NYC Junta

Check out this story on secret missions carried out in the “war on terror”. I think in the waning days of the Bush presidency we are going to see more stories like this, with out-going officials more willing to spill on some of the decisions made in the last 8 years. This to me doesn’t seem like some of the more scandalous stories that have come out of the Bush White House (torture for instance). The ability of intelligence agencies and special forces to carry out these raids is essential for national security, and covert action like this is better than overt war on a large scale. Working with people from the intelligence and special forces world, I’ve heard numerous stories (all carefully sanitized in terms of details) like this. More often then not they involve cases where there is a threat, sometimes an unconventional one, and these covert resources are mobilized, and then it doesn’t materialize. But everyone should keep in mind, and this story says as much, that there have been so many of these types of missions and who knows what they might have averted. The other side of the coin, some might say, is that these types of raids incur the wrath of the local population (see Pakistan and Syria for two recent examples). But it is hard to balance and the pluses and minuses when we don’t have all the facts about what these missions achieved and didn’t achieve.  With the Bush administration, it has been so hard to give anyone the benefit of the doubt. I’m wondering whether Obama’s administration will continue these policies and whether his greater moral authority will make them more palatable.