I’ll Take Choice “C:” Civil Society

/in , /by

Barely expressed in the NYT’s long story about our use of paramilitary strikes in places we’re not officially at war is a conflict between three choices. The NYT piece describes the first two–a covert war run by CIA and briefed to Congress, or a covert war run by JSOC subject less oversight–as the choice the Administration is currently debating.

The Yemen operation has raised a broader question: who should be running the shadow war? White House officials are debating whether the C.I.A. should take over the Yemen campaign as a “covert action,” which would allow the United States to carry out operations even without the approval of Yemen’s government. By law, covert action programs require presidential authorization and formal notification to the Congressional intelligence committees. No such requirements apply to the military’s so-called Special Access Programs, like the Yemen strikes.

Implicit in the choice, is the question of whether or not we want to partner with the Yemeni government as we launch attacks on extremist groups in the country.

In part, the spotty record of the Yemen airstrikes may derive from another unavoidable risk of the new shadow war: the need to depend on local proxies who may be unreliable or corrupt, or whose agendas differ from that of the United States.

American officials have a troubled history with Mr. Saleh, a wily political survivor who cultivates radical clerics at election time and has a history of making deals with jihadists. Until recently, taking on Al Qaeda had not been a priority for his government, which has been fighting an intermittent armed rebellion since 2004.

And for all Mr. Saleh’s power — his portraits hang everywhere in the Yemeni capital — his government is deeply unpopular in the remote provinces where the militants have sought sanctuary. The tribes there tend to regularly switch sides, making it difficult to depend on them for information about Al Qaeda. “My state is anyone who fills my pocket with money,” goes one old tribal motto.

The Yemeni security services are similarly unreliable and have collaborated with jihadists at times. The United States has trained elite counterterrorism teams there in recent years, but the military still suffers from corruption and poor discipline.

So we are partnering with forces with occasional ties to our enemies, but the Administration fights fully briefing this stuff to Congress for fear it will be leaked?

Read more →

Pelosi: Members Are Taking Votes … You Don’t Know What You’re Voting On

/in , /by

In his review of the Wikileaks material on Afghanistan, Marc Ambinder notes that John Kerry referred to “serious questions about the reality of America’s policy toward Pakistan and Afghanistan.”

Will it raise skepticism in Congress? Absolutely. The chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, John Kerry, said in a statement that “[h]owever illegally these documents came to light, they raise serious questions about the reality of America’s policy toward Pakistan and Afghanistan. Those policies are at a critical stage and these documents may very well underscore the stakes and make the calibrations needed to get the policy right more urgent.”

As Siun notes, the leak comes just before the House votes on an Afghan supplemental.

But what about the Senate, which voted on Thursday to pass the supplemental? If John Kerry, the Chairman of the SFRC and no slouch on Afghanistan policy, suggests these leaks shed new light on our Afghan policy, does that mean he and the rest of the Senate had enough information to vote to escalate the war in Afghanistan in the first place?

The degree to which Administrations–Republican and Democratic–withhold information and then ask Congress to endorse actions inflected by that information was a central theme of my discussion with Nancy Pelosi (and Jan Schakowsky) on Saturday. In a discussion of the way Administrations limit briefings on important issues to the Gang of Four or Eight, she describes  realizing–after she became Ranking Member of the House Intelligence Committee–the degree to which other members of Congress were voting on policies they knew nothing about. “When I became Ranking Member I was in a room all the time on this and that … and then members are taking votes and you’re thinking ‘you don’t even know what you’re voting on.'” Schakowsky followed up on Pelosi’s point to note how central that ignorance was when Congress authorized the Iraq War.

Now, Pelosi and other members of the Gang of Four bear some responsibility for perpetuating this system that asks Congress to authorize Executive Branch actions in ignorance.

But as I’ll show in my longer post on Pelosi’s comments, that’s precisely why she’s holding out for GAO oversight of the intelligence community and–more directly on point–expanded briefing beyond the Gang of Four.

I’m not sure there is anything in the new WikiLeaks bunch that would have convinced Congress that we can’t continue to dump money into Afghanistan (I’ll take a look at the WikiLeaks documents once I’m done transcribing this interview). But the lessons of the last week–notably, a reconsideration of the degree to which much of the intelligence community has been privatized and hidden in opaque contracts, as well as the WikiLeaks demonstration that the White House isn’t completely forthcoming about the problems in its war in Afghanistan–all demonstrate the need to give Congress the real oversight ability they lack now.

