Government Executive - Authors - Adam Clark Estes

UN Sources Say Syrian Rebels — Not Assad — Used Sarin Gas

Adam Clark Estes, The Wire — Mon, 06 May 2013 10:46:00 -0400

A member of the United Nations commission of inquiry announced on a Swiss-Italian television show that they believe the Syrian rebels have used chemical weapons on Assad's troops. "Our investigators have been in neighboring countries interviewing victims, doctors and field hospitals and, according to their report of last week which I have seen, there are strong, concrete suspicions but not yet incontrovertible proof of the use of sarin gas, from the way the victims were treated," said Carla Del Ponte, a member of the commission. "This was use on the part of the opposition, the rebels, not by the government authorities."

Well, this complicates matters. It was just ten days ago that the United States shook its fist andofficially declared that chemical weapons were being used by the Assad regime against its own people. This indicated that the Syrian government had crossed the "red line" that Obama determined last year and opened the possibility of greater U.S. involvement. But if it was the other way around — if the good guys sprayed sarin gas on the bad guys? That makes assisting the rebels a much more complicated transaction. Chemical weapons are horrible, no doubt about that. And sarin gas is absolutely off limits, according to the Geneva Protocol, and with three reported uses in Syria, it's not like it was an accident. Also, chemical weapons are horrible.

Read more at The Atlantic Wire.

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Before Boston, the Tsarnaev Brothers Planned a Fourth of July Attack

Adam Clark Estes, The Wire — Fri, 03 May 2013 11:55:54 -0400

As more details of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's bedside interrogation leak out, we learned on Thursday night that the brothers originally planned a Fourth of July attack but built their bomb too quickly, leading them to consider another target. An information-rich and just published New York Time spiece explains a series of new details about the planning of the attacks. The paper's unnamed sources say that Dzhokhar revealed two days after the attack that he and his brother "considered suicide attacks and striking on the Fourth of July."

In fact, the reason that they didn't stage an attack on July 4 was because the pressure cooker bombs were so easy to make. The Times reports, "The brothers finished building the bombs in Tamerlan's apartment in Cambridge, Mass., faster than they anticipated, and so decided to accelerate their attack to the Boston Marathon on April 15, Patriots' Day in Massachusetts, from July."

Read more at The Atlantic Wire.

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The CIA Gave Karzai Bags Full of Cash for Over a Decade

Adam Clark Estes, The Wire — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 09:34:07 -0400

Afghan president Hamid Karzai has a sugar daddy, and its name is the Central Intelligence Agency. Or at least it had a sugar daddy. For over ten years, American spies greased Karzai's palms about once a month with suitcases, backpacks and even plastic grocery bags full of cash. And not those relatively worthless Afghanis either. According to a New York Times investigation, the CIA delivered tens of millions of dollars in cash right to Karzai's office. "We called it 'ghost money,' " Khalil Roman, Karzai's former chief of staff, told The Times. "It came in secret, and it left in secret."

Read the rest at TheAtlanticWire.com.

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Senate Passes Bill to End FAA Furloughs Just in Time to Fly Home

Adam Clark Estes, The Wire — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 22:05:24 -0400

In a marathon session before a weeklong recess, Senators finally found a way to agree on something Thursday night, when they passed a bill to end flight controller furloughs. Thanks to the sequester, the Federal Aviation Administration has to figure out a way to save $637 million before Sept. 30, so cuts must be made. The furloughs kicked in this week, leaving many airports short on air traffic controllers and contributing to thousands of delays. Then there's the safety risk on top of that. Big mess. However, the Senate's new bill would allow the FAA to move the $253 million it needs to avoid furloughs from its $400 million-strong new airport fund to make up the difference.

This is great news for travelers. And would you believe that people are actually saying nice things about the Senate? For once, the do-nothing Congress did something that will actually make people's lives better. They failed to do that last week, when a series of much-anticipated gun control measures fizzled following a confusing vote and filibuster. This earned the upper house a week's worth of lambasting. (Jon Stewart did it best.) Of course, the Senate's been irking Americans for a long time, which is part of the reason that the approval rating of Congress plummeted to its lowest level ever a few months ago.

