Secret Hours

CNN reports:

Russia expressed interest in using Cuban airfields during patrol missions of its strategic bombers, Russia's Interfax news agency reported

"There are four or five airfields in Cuba with 4,000-meter-long runways, which absolutely suit us," Maj. Gen. Anatoly Zhikharev told Interfax.

Zhikharev, who is the chief of staff of the Russian Air Force's long-range aviation, said, "If the two chiefs of state display such a political will, we are ready to fly there."

Zhikharev also told Interfax that Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has offered a military airfield on La Orchila island as a temporary base for Russian strategic bombers.

"If a relevant political decision is made, this is possible," he said, according to Interfax. Zhikharev said he visited La Orchila in 2008 and can confirm that with minor reconstruction, the airfield owned by a local naval base can accept fully-loaded Russian strategic bombers.

Annoying. We got Ivan's point vis a vis the Monroe Doctrine after the Cuban Missile Crisis, so what's the benefit here? Ivan's strat bombers, subs, and rocket forces already have the legs to paint the entire US in a lime-green radioactive glow -- so why commit your already limited defense resources to an endeavor that will inevitably drive the Pentagon back into the waiting arms of Lockheed, Boeing, NG and their generous inventory of Russian killing weapon systems?

And, just a reminder, the entire Gulf Coast remains a giant kill box, with F/A-18s, F-16s, F-15s, and F-22s based at (deep breath) Tyndall, Eglin, Homestead AFBs, Naval Air Stations Key West and Pensacola, plus the Florida, Louisiana, Alabama, and Texas Air National Guard fighter wings.

If Ivan wants to test our new President, perhaps he should deploy his high-value bombers to an AO where they're something more than pricey target drones.

CNN’s Zain Verjee couldn’t seem to find any health care “experts” who agreed with Pope Benedict XVI during a report on Tuesday’s Situation Room about the “political firestorm” the pontiff apparently set off during his first visit to Africa. Verjee not only cited unnamed “experts” who disagreed with the pope’s statement that the distribution of condoms on the continent “increases the problem” of HIV/AIDS instead of helping it, but also found “some priests and nuns working with AIDS victims in Africa question the church’s anti-condom policy.”

Anchor Wolf Blitzer introduced the correspondent’s report, hyping how “Pope Benedict XVI is facing a condom controversy right now. That may be last thing he needs on his first tour of Africa, [which is] struggling to cope with a massive AIDS epidemic.” Verjee continued in this vein: “Pope Benedict XVI set off another political firestorm, even before he landed in Africa, saying condoms could make the HIV/AIDS crisis worse. He told reporters, ‘It’s a tragedy, but you can’t resolve with it the distribution of condoms. On the contrary, it increases the problem.’

After citing how “health experts disagree” with the pope’s stance, Verjee played the first of two sound bites from Dr. Anthony Fauci of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the only named “expert” in the report, who, as you might guess, argued in favor of condoms’ effectiveness against HIV/AIDS.  In his second sound bite however, Dr. Fauci did seem to be more open to the pope’s message of abstinence than CNN: “In certain circumstances, abstinence is important. And, obviously, if you don’t have sexual relations, you’re not going to get HIV through a sexual contact. But it has its place.”

The CNN correspondent did play two other sound bites, but neither one were directly related to the condom issue. The first came from an African women who was happy the pope was visiting, and the other was from the pontiff himself. She concluded her report by again citing unnamed “experts” who echoed President Obama’s line about putting “science over ideology” on embryonic stem cell research: “In light of the pope’s comments, experts say people really just need to listen to the health care workers and experts and to the community leaders on how to avoid HIV infection. Some experts say that, with all due respect to the pope, this is a health issue and not a religious issue. Wolf, the church would argue it’s a morality issue.”

The full transcript of Verjee’s report, which began 49 minutes into the 6 pm Eastern hour of Tuesday’s Situation Room:

WOLF BLITZER: Pope Benedict XVI is facing a condom controversy right now. That may be last thing he needs on his first tour of Africa, [which is] struggling to cope with a massive AIDS epidemic. Let’s go back to Zain. She’s got the details. What’s going on, Zain?

ZAIN VERJEE: Wolf, he’s been pope for four years, but he’s never talked openly about condoms. Well, today he did.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I can see the plane now.

