President Obama Prepares for War

according to a HuffPo author.  Well.  This is dramatic.  Excerpts:

‎...Last Friday, March 16, President Barack Obama may have quietly placed the United States on a war preparedness footing, perhaps in anticipation of an outbreak of war between Israel, the West, and Iran. A newly-propounded Executive Order, titled "National Defense Resources Preparedness," renews and updates the president's power to take control of all civil energy supplies, including oil and natural gas, control and restrict all civil transportation, which is almost 97 percent dependent upon oil; and even provides the option to re-enable a draft in order to achieve both the military and non-military demands of the country, according to a simple reading of the text.
The Executive Order was published on the White House website...

Further down the story...Okay--talk about cognitive whiplash.

From this:

Government experts who watch the day-to-day ebb and flow of oil stocks were surprised at the sudden move. One quipped, "If this is true, it would be such a departure in policy, I can scarcely believe it."

To this in the very next line:

The March 16 Executive Order is based on the Defense Production Act of 1950, as amended (50 U.S.C. App. 2061 et seq.), and Section 301 of Title 3 of the United States Code, and reads as a near-verbatim restatement of President Bill Clinton's 1994 Executive Order 12919, and several other orders of prior presidents. No specific plan was every outlined based any of the enabling Executive Orders.

This is an unbelievable departure from previous policy! It's nearly the exact same thing a prior Democratic president did!

‎Stockpiling or prioritizing will not require a state of war. In Section 310 entitled, "Critical Items," the government is empowered "to take appropriate action to ensure that critical components, critical technology items, essential materials, and industrial resources are available from reliable sources when needed to meet defense requirements during peacetime, graduated mobilization, and national emergency. Appropriate action may include restricting contract solicitations to reliable sources, restricting contract solicitations to domestic sources (pursuant to statutory authority), stockpiling critical components, and developing substitutes for critical components or critical technology items."

And then--uhhh...really?

We get:

Since 2007, when the prospect of Iran blocking the Strait of Hormuz became a daily threat enunciated by Iran, our local, state, and federal governments at all levels have been criticized for having no specific plan in the event an oil interruption occurred. The National Defense Resources Preparedness executive order appears to be the first step toward developing a potentially vast, far-sweeping plan that could reach into every garage and grocery store shelf....No specific plan was every outlined based any of the enabling Executive Orders.

And at the end of the piece:

At press time, administration sources could not be reached to elaborate on the timing of what many see as a year's overdue preparation for an oil interruption. Such an interruption and its disastrous consequence have been threatened for years. In short, for many years there has been no plan. But now apparently, the legal authority to organize a specific plan has been renewed and updated in crystal clarity.

Really? Really? First off, we get the incredibly unjournalistic "At press time, administration sources could not be reached to elaborate on the timing..." especially when a piece is prepared for an online publication. There is no press time.

And we go from "there is no plan--this is the first step towards elaborating a plan...this is the start of a plan" to "In short, for many years there has been no plan. But now apparently, the legal authority to organize a specific plan has been renewed and updated in crystal clarity." True, this still says that this is just giving the legal authority to organize a specific plan, but after being contrasted with there is no plan, it makes it sound like now we have a plan "in crystal clarity."

And comments are closed? At HuffPo? On an announcement like this about the policy of a Democratic President?...

Presidential Press Secretary Jay Carney gets a question about the Order at 25:51 in the below video.

And Edwin Black, the author of the piece, is also the author of the following--all making this even more interesting.