America’s Dilemma: Teachers or Food

/in , , /by

Remember that important NYT story from early this year describing the growing number of Americans whose sole income consists of food stamps?

About six million Americans receiving food stamps report they have no other income, according to an analysis of state data collected by The New York Times. In declarations that states verify and the federal government audits, they described themselves as unemployed and receiving no cash aid — no welfare, no unemployment insurance, and no pensions, child support or disability pay.

Their numbers were rising before the recession as tougher welfare laws made it harder for poor people to get cash aid, but they have soared by about 50 percent over the past two years. About one in 50 Americans now lives in a household with a reported income that consists of nothing but a food-stamp card.

Well, months after that report came out, some genius in the Obama Administration, according to a very shrill David Obey, proposed offsetting funds to keep teachers in the schools by cutting food stamps. Said genius wanted to cut these people’s only safety net so Arne Duncan could go on privatizing our schools.

The secretary of Education is whining about the fact he only got 85 percent of the money he wanted .… So, when we needed money, we committed the cardinal sin of treating him like any other mere mortal. We were giving them over $10 billion in money to help keep teachers on the job, plus another $5 billion for Pell, so he was getting $15 billion for the programs he says he cares about, and it was costing him $500 million [in reductions to the Race to the Top program]. Now that’s a pretty damn good deal.

So as far as I’m concerned, the secretary of Education should have been happy as hell. He should have taken that deal and smiled like a Cheshire cat. He’s got more walking around money than every other cabinet secretary put together.

It blows my mind that the White House would even notice the fight [over Race to the Top]. I would have expected the president to say to the secretary, “look, you’re getting a good deal, for God’s sake, what this really does is guarantee that the rest of the money isn’t going to be touched.”

We gave [Duncan] $4.3 billion in the stimulus package, no questions asked. He could spend it any way he wants. … I trusted the secretary, so I gave him a hell of a lot more money than I should have.

My point is that I have been working for school reform long before I ever heard of the secretary of education, and long before I ever heard of Obama. And I’m happy to welcome them on the reform road, but I’ll be damned if I think the only road to reform lies in the head of the Secretary of Education.

We were told we have to offset every damn dime of [new teacher spending]. Well, it ain’t easy to find offsets, and with all due respect to the administration their first suggestion for offsets was to cut food stamps. Now they were careful not to make an official budget request, because they didn’t want to take the political heat for it, but that was the first trial balloon they sent down here. … Their line of argument was, well, the cost of food relative to what we thought it would be has come down, so people on food stamps are getting a pretty good deal in comparison to what we thought they were going to get. Well isn’t that nice. Some poor bastard is going to get a break for a change. [emphasis original]

As a reminder, here’s David Dayen’s summary of the squabble between Obey and Duncan.

One of [the amendments in the war spending resolution] included this social spending money, comprised of:

$10 billion for an Education Jobs Fund, $4.95 billion for Pell Grants, $701 million for border security, $180 million for innovative technology energy loans, $163 million for schools on military installations, $142 million in additional Gulf Coast oil spill funding, $50 million in emergency food assistance, and $16.5 million to build a new soldier processing center at Fort Hood.

You can read the full summary from David Obey of the Appropriations Committee here. There were some underlying provisions from the Senate war supplemental that appropriated funds to disaster relief, victims of Agent Orange, mine safety, the oil spill, and other areas.

This money in this amendment is entirely paid for through rescissions in various programs, and actually reduces the deficit by $439 million. But in order to pay for the education jobs fund and save 140,000 teachers, House appropriators dipped into $500 million of the Race to the Top fund. Arne Duncan has been sitting on $4 billion dollars in stimulus money for over a year so he can bribe states into changing their education policies. In the meantime, state budgets are in absolute crisis and hundreds of thousands of teachers could lose their jobs. Read more →

Liz “BabyDick” Cheney and DNC: Ideological Soulmates?

/in , /by

A number of people have taken the DNC to task for its Rovian attack on RNC Chair Michael Steele for comments suggesting we might fail in Afghanistan (Glenn Greenwald, Greg Sargent, Adam Serwer). The only thing I would add to their comments is to note that not only a majority of the Democratic caucus in the House–as Glenn points out–but also two-thirds of Democrats in polls are ready to end the Afghan war, most of them strongly. Is the institutional Democratic Party trying to score political points on an issue that a solid majority of their party opposes? Really, we’ve gotten that stupid?!?

But what really demonstrates the stupidity of the move is how it puts us in ideological and political partnership with Liz “BabyDick” Cheney–who has called for Steele’s firing over his comments.

