Found at Starbucks: The Pentagon's Papers

[KC]

Found at Starbucks: The Pentagon's Papers

March 31, 2004


As most of America slept early last Sunday morning, the Bush Administration hustled and bustled to prepare for the Sunday morning talk shows –

snip

Condi Rice was not scheduled to appear until prime time, when she would make a star appearance on CBS' '60 Minutes' – the last in a long line of media appearances that caused 9/11 Commissioner Richard Ben Veniste to quip that “Condi Rice has appeared everywhere but at my local Starbucks.”

Well, others in the Bush administration did, apparently, make an appearance at the local Starbucks. And as the Washington Post reports today, one of them – obviously readying himself to prep Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld – left his notes on the table. Talking points, hand-written notes on spin tactics, and a hand-drawn map to the Secretary's house were found by a resident of DuPont Circle, who made them available to the Center for American Progress. The name of said resident is being withheld at his request,

snip


Download them in .pdf format here:


http://www.americanprogress.org/site/pp.asp?c=biJRJ8OVF&b=42125

[Catfight]

1. Repugs like to break into computers to get their stuff. ...

Maybe this wasn't an accident at all, maybe people are jumping ship to save the country we all love from the bullies running it.

[sniffa]

2. pass it on.

seriousLy.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x1316883

[John_H]

3. Rumsfeld: "This thing will go away soon"

[ramapo]

4. Somebody's in trouble

I doubt these mistakes are tolerated in the WH.

[zbdent]

5. A number of years back, Rush claimed that the entire Democratic party

plan of attack was "left at a bar" by a certain unnamed Massachusetts Senator known for drinking . . .

[The_Gopher]

6. Their arrogance is trumped only by their incompetence. n/t

[gandalf]

7. Misinformation?

Perhaps it was planted there.

[KittyWampus]

8. Center For American Progress Is A Great Asset! Hope Democrats Use It

[JHB]

9. Collossal self-serving spin!

For many years our strategy in dealing with terrorism was defense and law enforcement. We did some things like working on force protection, etc., but when Kobar Towers, USS Cole, East Africa Embassies were hit, we would send out FBI and look for people we extradite (sic), arrest and prosecute.

Politely ignoring the occasional cruise missile attack, predator drone surveillance, and hit-squad plans...

After 9/11 the president said this was war. That was a seminal, strategic insight

***sputter*** More like blindingly obvious position in the wake of that event.

and decision, the brilliance of which is reflected in the fact that it looks so obvious.

Bush is brilliant for doing the obvious? To everything, spin, spin, spin...

In fact it was not obvious because of our posture the many years before that, in which nobody said it was war. In fact, us officials avoided the term war and took particular care of addressing it as a law enforcement matter.

...and they were often criticized for even going that far. Before 9/11 Bush's present policy advisors loudly argued that the Clinton officials were inflating and overstating the threat posed by Bin Laden and Al Queda. Needless to say, in the 90's there was no political (or international) consensus for using overt military operations to deal with Al Queda, especially if it meant Republicans having to support Clinton.

We acted as if it were fundamentally a law enforcement problem. But we recognized as a military problem and we were treating it as war.

Something Bush had political and diplomatic carte blanche to do after such a dramatic attack, not before.

This had a lot of consequences. 1) if we're in a war, we are fighting terrorists in their state and non state sponsors (law enforcement, you're looking for an individual or individuals).

Yeah, it's not like law enforcement has any experience with hunting groups engaged in criminal enterprises.

In a war, the enemy is a collective -- this collective was unusual as it wasn't an army or nation state it was a network of terrorists with state and non-state sponsors.

...which actually sounds more like a law enforcement problem than a military one. Military problems tend to be pretty simple: engage and destroy the opposing force. It gets a lot messier when non-targets are mixed in with the targets.

We went about developing a strategy to fight a non-state network: domestic/international intel; financial, military, diplomatic

... which is pretty much what you have already with the "law enforcement" model, if you'd bothered using it.