Word: pentagonal
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...second-tier al-Qaeda commanders who know where their bosses are hiding. A recent CIA report speculates that bin Laden has long-term kidney disease and may have only months to live, two U.S. officials familiar with the report told TIME. (A CIA spokesman denied the report exists.) The Pentagon has requested that Bush sign an "execute order" expanding its authority to go after these commanders in Pakistani territory; senior counterterrorism and Defense Department officials tell TIME that broader authority for cross-border strikes from Afghanistan is awaiting consideration by the President and his top advisers. But some...
...mildly titled June 23 report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) is a glass-half-empty study of the vexations that continue to hamper U.S. efforts in Iraq as the war enters its sixth summer. While the GAO doesn't contradict a Pentagon report that indicates violence in Iraq has dropped significantly, it claims the improvement is based on a rickety foundation provided by the now slowing U.S. troop surge, a creaky cease-fire with Shi'ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and a U.S.-led effort to recruit former insurgents for policing--not on any sustained reforms needed for lasting...
...along the way, the competing reports measure progress in Iraq by yardsticks of differing lengths. While the GAO said electrical production was lagging, the Pentagon asserted that this was a function of escalating demand for power. Electrical output, it said, now tops what the country was generating before the invasion. The Pentagon also zinged the GAO for using, as an oil-production benchmark, the "arbitrary goal" of 3 million bbl. a day set by the U.S.-run occupation authority immediately following the invasion. More importantly, the Pentagon said, is that petroleum exports are at their highest level since the fall...
...study, while the Wall Street Journal highlighted what it called a "generally upbeat assessment" of Iraq's current security and political situation. It relegated the GAO's findings to the final three paragraphs of a 17-paragraph story. But it did lead with bad news from the Pentagon report: claims that Iran continues to funnel money to militias inside Iraq, and that Tehran "may well pose the greatest long-term threat to Iraqi security." In perhaps the most dire contrast of all, the 89-page GAO report never mentioned Iran...
Indeed, according to a new Pentagon report, Iraq's violence has hit a four-year low, and the country has made significant progress in establishing stability. But will it last? Or does the situation conform more to a report out of the Government Accountability Office? That one suggests that this period of calm, like others before it, is just a momentary blip...