real answer lies with the Army and Marine Corps. But he said that it was the Pentagon’s desire that forces returning from Iraq “start a two-year dwell period.” He wasn’t really clear about whether that meant the troops rotating out for the combat-troop drawdown that ends in August or the total withdrawal that ends in December 2011. But since Adm. Michael Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said last month that it’ll probably be “two years” before the expanded dwell time kicks in, we can probably assume Stanley means the final component of troops returning from Iraq in 2011 will be the ones who begin the new, longer dwell period.

See this guy? Marine Corps Maj. Gen. David Heinz? He’s the program manager for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, a program plagued by cost overruns. Robert Gates, the secretary of defense, just fired him.

One reporter called it a “bombshell” in a still-ongoing press briefing. But Gates canceled the Air Force’s F-22 fighter jet in favor of making the JSF the replacement jet, as, among other reasons, it’s operable across both the Navy and the Air Force. But defense reformers have pointed to the JSF’s ballooning costs as similarly problematic. Gates just said that the program’s coming under fiscal control. But he said he couldn’t put the program back in order “without people being held accountable.” So says a defense secretary who two years ago fired the entire leadership of the Air Force over a nuclear weapons mishap. If there’s a theme to Gates’ tenure at the Pentagon, he said, it’s that “when things go wrong, people will be held accountable.”

Unless I misunderstood Gates, Heinz’s deputy, Air Force Maj. Gen. C.D. Moore, will head up the F-35 program office for the time being.

Update, 1:49 p.m.: I think I did misunderstand Gates. Pressed on who takes over the program, Gates demurred, saying an announcement is forthcoming.

Update 2, 1:55 p.m.: Don’t miss Noah Shachtman’s detailed post on Gates’ JSF bombshell.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Adm. Michael Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have just begun their Pentagon budget and QDR press briefings. Here’s what they’re asking Congress to approve for the next year: $548.9 billion for the so-called base budget next year, excluding the cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, which Gates said reflects “realism with regard to risk, realism with regard to resources” and “plausible real-world scenarios, potential threats and adversaries.” But if you read my QDR preview, you knew all that. “The wars we fight are seldom the wars we planned,” Gates said.

So for next year’s war request, Gates wants $159.3 billion. But that’s not all: for the “extended surge,” he wants a $33 billion supplemental to pay for the extra 30,000 troops. That’s technically part of this year’s budget request. “I will be asking the Congress to enact the supplemental by the spring,” Gates said.

That’s $741.2 billion to be spent on the Pentagon over the next year, if you’re counting. Compare that to last year’s total $663 billion request.

From The Washington Post’s budget breakdown-ery:

The FBI will get an additional $145 million to boost its national security efforts and the Justice Department’s National Security Division will receive $100 million more to protect against terrorist threats and cyber attacks, according to President Obama’s proposed budget.

The White House is allotting $73 million for the transfer and prosecution of nearly 200 detainees remaining at the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, which the president has pledged to close.

Bad news for those hoping to stop Obama’s increased emphasis on the civilian and law-enforcement elements of national security.

Speaking of. According to the Servicemembers Legal Defense Fund’s blog:

We expect the Department of Defense to announce at the Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on Feb. 2 that ”Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” discharges were down by almost 30 percent last year. Indeed, the department may release the discharge numbers before the hearing. As we alerted you here last week, the new trend is indeed welcoming news, but it is not a substitute for full repeal in 2010.

My emphasis. Crazy, right? At a time of two wars and an “extended surge” in Afghanistan, the Obama administration doesn’t want to throw qualified service personnel out the door just because they’re gay!

This is one weird comment on President Obama’s proposed repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” from House GOP leader John Boehner (R-Ohio):

Boehner predicted that any action on “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” would lead to a “divisive debate” and “do nothing more than distract the real debate that should occur here about helping to get our economy going again and getting American people back to work.“

That’s via VetVoice’s Richard Allen Smith, who observes:

Repealing DADT would allow qualified gay troops who have been discharged as a result of the failed, discriminatory policy to return to work.  It would also allow qualified gay Americans who have heard the call to service in uniform to serve their country without sacrificing their integrity.

