David Axelrod Says Classified Leaks Not From White House

David Axelrod Says Classified Leaks Not From White House
By George Stephanopoulos | ABC OTUS News – 5 hrs ago

Obama campaign senior adviser David Axelrod said he is confident that newly launched investigations will show that recent leaks on classified national security information did not come from the White House.

"I think the authors of all of this work have said that the White House was not the source of this information," Axelrod told me this morning on "This Week." "I can't say that there weren't leaks. There were obvious leaks, but they weren't from the White House."

Axelrod said Obama takes all "life or death decisions" on national security seriously, and that the White House would not leak information that may jeopardize classified operations.

"He understands that when he commits people to missions that their lives are at stake, and the safety of Americans are at stake," Axelrod said. "And the last thing that he would countenance or anybody around him would countenance are leaks that would jeopardize the security of Americans on these secret missions, and the success of those missions."

Barack Obama is a paradox. This has never been as clear to me as while reading David Sanger’s Confront and Conceal: Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power. The book is a timely, gripping read that offers insights into some of the most surprising, most closely guarded dimensions of the Obama presidency. Early excerpts from his book that have already appeared in the New York Times have sent competitors scrambling and governments from Washington to Tel Aviv to Tehran to Islamabad into closed-door sessions to determine how to deal with his uncomfortable revelations. When it comes to ongoing conflicts between America and her perceived enemies (and friends) around the world, Sanger is a one-man WikiLeaks and Confront and Conceal is a glimpse into a world until now shrouded in secrecy.

A cynical observer might wonder why, at this particular moment, there have been a spate of books and articles like Sanger’s, revealing Barack Obama to be the Great and Powerful Oz of 21st-century white-collar warfare, a president with his hands on the joystick of American power, directing drones, computer worms, special-operations units, and covert actors in the kinds of shadow wars that offer a cheaper, lower-risk alternative to those unlamented days of shock and awe and trillion-dollar wars to nowhere. You might conclude that some in the administration were orchestrating the serial violation of its own secrecy laws to achieve a politically desirable image for its candidate-commander-in-chief. But whether that’s really the case is one of the few aspects of this White House onto which Sanger does not shed a direct light. As for the rest of what is going on in the Obama national security apparatus, Confront and Conceal is jam-packed with news, gripping anecdotes, stories of triumph, and stories of hubris.

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/06/04/the_obama_paradox

Beyond the overt use of cyber attacks, Daniel Klaidman of Newsweek says that Obama has been intimately involved with the life-and-death decisions of the vastly-accelerated drone strikes against terror suspects in Pakistan and Yemen.

“It’s extraordinary the extent to which this president has been very deeply and personally involved in these killing decisions - kinetic activity as they call it,” said Klaidman, the author of “Kill or Capture: The War on Terror and the Soul of the Obama Presidency” (Houghton Mifflin). “This is a president who came in to office wanting to wind down the wars of 9/11 to sort of a smaller footprint... he sort of emerges as a sort of shadow warrior using drones, using special operations forces and then in the Iranian context, as David reports, using cyber warfare and espionage, and it’s a way to try to continue to deal with these threats but without full-scale war,” he said.

The culmination of the drone and cyber wars is a new phase in American foreign policy.

“There is an Obama doctrine,” said Sanger, “which is, the country’s tired of these big wars of occupation, of sending 100,000 troops into a country, staying around for four or five years at a cost of a trillion dollars or more, and yet we still have these threats. So the way he has operated has been to try to choose a high tech area where the Unites States has advantage.”

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-3460_162-57446249/is-president-obama-changing-the-face-of-foreign-policy/

Acclaimed New York Times journalist David Sanger writes news breaking account of President Barack Obama’s national security decisions.

Exclusive new book reveals never-before-told details about a sophisticated
cyber-war program against Iran, a secret committee on Afghanistan called “Afghan Good Enough,” the chaos of the Arab spring, and how an effort to
re-establish American power in the Pacific set the stage for a new era of
tensions with the world’s great rising power, China

CONFRONT AND CONCEAL:

Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power

by David E. Sanger

http://crownpublishing.com/2012/06/04/“press-release-confront-and-conceal-by-david-sanger/

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