Incompetence At The White House

Oliver North: Obama Administration Is 'Jimmy Carter on Steroids'

Tuesday, 25 Jun 2013 06:22 PM

By Greg Richter and Kathleen Walter

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The failure of President Barack Obama's administration to convince China and Russia to turn over state-secrets leaker Edward Snowden shows an America losing influence in the world, Lt. Col. Oliver North tells Newsmax TV.

"We always thought that Jimmy Carter was the worst administration you could possibly have," North said. "This is Jimmy Carter on steroids."



Despite National Security Adviser Tom Donilon's assurances that Hong Kong would turn Snowden over to the United States, Snowden was aboard a plane the same day, and is now in a Moscow airport.



"Now we've got Putin who basically says, 'Stick it in your ear, Obama; I'm going to send the guy wherever he wants to go,'" North said. "This is a total breakdown of American credibility because everybody knows that Barack Obama doesn't mean anything he says."

The IRS targeting of conservatives, the Benghazi probe, the NSA scandal, and spying on the media all contribute to a lack of credibility for the administration, North said.

There are plenty of ways to put pressure on foreign governments to convince them to help us, North added. "Some of them are economic, some of them . . . make life difficult for the diplomats."

Though he is critical of the White House's ability to catch Snowden, North believes the PRISM program exposed by the former NSA contract worker goes further than the Patriot Act intended.

"There is no doubt we need to be able to figure out who's talking to bad people overseas," North said, but "the idea of intercepting every single American communication to do that shows first of all a broader, deeper reach than was ever intended."

Only calls to someone outside the United States were supposed to be picked up by surveillance, North said. Any calls between two phones inside the United States would be kicked out of the system.

But in the final year of the George W. Bush administration, the program was modified to pick up broader data.

"Clearly the Obama administration is now overwhelmed itself with data so that we don't even know that there's a United States Army major making phone calls to places like Yemen and sending emails to places like Yemen," North said. "We don't know that there's two Chechen youngsters in Boston who are communicating with people in Chechnya and other terrorists in other parts of the world because they've overwhelmed themselves with data."

North doesn't hold out much hope for Obama's promised cut in nuclear weapons. Obama has said that if he can get Russia on board he can bypass treaties and Congress to reduce American warheads to 1,000.

"First of all, the guy who's supposedly going to cooperate with this is Vladimir Putin," North said. "Czar Putin isn't about to do this."

Putin can see the proliferation of nuclear weapons around the world, North said, and while the Russians have modernized their weapons programs, the United States has done nothing for more than 20 years.

There is no historical record that unilateral disarmament has ever made the world safer, North said, particularly for the country that is disarming. "Even Switzerland, which has been neutral in all the wars in the last four centuries in Europe … doesn't disarm."

© 2013 Newsmax. All rights reserved.

Read Latest Breaking News from Newsmax.com http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/north-obama-carter-administration/2013/06/25/id/511890?s=al&promo_code=13F29-1#ixzz2XKoNUKsH
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Obama's Nuclear Folly

In our posting yesterday entitled "Is Flexibility Another Word For Surrender" we questioned the President's decision to make what we feel is irresponsible unilateral nuclear cuts.  We apparently are in good company. In the following posting, Lord Conrad Black has similar concerns.  

Obama's decision to make these cuts are folly and dangerous.  They must be stopped.
Additionally, not including the Congress in the decision reeks of the Imperial Presidency that Obama has tried to create. He is not the king or emperor and he should submit such a significant action to Congress.

Conservative Tom

Conrad Black: Nuclear Cuts Would Encourage Iran, Other 'Irresponsible' Nations

Thursday, 16 May 2013 07:56 PM

By Todd Beamon and Kathleen Walter

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Any further reduction in U.S. strategic nuclear warheads would encourage "completely irresponsible, ambitious, aspirant nuclear powers such as Iran," former newspaper publisher and author Lord Conrad Black tells Newsmax TV.



"I do not question for an instant the president's good intentions, but it will be just as conspicuous and in some ways more dangerous a failure than the plan of the late Defense Secretary [Robert] McNamara, who allowed the Soviet Union to gain nuclear power with the United States," Black tells Newsmax in an exclusive interview. "The assumption was that the Russians would then negotiate more respectably. Instead, they just tended to achieve nuclear superiority."

Unilateral disarmament has never worked. It is exactly the wrong thing to do."

Black, a member of the British House of Lords and the former CEO of Hollinger International, was responding to a Newsmax report that President Barack Obama soon will announce that the United States will unilaterally reduce its arsenal of strategic warheads to around 1,000.T

hat position is expected as part of the Pentagon's long-delayed Nuclear Posture Review implementation study that Obama was expected to sign earlier this year, and recent news reports say Obama may make the cuts by executive action, without congressional authorization.

The reduction represents a third of the nation's arsenal. The United States currently has 1,550 deployed warheads, mandated by the 2010 New START arms treaty, according to the Newsmax report.

The author of five books, Black’s latest is "Flight of the Eagle: The Grand Strategies That Brought America From Colonial Independence to World Leadership."

The work chronicles America's strategic development into a world superpower from 1754 to 1992. Black details the specific strategic decisions of such statesmen as Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin D. Roosevelt that transformed the world and established America's role in it.

"Abraham Lincoln masterfully handled the whole task of finding the underlying cause of the Civil War: slavery," Black tells Newsmax. "Franklin D. Roosevelt did a brilliant job of tying the American national interest to the survival of the democracy, with the defeats of the Nazis and Japanese imperialists.

"These were all tremendous achievements that wouldn't necessarily happen just because the United States is a rich, well-populated country."

Black, 68, calls China one of America's rivals -- not adversaries -- and it's imperative that "they click with each other. The Americans need to make sure that their allies in the area,  the Japanese, the Philippines, the South Koreans and others, are not intimidated by the Chinese."

But radical Islam, Black says, poses a clear threat to the United States. "It is an enemy. It's a nuisance and it's a terrible nuisance. They commit these atrocities, and they kill a lot of people."

Regarding the Middle East, Black tells Newsmax that "no durable achievement will be attained until there is a general recognition in the Muslim world of Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state.

"The Islamic forces in general do not accept that, and Palestine could have its state next week if they would accept that. Israel should not be encouraged to and should not negotiate with anyone who does not accept the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state."

Black also wrote the 2007 biography, "Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full." The president faced impeachment proceedings over Watergate.



And in recent weeks, a bevy of scandals facing the Obama administration -- the four Americans killed in Benghazi last Sept. 11, the Justice Department's secret seizure of telephone records of The Associated Press, and the IRS' targeting of conservative groups -- has led to similar impeachment calls.

That would not be good for the United States, Black tells Newsmax.

"I don't think this is, to be fair, a particularly scandalous administration. I don't think it's very successful, but I don't think they've done anything that should cause the president to be under a moral cloud.

"We just shouldn't be talking in those terms," Black adds. "We shouldn't be getting into this. I would hope that the powers that be in Washington would do something to try and reform the situation, but they're not doing it.

"You have a prosecutorial glasnost -- and it's out of control."

Read Latest Breaking News from Newsmax.com http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/black-iran-nuclear-warheads/2013/05/16/id/504927?s=al&promo_code=#ixzz2TYPkf1hM
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