Photograph by Sebastiano Tomada/Sipa USA via AP Images

FSA fighters clear a room in a newly conquered building along the front line of Sheikh Saeed a highly contested area of Aleppo, Syria, on March 18, 2013.

President Barack Obama is remembering Iraq.

And the world, he says, will remember what the U.S. did about Osama bin Laden and Muammar Qaddafi.

All of this has to do with the “red line” — the use of chemical weapons in Syria which Obama has said the U.S. will not tolerate. And what the world is to make of the time Obama is taking assessing evidence that Syria has crossed it.

At a joint White House news conference with President Park Geun-Hye of Korea today, Obama was asked at what point the costs of doing something are outweighed by the costs of doing nothing.

“I think there’d be severe costs in doing nothing,” Obama replied. “`That’s why we’re not doing nothing.”

The U.S. is providing nonlethal aid to the opposition.

“If what you’re asking is, are there continuing reevaluations about what we do, what actions we take in conjunction with other international partners to optimize the day when, or to hasten the day when we can see a better situation in Syria, we’ve been doing that all along and we’ll continue to do that,” he said.  “Understandably, there’s a desire for easy answers.”

Intercepting a question posed to his Korean counterpart — asked if the U.S. failing to act on perceived violations of the red line in Syria “could embolden” U.S. enemies elsewhere, such as North Korea — Obama said:

“The operative word there, I guess, is… perceived. And what I’ve said is we have evidence that there has been the use of chemical weapons inside of Syria, but I don’t make decisions based on `perceived’… And I can’t organize international coalitions around “perceived.”  We tried that in the past, by the way, and it didn’t work out well. ”

That would be Iraq, where the U.S. went to war over weapons of mass destruction never found.

Yet the world should take notice of what his administration has done when he has declared that a leader must go, as he did in Libya, and as he has done in Syria, and what he did after a decade-long search for Osama bin Laden.

“In the end, whether it’s bin Laden or Qaddafi,” Obama said, “if we say we’re taking a position, I think at this point the international community has a pretty good idea that we act on our commitments.”

Original post is Obama: ‘Not Doing Nothing’ in Syria by Political Capital.

Photograph by Jonathan Olley/Columbia Pictures/Everett Collection

Actor James Gandolfini as Leon Panetta in “Zero Dark Thirty.”

Just exactly a month ago, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta steered clear of critiquing “Zero Dark Thirty” when asked about the film by reporters flying with him to Lisbon. Today, though, he offered a casting quibble.

“The guy who plays me isn’t quite, quite right,” Panetta said with a smile during a ceremony at the Pentagon honoring former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who recently stepped down from her Cabinet job.

James Gandolfini of “The Sopranos” fame portrays Panetta in the controversial movie about the hunt for terrorist leader Osama bin Laden.

“My preference probably would have been Pacino,” he said, referring to Oscar-winner Al Pacino, another Italian-American with less girth than Emmy-winner Gandolfini.

Panetta also said it’s impossible for a movie to do justice to all that went into tracking down and killing bin Laden in the years after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on America..

“There’s no way you can take 10 years of all of the work that was done, even in the last four years or the last two years up to that operation, that I was involved with,” he said. “There’s no way you can take that and put it into a two-hour movie.”

The ceremony was among the wrap-up activities by Panetta, 74, who will leave his post once President Barack Obama’s choice to take over the Pentagon post, former Senator Chuck Hagel, wins Senate confirmation.

After citing some of Clinton’s accomplishments, Panetta — a longtime California congressman and former White House chief of staff – provided some personal thoughts.

“Hillary and I are a little older, perhaps a little wiser, a little less patient, particularly with political dysfunction, a little bit less tolerant of B.S. in general — and it is probably a good thing at this point in time that we have a chance to get some damn rest.”

As the audience of military officers and Pentagon employes laughed, he added, “I’m going to have as broad a smile as she does, hopefully, in a few days.”

