A. Carter:"We had a cyber Pearl Harbor. His name was Snowden" ; +he is willing to use American power

[jakeXT]

Obama’s Pentagon Choice, Ashton Carter, Is Known as Assertive and Independent

...

Former aides and administration officials say that Mr. Carter — like both Mr. Hagel and Mr. Kerry — was stunned last year when Mr. Obama, after a walk and talk on the South Lawn of the White House with Mr. McDonough, decided at the last moment to call off military strikes against President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, who had charged across Mr. Obama’s own “red line” on the use of chemical weapons. Mr. Carter will now inherit a military campaign that has made some progress in reversing the gains of the Islamic State but has made dealing with Mr. Assad a far less important issue.

Mr. Obama’s apparent willingness to wait years for the Syrian civil war to play out may frustrate Mr. Carter, who former colleagues say often pushed for clarity in policy goals — and then moved swiftly to pursue those goals.

“I would not call him a hawk,” said William J. Perry, a defense secretary under President Clinton and one of Mr. Carter’s mentors. “But he is pretty hard-nosed about what can be done with American power, and he is willing to use it when appropriate.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/06/us/ashton-carter-obamas-pentagon-choice-is-known-as-assertive-and-independent.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=first-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0

In his remarks at Harvard, Carter said another “obvious” national security challenge facing the United States is cybersecurity. But he said the defense establishment has often focused too much on external threats and not on insider ones.

“We had a cyber Pearl Harbor. His name was Edward Snowden,” Carter said, referring to the former intelligence contractor who exposed inner workings of U.S. espionage and surveillance networks.

He said that U.S. security officials who were supposed to safeguard against a mole “screwed up spectacularly in the case of Snowden. And this knucklehead had access to destructive power that was much more than any individual person should have access to.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/ash-carter-passed-over-before-gets-picked-by-obama-to-lead-pentagon/2014/12/05/33a2429a-7c95-11e4-9a27-6fdbc612bff8_story.html

[nichomachus]

1. Why don't they just change the name back to War Department and be done with it

This jackass is only going to make things worse.

[bemildred]

2. At least he is not saying everything is peachy at the NSA. nt