VERJEE (voice-over): Pope Benedict XVI set off another political firestorm, even before he landed in Africa, saying condoms could make the HIV/AIDS crisis worse. He told reporters, ‘It’s a tragedy, but you can’t resolve with it the distribution of condoms. On the contrary, it increases the problem.’ Health experts disagree.

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI, DIRECTOR, NIAID: Condoms have been proven time and again to play a major role in the prevention of the transmission of HIV infections. There’s no evidence whatsoever to indicate that the distribution of condoms to people who would be using condoms in any manner or form makes them engage in more risky sexual activity.

VERJEE: From Cameroon, the pope will go to Angola, and what the pope says matters in Africa. Twenty-two million people in Sub-Saharan Africa are infected with HIV/AIDS — a continent where Catholicism is finding converts.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Oh, it’s a pleasure to receive the pope today.

POPE BENEDICT XVI: Even amidst the greatest suffering, the Christian message always brings hope.

VERJEE: The Vatican is pushing sexual abstinence and one-partner relationships to fight HIV/AIDS.

FAUCI: In certain circumstances, abstinence is important. And, obviously, if you don’t have sexual relations, you’re not going to get HIV through a sexual contact. But it has its place.

VERJEE: But some priests and nuns working with AIDS victims in Africa question the church’s anti-condom policy. President Bush poured billions of dollars into HIV/AIDS programs in Africa for treatment, education, and prevention. But, like the pope’s message, those programs stressed abstinence and monogamy, while downplaying the role of condoms.

VERJEE (on-camera): In light of the pope’s comments, experts say people really just need to listen to the health care workers and experts and to the community leaders on how to avoid HIV infection. Some experts say that, with all due respect to the pope, this is a health issue and not a religious issue. Wolf, the church would argue it’s a morality issue — Wolf?

France’s president has lived up to the stereotype that his people, fond as they are of home vacationing and generally convinced of their own superiority, not infrequently fail to know what they are talking about when dealing with foreign countries.

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What’s to be done when companies that received major bailouts from taxpayers turn around and brazenly offer beaucoup bucks to the executives who helped put us in the hole in the first place? Here are a couple suggestions by way of an answer: Pitchforks! Angry mobs!

"Where'd that shot come from!?"

That's a question most troops ask themselves when a sniper or a small band of bad guys pop off a few rounds and scurry -- that is, assuming the triggermen missed.

It turns out the Army is taking the shot detection dilemma pretty seriously and has fielded limited quantities of Humvee and MRAP-mounted sniper detection systems and even detectors mounted on troops.

According to Lt. Gen. James Thurman, the Army has fielded the so-called "Boomerang" sniper detection system on Humvees in Afghanistan. These systems detect the crack (the bullet going by you) and the bang (the bullet leaving the muzzle) and correlate distance and bearing pretty accurately and display that information on a simple digital readout in the Humvee.

These systems have been around for a while and were of limited use in Iraq since the walls of tall buildings and other urban debris tend to interfere with the acoustics of the shot. But in the rugged hills of Afghanistan where shots are taken at a greater distance, the Boomerang has found a home.

But Thurman also added during a hearing this morning on Capitol Hill that the service has fielded the so-called Soldier Wearable Acoustic Targeting System, or SWATS, to the 56th National Guard Stryker Brigade Combat Team serving in Iraq. He said about 100 have been fielded and about 350 have been purchased from SAWTS manufacturer QinetiQ.

Here's a company description of the system:

Designed for both mounted and dismounted infantry, QinetiQ’s miniature, low-profile acoustic Ears family of wearable, sniper detection and gunshot localisation solutions is based on a miniature single integrated acoustic sensor.

The palm-sized, 6.4-ounce sensor can be coupled with an individual operators’ interface or used in vehicles and at fixed locations. It responds with the direction and distance in less than a tenth of a second from the first gunshot being fired, without being confused by surrounding sounds, to accurately locate snipers in a 360o view, even when in use on a vehicle moving at speeds over 50mph.

For his part, Marine Lt. Gen. George Flynn played down the technical approach.

"The best counter to a sniper is another sniper, and we make sure that we train our snipers to be the best and most deadly on the battlefield."