As best I can tell, either John Boehner doesn’t really want Americans to have jobs in a field in which they are qualified to serve, he doesn’t think gays are real Americans, or he doesn’t think they are people.

Tomorrow afternoon, Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, will testify before the Senate Armed Services Committee about repealing the ban on gay servicemembers serving openly.

Ever since Dennis Blair, the director of national intelligence, told a congressional panel two weeks ago that he was cut out of the loop on reading would-be Christmas bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab his Miranda rights, it’s been a circus. Sens. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine) plan to introduce a bill requiring the intelligence and homeland security agencies to have a say in any future Mirandization decision for a foreign terror suspect captured in the United States. Just yesterday, Michael Hayden, Bush’s final CIA director, called Mirandizing Abdulmutallab the latest in a line of alleged failures of leadership on counterterrorism from the Obama administration.

But now the administration is painting a different picture. Both Blair and FBI Director Robert Mueller presented the decision to Mirandize Abdulmutallab as an ad-hoc one made by the FBI special agent on the scene at the Detroit airport when Northwest Airlines Flight 253 landed with the suspect subdued. But maybe not, reports the Los Angeles Times:

The decision to advise the accused Christmas Day attacker of his right to remain silent was made after teleconferences involving at least four government agencies — and only after Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab had stopped talking to authorities, according to knowledgeable law enforcement officials.

Among those involved in the hastily called teleconferences were representatives from the Justice Department and the FBI, along with officials from the State Department and the CIA.

“It was a [law enforcement] community-wide conference, and they discussed a number of things,” one source said on condition of anonymity. “That’s when decisions were made on which course was going to proceed, to Mirandize him or otherwise.”

Whether or not that’s true, it’s consistent with the timeline of Blair’s and Mueller’s testimony — that the interrogation proceeded along the FBI’s timetable, except the agents later put a conference call together to strategize. Blair wasn’t in on it if so. But that says more about Blair’s position in the Obama administration than it does about the administration itself.

Again, this may not be true. Attorney General Eric Holder will undoubtedly have to answer questions about it from Congress.

If you didn’t get enough reporting and analysis on the Pentagon’s master planning document, the Quadrennial Defense Review, from my preview piece on Friday, today is your day. This afternoon, Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Admiral Michael Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in a briefing for reporters, will unveil the so-called QDR alongside next year’s Pentagon budget request. But if you were hanging around the internet this weekend, you already know what the QDR says.

That’s because Andrew Exum, a defense analyst at the Center for a New American Security, posted the final version of the QDR on Saturday. That led to a series of posts from Robert Farley of the University of Kentucky and (ahem) myself, on my personal blog, here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here, digesting its importance. By the time Gates and Mullen present, you’ll already know what the document is about: reorienting defense around the fights we’re in and the threats we presently face and not some futuristic vision of warfare; robust collective security and multilateralism; and helicopters, helicopters, helicopters. There’s a lot about including cybersecurity in our conception of defense — in fact, as much about cybersecurity as about conventional warfare! — and the rationale for that is adequately demonstrated by the fact that you can, by now, argue that the QDR is Old News.

(photo by Paul Keller)

Let me start off by saying I don’t hold any particular brief for Scott Horton, although I was impressed with his recent Harper’s report into some dubious 2006 suicides at Guantanamo Bay. But Jack Shafer’s attempt at refuting Horton is unpersuasive. This, for instance:

[I]f you were going to torture prisoners to the point of death in interrogations, would you really draw three prisoners from the same cell block, inside the same hour, for that punishment? It would make more sense to torture one to death, cover up that murder, and after a decent interval proceed with the gained information to torture the second prisoner to death.

That assumes way too much rationality, I think we can all agree. If you’re killing detainees, maybe you’re not thinking everything through, and maybe the long history of impunity at Guantanamo — beatings, prolonged isolation, etc — on some level you don’t think you need to think everything through. Shafer also assumes that interrogations were ongoing in July 2006, despite the lack of influx of new detainees and the near-halt to interrogation operations by 2005. (You can read pieces in the New Yorker by Jane Mayer in July 2005 and me in TNR in August 2005 for more on that.) In fairness, Horton suggests that the possibly-concealed detention facility he dubs “Camp No” (after what his sources say their shorthand for the thing-that-might-have-been was) might have been used for interrogations as well, possibly on the June 9 timeline, and that should have jumped out at me earlier as dubious.

