Posted on Friday, January 16th, 2009 by campaign2008
President-elect Barack Obama told USA Today, in an interview published Thursday, he plans to appoint a team to address the crisis in Gaza immediately after his inauguration.
CONFIRMATION HEARINGS: Attorney General-designate Eric Holder denounced the use of torture (CSMonitor) in his Senate confirmation hearing on Thursday.
“I will use every available tactic to defeat our adversaries, and I will do so within the letter and spirit of the Constitution,” he told the Senate Judiciary Committee. Janet Napolitano, nominated to be secretary of the Homeland Security Department, told a committee the nation’s transit system
needed to be made more secure (Philadelphia Inquirer).
Meanwhile, Susan Rice, nominated to be ambassador to the UN, said hoped to strengthen the “indispensable if imperfect” institution.
Posted in Homeland Security, Morning Update, Transition | 0 Comments »
Posted on Wednesday, January 14th, 2009 by campaign2008
The Wall Street Journal looks at new questions surrounding Barack Obama’s nominee to head the U.S. Treasury, Timothy Geithner.
IRAQ: Vice President-elect Joe Biden met (Reuters) with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki on Tuesday in Baghdad. Biden “asserted the importance of cooperation … to implement the foreign troop withdrawal agreement signed by the two countries,” according to Maliki’s office.
TERROR: Transition and White House officials conducted a joint disaster drill (WashPost), laying out a hypothetical terrorist attack on transportation and other targets in multiple U.S. cities, at the White House on Tuesday morning.
Posted in Economy, Homeland Security, Iraq, Morning Update, Terrorism, Transition | 0 Comments »
Posted on Thursday, January 8th, 2009 by campaign2008
President-elect Barack Obama has a plan to overhaul the Bush administration’s domestic counterterrorism program, the New York Time reports. Under the plan, the duties of the homeland security adviser would be transfered to the National Security Council.
Posted in Homeland Security, Morning Update, Transition | 0 Comments »
Posted on Thursday, December 4th, 2008 by campaign2008
The Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction Proliferation and Terrorism briefed Vice President-elect Joe Biden and Secretary of Homeland Security nominee Janet Napolitano on its latest report Wednesday. In remarks at the briefing (AFP), Biden said the United States is “not doing all we can to prevent the world’s most lethal weapons from winding up in the hands of terrorists.”
OIL: President-elect Barack Obama has apparently dropped his proposal (ABC News) to impose a windfall profits tax on oil companies.
Posted in Energy Policy, Homeland Security, Morning Update, Terrorism | 0 Comments »
Posted on Thursday, November 20th, 2008 by campaign2008
The Obama-Biden transition team announced its policy working group leaders on Wednesday. Among the leaders are Daniel Tarullo on economic issues, Carol Browner on energy and the environment, T. Alexander Aleinikoff and Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar on immigration, and James Steinberg and Susan Rice on national security.
DHS: CNN reports Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano will likely be the next secretary of the Department of Homeland Security.
SENATE: Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) will be named chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the Boston Globe reports.
Posted in Homeland Security, Morning Update | 0 Comments »
Posted on Wednesday, November 12th, 2008 by campaign2008
President-elect Barack Obama has opted not to attend (NYT) this weekend’s emergency international economic meetings in Washington. Nineteen foreign leaders will be in attendance.
GUANTANAMO: Politico asks a group of policy experts, legal scholars and politicians how Obama should handle the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay.
For full coverage of the transition to the Obama administration, see CFR.org’s Transition 2008 website.
Posted in Economy, Homeland Security, Morning Update, Transition | 0 Comments »
Posted on Tuesday, November 11th, 2008 by campaign2008
President-elect Obama, meeting President Bush yesterday at the White House, urged Bush to extend an aid package (WashPost) to automakers by giving them access to some of the Treasury Department’s $700 billion economic rescue program. Bush indicated to Obama that he might be willing to consider throwing his support behind such a measure if congressional Democrats agree to support his proposed free trade deal with Colombia.