But now that it's done its job, the Senate can sit back and smile for a second. The bill still must clear the House, where a vote's expected to take place on Friday. Thankfully, though, the Senators got their job done just in time to hop on planes bound for their home districts. America can breathe easier knowing they won't be stuck in airports for hours every time they want to fly. The gun thing is a done deal, though.

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CIA Added Tamerlan Tsarnaev to a Terrorist Watchlist 18 Months Ago

Adam Clark Estes, The Wire — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 08:40:00 -0400

The U.S. intelligence committee is already contradicting itself as the investigation into the Boston bombing unfolds. Turns out the CIA knew about one of the Tsarnaev brothers after all. In fact, the sleuths in Langley added Tamerlan Tsarnaev to a watchlist a full 18 months before the attack on the Boston marathon. The Associated Press broke the news on Wednesday night and explained, "The new disclosure was significant because officials have said the U.S. intelligence community had no information leading up to the April 15 bombings that killed three people and injured more than 260 others."

This latest detail clarifies a report from The Washington Post published just a couple hours before the AP's take. The Post says the CIA "took the step after Russian authorities contacted officials there in the fall of 2011 and raised concerns that Tamerlan Tsarnaev." Adding that all this happened "more than a year before the attack," the two updates paint a pretty troubling portrait of yet another U.S. government agency that failed to stop a terrorist attack. We already knew that the FBI investigated Tamerlan Tsarnaev about two years ago but decided that he was not a threat. Well, that was the wrong decision, especially since the Bureau was working with the same information from the Russian government as the CIA.

Read the rest at TheAtlanticWire.com.

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The Government's Throwing the Book at Lance Armstrong

Adam Clark Estes, The Wire — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 09:31:13 -0400

After much speculation, the Justice Department pulled back the curtain on its plan to recoup some of the dozens of millions of dollars that the government spent sponsoring confessed cheater Lance Armstrong. The filing contends that Armstrong was "unjustly enriched" during his time on the United States Postal Service Team. What does that phrase mean? It means that the (very broke) USPS paid Armstrong $17 million between 1998 and 2004, nearly half the total amount of $40 million it paid to sponsor the team. Now, the government doesn't just want its $17 million back. It wants "triple damages assessed by the jury," the Associated Press reports.

Perhaps not so obviously, Armstrong and his army of lawyers aren't going down without a fight. This isn't so obvious because Armstrong very publicly — can't get more public than Oprah — confessed to doping during his cycling career in the face of overwhelming evidence that he juiced his way to the top. However, the Armstrong defense doesn't have to prove that the cyclist didn't dope. It just has to prove that the USPS wasn't damaged by the doping. The Justice Department, meanwhile, aims to base its case on the fact that it's against the rules of cycling to use performance-enhancing drugs, and Armstrong not only broke those rules, he tried to cover it all up.

Read the rest at TheAtlanticWire.com.

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Feds Arrest Paul Kevin Curtis Over Ricin-Laced Letters

Adam Clark Estes, The Wire — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 09:14:07 -0400

Federal agents took a man from Corinth, Mississippi into custody on Wednesday evening under suspicion of sending letters covered in ricin to the president and Mississippi Sen. Roger Wicker. Citing an FBI bulletin, NBC News reports that the suspect's name is Paul Kevin Curtis, and anyone who's been following the story will immediately realize that the suspect's initials match those in the sign-off on both letters: "I am KC and I approve this message." Both letters also contain the phrase "to see a wrong and not expose it, is to become a silent partner to its continuance," and both were sent from Memphis, Tennessee on April 8, 2013.

Open and shut case right? We'll see. It's so far unclear if there's a harmful amount of ricin on the letters. To give the suspect the benefit of the doubt, one federal official told NBC News that the sender of the letters "may have stumbled onto something." We're not sure exactly what it means, but it sort of sounds like they're not ruling out the possibility that this person wasn't exactly a seasoned terrorist.

A few suspicious packages remain on Capitol Hill, and this is obviously the early stages of a longer investigation and, eventually, trial. One thing's for sure, though. If Paul Kevin Curtis is the guy, he's not the brightest crayon in the box for signing his real initials at the end of the letter. Then again, people want to get caught sometimes.

