redblueamerica.com

President Bush’s choice to lead the principal agency charged with coordinating both counterterrorism operations and synthesizing intelligence says killing and capturing jihadists is one facet of the wider war, which must focus on the battlefield of ideas.

At his confirmation hearing yesterday, Michael Leiter said America is fighting a “full-spectrum war,” of which law enforcement and “kinetic” operations are but one part. Kinetic force, he said, is “high explosives. It’s going out and killing people. For a certain population, that is probably the right answer.”

The testimony represents a change in emphasis for the Bush administration, which spent its first four-year term stressing the kinetic side of what the president calls “the global war on terror.”

The shift may have come last July, when a National Intelligence Estimate concluded that Al Qaeda had reconstituted its ability to launch operations in its new base in the Federal Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan, along the border with Afghanistan.