The Washington Times reports that President Obama has signaled Congress that he is ready to share missile defense secrets with Russia.
According to the Times:
In the president’s signing statement issued Saturday in passing into law the fiscal 2012 defense authorization bill, Mr. Obama said restrictions aimed at protecting top-secret technical data on U.S. Standard Missile-3 velocity burnout parameters might impinge on his constitutional foreign policy authority.
As first disclosed in this space several weeks ago, U.S. officials are planning to provide Moscow with the SM-3 data, despite reservations from security officials who say that doing so could compromise the effectiveness of the system by allowing Russian weapons technicians to counter the missile. The weapons are considered some of the most effective high-speed interceptors in the U.S. missile defense arsenal.
The obvious concern is that Russia will share those secrets with China or other rogue nations like Iran and North Korea.
Iran has already started analyzing a secret RQ-170 drone that landed there in early December.
According to the Times, State Department and Missile Defense Agency officials have considered the idea as part of missile defense talks, led in part by Undersecretary of State Ellen Tauscher, reportedly a critic of missile defense.
The Times adds:
Their thinking is that if the Russians know the technical data, it will help allay Moscow’s fears that the planned missile defenses in Europe would be used against Russian ICBMs. Officials said current SM-3s are not fast enough to catch long-range Russian missiles, but a future variant may have some anti-ICBM capabilities.
In other words, if we just show how nice we are, and how ineffective our equiment is, the Russians will feel better about us.
The Times also notes that the administration has provided almost no information to Congress, however, Undersecretary Tauscher claims the talks have not been conducted in secret.
The new National Defense Authorization Act signed by the President would seem to provide a legal block for this action, but as the Times reports, President Obama's signing statement gives him a loophole to do as he pleases:
Section 1227 of the defense law prohibits spending any funds that would be used to give Russian officials access to sensitive missile-defense technology, as part of a cooperation agreement without first sending Congress a report identifying the specific secrets, how they would be used and steps to protect the data from compromise.
The president also must certify to Congress that Russia will not share the secrets with other states and that it will not help Russia “to develop countermeasures” to U.S. defenses.The certification also must show whether Russia is providing equal access to its missile defense technologies, which are mainly nuclear-tipped anti-missile interceptors.Mr. Obama said in the signing statement that he would treat the legal restrictions as “non-binding.”
“While my administration intends to keep the Congress fully informed of the status of U.S. efforts to cooperate with the Russian Federation on ballistic missile defense, my administration will also interpret and implement section 1244 in a manner that does not interfere with the president’s constitutional authority to conduct foreign affairs and avoids the undue disclosure of sensitive diplomatic communications," he said, citing the incorrect section of the law.
Joel B. Pollack of Big Peace notes:
In the pursuit of a thirty-year-old leftist grudge against President Ronald Reagan’s policy of “peace through strength,” Obama has now apparently suggested his willingness to give away a technological edge eagerly coveted by Russia and especially by China.There can be no stronger case for replacing Barack Obama in November.
More on the case against re-electing Barack Obama at Examiner.com can be found here.
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