“RNC Chairman Michael Steele’s comments about the war in Afghanistan were deeply disappointing and wrong,” Cheney’s statement read. “The chairman of the Republican party must be unwavering in his support for American victory in the war on terror — a victory that cannot be accomplished if we do not prevail in Afghanistan. I endorse fully Bill Kristol’s letter to Chairman Steele. It is time for Chairman Steele to step down.”

Where BabyDick calls Steele’s comments “wrong” DNC calls them “unconscionable.” Where BabyDick demands that the RNC Chair “must be unwavering in support” for the Afghan war, DNC warns that Steele’s “words have consequences.”

Tim Kaine? A little unsolicited advice. BabyDick has spent a year and a half trying to undermine President Obama at every turn. She has done so using authoritarian dictates about what should and shouldn’t be done. It’s bad enough the party adopted a strategy pioneered by Karl Rove. But the day we’re moving in concert with Baby Dick and her Daddy? That’s a pretty good sign that we’ve made a mistake.

Cowboys, T. Jeff’s Declaration, Bond Bitchez and Teh Porn Stash

/in , , , , , , , , , , /by

Hi there buckaroos and buckarettes. Sometimes a man has gots to do what a man has gots to do. Now is one of those times. Marcy up and penned this most awesome cutting, biting, truth to power wonderful post. And then she went and buggered the pooch with a sandpapered, plain vanilla, non confrontational milquetoast title.

Bleeeccchhh.

Responsible blog wingman and all that I am, I immediately pointed out the title should be “The Declaration of Independence, Obama’s Presidential Kill Cards and the Porn Stash”. Same old story; same old song and dance. Nobody ever listens to good old bmaz. Instead we went with the Wolf Blitzer/Jonas Brothers/Disney Lite title of “Keep Your Declaration of Independence Right Next to Your Assassination Cards”.

Yawn.

Come on, you just know that Michael Leiter, the designated human kill switch of the Obama Administration, keeps those two critical reference materials – the Declaration of Independence and the US Government’s deck of snuff cards – in the safest, most discreet and yet accessible, location to his bedroom. You know, right where he keeps his porn stash.

Now what is really odd about this report, and does not register at first blush, is that Leiter has mentally honed in and lasered his focus on the Declaration of Independence rather than the Constitution. Seriously; think about it. It is an incredibly telling difference.

Here is the opening text of the aggressive and intentionally somewhat in your face Declaration of Independence, the forward cry and belligerent marking of territory by a new nation staking its claim in the world:

When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

Then ponder the respectful, moral and enlightened reach of the Preamble to the Constitution, the hallowed document that Leiter and Obama ought to be paying attention to when deciding to remotely snuff human lives (including, by all reports, those of American citizens) without the protection of due process and by the cold mechanical death by drone:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

The Declaration is an affirmative statement of manifest authority; the Constitution is a self imposed restriction of manifest authority and protection of due process in the face of it. So, there are a lot of issues with this whole gig surrounding Leiter and his nighttime is the right time to kill thing. And people were worried about Hillary getting a 3 am call; seems all so quaint now.

Oh, and by the way, T. Jeff it has now been concluded made a mistake in drafting the Declaration of Independence, and had it even more authoritarian than anybody ever knew:

Preservation scientists at the Library of Congress have discovered that Thomas Jefferson, even in the act of declaring independence from England, had trouble breaking free from monarchial rule.

In an early draft of the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson wrote the word “subjects,” when he referred to the American public. He then erased that word and replaced it with “citizens,” a term he used frequently throughout the final draft.

The Library released news of the struck word for the first time on Friday.

Jeebus, even dead presidents and founders are going rogue.

The other quite random thought I cannot pry from my beady little mind is the slathering coverage of the super hot, most awesomest, Redhead Rooskie Spy Babe, Anna Chapman. At first I could not figure out the singular fascination of the press with this chick who is being billed as the new “Bond Babe”.

Then it dawned on me. Chapman is hot, red, sultry and enticing. And she looks eerily like a young and come hither Maureen Dowd. Come on, you just know Howie Kurtz and his penis er the media is thinking that.

Well, that is yer friendly Friday Night Emptywheel Trash Talk. New and improved with no sports! Eh, it will be Favre season soon enough, so do not despair. Tonight’s musical interlude is a little slice of the old west I know and love. Actually, I like both kinds of music, country and western. The incomparable Phil Lynott and Thin Lizzy with The Cowboy Song. Oh, and the Boys Are Back.