Original post is Panetta Sees Himself More Like Pacino Than Gandolfini by Political Capital.

Photograph by Richard Olley/Columbia Pictures via Everett Collection

A scene from Zero Dark Thirty.

On a flight to Lisbon today, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta had a chance to
weigh in on the controversial, Oscar-nominated film “Zero Dark Thirty,” which depicts the 2011 raid that killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan.

Senators including Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat who heads the Senate Intelligence Committee, have criticized the film for suggesting that harsh interrogation techniques yielded crucial information that led to bin Laden.

Panetta, as head of the Central Intelligence Agency at the time, played a pivotal role in directing the raid. James Gandolfini of “The Sopranos” fame plays Panetta in the movie, which opened in limited release on Dec. 19 and went wide this past weekend.

If Panetta is troubled by the film, he wasn’t willing to say so today. He stopped short of offering any critique.

“You know what?” he told reporters on his plane when asked about the film. “I lived it.”

“Zero Dark Thirty” proved the weekend’s top-grossing film in the U.S. and Canadian markets, taking in $24 million. Its Oscar nominations include Best Picture and Best Actress (Jessica Chastain). The Golden Globe award for best actress has gone to Chastain, who draws a cafeteria visit from Gandolfini playing Panetta in the film, with praise for her work on the bin Laden hunt.

Original post is Panetta Passes On Critiquing ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ — ‘I Lived It’ by Political Capital.

Photograph by Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP Photo

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, with his golden retriever dog Bravo, during an interview at the Pentagon.

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta today suggested his dog Bravo turned out to be a better keeper of secrets than David Petraeus, who resigned in disgrace as CIA director last month after acknowledging a sexual affair.

Panetta appeared surprised when asked at the National Press Club why Petraeus had to resign instead of accepting a lesser punishment.

“In this town, with that kind of e-mail, do you think he could have survived as director of the CIA? I don’t think so,” Panetta said during a luncheon appearance. The Petraeus affair was exposed after the FBI discovered e-mails he wrote to his biographer, Paula Broadwell, with whom he had an extramarital affair.

While Petraeus couldn’t keep the affair secret, Panetta touted the discretion of his own golden retriever, who he said sat in on many of the top-secret meetings that focused on planning the raid that killed terrorist Osama bin Laden last year. Panetta was CIA director when the raid occurred.

The dog “used to come to the office when I was CIA director,” Panetta recalled. “And Bravo sat in on almost all of the meetings involving the operations against bin Laden. And you know, to this day, he hasn’t told a damn soul what happened.”

Original post is Panetta Says His Dog, Unlike Petraeus, Proved Soul of Discretion by Political Capital.

Photograph by Richard Olley/Columbia Pictures/Everett Collection

'Zero Dark Thirty.'

The relentless drumbeat about “Zero Dark Thirty” centers on its depiction of “enhanced interrogation techniques” on a detainee named Ammar who provided the initial tip on a courier whose tracking became crucial in the 10-year hunt for Osama bin Laden.

That’s the impression the film leaves, yet the production also shows that no matter how the initial tip came about, there was not a clear path from those beatings to bin Laden’s death.

Unanswered for many, until the film opens in New York tomorrow, is the question of whether sitting through an entire two and a half hours of the retelling of the hunt for bin Laden  is another form of torture — boredom.

It’s not.

We saw the film at a D.C. screening. It’s basically a CIA-centric depiction of the hunt through the eyes of Maya (Jessica Chastain), a “targeter,” according to the press notes.

In spite of some initial introductory meetings with Pentagon officials last year, the filmmakers didn’t ask for any military assistance. We’re still waiting for the CIA’s public affairs office to tell us what assistance it provided the producers. They might not want to say.

That’s because, yes, there are the torture scenes of Ammar (Reda Kateb) – simulated drownings, dog-collar degradation, arms strung from ceiling ropes, crammed into a small wooden crate. Dan, his bearded CIA tormentor, yells repeatedly, “When you lie to me, I hurt you.” A clean-shaven Dan (Jason Clarke) later ends up at CIA headquarters in Virginia.