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North Korea Reportedly Just Moved Its Missiles a Little Closer to the U.S.

Adam Clark Estes, The Wire — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 11:51:26 -0400

A number of sources have told South Korea's Yonhap news agency that North Korea just moved its mid-range Musudan missile to the east coast of the country. That's towards the United States. But don't worry. It's towards a lot of other stuff, too, notably the Pacific Ocean where many of North Korea's failed missile tests have landed.

Before getting into the specifics of this latest provocation, let us remind you that the escalation of North Korea's threatening rhetoric is just that: threatening rhetoric. Kim Jong-Un and friends have been slinging increasingly threatening threats at the United States and allies (read: South Korea) for weeks now, and yet, we're not swimming in a river of fire and our waists are not broken, as Kim Jong-Un promised they would be.

Things get a little more worrisome when North Korea actually starts moving its arsenal around. According to Yonhap's sources, a Musudan missile made its way by train to the country's east coast early Thursday morning. Japan's Asahi Shimbun published similar reports, signaling that this is no false alarm. It's so far unclear if had been moved to the spot on the northeastern coast where North Korea has launched many (failed) missile launches in the past. But it's never a good sign to see North Korea translating its trash-talk into arming weapons.

Read more at The Atlantic Wire.

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As Kim Jong-Un Likens Nukes to 'Treasure,' U.S. Sends More Fighter Jets

Adam Clark Estes, The Wire — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 08:16:01 -0400

North Korea's smoldering conflict with the United States, South Korea and other Western nations took another twist on Sunday, when Kim Jong-Un called a rare party meeting. The plenary meeting of the Central Committee of the ruling Workers' Party included high-ranking government officials, including Kim Jong-Un himself, and set out to draw a new "new strategic line" to guide the country's politics. A big part of that plan involves beefing up its nuclear arsenal even more. A statement released after the meeting called North Korea's nuclear arsenal "the nation's life" and a "treasure" not worth trading "billions of dollars." In other words, they're not backing down any time soon.

The more notable fact about the event wasn't so much what was said, but simply the fact that it took place at all. The Central Committee hasn't held a plenary session since 1992, when the country agreed to cooperate with inspections conducted by the International Atomic Energy Administration (IAEA). North Korea denied access to inspectors for the next two years, when Kim Jong-Il agreed to halt the program in exchange for $5 million in humanitarian relief. But as we know all too well at this point, North Korea fired that program right back up, and things are now starting to get pretty hot in Pyongyang. That heat hit a new high on Saturday, when North Korea boldly mentioned entering a "state of war" with South Korea. "Time has come to stage a do-or-die final battle," said the government in a statement.

We wondered at the time how seriously to take the latest episode of sabre-rattling. The United States doesn't appear to be taking any chances. Apparently in response, the Air Force sent a fresh batch of the radar-dodging F-22 Raptor stealth fighter jets to the Osan Air Force base in South Korea. In a statement, U.S. military leaders said that North Korea "will achieve nothing by threats or provocations, which will only further isolate North Korea and undermine international efforts to ensure peace and stability in Northeast Asia."

Read the full story on The Atlantic Wire.

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The Official Story of Who Shot Bin Laden Has Given Way to a Media Feud

Adam Clark Estes, The Wire — Wed, 27 Mar 2013 09:33:39 -0400

"You really believe this story? Osama Bin Laden?" asks Chris Pratt in the action movie version of the Zero Dark Thirty trailer that's been tearing up March Madness commercial breaks over the last week. And if you looked at the CNN.com homepage Tuesday night, the network was raising the question again, except this time, it wasn't just Hollywood's interpretation of real-life events. This was the counter-history of the news:

CNN is challenging last month's widely read exclusive account of Bin Laden's death by veteran investigative reporter Phil Bronstein in Esquire : " The Man Who Killed Osama bin Laden. " Bronstein's story profiles "The Shooter," the member of Navy SEAL Team 6 who claims to have shot the world's most wanted man. It's a dramatic claim about a dramatic event, and the fact that conflicting accounts are emerging isn't a complete surprise. But the shadowy, sometimes schizophrenic and increasingly desperate struggle to figure out what really happened in Abbottabad the night of May 2, 2011, well, it's starting to get a little bit dirty.