The Marine Corps’ aging heavy-lift helicopters lack a “high-hot” capability, limiting where Marines can operate in Afghanistan’s mountainous terrain. To provide Marines fighting there with greater mobility, the service will deploy a squadron of V-22 Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft to Afghanistan, said Marine Corps Commandant Gen. James Conway. “By the end of the year, you’re going to see Ospreys in Afghanistan.”

The Osprey, which had a rather troubled development period, has proven itself in combat conditions in Iraq, where it has been operating with the Marines for the past year. “It has gone from a wounded duck to a poster child, in terms of what aircraft with that leap-ahead technology can do,” Conway said, and the Osprey will greatly expand the range of missions the Marines can conduct and territory where they can operate in Afghanistan. Afghanistan has almost no road network and helicopter, soon the Osprey, is really the only way to get around faster than a marching pace.

One Osprey squadron is still in Iraq, but will be returning in a couple of months. The next Osprey squadron to deploy will be going aboard ships with a Marine Expeditionary Unit, Conway said, to test the aircraft’s ability to handle salt and sea and give crews shipboard operating experience. The Osprey was developed to lift Marines from ships offshore and rapidly carry them deep into contested territory. The squadron that follows in the deployment line up will then go to Afghanistan.

Marine units have been sent to southern Afghanistan largely because they lack a helicopter that can lift troops or cargo in what are called “high-hot” flying conditions. “We couldn’t handle the north, we couldn’t do what the Army is doing today up in RC East because of the dramatic terrain that’s up there. Our (CH) -46 has seen age and elevation and temperatures catch up with it,” Conway said, speaking at a defense industry conference in Washington on Wednesday. During the hot summer months in Afghanistan the CH-46 could only carry 5 or 6 fully loaded Marines.

The Marines must lighten up and get back to their expeditionary roots, he said. The past five years spent in Iraq as America’s second land army forced the Marines to buy heavily armored MRAP vehicles that do not fit the service’s expeditionary mission. Even personal body armor has gotten too heavy, he said, so the Marines are developing a “family of protective equipment” that will be scalable, according to the threat environment.

Conway gave a rather lukewarm endorsement to the troubled Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle program, intended to provide the Marines with a replacement for their Amtrack amphibious personnel carrier. The EFV is rumored to be on a list of possible program cancellations under consideration by the Obama administration. Conway said he hoped the program would not be cancelled. “We make our best case and then it’s out of our hands.”

Outrage burst forth from lawmakers in Washington when the story broke that insurance giant AIG still planned to dole out $165 million in bonuses to executives while it teeters near bankruptcy, kept afloat by taxpayers. But the outrage is mostly coming from hypocrites. Just days earlier, President Obama signed an omnibus spending bill with $12.8 billion in self-serving earmarks for legislators during the economic crisis. How can the president and Congress lecture AIG? Don’t the earmarking hogs look like hypocrites?

Liberals dismiss complaints about their drunken spending habits as just a conservative distraction. Why, it’s only a couple percentage points of the omnibus spending bill. So how much of the AIG bailout is for bonuses? The company has benefited from more than $170 billion in government bailout cash, or one dollar out of a thousand. If the earmarks are a tiny distraction, the AIG bonuses are less than insignificant.

But no one’s expecting the media to be consistent in their thinking. The same reporters who yawned past the excesses of the Democrats (and yes, the Republicans) stuffing their budget with pork – now they’re outraged, positively outraged at AIG.

ABC morning anchor Chris Cuomo played up the populist anger: "Outrageous. A slap in the face. That’s how lawmakers are describing insurance company AIG’s decision to hand out $165 million in bonuses after receiving $170 billion in your money." He even allowed Republican Sen. Richard Shelby to rail against AIG, without noting that Sen. Shelby was a leading Republican at the earmark trough, with $114 million in pet projects.

Last week, Cuomo left out the adjectives like "outrageous" as he noted Obama would sign a pile of earmark spending into law: "Despite pledging to crack down on them, President Obama today will sign a $410 billion spending bill loaded with congressional pet projects known as earmarks. The President says he’s only signing the bill to finish up last year’s business. Today, he will outline a plan to curb earmarks in the future."

The media found no outrage as a Democratic-majority Congress feathered its own nest during this downturn, including no move to freeze its own automatic pay increase of $4,700 a year for 2009. They didn’t have to vote for a pay raise. They have rigged it now, so the raise is automatic. Freshman Rep. Harry Mitchell, a Democrat, attempted to stop it, but it never came out of committee. Outrage, anyone?