Still, the detainee also gets treated by his CIA handler to a hummus lunch and cigarette after his pummeling. Call that balance, I guess.

Then-President-elect Obama shows up in a mid-November 2008 post-election “60 Minutes” interview, watched by Maya. “ I’ve said repeatedly that America doesn’t torture,” Obama says.

The guts of the movie is the CIA hunt as pushed, prodded and pleaded by Maya.

Maya utters the film’s best line when the CIA director, played by a bearish, cussing and bespectacled James Gandolfini, asks,“who are you?” at his first briefing on bin Laden’s Abbottabad hideout:

“I’m the….”

I don’t want to spoil the moment.

There are some goofy scenes, for sure.

They start with the first appearance of the Islamabad CIA station chief wearing a CIA label pin. That’s later changed to an American Flag.

Then there’s a cameo of the Air Force’s once-secret “Area 51” testing range in Southern Nevada, depicting Jordan in the film, where the U.S. kept two secret, stealthy UH-60 Black Hawks used in the raid.

Maya and a group from SEAL Team Six visit the site to get a close-up look at the choppers that would make history. Maya tells the group the aircraft will be used in an operation against bin Laden. We’re left wondering how Army choppers ended up in a secret Air Force base once alleged to have held dead Martians.

Maya also spouts the messianic line of “I believe I was spared” death during several previous near-miss terrorist attacks “so I can finish the job.”

But those campy moments are few. The hunt for OBL includes finding a lost file that rekindles the chase for the presumed dead courier, the CIA bribing a Kuwaiti official with a Lamborghini in exchange for the phone number of the courier’s mother (about a $400,000 expense) and tracking his cell-phone call locations in “Pakistan” cities — mostly shot in India — with a geo-location device known in spy circles as “the magic box”.

The raid — sans any White House Situation Room depiction of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton with hand on mouth — unfolds according to the public record — on night vision goggles, with the crashed-landed Black Hawk, surgical shots and no sustained firefight.

I’m not sure whether a SEAL Team Six raider actually listened to motivational speaker Tony Robbins en route to Abbottabad, as the film depicts. But it’s a nice touch.

You’ll see the now-demolished three-story building through the gauzy green of night vision goggles and darting laser beams from rifle aiming devices as the SEALs hit the place.

They are correctly wearing four-tube goggles, as opposed to two-tube model goggles, allowing for a 120-degree field of view.

As for the end of bin Laden? Viewers should keep a vigilant ear as the SEALs clear the building. I swear I heard some whispering “Osama, Osama,” as if calling him out to play.

Still, bin Laden’s end is not an iconic moment of him peeking from a doorway and then falling back into his room from a shot to the head. Blink or dip your head to eat popcorn and you’d miss it.

Instead, muffled shots are fired at the top staircase, SEALs enter a room, one fires shots into OBL’s chest as he lays on the ground. No prolonged close-up.

One SEAL says something to the shooter like “do you know what you’ve just done?” Gun buffs will note the SEALs fired a Heckler & Koch 416 assault rifle fitted with an M2000 silencer at bin Laden. Score another one for German engineering. (The Pentagon’s never acknowledged what gun killed bin Laden, by the way.)

We barely hear the famous “For God and Country,” Geronimo line message sent on scene.

The SEAL doesn’t gloat over his kill and later is seen dutifully grabbing up computer discs and hard drives for intelligence analysis — all in a Hard Night’s Raid that “Zero Dark Thirty” depicts pretty well.

Read Bloomberg Muse critic Greg Evans’ take on the film here.

Original post is Zero Dark Thirty: A Tale Told Well by Political Capital.

One day and 11 years to the date the nation was attacked by terrorists from abroad, a morning on which the U.S. envoy to Libya was reported dead in an attack on a consulate, Romney was racing to his first campaign appearance of the day. He would add an impromptu press conference at his campaign headquarters in Jacksonville, in the most reliably Republican region of the biggest swing state of all. Florida is fast becoming a must-win for a candidate contesting President Barack Obama in just eight states, and perhaps a ninth, in Wisconsin.

