President Franklin Roosevelt may not have invented the airplane, but during World War II he transformed strategic bombing into one of the principal emblems of the reigning American way of war. General Dwight D Eisenhower had nothing to do with the Manhattan Project that developed the atomic bomb. Yet, as president, Ike's strategy of Massive Retaliation made nukes the centrepiece of US national security policy.

So, too, with Barack Obama and special operations forces. The US Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) with its constituent operating forces - Green Berets, Army Rangers, Navy SEALs and the like - predated his presidency by decades. Yet it is only on Obama's watch that these secret warriors have reached the pinnacle of the US military's prestige hierarchy.

John F Kennedy famously gave the Green Berets their distinctive headgear. Obama has endowed the whole special operations "community" with something less decorative but far more important: privileged status that provides special operators with maximum autonomy while insulating them from the vagaries of politics, budgetary or otherwise. Congress may yet require the Pentagon to undertake some (very modest) belt-tightening, but one thing's for sure: no one is going to tell USSOCOM to go on a diet. What the special ops types want, they will get, with few questions asked - and virtually none of those few posed in public.

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/06/20126285724611237.html

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) called on President Obama on Tuesday to appoint a special counsel to investigate and prosecute recent leaks by top government officials to news outlets regarding key national security decisions, arguing that the leaks are timed to bolster the president’s reelection efforts.

McCain, who faced Obama in the 2008 presidential race and remains a leading critic of the president’s foreign policy, charged in a Senate floor speech Tuesday afternoon that recent leaks to The Washington Post, the New York Times and other news outlets and authors “appears to be a broader administration effort to paint a portrait of President Obama as a strong leader on national security issues.”

“There is no legitimate reason” for the information to be “out in the public domain,” McCain said, adding that releasing the information “only harms our national security and the men and women sworn to protect it.”

McCain cited several reports detailing key national security decisions by the Obama White House, including a New York Times story chronicling Obama’s approval of a “kill list” of suspected terrorists targeted with drone attacks, reports in the Times and The Washington Post regarding U.S. involvement in cyberattacks on Iran’s nuclear program and details in a new book by Newsweek special correspondent Daniel Klaidman about the administration’...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/2chambers/post/john-mccain-wants-special-counsel-to-investigate-national-security-leaks/2012/06/05/gJQAZU4kGV_blog.html

The article above this one asked the question about the problem of not having any questions re questionable activities, but McCain is now asking questions not about the questionable practices questioned above but about the way the answers are leaked before any questions are asked, which McCain believes are leaks without questions, apparently in an effort to boost the questionable secret war activity of president Obama...  Blimey...