I’m not saying the thing happened the way Horton said it did, because I don’t know. I’ve interviewed guards at Guantanamo and heard their frustrations, to the point where I was kind of shocked there weren’t more severe beatings at the hands of 19 year olds who have cocktails of excrement thrown at them. Obviously I’m not excusing any such beatings; I’m just saying that when someone is given responsibility over other people in an environment of legal impunity, standards of acceptable behavior can slip very fast. That’s just human nature.

Shafer also premises his piece on the idea that Horton “proved” his case, which is not how I read Horton’s article. Like with much investigative work, Horton cobbled together a case for further investigation, pulling together information that demands additional inquiry. By his standards — undue deference to knowledgeable officials-turned-whistleblowers, clashes with the “official record,” “ignoring facts and statements collected by the government” — Dana Priest didn’t “prove” the CIA’s black sites exist, either.

Finally, there’s this:

But maybe the CIA is capable of such a crime and the entire U.S. government—across two administrations—is willing to devote its energies to a cover-up.

That’s just credulous. If you call it a “cover-up,” then sure, people will take it to be unserious and conspiratorial. But think of all of the unanswered questions around torture that Eric Holder’s torture inquiry won’t get at. What was the relationship between contract psychiatrists Bruce Jessen and James Mitchell and the CIA ahead of their 2001 contract for torture? How did the CIA know to tap those two for the basis for its torture programs? How many black sites did the CIA maintain, and for how long? How long, and for what purpose, did the CIA maintain a seperate facility at Guantanamo (as Shafer concedes)? And on and on. Shafer’s piece would make a lot more sense if we didn’t go through five years of revelations about torture — but maybe then he wouldn’t have written this in the first place.

I should say that I haven’t read the First Things blog posts Shafer hat-tips. I’ll read them today; maybe they’ll convince me Horton messed up.

For a one-stop compendium of how the prospects for trying Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in New York City for his role in 9/11 have deteriorated, ProPublica’s Dafna Linzer has you covered. What remains interesting: There has yet to be any effort by any New Yorker skeptical of holding the trial in Manhattan to stop KSM’s criminal trial. The objection is the venue.

One dissent from the New Yorker chorus of KSM panic: Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.), who argued today that New Yorkers are looking weak by biting their nails over KSM.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Michael Mullen (Oscar Matatquin/ZUMA Press)

President Obama announced in his State of the Union address that national security programs would not be subject to his proposed spending freeze. But that hasn’t stopped Pentagon officials from placing what they consider to be outdated military programs in the budgetary icebox.

In its master planning document for the medium-term defense outlook, known as the Quadrennial Defense Review, the Pentagon will announce cuts to some Navy and Air Force programs. The Pentagon will not purchase any more of the costly C-17 transport aircraft for the Air Force. It will delay purchase of the Navy’s LCC command ship. It will cancel production of the Navy’s planned CG(X) cruiser. And it will contend that these steps and others are necessary for reorienting the U.S.’s defense posture around the wars the U.S. is fighting now and the threats it presently faces.

Image by: Matt Mahurin

According to a knowledgeable Defense official who requested anonymity, the cuts in the QDR will not be as extensive as the ones announced in last year’s Pentagon budget. Last spring, Defense Secretary Robert Gates ended several persistent, expensive and underutilized or unproven defense systems like the F-22 fighter jet and the Army’s Future Combat Systems vehicle, steps lauded by defense reformers and the subject of a tough but successful congressional fight. Those cuts “created the space for the QDR to focus on areas of reinvestment,” the Defense official told TWI.

The QDR is scheduled to be unveiled on Monday. Gates and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Michael Mullen, will testify before the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday about both the QDR and the fiscal 2011 defense budget, the first budget guided by the new document. An early draft of the QDR that leaked to Defense News and InsideDefense on Wednesday did not identify the three systems as slated for cuts, and the Pentagon official said the final document will change substantially from the version that leaked.