The president was preparing to make his own statement at the White House — voicing, on this urgent morning, a message reminiscent of what his predecessor said at a schoolhouse in Florida on the morning of 9/11: Those who attacked the U.S. will pay the price.

And suddenly, on this morning less than two months from Election Day, the one issue that has played only a small role in the contest between Obama and Romney would dominate the day: Foreign affairs, and the posture of the U.S. in a dangerous world.

Obama was informed last night that Ambassador Christopher Stevens was among the missing in the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi. This morning, he was told of his death, according to a White House official.

But before all the facts were known, the Romney campaign launched an attack on the Obama administration last night for supposedly sympathizing with the attackers.

In a statement that was was initially embargoed for midnight, but then lifted at 10:25 pm EDT, Romney said: “It’s disgraceful that the Obama administration’s first response was not to condemn attacks on our diplomatic missions, but to sympathize with those who waged the attacks.” He was referring to a statement from the U.S. embassy in Cairo denouncing a breach of the grounds there as an act by “misguided individuals.”

Less than two hours later, but once the calendar had flipped from Sept. 11, the Obama campaign responded.

“We are shocked that, at a time when the United States of America is confronting the tragic death of one of our diplomatic officers in Libya Governor Romney would choose to launch a political attack,” Ben LaBolt said in an e-mail blast to reporters at 12:10 am.

Overnight, Libyan authorities reported that Stevens, a career diplomat who worked with the Libyan opposition, was dead.

At 7:21 am, Obama made a statement, confirming the death. “I strongly condemn the outrageous attack on our diplomatic facility in Benghazi, which took the lives of four Americans, including Ambassador Chris Stevens,” Obama said in that statement.

The president went to the Rose Garden later this morning, with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton by his side, to condemn the attacks, vow vengeance and pledge to work with the Libyan government to bring those responsible for the killings to justice.

“These four Americans stood up for freedom and human dignity,” the president said of Stevens and three other victims.

Romney, for his part this morning, maintained that the Obama administration had sent “mixed messages” after Islamist protesters breached the grounds of the U.S. embassy in Cairo. Romney told reporters in Florida: “The first response of the United States must be outrage at the breach of the sovereignty of our nation.”

The campaign largely has steered around the terrorist threats that dominated the terms of predecesor George W. Bush — muted by the Obama-ordered, Navy SEAL attack that captured and killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan. Romney managed to accept his party’s nomination for president in Tampa without mention of the war in Afghanistan, an oversight repaired with a muscular address on foreign affairs in Reno, Nevada, this week.

Nevada — the president is bound there, too. He spent the weekend in Florida, where Romney follows today. Former President Bill Clinton campaigns across Florida for Obama this week.

They’re fighting on familiar battlegrounds, and today there is new ammunition.

With reporting by Hans Nichols, Roger Runningen, Lisa Lerer and Phil Mattingly

Original post is Obama-Romney: World Closing In by Political Capital.

The John Kerry who spoke tonight at the Democratic National Convention seemed like a different fellow, letting loose with a number of memorable lines.

Kerry, as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, focused on questioning the credentials Republican presidential contender Mitt Romney brings to the table on this front. To that end, he took note of Romney’s gaffe-filled foray to Europe and Israel earlier this summer.

“For Mitt Romney, an overseas trip is what you call it when you trip all over yourself overseas,” Kerry said.

Digging the knife in deeper, the senator added that for Romney, “it wasn’t a goodwill mission — it was a blooper reel.”

Kerry even worked Sarah Palin, the 2008 Republican vice presidential nominee that Democrats love to make fun of, into his remarks.

He set it up by terming “preposterous” Romney’s assessment that Russia stands as the “No. 1 geopolitical foe” for the U.S.

