The Political Conundrum!

The Senate Intelligence Committee’s new chairman, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), raised a few eyebrows on Thursday during a hearing by bringing up the diplomatically sensitive matter of Pakistan’s cooperation with U.S. missile strikes on its soil.

Here’s the setup: Feinstein raised a recent National Public Radio report about the success of the CIA-led offensive in Pakistan’s tribal areas - which the New York Daily News's Mouth of the Potomac Blog exclusively reported last month (and mirrored here on the CT Blog) has zapped at least eight mid-level Al Qaeda leaders since July. The NPR report said the missile strikes by remotely-piloted drones had decimated Al Qaeda and brought it to the edge of extinction.

Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair disagreed with such rosy assessments, remarking, “I have no idea why people would talk in those terms when the facts as I know them are not that optimistic.”

“I don’t know whether you’d care to comment on this, but I also notice that [special U.S. envoy Richard] Holbrooke in Pakistan ran into considerable concern about the use of the Predator strikes in the FATA area of Pakistan, and yet as I understand it these are flown out of a Pakistani base,” Feinstein said next.

Blair did not comment. But some veteran intelligence officers told me yesterday that they were taken aback, since the Predator bases located inside Pakistan are part of a classified covert action program.

Spokesmen for the longtime lawmaker insisted Feinstein wasn’t divulging any secrets she’s been briefed on as the top intelligence oversight official in Congress. They said she was simply referring to an article she read in the Washington Post last March, which cited “Predator strikes launched from bases near Islamabad and Jacobabad in Pakistan.”

“The first question was based on an NPR story. The second was based on the Washington Post story,” Feinstein spokesman Gil Duran told me late Thursday in response to an inquiry. “She did not cite the story in her question, but it ran on [Page] A1 and was the source of the question.”

CIA had no comment.

This week the Department of Veterans Affairs mailed thousands of letters to military veterans warning that they may have been exposed to the bodily fluids of other patients at a VA clinic in Murfreesboro, Tenn.

Despite repeated promises and public statements, Venezuela's Hugo Chavez continues to allow the FARC to operate from Venezuelan territory. This is not surprising, given that Chavez has not often kept his word on such issues.

What is interesting is that the support continues despite the FARC's recent killing spree of indigenous people in Nariño province. Wasn't the Bolivarian Revolution supposed to be against that? Respected groups like Human Rights Watch have documented the incidents.

Then there is the rising anti-Semitism of the Chávez folks, and the official hate speech and attacks on places of worship,.

But the point is that such reports of ongoing support come as the FARC is showing clear signs of regrouping after a very difficult past few months. The release of the handful of hostages has perhaps helped people forget the other 700 that remain behind.

The revelation in Semana magazine that the FARC summarily executed 11 Colombian members of congress in 2006, when they mistook some comrades for an army patrol should remind folks of what the FARC is really like.

Clearly the FARC, with access to cocaine revenue streams and extra territorial support, can survive long after their ideology has faded away. It is, slowly, regrouping in the triple canopy jungle, enjoying a rear-guard protected by Chávez and making their presence felt by a series of attacks against unarmed civilians. My full blog is here.

President Obama’s new intel guru, retired Navy Adm. Dennis Blair, dropped what I considered kind of a bombshell on Thursday which was all but ignored in a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing looking at global threats to the U.S. You'll have a hard time finding it in news coverage, too, though we reported it in today's New York Daily News.

Buried 19 pages deep in Blair's 49-page statement - and not even worthy of his office's press release - Blair said that Iraq’s Sunni insurgency has all but quit the fight after six years of war against the U.S.-led coalition:

“Most Iraqi-led Sunni insurgent groups have largely suspended operations against the Coalition, favoring engagement with the United States to protect their communities, to oppose AQI, or protect against feared domination by the Iraqi Government, although many are hedging by maintaining their organizational structures and access to weapons.”

Blair also noted that operations targeting the foreign-led Al Qaeda in Iraq...

“[H]ave reduced AQI’s operational capabilities and restricted the group’s freedom of movement and sanctuaries. Nevertheless, we judge the group is likely to retain a residual capacity to undertake terrorist operations for years to come.”

I certainly don’t want to leap to any conclusions here or get too far ahead of events, but…doesn’t that essentially mean WE HAVE WON?

Next question: Why did it take so long to figure out how to do it?

Twenty years after Red Army troops pulled out of Afghanistan, the last general to command them says the Soviets' devastating experience is a dismal omen for U.S. plans to build up troops there.

Many people know Abraham Lincoln as the 16th American president or the man who brought an end to slavery. But not many know of his military service.

A female suicide bomber attacked a procession of Shiite pilgrims - many of them women and children - south of Baghdad on Friday, killing 35 people and injuring 65 others, officials said. It was the third straight day of deadly bombings against Shiite pilgrims.

President Barack Obama's go-slow approach to missile defenses in Europe is stirring speculation that he is planning either to deep-freeze the costly project he inherited from the Bush administration or use it as a bargaining chip in broader security talks with Russia.

Blackwater Worldwide is abandoning its tarnished brand name as it tries to shake a reputation battered by oft-criticized work in Iraq, renaming its family of two dozen businesses under the name Xe.

A United States marine wanted by the military for recently abandoning his unit managed to cross the border into Canada and fatally shot himself outside his mother's farmhouse in Nova Scotia, police said Friday.