Read the full story on The Atlantic Wire.

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Analysis: FCC Chairman's Resignation Is a Chance to Diversify the Administration

Adam Clark Estes, The Wire — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 09:34:27 -0400

Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission Julius Genachowski will announce his resignation on Friday, according to The Wall Street Journal's unnamed sources, and the hunt for his replacement is well underway.

Don't worry, though. There's no big scandal just a chance for Obama to make a bold move in what's the beginning of the end of his presidential appointments. Genachowski took over the telecommunications industry regulator in June 2009 and oversaw some pretty big challenges, like AT&T's failed takeover of T-Mobile. It's unclear why he chose to step down early — his term is up in July — but it appears to be an amicable departure on all fronts.

Now for the fun part: figuring out who gets to take over one of the more powerful regulatory bodies in the United States government. The Washington Post anticipated Genachowski's departure last week and reported that the White House was holding meetings with a number of likely candidates, like venture capitalist Tom Wheeler and assistant Commerce Secretary Larry Strickling. Oh great, you might be thinking, more old white men, just what what the Obama administration needs.

Or, Obama and his advisors could decide to pick somebody like law professor Cathy Sandoval, the first Latina Rhodes scholar and a former FCC offiical.

Read the rest at TheAtlanticWire.com.

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The Fort Hood Shooter Can't Dodge the Death Penalty

Adam Clark Estes, The Wire — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 09:21:56 -0400

An Army judge in Texas just made a somewhat unconventional ruling in the trial of Fort Hood shooter Maj. Nidal Hasan: She refused to let him plead guilty. Why? It would enable him to avoid execution. Apparently, the Army would not be satisfied to see this alleged mass murderer simply go to jail for a few decades. It appears the prosecution is out for blood.

The situation is a little bit dicey, when you think about it. After Hasan's lawyers made it very clear that Hasan would plead guilty in order to avoid the death penalty, Col. Tara Osborn made it very clear that that wasn't going to happen on Wednesday when she ruled out any guilty pleas. Since it's against Army rules to plead guilty to a capital offense, the defense abandoned its original plan of pleading guilty to 13 counts of premeditated murder and instead asked the court to allow Hasan to plead guilty to 13 counts of unpremeditated murder, a charge that does not carry the death penalty. On Wednesday, the judge said no way since that "would be the functional equivalent of pleading guilty to a capital offense." Ditto to pleading guilty to the 32 counts of attempted premeditated murder. That would complicate a not guilty plea to the murder charges.

This is a real "no mercy" sort of situation isn't it? However, the general public probably has little doubt whether Hasan was the one who ran around Fort Hood, Texas in 2009 shooting his fellow soldiers and screaming "Allah Akbar." Hasan is suspected of killing 13 people and 32 others, and it's become glaringly apparent that the Army is not going to give him a break in court. This lastest move is an especially powerful one on the judge's part. The United States military hasn't executed a prisoner since 1961, so one might say this is the trial of a generation. The Army intends to do it right.

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U.S. Ambassador Asks U.N. Colleagues to Stop Showing Up Drunk to Meetings

Adam Clark Estes, The Wire — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 17:00:41 -0500

The United Nations is a pretty fun place. The headquarters hosts all kinds of cultural events. Everyone's open-minded about the dress code. Delegates can even show up hammered to budget negotiations. Or at least they used to be able to.

At a General Assembly budget committee meeting on Monday, the United States ambassador for management and reform at the UN stood up to scold his colleagues for always showing up drunk to negotiations. "We make the modest proposal that the negotiating rooms should in future be an inebriation-free zone," said Joseph Torsella. "While my government is truly grateful for the strategic opportunities presented by some recent past practices, let's save the champagne for toasting the successful end of the session, and do some credit to the Fifth Committee’s reputation in the process."

This is apparently not a new problem. The budget committee meetings tend to run late into the night at this time of year, as delegates struggle to meet deadlines. Some diplomats spoke up after Torsella's very public shaming and said it's not uncommon for delegates to show up visibly drunk to negotiations.

