Spencer Ackerman

I wasn’t sure that New START actually would have died when Sen. Kyl argued today against voting on it during the lame-duck. But this statement from Vice President Biden makes me think it’s lights-out.

Failure to pass the New START Treaty this year would endanger our national security. Without ratification of this Treaty, we will have no Americans on the ground to inspect Russia’s nuclear activities, no verification regime to track Russia’s strategic nuclear arsenal, less cooperation between the two nations that account for 90 percent of the world’s nuclear weapons, and no verified nuclear reductions. The New START treaty is a fundamental part of our relationship with Russia, which has been critical to our ability to supply our troops in Afghanistan and to impose and enforce strong sanctions on the Iranian government.

As I tweeted and wrote for Danger Room today, the incoming chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Rep. Buck McKeon, briefly argued in a speech today that Congress should “reaffirm — in statute — the Authorization to Use Military Force of 2011.” To expand on that: McKeon mentioned the AUMF in the context of detainee policy — that is, to keep terrorism detainees out of federal courts. But it clearly goes beyond that. Here’s what a McKeon aide told me.

Not only were there F-35s traded for a settlement freeze, the U.S. has agreed not to recognize declared preliminary Palestinian statehood for the second time in 20 years.

So can the Obama administration manage to reach a decision more craven than this one? According to the Washington Post, the months-long internal administration deadlock over trying Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and the other 9/11 co-conspirators has resulted in a decision: apoplexy. No trying them in federal courts in New York; no trying them at Guantanamo Bay in a military commission. Just… nothing.

Senator Lindsey Graham — a reasonable guy! — possesses such magical thinking about what a war with Iran would accomplish.

Really good New York Times piece on WikiLeaked accounts of private security contractors. And while it’s not the main thrust of the piece, the following section shows how the murky legal rules and chain-of-command situation in Iraq worked to the contractors’ detriment as well as their benefit: The threats were not limited to insurgents, the [...]

It would be quite an irony if the chief counterinsurgent prosecuted a hit-em-n-quit-em campaign that helped convince the Taliban that enough is enough. How conventional!

The State Department’s $10 billion, five-year contract with private security firms is finally out. Guess who’s still a part of it?

The Iraqi Interior Ministry essentially de-certifying 410 Anbar Awakening fighters whom the U.S. turned into police officers. The Awakening vets never graduated from any police academy, and that’s all the pretext the ministry evidently needs.

Here I was, set to write a long post about the new Woodward book excerpts, when Gulliver distills my intended point in a tweet:

Does not compute: if we could “absorb” another 9/11, why are we wasting $70B/yr on war that won’t prevent it anyway?