Delaying production of the LCC and canceling the CG(X) would probably not “equal a big cost savings,” said Laicie Olson, a defense analyst at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, since it is unclear how much replacing those systems with different ones would cost. But ending the C-17, manufactured by Boeing, would be a “huge cost saving,” she said, representing an estimated $2.5 billion — that is, if the administration can persuade Congress to stop authorizing the purchase of a plane that provides about 30,000 jobs in more than 40 states.

In any event, the budget request the Obama administration will send to Congress next week is expected to total $740 billion when factoring in the cost of sending 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan, up from $663 billion last year. But when not factoring in the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Pentagon budget is expected to grow by 2 percent over last year, or about the rate of inflation.

Both the QDR and the anticipated cuts reflect the document’s reorientation of Pentagon thinking, planning and budgetary decisions toward immediate and manifested threats over the next four years — principally the U.S. combat mission in Afghanistan, which the leaked draft anticipates continuing throughout the four-year life of the QDR — and away from remote or hypothetical ones. The 2010 document abandons a construct of its predecessors that instructs the military to prepare to fight two simultaneous conventional wars, the result of painful experience fighting two simultaneous unconventional wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that earlier QDRs did not envision.

Rather than instruct the military to prepare for particular conflicts against particular enemies, the 2010 QDR will instruct it instead to defend against demonstrated enemy capabilities and to support specific missions. Those missions include supporting civilian authorities, improving cyberspace capabilities and performing counterinsurgency, counterterrorism and stability operations — the first time a QDR has embraced these once-marginal functions as core Pentagon capabilities. It instructs the military to deter, counter and defeat weapons of mass destruction and “anti-access capabilities” possessed by adversaries, like missiles and cyber defenses that inhibit the U.S.’s ability to project its military power. And the document urges the military to increase its supply and use of remotely piloted vehicles like the drones used by the Air Force in Afghanistan.

“This QDR focuses on the wars we are actually fighting, not the wars we sometimes wished we were fighting,” the official said, adding that a “hypothetical calculus” like the abandoned two-wars concept that did not focus on specific capabilities had “done far more harm than good.”

In particular, the QDR instructs the military to counter “ballistic missiles, anti-satellite capabilities and other systems” that adversaries can use to deter the U.S., the Pentagon official previewed. While it does not call out particular enemies and focuses instead on the capabilities they might possess, “we argue that the proliferation of some of these things to non-state actors will also magnify the problem — think Hezbollah using anti-ship missiles in 2006” during its war with Israel, the official said.

The QDR also emphasizes that military forces require “seamless integration” with a “range of civilian and military partners,” both from within the civilian sectors of the U.S. government and across the international community. But Raymond Pritchett, one of the leading naval bloggers, said that delaying the LCC command ship, a platform that allows several militaries to network together aboard essentially a floating headquarters, appeared at odds with the broader approach. “The command ship is a big deal,” Pritchett said. “If your stated strategic direction is partnership with other countries, the last thing you want to do is get rid of a platform that brings all those capabilities together.” He worried that delaying the LCC indicated that “the Navy is disconnected from strategy.” But some contend that the Navy’s advanced communications infrastructure means the LCC is no longer required for the Navy to operate alongside partner militaries.

By contrast, Pritchett saw the cancellation of the CG(X) as an inevitability that will cause the Navy to redesign its cruisers and destroyers into a single ship class. “From the perspective of defense reform, it’s a good thing, standardized to one hull,” he said.

Whether Congress will accept the cuts is an open question. The C-17 transport plane has limited utility in a war like Afghanistan, since the plane is too big for most of the country’s available landing space, but the plane has a lot of legislative allies. “They’ve tried to cut the C-17 before, and it hasn’t worked. They can’t get the cut through Congress,” Olson said. “As far as delays, that’s usually easier to get through. But those 30,000 jobs are going to be a kicker.”

Similarly, the Pentagon is preparing for a struggle with the Hill and the press about the anticipated cuts — and the focus of the QDR itself. Emphasizing the need to counter threatening capabilities rather than specific enemies opens the administration up to the political argument that it is neglecting particular U.S. adversaries. Monday and Tuesday will be filled with extensive press briefings, think-tank lectures and congressional testimony from Gates, Mullen and Michele Flournoy, the undersecretary of defense for policy, whose subordinates conducted the QDR process.