We're not talking about cheerful, oops-I-had-a-glass-of-chardonnay-at-dinner drunk either. "There has always been a good and responsible tradition of a bit of alcohol improving a negotiation, but we're not talking about a delegate having a nip at the bar," one unnamed diplomat told the press, mentioning one incident where a delegate got so hammered that he barfed, though it's unclear where. Another explained, "On one occasion the note-taker who was meant to be recording the talks was so intoxicated he had to be replaced." One more unnamed diplomat said that delegates were showing up "falling down drunk."

Read the full story at The Atlantic Wire

(Image via Natalia Bratslavsky/Shutterstock.com)

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Guantanamo Guard Fires 'Non-lethal' Round at Prisoner

Adam Clark Estes, The Wire — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 16:02:36 -0500

In a news cycle already clogged with troubling reports from Guantanamo Bay arrives an even more troubling report: In January, a guard fired a "non-lethal" round at a prisoner. The military says it was just a ploy to win attention, a claim that makes a little less sense once you learn that the incident happened in Camp 6, the area reserved for cooperative captives where the government just spent $744,000 on renovations that included a soccer field for prisoners. While it's basically impossible to know what motivated the prisoner in question to act out and how exactly the guard decided to fire his weapon, this marks an unprecedented escalation of tension between Guantanamo officials, inmates and the lawyers who represent them. Only once before have Guantanamo prisoners reportedly been fired on but details of the incident were never confirmed.

Details about the so-called "use of firearm incident" are sketchy, but both sides have confirmed that an inmate caused trouble and a guard used his gun. We probably never would've known about it either if a group of lawyers for Guantanamo prisoners hadn't spoken up. "According to the narrative emerging from both sides, a detainee in the recreation yard had sought the attention of a tower guard who controlled a gate leading to the pathway back to the prison," reports The MIami Herald's Carol Rosenberg, who broke the story. "[Guantanamo spokesman Navy Capt. Robert] Durand said he tried to scale a fence, a violation of rules, but climbed down when the guard ordered him to do it." The prisoners' lawyers requested an investigation in a letter to Guantanamo commander Navy Rear Adm. John Smith Jr. but say they have not received a response.

Read more at The Atlantic Wire.

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Jack Lew and His Squiggly Signature Are Your New Treasury Secretary

Adam Clark Estes, The Wire — Thu, 28 Feb 2013 09:17:36 -0500

Everybody assumed that the Senate would confirm hard-working, navel-gazing Jack Lew as treasury secretary. And they just did. The real question is: Does Lew know what he's getting into? The first of three budget deadlines kicks in on Friday, and Lew has to take the lead on fixing the United States' substantial budget woes. Tim Geithner is surely thrilled to go on vacation instead.

Those Missing Drone Memos Are Now John Brennan's Worst Enemy

Adam Clark Estes — Wed, 27 Feb 2013 13:48:45 -0500

Now that Chuck Hagel's confirmation has gone off without a hitch (for the most part), it's John Brennan's turn to take the spotlight, and it look like those drone memos will be a real roadblock. We could've guessed as much a couple of weeks ago when a Justice Department "white paper" revealed details of how the Obama administration decides to kill American citizens in the war on terror. However, as the issue quietly hid in the shadow of Hagel's confirmation hearing, the neverending battle over the sequester and Seth MacFarlane's offensive Oscar performance, some senators still want to know why the Obama administration won't release all of the drone memos. The New York Times's Jeremy Peters reports that "Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, said Tuesday that he thought the confirmation process should continue to play out, and he indicated that he was willing to help delay it until Mr. Brennan answered further questions about drones." Sen. Rand Paul also wants answers.

As far as these drone memos are concerned, the Obama administration's been walking a fine line between actual transparency and appearing to be transparent. The White House won points after the Justice Department white paper leaked for making two legal opinions on the government's use of drones available to senators. The memos were only shown to the senators, though — no legislative aids, no drone experts, nobody — and only for a limited amount of time. (Just curious: Did somebody have to watch the senators read the documents so that they didn't take Instagram photos of them or anything? Probably…) The administration hoped that this would be enough to satisfy members of the Senate Intelligence Committee so that they'd give Brennan the green light. A vote is expected on Thursday.

Read more at The Atlantic Wire.

