Free Republic

Thornberry Fears Bureaucracy Hamstrings Cyber Vs. ISIS WASHINGTON: Why does the internet still work in Raqqa? That simple question about the Syrian capital of Daesh, the self-proclaimed Islamic State, posed today by retired fighter pilot Rep. Martha McSally, goes to the heart of how the military will use — or refrain from using — cyber weapons. It goes to deep suspicions that President Obama’s swollen National Security Council staff is micromanaging the military. No less a figure than House Armed Services Committee chairman Mac Thornberry voiced deep concern that we are bureaucratizing the cyber force at birth. All too often...

Former congressman Dennis Kucinich (D., Ohio) said today that striking Syria would turn the United States military into “al-Qaeda’s air force.” Kucinich, who voted against the Iraq War and campaigned for the Democratic nomination for president in 2004 and 2008, lambasted the idea that Obama could act without congressional authorization, which he said would be a violation of the Constitution. He also warned that intervening in Syria would entangle the United States in another war in the Middle East and encourage Islamists who are fighting the forces of Syrian president Bashar Assad. “So what, we’re about to become al-Qaeda’s air...

Senate Foreign Relations Chairman Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) on Monday introduced a bill that would provide arms to vetted rebel groups. Menendez’s legislation would give arms and military training to opposition groups that had been vetted, as well as provide $250 million for basic services and security in a post-Assad Syria. The bill also includes new sanctions against those providing arms or oil to Syrian President Bashar Assad’s regime. Menendez’s bill comes as the Obama administration is reconsidering its opposition to providing arms to the Syrian rebels.

Even in light of recent evidence that Syria‘s embattled ruler, Bashar al-Assad, might have used nerve gas against his own people, Barack Obama seems reluctant to escalate American involvement in Syria’s brutal civil war. But another scenario involving chemical weapons could force Obama into the deeper engagement he has long resisted: the alarming prospect that radical Islamists could acquire Syrian chemical weapons and try to use them beyond Syria’s borders, perhaps even within the United States. “I think we should be worried,” says Jeffrey White an analyst at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and former military intelligence officer....