“We’ll take some hits for not having a bumper-sticker force planning construct, but screw it,” the Pentagon official said. “The world is complicated.”

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the chairwoman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, has released a letter she sent to President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder asking them to reconsider trying Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the architect of the 9/11 attacks, in Manhattan. Significantly, Feinstein urged Obama and Holder to move “his trial to a less prominent, less costly, and equally secure location” — not abandon KSM’s civilian trial and indict him in a military commission, as several prominent Republicans want.

But Feinstein made a more alarming argument to Obama and Holder. “Without getting into classified details, I believe we should view the attempted Christmas Day plot as a continuation, not an end, of plots to strike the United States by al-Qa’ida and its affiliates,” Feinstein wrote. That sounds a lot like Feinstein has seen intelligence suggesting that there are active plans under way by al-Qaeda or its franchises to hit the U.S. domestically.

Feinstein’s full letter is after the jump.

January 29, 2010

The President
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue
Washington, D.C. 20500

Dear Mr. President:

I urge you to reconsider the decision to bring 9/11 terrorist mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to justice in New York City.

First, the concerns of New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and other local government officials should be taken seriously. The mayor’s concerns, raised earlier this week in a departure from his initial views, focused on the costs associated with the trial and the burdens on residents and businesses in Lower Manhattan. New York City could incur security costs of more than $200 million annually on security for the trial; Mayor Bloomberg cited a figure this week as high as a billion dollars overall. While the federal courthouse planned for use is extremely secure, the additional precautions that would be necessary to protect the surrounding areas could overburden law enforcement and prove an unnecessary burden on federal, state, and local governments. Reportedly, local police estimate that more than 2,000 checkpoints would need to be installed around Lower Manhattan for trial security.

Second, the terrorist threat to the United States remains high. Without getting into classified details, I believe we should view the attempted Christmas Day plot as a continuation, not an end, of plots to strike the United States by al-Qa’ida and its affiliates. Moreover, New York City has been a high-priority target since at least the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993. The trial of the most significant terrorist in custody would add to the threat.

To be clear, I have great respect for the professionalism and sophistication of the intelligence and national security capabilities of both the federal government and the New York Police Department. Our adversaries are capable and adaptive, however, and I believe holding this trial in Manhattan makes their interest in a terrorist attack even stronger.

Third, setting the trial in New York City, blocks away from Ground Zero of the 9/11 attacks, would only heighten media and public attention. We know from his conduct during pre-trial proceedings at Guantanamo that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is seeking to turn the trial into a venue for spreading his twisted views. We do not need to allow him to spew hatred to a larger audience and attempt to radicalize more future terrorists.

The bottom line is that decisions over the trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed should be made with consideration of the views of local governments, the security involved, and the costs. You have the flexibility to move this trial to a less prominent, less costly, and equally secure location. In my view, trying Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in New York City presents an avoidable danger, very large costs, and undue burdens on the city.

Thank you for considering my views. I look forward to continuing to work with you on this and many other issues.

Sincerely,

Dianne Feinstein
Chairman

cc: The Honorable Eric Holder, Attorney General
Members, Senate Select Committee on Intelligence

Under a new policy announced today by CIA director Leon Panetta, an intelligence officer can’t be promoted to the agency’s highest rank — the Senior Intelligence Service — without a demonstrated proficiency in a foreign language. From a CIA release:

While many senior Agency officers have tested proficient in a foreign language over the course of their careers, some have not kept their skills current. Under the new policy, promotions to SIS for most analysts and operations officers will be contingent on demonstrating foreign language competency. If an officer is promoted to SIS and does not meet the foreign language requirement within one year, he or she will return to their previous, lower grade. This is a powerful incentive to maintain and improve skills critical to the Agency’s global mission. Languages play a key role in the CIA’s work at all career levels.

