Word: blaire
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...Penalty, the state averaged nearly one lethal injection per week over a five month period in 2008. There have been 423 executions in Texas since the state reininstituted the death penalty in 1982, and 374 condemned men and women are currently residing on Texas' Death Row. (One resident, Michael Blair, walked off death row this year after being exonerated by DNA testing.) (See the Top 10 Unsolved Crimes...
...should the appointment of Ms Julianne Caspar, someone who is clearly a hugely qualified traditional French cuisine proponent ... shock the French?" asked Anglophone French blog franceblogcom. "This blog and its French members are happy to learn that a woman, a German, has been selected for the job." (Read Tony Blair's view of French President Nicolas Sarkozy, a runner-up for TIME's Person of the Year...
Then there's also the fact that, like most military officers, Blair is a believer in tactical intelligence. Let me explain why that's problematic: During the last Gulf war, the Pentagon badgered the CIA for things like sand samples and stress limits of Iraq bridges, the terrain its Abrams tanks would roll across. Yes, that information was nice to have, but such requests diverted CIA resources from strategic intelligence. Rather than answering the question of whether Saddam had kept his weapons of mass destruction, the CIA sent its clandestine sources into Iraq with baggies and little plastic shovels...
...Whatever Blair's personal biases and inclinations are, as long as the U.S. remains in Iraq and Afghanistan, fighting two wars that have neither been won nor lost, he will have no choice but defer to the Pentagon. You can't fight over money and people in the middle of hot wars. If the Pentagon says it needs sand samples, that's what the intelligence community...
Leaving Robert Gates at the Pentagon and appointing Blair as DNI is a pretty clear sign that Obama intends to live with the national security status quo. Obama knows all too well that intelligence reform is the third rail of American politics, one he does not intend to touch as long the country teeters on the edge of depression...