“Folks, Sarah Palin said she could see Russia from Alaska; Mitt Romney talks like he’s only seen Russia by watching Rocky IV,”  Kerry said.

Some of his longtime supporters might be asking where this type of gusto was eight years ago.

Original post is John Kerry Lets Loose by Political Capital.

Senator John Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat who ran for president as his party’s nominee in 2004, answered the question on stage at the Democratic National Convention tonight in his own way.

“Ask Osama bin Laden if he is better off now than he was four years ago,” Kerry said.

Original post is Bin Laden: Better Off Four Years Ago by Political Capital.

Photograph by Pete Souza/White House Photo via Getty Images

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, left, President Barack Obama and National Security Advisor Tom Donilon, right, attend a meeting in the Situation Room on May 1, 2012 in Washington, DC.

As she introduced President Barack Obama in New Hampshire today, Senator Jeanne Shaheen, a Democrat, suggested that Obama led the mission to kill Osama bin Laden.

That’s a bit further than the president, who is careful in his phrasing, usually goes.

“And let’s not forget, that this is the commander-in-chief who finally led the mission that brought Osama bin Laden to justice,” Shaheen said at a rally in Rochester, New Hampshire.

While Obama, in his typical campaign speech, mentions that the al-Qaeda leader died on his watch — in a Navy SEAL raid on a compound in Pakistan that the president and top advisers followed via remote connections at the White House, he is judicious in how he’s couches it.

Here’s how he put it at a rally earlier today in Windham, New Hampshire.

“In 2008 I promised I would end the war in Iraq — we did,” Obama said. “I said we’d go after al-Qaeda and bin Laden — we did.”

He used almost identical language at the day’s second rally in Rochester, a 25-minute helicopter ride away, as he has at previous events.

The first time the president mentioned bin Laden in a campaign setting, he was even more careful. At a May 11, 2011, fundraiser in Austin, Texas, Obama gave the credit to the military.

“We are taking the fight to al-Qaeda and because of the extraordinary bravery of men and women who wear this nation’s uniform, the outstanding work of our intelligence agencies, Osama bin Laden will never again threaten the United States,” Obama said.

Original post is The Retelling of the Bin Laden Raid by Political Capital.

Photograph by Charles Dharapak/AP Photo

President Barack Obama with former President George W. Bush and former first lady Laura Bush as they unveil their official portraits on May 31, 2012, in the East Room at the White House.

The presidents’ club is a small one and tradition dictates a gracious reception when a predecessor comes back to the White House for the unveiling of his official portrait.

There may also be a traditional speech, judging from comments that President Barack Obama made for George W. Bush today and the speech Bush delivered for Bill Clinton in 2004.

“President Clinton and Senator Clinton, welcome home,” Bush said to Bill and Hillary Clinton back then.

“President and Mrs. Bush, welcome back to the house that you called home for eight years,” Obama said today.

“All who live here are temporary residents,” Bush said in 2004.

“It’s fair to say that every president is acutely aware that we are just temporary residents,” Obama said eight years later.

“And so beginning today, the likenesses of President William Jefferson Clinton and First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton will take their place in a line that began with George and Martha Washington,” Bush said.

“And today, with the unveiling of the portraits next to me, President and Mrs. Bush will take their place alongside the men and women who’ve built this country and those who worked to perfect it,” Obama said.

The rhetoric hasn’t always been so kind. While Bush has made a point of staying largely away from the political arena in his retirement, he often serves as a foil for Obama, who blames Bush for contributing to the worst recession in more than seven decades.

Today, Obama focused on the positive. Using the occasion to once again mention the killing of Osama bin Laden under his watch, Obama said the victory was a shared one. His first call, he said, was to Bush, once he knew American troops were out of harm’s way.

Obama also had some unique things to say to his predecessor. For one: “You also left me a really good TV sports package,” he said. “I use it.”

Roger Runningen contributed to this post. 

Original post is Obama Likes Bush’s Sports Package . . . And His Words? by Political Capital.