The media largely skipped the story last week that the group Judicial Watch found that Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s aides fussed about the need to have high-level military aircraft like the Gulfstream G-5 at Pelosi’s beck and call: "It is my understanding there are NO G-5s available for the House during the Memorial Day recess. This is totally unacceptable…The Speaker will want to know where the planes are," Kay King wrote. In another note, when told a certain type of aircraft would not be available, King complained: "This is not good news, and we will have some very disappointed folks, as well as a very upset Speaker."

Do you remember when Pelosi pledged to clean out a Republican culture of corruption and "drain the swamp" of self-interest? That was news then. But now that she is exposed as even more corrupt? ABC, CBS, NBC, and NPR all skipped the Air Pelosi story. Fox News had it, and CNN covered it – on the contrarian Lou Dobbs show.

Every once in a blue moon, a reporter will file a story that breaks from the pack. On February 16, ABC reporter Jonathan Karl found footage of congressmen lecturing auto executives about superfluous jet travel, and then reported that members of Congress regularly travel the globe on the taxpayer’s dime. Ten members and their spouses traveled via the Air Force at that time to Brussels, Vienna, Paris, and the Bavarian Alps. "We asked how much this cost," Karl insisted. "But the amount taxpayers spend on military travel for Congress is a tightly guarded secret. The cheapest charter flight we could find was $200,000. Military air would cost more. How much more? Neither Congress nor the Pentagon would tell us."

So much for the vaunted transparency of the Obama era. But it was only one story.

Karl even confronted liberal Rep. Gary Ackerman of New York about his $14,000 in transportation costs for a trip to London. "I didn’t go to England," Ackerman claimed. Karl said the record had his name on a three-day trip to Britain. Ackerman revised his remarks: "Oh, I represented the United States Congress." When asked how he spent 14 grand in taxpayer money, Ackerman blamed staff: "Whatever the airline costs, I don’t book the flights."

Is President Barack Obama’s administration showing hints it is losing confidence in Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner? CNBC’s Larry Kudlow said the signs are suggesting as much.

The host of "The Kudlow Report" said in an appearance with CNBC On-Air Editor Charlie Gasparino on his March 17 broadcast that a statement put out earlier today by the administration, and placed at the top of the Drudge Report, hinted this was the beginning of the end for Geithner.

"You know, statements out of the blue - statements like this are what I call a real bad leading indicator that Geithner’s time, days may be numbered," Kudlow said. "It may not happen in the next week, but it may happen."

The statement was made in relation to the Treasury Department’s handling of the brouhaha surrounding the $165 million in bonuses paid out to American International Group (AIG) executives, even though they were recipients of bailout money from the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP).

ABC’s Jake Tapper reported today that Geithner found out on March 10 about the AIG bonuses. Tapper also reported Geithner phoned AIG CEO Edward Liddy the evening of March 11 to protest the bonuses, but it wasn’t until March 12 that he informed "a senior White House official about the controversy." And then it wasn’t until the next day, March 13 that aides passed the information on to the President.

Gasparino compared the quot;complete confidence" Kudlow had referred to earlier to the statements put out by the administration to the defenses made for the former CEO of Citigroup before his resignation in November 2007.

"You know, as the losses mounted, you know, everything’s OK, then you start seeing all these write-downs. You know, the company comes out and the people like Bob Rubin come out, and [say], ‘We have full confidence in Chuck Prince,’ and that’s what happened right after that," Gasparino said.

According to Kudlow, who served in the Reagan administration as the associate director for economics and planning for the Office of Management and Budget, the same holds true for politics.

"The same in politics, Charlie," Kudlow said. "My experience is when somebody says we have full confidence in so-and-so, get ready - the ax is going to fall."

Geithner faced another controversy during his confirmation after it was reveal he failed to pay payroll taxes on income he received from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in 2001-2004.

Researchers at the University of Miami and at the Universities of Tokyo and Tohoku, Japan, have been able to prove the existence of a "spin battery," a battery that is "charged" by applying a large magnetic field to nano-magnets in a device called a magnetic tunnel junction (MTJ).

The creation of long platinum nanowires at the University of Rochester could soon lead to the development of commercially viable fuel cells.

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