Showing posts with label Eli Lake. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Eli Lake. Show all posts

Sunday, March 15, 2015

Or Intentional Deception?

March 15, 2015 Bloomberg.com , Eli Lake 0 Comments
U.S. Exaggerates Islamic State Casualties --Fog of War, Tactical Misleading

By Eli Lake and Josh Rogin, Mar. 13, 2015, Bloomberg.com

The war against the Islamic State has killed thousands of fighters and even some mid-level battlefield commanders, but the organization's senior leadership and nerve center remain largely untouched, according to U.S. military and intelligence officials.

These officials and other experts tracking the terror group tell us that the Islamic State's Shura and Sharia councils, the advisory bodies that help inform the major decisions of the group's leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, remain intact, notwithstanding one close call in November for Baghdadi. Although airstrikes and military campaigns have killed several regional administrators and designated “governors,” the Islamic State has quickly replaced them and maintains its command-and-control capabilities.

Read the full story:  www.bloombergview.com

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Wednesday, December 10, 2014

Hard to blame Bush nowadays

December 10, 2014 Bloomberg View , CIA 0 Comments
CIA Torture Report: Bush Was Kept In The Dark for Years

Josh Rogin and Eli Lake, Dec. 9, 2014, Bloomberg View

The White House also resisted CIA efforts to brief other cabinet officials in the beginning stages of the program, Senate Democratic aides said. The CIA acting general counsel at the time, John Rizzo, wrote in an internal agency e-mail that the White House had told the CIA not to brief cabinet officials in 2002 because they feared press leaks, but Rizzo said the White House’s clear implication was that if Secretary of State Colin Powell were aware of the details, “he would blow his stack.”

Read more: www.bloombergview.com

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Tuesday, September 30, 2014

Clapper under the bus

September 30, 2014 60 Minutes , Eli Lake 0 Comments
Why Obama Can’t Say His Spies Underestimated ISIS

Steve Kroft interviews President Obama
60 Minutes / CBS
By Eli Lake, Sept. 28, 2014, Thedailybeast.com

On 60 Minutes, the president faulted his spies for failing to predict the rise of ISIS. There’s one problem with that statement: The intelligence analysts did warn about the group.

Nearly eight months ago, some of President Obama’s senior intelligence officials were already warning that ISIS was on the move. In the beginning of 2014, ISIS fighters had defeated Iraqi forces in Fallujah, leading much of the U.S. intelligence community to assess they would try to take more of Iraq.

But in an interview that aired Sunday evening, the president told 60 Minutes that the rise of the group now proclaiming itself a caliphate in territory between Syria and Iraq caught the U.S. intelligence community off guard. Obama specifically blamed James Clapper, the current director of national intelligence: “Our head of the intelligence community, Jim Clapper, has acknowledged that, I think, they underestimated what had been taking place in Syria,” he said.

Reached by The Daily Beast after Obama’s interview aired, one former senior Pentagon official who worked closely on the threat posed by Sunni jihadists in Syria and Iraq was flabbergasted. “Either the president doesn’t read the intelligence he’s getting or he’s bullshitting,” the former official said.

Read the full story:  www.thedailybeast.com

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Monday, August 11, 2014

Maybe they won't notice!!

August 11, 2014 Blacks , Eli Lake 0 Comments
Democrats Pay Black Staffers 30% Less
By Eli Lake, Aug. 11, 2014, Thedailybeast.com

 Campaign staffers who are people of color routinely get paid less than their white counterparts, and are often given less glamorous jobs. How an antiquated understanding of race relations results in minority staffers getting the short shrift.

 If you’re a person of color hoping to get hired by a political campaign, here’s the ugly truth: You’ll probably get paid less than your white counterparts, if you’re even hired at all.

On both sides of the aisle, there is a racial pay gap in campaign politics. Asian, Black and Latino staffers are paid less than their white counterparts, according to an analysis by the New Organizing Institute.

For example, African-American staffers on Democratic campaigns were paid 70 cents for each dollar their white counterparts made. For Hispanic staffers in Democratic campaigns, the figure was 68 cents on the dollar.

And a recent study by PowerPAC+, funded by a major Democratic donor, revealed that less than 2 percent of spending by Democratic campaign committees during the past two election cycles went to firms owned by minorities.

Political operative Michael Gomez Daly worked on two congressional campaigns in 2012 with similar budgets. On one campaign, Daly, who describes himself as “a very light-skinned Hispanic,” was brought in as a field director, primarily for his skills as a Latino operative who could reach out to the Hispanic community. On the second campaign, where they did not know he was Hispanic, “I just came in as ‘Michael Daly,’ instead of ‘that Latino operative,’” he said. “Right off the bat they offered me twice the amount for the same job.”

 Most of the operatives interviewed for this article, all of whom have years of experience in campaign politics, said they had to make an early, conscious decision to avoid being pigeonholed as a specialist in minority outreach. For minority campaign staffers, they said, the path to enduring success lies in saying “no” to jobs like that early on in your career.

Read the full story:  www.thedailybeast.com

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Wednesday, April 23, 2014

FLASHBACK SADDAM'S WMD: NDI's Clapper--“an intensive effort to...move documentation & materials out of the country."

April 23, 2014 Air Force Lt. Gen. James R. Clapper , Defense Intelligence Agency 0 Comments
By Eli Lake, Jun. 4, 2010, The Washington Times

President Obama’s choice to be the next director of national intelligence supported the view that Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq sent weapons and documents to Syria in the weeks before the 2003 U.S. invasion.

Retired Air Force Lt. Gen. James R. Clapper, a former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency and current undersecretary of defense for intelligence, will be the next DNI. President Obama announced Gen. Clapper as his nominee Saturday, saying he must not fall victim to Washington politics.

He will replace retired Adm. Dennis Blair, who resigned after 16 months in the position following several disputes with other intelligence leaders and, in particular, the CIA.

Gen. Clapper’s selection is a rebuke to senior members of the congressional oversight committees who had said they hoped Mr. Obama would nominate a civilian as his top intelligence adviser and someone with whom the president shares a personal relationship.

Gen. Clapper will be the fourth director of national intelligence since the position was created in 2005 to oversee and coordinate all 16 independent intelligence agencies.

Two former DNIs, John Negroponte and Navy Adm. Mike McConnell, have said Congress needs to fix the law to give the director more authority over the budgets of the 16 intelligence agencies.

Gen. Clapper, according to one senior intelligence official, has argued inside the government that the secretary of defense had veto authority over the office of the DNI with regard to military intelligence budgets. Eighty-five percent of the intelligence budget goes to military or Pentagon programs, such as spy satellites and electronic eavesdropping.

Read the full story: www.washingtontimes.com

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