“The stricter requirement for SIS promotion,” said Panetta, “is meant to ensure that leadership on this vital initiative comes from the executive level. With an unwavering commitment from SIS officers—to both lead by example and to support language proficiency at all levels—we will reach not only our language goals, but our ultimate objective: an Agency that is better positioned to protect our nation in the years ahead.”

Some conservatives are taking heart that New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg had second thoughts about trying 9/11 architect Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in Manhattan. But Bloomberg doesn’t want what they want, which is for KSM not to be tried in civilian court. If the trial occurs in some other federal venue, that wouldn’t bother most liberals and would bother many conservatives.

The Washington Post points out that the Obama administration is running out of options for closing Guantanamo. Too true — it needs about a $150 million appropriation to buy the Thomson Corrections Center if it wants GTMO shut down. So the question becomes which must-pass bill will be the vehicle for that funding. The Afghanistan war supplemental? The overall defense budget?

When Osama bin Laden is so desperate for international support that he’ll start making an environmentalist case against the United States, something is going very right. Still, Get Energy Smart Now is trying to stop the stupidity before it starts:

Turning the world back to the 12th century, including killing off perhaps 95 percent or so of the world’s population supportable without modern technology and with women suppressed without health care (dying in child birth), might well actually address “climate change” in an incredibly dystopian and immoral fashion. (Oops, moral in your distorted lens on the world.) …

That bin Laden is able to, via his distorted lens, gain a glimpse of reality and understand that climate change is a serious issue meriting attention doesn’t suddenly make climate change unreal even though there will be those who seize on this to say things like “bin Laden is against it, therefore I’m for it …”

The path “to stop” climate change is not to “bring the wheels of the American economy” to a halt, but to turn those wheels toward the creation of a clean-energy future … to help Saudi Arabia turn itself into the “Saudi Arabia of Solar Power” … to aid Afghanis prosper with micro-hydro and wind power and efficient lighting … to tap geothermal power in nation’s around the world …

Robert Gates vs. John McCain! Decency vs. bigotry! National security vs. … well, bigotry!

The Senate Armed Services Committee was probably always going to get into discussing President Obama’s call to get rid of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” during its Tuesday hearing with the defense secretary about next year’s proposed defense budget. But just now the committee officially added the subject to its calendar. A shame that Rep. Joe Sestak (D-Pa.) can’t attend.

It comes in the course of a good Laura Rozen story about the differences in style and results between embattled Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair and CIA Director Leon Panetta:

Paul Pillar, a former senior CIA official and National Intelligence Council senior officer, said it’s no surprise that Panetta turned out to be a savvy inside player, given his “Washington street experience.”

But such analysis “overstresses the men and the personalities,” Pillar said. “That is to say, it misses some of the intractable illogic of the DNI position.” A position, he said, that “never had the full authority to move personnel around” or budgetary authority over the 16 intelligence agencies the DNI nominally oversees.

Wait, you mean not everything in politics or policy is reducible to a clash of personalities? Structures, institutions and their interplay determine a great deal about governance? That’s crazy!

NATO’s major diplomats and other assorted friends are in London right now to reinforce their commitment to the post-Taliban government in Afghanistan headed by Hamid Karzai. The so-called London Conference (following on the 2011 Bonn Conference) has just issued its communique, essentially a document outlining political, security, economic and diplomatic goals and the commitment of the signatories to achieving them (and funding them). This part jumped out at me.

Conference Participants welcomed the shared commitment to create the conditions to allow for transition as rapidly as possible. This is with a view to a number of provinces transitioning to ANSF lead, providing conditions are met, by late 2010/early 2011, with ISAF moving to a supporting role within those provinces. Conference Participants welcomed the intention to establish a process among the Government of Afghanistan, ISAF and other key international partners to assess progress and monitor in areas other than security that influence transition.

That’s the first indication I’ve seen that any security transition to Afghan control will occur before President Obama’s “strategic inflection point” of July 2011. This will probably occur in the more-secure provinces of Afghanistan first, and not the restive south and east, but still. The document also supports a goal of expanding the Afghan National Army and Police to 305,600 men-in-uniform by October 2011. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the NATO commander in Afghanistan, thinks the total ideal size for the two forces is 400,000, but he’s testified that his preference is the fastest realistic possible growth in quality rather than a static quota.