Word: efforts
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...effort to make good on his campaign promise to increase government transparency, President Barack Obama's Administration has launched data.gov, a website intended to enhance public access to vast troves of previously inaccessible government information. Sound exciting? It isn't. Conspiracy junkies hoping to tap into secret CIA files or to find out who really killed JFK are out of luck. The data catalog includes just 47 documents - most of which would only appeal to those desperate for information on migratory bird patterns or unconsolidated stream sediments. (Read "A Brief History of the National Archives...
...Texas A&M University to replace the disastrous Donald Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense. His mission, Gates said, was "to put Iraq in a better place," which is a spectacular understatement. Iraq was falling apart in late 2006, and Gates found the Defense Department in paralytic denial. His nonstop effort to reform the institution - abetted by military rebels who had been cast into the outer darkness by the powers that were - is a great untold story of the war on terrorism...
...Bush Administration, was stuck in the Cold War. Rather than fight the enemy we had - the stateless terrorists of al-Qaeda - they sought more conventional enemies. Attention quickly - too quickly - shifted from Afghanistan to Iraq. And then, once the conventional armored push to Baghdad was completed, the ongoing war effort became - amazingly - a bureaucratic orphan. "Every time we tried to do something for the troops in the field in both Afghanistan and Iraq, we had to go outside the regular Pentagon bureaucracy to get it done," Gates recalled. "For example, there was no institutional home" for figuring...
...international capital markets. "Again, it was a cost-benefit choice for them, and in that case, it was clear the costs were much worse than the benefit of standing by Pyongyang," says a former U.S. intelligence official. Washington ultimately dropped those sanctions in lieu of a diplomatic effort to entice North Korea to give up its nukes...
...That effort will now at least go into abeyance, if only because Pyongyang clearly has no interest in accepting U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's invitation, issued this week, to return to the six-party talks. South Korean President Lee Myung Bak in Seoul flatly told President Obama earlier this week not to go back to simply trying to bribe the North out of its nuclear program. Japan is more or less in the same place. China, which could inflict considerable economic pain on Pyongyang by cutting off trade and fuel shipments, now must decide whether...