GUANTANAMO: Prominent human rights groups are pressuring Barack Obama to close the detention facility (WashPost) at Guantanamo Bay immediately upon taking office.
Posted in Economy, Homeland Security, Morning Update, Transition | 0 Comments »
Posted on Friday, November 7th, 2008 by campaign2008
Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad made his first public statement on the U.S. elections, offering President-elect Barack Obama congratulations on his victory and calling on Obama to implement a foreign policy of “non-interference.” The BBC says Ahmadinejad’s gesture is the first official message of goodwill to an American leader from an Iranian president since the country’s Islamist revolution in 1979.
DHS: In a statement Thursday, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff outlined the Department of Homeland Security’s plans for the Obama administration’s transition. In the coming months, Chertoff said, DHS will “include the transition team in the ongoing series of tabletop exercises that we have been running for some time, to educate the new administration on incident response procedures.”
EU: Der Spiegel asks which European Union country will elect one of its own ethnic minorities.
Posted in Europe, Homeland Security, Iran, Morning Update | 0 Comments »
Posted on Tuesday, September 9th, 2008 by campaign2008
In a Wall Street Journal op-ed Tuesday, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) and Gov. Sarah Palin (R-AK) call the bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac “outrageous, but sadly necessary,” and say they will ensure the institutions are “permanently restructured and downsized, and no longer use taxpayer backing to serve lobbyists, management, boards and shareholders.”
Obama announced he is cosponsoring a bill to establish a national catastrophe insurance program. “Every year, American families throughout the country suffer catastrophic losses due to hurricanes, earthquakes, or other natural disasters, and our existing insurance infrastructure is severely strained,” Obama said in a statement.
Posted in Economy, General Election, Homeland Security, Morning Update | 0 Comments »
Posted on Wednesday, September 3rd, 2008 by Robert McMahon
MINNEAPOLIS — Rep. Ray Lahood (R-IL) is one of the country’s most prominent Arab-American lawmakers and is ranking Republican on the Select Intelligence Oversight Panel. Now preparing to step down after 14 years in Congress, Lahood spoke with CFR.org on the sidelines of the GOP convention about some foreign policy developments and priorities. Here are excerpts:
On 9/11: “It created a whole new paradigm of thinking and a whole new way of scholars thinking about it, and certainly a whole new way of Congress thinking about everything–whether its food safety, water safety, whether its terrorism, whether its laws to increase FBI agents and the whole issue of the CIA and their involvement. It changed everyone’s thinking. It was so dramatic that I think in our haste to enact legislation we may have made some mistakes along the way, although in the reenactment of the Patriot Act we tried to correct some of those.”
On national security challenges: “I think whoever gets elected we’re going to have far less involvement in Iraq and a lot more involvement in Afghanistan. I also believe that whoever’s elected needs to continue to pay attention to keeping America safe. I think the American people over the time since 9/11 have been a little complacent about the fact that our country has been safe. People have sort of forgotten that the further away we get from 9/11, the further away we get from any attack on the United States, I think people are complacent. Whoever is elected needs to figure out a game plan for keeping America safe, whether that means continued vigilance from the FBI, continued vigilance from the CIA and other intelligence-gathering capability to watch our borders, whatever it takes, but I think that’s where you’ll see the focus. [The priorities are] Afghanistan, Pakistan, al-Qaeda, bin Laden, and keeping America safe, homeland security.”
On energy security: “I think the American people are going to require Congress in a bipartisan way to solve this energy thing and it’s not just going to be drilling. It’s going to be getting the car manufacturers to make higher mileage cars, and to think outside of the box about the kind of cars we drive today and the kind of trucks we drive today. It’s solar, it’s nuclear, it’s wind, it’s a combination of all kinds of things that in a comprehensive way really looks at this problem that we have and right now the American people are telling every member of Congress ‘you all need to do something to help us.’ Drilling is just one aspect of it. We need a real comprehensive long-term approach to our energy. We’re hooked on oil and almost all of our oil comes from somewhere else.”
Posted in Homeland Security, RNC, Terrorism | 1 Comment »