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'Zero Dark Thirty' Is Off the Hook with the Senate

Adam Clark Estes, The Wire — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 12:36:52 -0500

After failing to win all but one* of its Oscar nominations, Zero Dark Thirty's filmmakers got some good news on Monday, when the Senate Intelligence Committee dropped its investigation into the movie. It's been six weeks since a panel of senators lead by Diane Feinstein and John McCain opened the probeafter previously describing the film as "grossly inaccurate and misleading in its suggestion that torture resulted in information that led to the location of Osama bin Laden" and condemning "particularly graphic scenes of CIA officers torturing detainees." The investigation closed with much less bombast. A congressional aide confirmed to Reuters on Monday that the senators had indeed abandoned the inquiry and didn't offer any hints of their findings.

Now about that bad Oscars night. It was also Reuters that was quick to the trigger with the headline "Zero Dark Thirty fails at Oscars amid political fallout," after the film came up almost empty handed at the Academy Awards. Everybody's been wondering if the scrutiny from the Senate, not to mention the Defense Department and the Central Intelligence Agency, would hurt Zero Dark Thirty's chances at the industry's highest honor. Some critics thought that Zero Dark Thirty was already screwed when the nominations were announced. "Chalk up this year's nominations as a victory for the bullying power of the United States Senate and an undeserved loss for Kathryn Bigelow," wrote Los Angeles Times film critic Kenneth Tura, who called the film an "undeserved victim of politics" in January. Boal himself accused the politicians of using his movie as a "publicity platform."

Read more at The Atlantic Wire.

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Afghanistan Just Banned U.S. Troops from an Entire Province

Adam Clark Estes, The Wire — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 10:53:58 -0500

Afghanistan's National Security Council ordered all NATO and American troops out of the Wardak province on Sunday, following allegations that American Special Operations forces tortured and murdered locals. President Hamid Karzai explained at a meeting of the council on Sunday, "It became clear that armed individuals named as U.S. special force stationed in Wardak province engage in harassing, annoying, torturing and even murdering innocent people." Karzai's office reported one incident where a student went missing only to be found two days later when his "tortured body with throat cut was found two days later under a bridge." Another nine people "disappeared in an operation by this suspicious force." U.S. Forces-Afghanistan and the International Security Assistance Force said in a statement that it was investigating the allegations.

This could turn into another ugly scandal for the military but in the short term stands to compromise the large mission in Afghanistan. The Wardak province is a key area for protecting Kabul against attacks from the Taliban. As The New York Times explains, "If enforced, [the ban] would effectively exclude the American military's main source of offensive firepower from the area, which lies southwest of Kabul and is used by the Taliban as a staging ground for attacks on the city." It also doesn't bode well for the planned troop reduction, though Karzi's office says that local police will be able to handle things.

Read more at The Atlantic Wire.

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Arms Sales Are Down for the First Time in Decades

Adam Clark Estes, The Wire — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 09:29:29 -0500

The world's largest weapons manufacturers just saw the first decline in sales since the mid-1990s. Collectively, the top 100 arms manufacturers in the world saw $410 billion in sales in 2011, a five percent decline from the year before.

"Austerity policies and proposed and actual decreases in military expenditure as well as postponements in weapons programme procurement affected overall arms sales in North America and Western Europe," reported the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), a think tank that just released a report on global arms sales.

Read the full article at The Atlantic Wire.

(Image via Robert McLaughlin/Shutterstock.com)

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Hillary Clinton just quietly disbanded her presidential committee

Adam Clark Estes, The Wire — Tue, 05 Feb 2013 11:16:33 -0500

Don't read too far into this, but Hillary Clinton's 2008 presidential campaign organization, Hillary Clinton for President, has finally paid its debts and closed its doors. Documents filed with the Federal Election Committee (FEC) on Monday confirm as much, and the transfer of the old organization's leftover cash to a new organization, Friends of Hillary, make the transaction complete. At $102,797, the surplus funds are nothing to scoff at, but they're certainly a long ways off from the billion or so dollars Hillary would need for a full fledged presidential campaign in 2016. But please, before we go any further, let us remind you once again: Don't read too far into this. The fabled Hillary 2016 campaign is still a fable at this point and a fable without an ending at that.

