Results tagged “Jack Bauer” from SpyTalk

Monday Afternoon Quarterback

By Jeff Stein | November 24, 2008 2:53 PM | | Comments (0)

JACK'S BACK. Everybody watch "24" last night? For the vicariously torture-deprived, Season VII's two hour debut didn't disappoint: Bauer got his ear seriously singed by a demonic African warlord in the first hour. But that wasn't half as nausea-inducing as what's next for our counterterrorism hero: Being rendered into political pigskin and dragged before a congressional committee investigating his less sensitive interrogation techniques. Fingernail biter: Will our friend James Jay Carafano, who showcased cast members at a Heritage Foundation extravaganza in June 2006, get a cameo? . . .

SPEAKING OF TORTURE: With so much else going on in the spook world, not to mention the economy, I'd forgotten about the Justice Department's investigation of the CIA's destruction of its interrogation videotapes until it popped up near the bottom of Sunday's Washington Post story on possible Bush administration pardons. Federal prosecutor John Durham has been working on that for almost a year now, without any announced results.    The CIA official who reportedly ordered the tapes' destruction, Jose A. Rodriguez, retired in 2007 and last month joined National Interest Security Company, a government contractor in Fairfax, Va., with the responsibility to "improve the current value of intelligence and create new intelligence capabilities that integrate technology into new concepts of operations."    


INGRATE, REDUX: When last seen in these parts, Iraqi exile leader Ahmed Chalabi was serving up phony defectors to the New York Times in a campaign to justify toppling Saddam Hussein. Some suspect Chalabi was acting on behalf of Iran, to get rid of its major nemesis, and has continued to do its bidding in Baghdad. So imagine our surprise when we found Chalabi's byline yesterday in ... The New York Times telling the U.S. to get out of Iraq.  In "Thanks, but You Can Go Now,"  the Iraqi Zelig writes that "there are still those in Washington's corridors of power who want to reduce Iraq to being an American puppet state, like Jordan or Egypt, nations governed through a corrosive mix of covert intelligence and military support spoon-fed to a permanent oligarchy."  He should know. Years back, the portly master intriguer fled Jordan after being charged with looting a bank. But "What was the Times thinking?" wonders Aram Roston, author of The Man Who Pushed America to War: The Extraordinary Life, Adventures, and Obsessions of Ahmad Chalabi . . .

THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION: One of these days Bulgaria is just going to fly apart from corruption.  Today an official there was denying a report in Sunday's Washington Post  accusing the former Soviet satrap of shipping arms to Iraqi Kurdistan, which seems well on the way toward its dream of autonomy, if not independence, from Baghdad. "Such a transaction is impossible," deputy economy minister Yavor Kuyumdjiev told Bloomberg's Elizabeth Konstantinova. "We have one of the of the strictest arms export control procedures in the European Union."  

But close observers of the fledgling democracy are tempted to say, "So what?" Gangsters with tentacles in the Sofia government can make anything happen there, including murder. Bulgaria "has several Soviet-era arms plants producing assault rifles, guided missiles and radio devices," Bloomberg reported. "The country was criticized by the U.S. in the mid-1990s for illegal arms sales to Africa." But Kuyumdjiev suggested the problem lies elsewhere. "Bulgaria has no control over what happens to an arms shipment after it reaches Baghdad," he said.

Tags: 24, Aram Roston, Bulgaria, Chalabi, Elizabeth Konstantinova, Iran, iraq, Jack Bauer, Joese A. Rodriguez, John Durham, Kurdistan, National Interest Security Company

Could Bush's Commanders Handcuff Obama in Iraq?

By Jeff Stein | September 9, 2008 5:36 PM | | Comments (0)

One of the more provocative but little noticed passages in Bob Woodward's fascinating new book, The War Within, reports on a meeting between Defense Secretary Robert Gates and retired Army General Jack Keane, the White House's secret, backchannel conduit to the Iraq War commander, Gen. David Petraeus.

President Bush and Vice president Cheney were using Keane, a plain spoken Irishman with a boxer's face, to get around the Joint Chiefs of Staff and communicate directly with Petraeus, who'd presided over a dramatic reduction in violence in Iraq.  It didn't hurt that Petraeus welcomed more troops in Baghdad, while the Chiefs worried about U.S. forces being stretched too thin to handle emergencies elsewhere in the world. He'd also managed the Sunni tribes' U-turn on al Qaeda in Iraq

On April 7, the end of Petraeus's tour of duty was on the horizon, and Keane was working hard to convince the brainy general to take over CENTCOM, where he'd be responsible for U.S. military forces across the entire region, instead of the far more comfortable, and traditionally prestigious, slot as supreme commander of NATO.

Keane also wanted Gen. Ray Odierno, the highly regarded, "unsung hero" of the turnaround in U.S. fortunes in Iraq, to take Petraeus's job in Baghdad.

Both men opposed any withdrawal timetables of U.S. forces in Iraq while the situation remained dicey there.

An Obama administration would find it difficult to oust either of them, Keane argued to Gates.

"Let's be frank about what's happening here," Keane says.

    "We are going to have a new administration. Do we want these policies continued or not? Do we want the best guys in there who were involved in these policies, who were advocates for them?"
Keane presses Gates.

    "Let's assume we have a Democratic administration and they want to pull this thing out quickly, and now they have to deal with General Petraeus and General Odierno. There will be a price paid to override them."

After his July visit to Iraq and Afghanistan, Obama said he would listen to the senior military leadership on Iraq, but not be bound by their advice.

    "It is clear that Gen. David Petraeus, in his role as U.S. commander in Iraq, prefers 'maximum flexibility' over a timeline for troops withdrawal. The notion is that either I do exactly what my military commanders tell me to do, or I am ignoring their advice. No, I am factoring in their advice and placing it into this broader strategic framework."  

An Obama spokesperson could not be reached late in the afternoon, but it's safe to say that the Democratic candidate will replace, or keep, any general he wants to as commander-in-chief.
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THIS JUST IN... 

McCain: 'I'd like to be Jack Bauer.'

In an interview published Tuesday in the women's style magazine Marie Claire, Republican standard bearer John McCain told Washington author Tara McKelvey that he'd like to be compared to Jack Bauer, Fox TV's ace counterterrorism agent -- except for the torture part.

McKelvey: You liken Obama to Britney in your famous ad, while portraying yourself as the more serious candidate. Which celebrity would you like to be compared to? Bob Dylan? Jack Nicholson?

McCain: Kiefer Sutherland. [laughs, imitates a voice from the show 24] "It's Jack Bauer." We have a lot in common because he escapes all the time.

McKelvey: Um, he's also a torturer.

McCain: Yeah, that's right. That's where Jack and I disagree. He believes in torture, but I don't. He says, "Tell me where the weapons are." The person says, "I won't." Bam! "OK, I'll tell."

McCain, a Vietnam prisoner of war, has repeatedly voiced a visceral disdain for torture, but he did vote against a bill that, with many other provisions, would have banned waterboarding, which the Bush administration had declared legal.

At a debate before the vote last April, McCain said, "I would hope that we would understand, my friends, that life is not 24 and Jack Bauer."

Tags: Afghanistan, Bush, Cheney, Gen. Jack Keane, Iraq, Jack Bauer, Kiefer Sutherland, Obama, Odierno, Petraeus, The War Within, Woodward