Word: pentagonal
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Beckstrom, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, points out that Obama's nominee will need political skills to deal with the many voices that will want to be heard on cybersecurity, including many government departments - the Pentagon, various intelligence agencies and the Department of Homeland Security, among others - and private-sector bodies. "There's a lot of rice in this particular rice bowl," Beckstrom says. He knows from personal experience how difficult that can be: earlier this year, he quit as Director of the National Cybersecurity Center in March, citing interdepartmental politics...
...they pull into harbors relatively frequently for fuel and supplies. "There are many countries in the region that we believe would be cooperative with us in trying to persuade the North Koreans to allow us to inspect their cargo once they were to take a port call for refueling," Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell said on June 16. He added that the U.S. and its allies have sufficient naval power in the region to monitor North Korean shipping without dispatching additional vessels...
...Pentagon officials acknowledge that their track record on monitoring North Korean shipping leaves something to be desired. Pyongyang played a major role in the development of a nuclear reactor that Syria was building until the Israeli air force bombed it into rubble in 2007. U.S. intelligence never has been able to identify what North Korean ships, if any, were involved in its construction. Which raises a troubling notion: North Korea's nuclear know-how may be able to elude even the tightest naval noose...
...order to really understand the CIA's angst, you have to remember that the Pentagon already takes more than 80% of the intelligence budget. It runs the National Security Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency and is in charge of satellites. In Afghanistan and Iraq, the Pentagon dwarfs the CIA in terms of people and money it has for spying. Which leaves the CIA with stations like Kabul serving as small but important citadels of independent civilian intelligence. (Read "The CIA's Silent War in Pakistan...
...authority to send back to Washington and disseminate around the government what is essentially finished analysis. This happened in Iraq in mid-2003, when the CIA station in Baghdad sounded the alarm that the invasion was about to go very badly. When the White House and the Pentagon's civilian management read the Baghdad chief's conclusions, they raged, dismissing the analysis as "defeatist," even going so far as to accuse the chief of being a closet Democrat. The chief came home, but that did not stop his successors, CIA officers from the ranks, from sending in similar bad news...