That doesn't mean that Hillary's not up to some pretty curious fun, since she left her post at the helm of the State Department a few days ago. Presumably in the same motion as disbanding her old presidential committee, Hillary also launched a new website: www.hillaryclintonoffice.com. What a curious URL! Does this mean she's going to run for the nation's highest office in three years? Who knows. Twitter certainly though that was the obvious conclusion. After all, the news came just a couple of days after a new super PAC called "Ready for Hillary" launched its website and filed paperwork with the FEC. "Our purpose is simple: we are ready to work for Hillary to be president when she is ready to run," the super PAC's chairwoman Allida Black told the Center for Public Integrity. Black and Ready for Hillary are joined by the Hillary Clinton Super PAC, which was formed on January 10 in Iowa.

Read more at The Atlantic Wire.

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Where Does Sandy Aid Go from Here?

Adam Clark Estes, The Wire — Tue, 29 Jan 2013 11:16:00 -0500

As expected, the Senate passed a $50.5 billion aid package on Monday evening to help rebuild areas affected by Hurricane Sandy. With the $9.7 billion increase in national flood insurance that was passed earlier this month, Sandy victims now have $60.2 billion coming to their rescue. But who exactly gets all that money? And when?

Well, the next stop for the Sandy relief bill itself is obviously the president's desk. Obama is expected to sign it and will probably do so with a coy grin, since he literally got over 99 percent of what he asked for. (Obama's original budget request called for $60.4 billion in aid, which is only slightly more than the $60.2 billion in aid that Congress ended up passing.) But after the ink dries, things get a little complicated.

The Sandy Aid package must be divvied up between the completely devastated communities in coastal areas of New Jersey and New York, not to mention the less devastated parts of states like Maryland, Delaware and Connecticut. From a big picture perspective, some $50 billion will go towards disaster relief, while the remainder of the money will go towards mitigation -- that is, reducing the risk of a disaster like this happening again. Think infrastructure improvements, rather than an ultra powerful weather machine built by a mad scientist. Now because the original Obama proposal went through both the media's and the Republicans' gauntlet, some got the impression that the bill was "stuffed with pork." That was, however,not the case, and the final breakdown of aid dollars doesn't look too different from Obama's original breakdown.

President Obama does not want to talk about 2016

Adam Clark Estes, The Wire — Mon, 28 Jan 2013 14:16:20 -0500

On Sunday night, 60 Minutes' Steve Kroft sat down with President Obama and outgoing Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, neither of whom seem very interested in talking about the next election. If anything, it was a feel-good 30-minutes of chatting -- and a rare sight to see the two politicians in a joint interview. Niceties were exchanged, heads nodded, hands crossed. Barack wore blue. Hillary wore pink. And neither of them dared say a word about the next election.

That doesn't mean Kroft didn't ask. Pivoting gracefully on the president's praise for Hillary, Kroft asked, "What's the expiration on this endorsement." You can almost hear the sound of Obama's internet eye-rolling. "You know, Steve, I gotta tell you, the -- you guys in the press are incorrigible," said the president, whose vice president is eyeing the nomination. "I was literally inaugurated four days ago. And you're talking about elections four years from now."

So Kroft turns to Clinton. "Yeah, and I am, as you know, Steve, I am still secretary of state," said Clinton. "So I'm out of politics. And I'm forbidden from even hearing these questions." She could've just said, "Yeah, and I am, as you know, Steve, I am not running for office in 2016. I've said that several times now, okay?" Or, of course, she could've announced her candidacy! (Highly unlikely.) That would've been bad timing, though, because what followed were a bunch of somewhat serious questions about her Benghazi testimony -- She "deeply regrets what happened" -- and her health -- "It's great."

Read more at The Atlantic Wire.

