Video: Protesting N.Y. Terror Trials
Hundreds rallied in NYC to protest the government's plans to hold major terrorism trials in a Manhattan federal courthouse. As Randall Pinkston reports, the courthouse is just blocks from ground zero.
Durbin questions Afghanistan strategy

by Mark Silva

Count Sen. Dick Durbin among those doubtful about the new deployment of troops in Afghanistan that President Barack Obama has ordered.

"I'm skeptical as to whether 30,000 more troops will make a difference,'' Durbin, the senior senator from Illinois, No. 2 Democratic leader in the Senate and mentor and friend to Obama, said on FOX News Sunday. " We have over 200,000 now when you count NATO forces, American forces and Afghan military forces."

The U.S. military presence will grow to 98,000 by next summer, under the surge that Obama has ordered for Afghanistan, followed by a planned withdrawal of troops starting in July 2011, with the pace and endpoint of that draw down to be determined by "conditions on the ground,'' under the "new way forward'' that the president announced in a nationally televised speech last week.

"I understand the president took the time to reach this decision after more than seven years'' of U.S. involvement in Afghanistan,'' Durbin allowed. "We were at a point where we had to really reassess our strategy.''

Among the questions remaining: that announced intention for withdrawal starting in 2011 which the White House acknowledged would likely be "misinterpreted'' even as the president was announcing his plans.

"I'm going to meet with the president, I'm sure, and have conversations about that deadline which appears to be interpreted different ways by different people,'' Durbin said. "But I would like to believe by July of 2011 that we will be in a... a position... where we're going to see our troops really coming home."

Durbin said: "The pace of our troops coming home, I understand, depends on conditions...Are we going to let American soldiers stay there indefinitely while they dither, in Vice President Cheney's words? I don't think we should. American lives are at stake. And so I want to know, at least from my point of view, what the president's meaning is when he talks about this deadline."

Obama Rallies Democrats On Health Overhaul

President Obama appealed directly to senators' desire for history-making change and their short-term political fears Sunday in urging them to stand together and overhaul the nation's health care system.