Apparently the CIA can now detect in advance all plots to attack commercial airliners so maybe Congress will shift some additional intelligence gathering money to study why birds sometimes fly into windows. Congress declared war in 2002 when it authorized the President to use military force in Iraq. While nowhere within our Constitution does it describe how Congress undeclares war, leading Democrats yesterday signaled they will figure out how:
“The 2002 authorization to use force has run its course,” said Sen. Robert C. Byrd, West Virginia Democrat and chairman of the Appropriations Committee. He announced the planned legislation jointly with Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, a New York Democrat who serves alongside Mr. Byrd on the Armed Services Committee. “It is time — past time — to decommission this authorization and retire it to the archives,” Mr. Byrd said on the Senate floor. “The president must redefine the goals and submit his plan to achieve them to a thorough and open debate in the Congress and throughout the country. That is the American way.”
Mrs. Clinton, the Democratic front-runner in the 2008 presidential race who has struggled to explain her 2002 vote for the war, said the deauthorization legislation would answer Mr. Bush’s veto of the pullout plan. “If the president will not bring himself to accept reality, it is time for Congress to bring reality to him,” Mrs. Clinton said.
The sponsors say the maneuver also undercuts Mr. Bush’s argument that the troop surge in Baghdad needs time to work. The cutoff date comes a month after a scheduled progress report by Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, who says he will be able to tell in September whether the surge is working.
Still, Mr. Bush would have the same veto power over any bill to which a sunset provision was attached, and White House spokeswoman Dana Perino derided the proposal as political posturing. “Here we go again. The Senate is trying another way to put a surrender date on the calendar. Welcome to politics ’08-style,” Mrs. Perino said, referring to the presidential race.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, Kentucky Republican, said the deauthorization ploy was a distraction from the troop-funding debate.
“No matter how you may feel about the effort to secure Iraq, providing the funds to our troops should be everyone’s top priority,” McConnell spokesman Don Stewart said.
The gambit came as Mr. Bush’s top aides sat down with Democrats on Capitol Hill to discuss the Iraq war in the first serious overture by both sides to cooperate. Both sides came armed with ideas and notebooks and talked for about 45 minutes. They agreed to meet again early next week and not to divulge details to outsiders in the spirit of cooperation.
“There is nothing off the table — including timetables. Nothing,” said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Nevada Democrat.
And the “tough on terror” Democrats want to shift assets away from intelligence gathering:
The House next week will consider the Democrat-crafted Intelligence Authorization bill, which includes a provision directing an assessment of the effects that climate change has on national security.
“Our job is to steal secrets,” said Rep. Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, the ranking Republican on the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. “There are all kinds of people analyzing global warming, the Democrats even have a special committee on this,” he told The Washington Times. “There’s no value added by the intelligence community here; they have no special expertise, and this takes money and resources away from other threats.”
Democrats, who outnumber Republicans on the committee, blocked the minority from stripping the warming language from the bill.
Intelligence panel Chairman Silvestre Reyes, Texas Democrat, said the climate-change study is one of several shifts his party has made to intelligence policy. “We’re concerned that global warming might impact our ability to maintain national security,” he told The Times, describing the idea as “cutting edge.” “We want to get feedback from the intelligence community to understand if there are possible global issues,” Mr. Reyes said, noting the change was on the advice of “several former military commanders.”
The panel voted 11-9 to keep the provision that directs a National Intelligence Estimate “on the anticipated geopolitical effects of global climate change and the implications of such effects on the national security of the United States,” according to a Republican staffer familiar with the bill.
The study, which so far has an undetermined cost, would examine the science of climate change, among other things. Few details about its method were available, but the staffer said it would “divert already scarce resources to study the climate.”
The staffer added that the U.S. already tried using intelligence resources for this purpose in the 1990s.
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There are other parts of the government better suited to doing this type of study,” agreed Rep. Darrell Issa, California Republican. “Our government should not commit expensive spy satellites and human intelligence sources to target something as undefined as the environment.”The Clinton administration’s Director of Central Intelligence created the DCI Environmental Center in 1997 to examine environmental issues.
The sooner Congress undeclares war, the sooner the CIA can get back to studying the environment.
Don’t you all feel so much safer with the Democrats in charge of Congress?
Editor’s note: Updated and bumped to the top at 5:02 PM EDT
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