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Cleared of wrongdoing, General Allen wants to get back to his old life

Adam Clark Estes, The Wire — Wed, 23 Jan 2013 14:45:13 -0500

Over two months after allegations surfaced that he'd carried on an inappropriate relationship with Jill Kelley, the Tampa socialite at the center of the Petraeus scandal, General John Allen is off the hook. The Pentagon's inspector general sent Allen, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, a nice letter last Friday that cleared him of wrongdoing after an investigation showed that he did not, in fact, violate military codes of conduct. He did send Kelley some emails that weren't exactly G-rated, though, as an unnamed officer with knowledge of the investigation told The Washington Post. "Some of the messages are not the sort of things you would print in a family newspaper," said the official. "But that doesn't mean he violated military regulations by sending and receiving them." Because hey, let's be honest. Even top-level military officials like to flirt on the Internet. That doesn't make them bad people, though.

It does make the scandal a little less juicy, which has kind of been the trend lately. It all started when The Seattle Times leaked the supposedly super scandalous shirtless photo -- alliteration, oh my! -- of the FBI agent who investigated a series of potentially abusive emails sent to Kelley back in mid-November. Turns out it was definitely not even regular scandalous but just a joke between friends. (It's kind of a funny photo, too.) Paula Broadwell, whose threatening emails to Kelley incited the FBI investigation, was unmasked soon thereafter as being an ambitious Beltway type with ambitions to run for office -- just like every other young professional in Washington DC. The scandal had clearly started to cool by the time that a letter from the former CIA director to retired Brig. Gen. James Shelton in which the Petraeus confessed that he had "screwed up royally" and how his wife was "once again demonstrating how incredibly fortunate [he] was to marry her."

Read more at The Atlantic Wire.

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AIG is thinking about suing the government for bailing it out

Adam Clark Estes, The Wire — Tue, 08 Jan 2013 10:59:04 -0500

It's been almost five years since AIG's stock dropped 60 percent in a day leaving the company doomed to failure, when Uncle Sam swooped in with $182 billion to rescue it. But AIG must have a short memory, because on Monday night news emerged that the insurance company is actually thinking about suing the U.S. government over the bailout that saved it. The board will discuss the idea with shareholders at a meeting on Wednesday.

It's not so much that AIG's mad the government bailed them out. (They wouldn't be around to be mad if it hadn't.) They just wish they'd done it a little bit differently. "The lawsuit does not argue that government help was not needed," The New York Times reports. "It contends that the onerous nature of the rescue -- the taking of what became a 92 percent stake in the company, the deal's high interest rates and the funneling of billions to the insurer's Wall Street clients -- deprived shareholders of tens of billions of dollars and violated the Fifth Amendment, which prohibits the taking of private property for 'public use, without just compensation.'" Does that kind of bad attitude count as "looking the gift horse in the mouth" or "biting the hand that feeds you?" Or both?

Read more at The Atlantic Wire.

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'Zero Dark Thirty' is now officially wrong about torture

Adam Clark Estes, CityLab — Thu, 20 Dec 2012 10:24:21 -0500

We already knew that Zero Dark Thirty messed up a couple of details about the bin Laden raid, but now, some senators would like the filmmakers to know they're straight up "incorrect." More specifically, Senators Dianne Feinstein, Carl Levin and John McCain wrote in a letter addressed to Michael Lynton, chairman and CEO of Sony Pictures, that "Zero Dark Thirty is factually inaccurate, and we believe that you have an obligation to state that the role of torture in the hunt for Usama Bin Laden is not based on the facts, but rather part of the film's fictional narrative." They go on to say that the film encourages the minority of Americans who favor torture as an intelligence gathering technique. "This is false," the letter reads. "We know that cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment of prisoners is an unreliable and highly ineffective means of gathering intelligence."

This is hardly the cut-and-dry issue the senators make it out to be, though. Ever since the initial details of what Glenn Greenwald called a White House "propaganda film," critics and pundits alike have been jousting over the scenes that depict torture. Mother Jones's Adam Serwer said as much as the senators' letter does about the film's potential for changing Americans' mind about torture. That is, if they think torture helped us find bin Laden, they'll probably think torture is a good thing. Greenwald said in a separate column that the film propagandizes the public to favorably view clear war crimes by the US government, based on pure falsehoods." (He loves the "p" word.) Critics of the critics said that torture happened, the film is fiction and, furthermore, most Americans haven't even seen the film, so who are we to say what they'll think. You can read more about these issues in our handy guide to the Zero Dark Thirty debate.