Happy trails pardners!

Does Kagan Think the 2001 Afghan AUMF Authorized Iraq?

/22 Comments/in , /by

I’m going to assume that this was just a misstatement on Elena Kagan’s part, but it’s one that I hope she corrects before her confirmation hearings are done. In response to a question from DiFi, Kagan suggested that SCOTUS’ decision in the Hamdi case–which relied on the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force passed after 9/11–applied to Iraq and Afghanistan.

DiFi: Could you elaborate on the scope of the President’s authority to detain individuals under the law of armed conflict?

Kagan: Senator Feinstein, the conversation that Senator Graham and I had–and I believe in that same hearing you asked a similar question–starts with the Hamdi case, where the Supreme Court said that the AUMF–the authorization for the use military force–which is the statute that applies to our conflict with Iraq and Afghanistan, that the AUMF includes detention authority, detention authority, and Hamdi said that the law of war typically grants detention authority in a wartime situation and interpreted the AUMF consistent with that law of war understanding.

Hamdi, of course, doesn’t even mention Iraq. And while Bush did conduct detention in Iraq in relation to that separate war, those detention operations fell under different guidelines even according to the radical people running the Bush Administration. More troubling, however, is the possibility that Kagan has internalized the false claims of many on the right that Iraq had anything at all to do with the 2001 AUMF, which authorized action only against those with ties to 9/11.

Again, I’m hoping this was just a misstatement, one which Kagan will correct before these hearings are done.

Tapper Throws Softball on Drones to Panetta

/32 Comments/in /by

Jake Tapper’s interview with Leon Panetta has made a lot of news already and he deserves credit for getting the CIA Director on film in the first place. But one question he asked did more harm than good. Tapper asked Panetta to assure us that the US use of drones was legal. But he limited that question to Pakistan.

Tapper: Will you give us your personal assurance that everything the CIA is doing in Pakistan is compliant with US and international law?

Panetta: There’s no question that we are abiding by international law, and the law of war.

As the UN report on targeted killing (which Tapper references in setting up his question) makes clear, the problem with drones is not so much their use against combatants in active war zones (as the borderlands of Pakistan, at least, is).

79. The use of drones for targeted killings has generated significant controversy. Some have suggested that drones as such are prohibited weapons under IHL because they cause, or have the effect of causing, necessarily indiscriminate killings of civilians, such as those in the vicinity of a targeted person.142 It is true that IHL places limits on the weapons States may use, and weapons that are, for example, inherently indiscriminate (such as biological weapons) are prohibited.143 However, a missile fired from a drone is no different from any other commonly used weapon, including a gun fired by a soldier or a helicopter or gunship that fires missiles. The critical legal question is the same for each weapon: whether its specific use complies with IHL. [my emphasis]

Rather, the problem is using drones in places like Somalia and Yemen, where we are not at war.

86. Outside its own territory (or in territory over which it lacked control) and where the situation on the ground did not rise to the level of armed conflict in which IHL would apply, a State could theoretically seek to justify the use of drones by invoking the right to anticipatory self-defence against a non-state actor.147 It could also theoretically claim that human rights law’s requirement of first employing less-than-lethal means would not be possible if the State has no means of capturing or causing the other State to capture the target. As a practical matter, there are very few situations outside the context of active hostilities in which the test for anticipatory self-defence – necessity that is “instant, overwhelming, and leaving no choice of means, and no moment of deliberation”148 – would be met. This hypothetical presents the same danger as the “ticking-time bomb” scenario does in the context of the use of torture and coercion during interrogations: a thought experiment that posits a rare emergency exception to an absolute prohibition can effectively institutionalize that exception. Applying such a scenario to targeted killings threatens to eviscerate the human rights law prohibition against the arbitrary deprivation of life. In addition, drone killing of anyone other than the target (family members or others in the vicinity, for example) would be an arbitrary deprivation of life under human rights law and could result in State responsibility and individual criminal liability. [my emphasis]

So by phrasing the question as he did, specifically limiting it to one of the few places where it is legal, Tapper invited Panetta to claim legality for the wider drone program.

Now, Tapper prefaces this question by noting that Panetta can’t discuss classified programs, perhaps suggesting that the drone attacks in countries with which we are not at war are a secret (though our first strike in Yemen was widely reported in 2002!).

But if the effect of the question, as asked, is to allow the government to specifically obscure the legal issues, is it really worth asking?

We Spend $1 Billion/Year Fighting Each al Qaeda Member in Afghanistan

/48 Comments/in /by

Think Progress does the math on Panetta’s admission that there are just 100 al Qaeda members in Afghanistan, and discovers we’ve got 1,000 American troops in Afghanistan for each al Qaeda member.

The U.S. has committed nearly 100,000 troops to the mission in Afghanistan. ABC This Week host Jake Tapper asked CIA Director Leon Panetta how big is the al Qaeda threat that the soldiers are combating:

TAPPER: How many Al Qaeda, do you think, are in Afghanistan?

PANETTA: I think the estimate on the number of Al Qaeda is actually relatively small. I think at most, we’re looking at 50 to 100, maybe less. It’s in that vicinity. There’s no question that the main location of Al Qaeda is in the tribal areas of Pakistan.

The 100,000 U.S. forces that have been tasked to dismantle the 100 or so al Qaeda members — a ratio of 1000:1 — is complicated by the fact that we are also engaged in operations going after the Taliban leadership.

Now let me add to their math. Even Afghan war fans admit that it costs $1 million a year–on top of things like salary–to support a US service member in Afghanistan.

Michael O’Hanlon, a defense analyst at the Brookings Institution, says one useful way to break down these huge numbers is to look at how much it costs to send just one soldier to war.

“We are at a point where it’s unbelievably costing us close to a million dollars, in additional costs — above and beyond salaries and the equipment that’s already in the inventory — per soldier or Marine per year,” he says.

Fighting in Afghanistan means fighting in one of the most remote regions on Earth, and that plays a large role in the seemingly astronomical figure.

Dov Zakheim, a former chief financial officer for the Defense Department, says the $1 million price tag includes getting the soldier to Afghanistan, getting his equipment to Afghanistan, and moving the soldier around once in the country.

So 1,000 US troops per al Qaeda member, at a cost of $1 million each. That’s $1 billion a year we spend for each al Qaeda member to fight our war in Afghanistan.

This sort of adds a new twist to that old Einstein quip about the definition of insanity being doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Because we’re doing the same thing over and over again–at a cost of $1 billion a year per nominal opponent–and expecting anything other than bankruptcy.

DARPA Seeking CompLit Experts

/154 Comments/in , /by

Oh boy, I’ve got a lot to say about this:

After nine years of conflict, the U.S. military is still having trouble finding common ground with warzone locals. One way to fill that breach, Darpa figures, is through “interactive stories.”

Counterinsurgency, in many ways, is a series of negotiations — over economic development, over security, over political power. And “negotiation,” Darpa explains in a new request for information, “is best served by a culturally-specific narrative that explains why we hold a position, how it relates to other parties, and how it affects all parties both positively and negatively.”

[snip]

To come up with its storytelling tools, Darpa’s Information Processing Technologies Office is hoping to go beyond its usual cadre of neuroscientists, artificial intelligence specialists, and gadgeteers.  The agency also wants contributions from “art, literature, film, dance, games development, advertising and public relations, advertising, grass roots organizing, collective decision making or any other discipline for which the respondent can make an argument that the approach bears on this task.”

Click through for the bit about Wizard of Oz.

First, a story. As I was finishing my PhD–having done research on what amounted to interactive narratives–I was hanging around MI’s School of Information some. I saw a presentation from some IBM dude who worked at their Yorktown Heights research center. He was describing how IBM’s consulting wing had started working with their clients to use narrative to better manage corporate culture. It quickly became clear to me that they hadn’t ever considered one of the basic problems of the literary sphere–irony (or, more generally, language that was not transparent, that meant something different than its plain language meaning). This IBM dude was describing, for example, how significant they thought it was that one story-collection they had done had mentioned one of their clients’ VPs a large number of times. I asked, “were they being sincere? because some of those comments sound like they were being ironic?” Because IBM was assuming language was transparent (as it often is when you’re talking to computers), they had misread that what they thought was instilling strong corporate culture but was instead a corporate-funded way to trash their own VP.

I went to ask IBM dude about this after he finished. As it turned out, he had worked with my father when he worked at Yorktown Heights; my dad was a big hero to this IBM dude (I believe he meant his compliments sincerely). And IBM dude was thrilled when I told him I was a Watson scholar; IBM had paid a big chunk of my college tuition and employed me every summer in college (I also learned to swim at the IBM pool, that’s how thoroughly I was immersed in IBM culture). So for shits and giggles, I asked whether IBM would be able to hire someone like me–someone with expertise in the subtleties of human narrative. And he sort of soured and said, “oh, no, we’re really only able to hire social scientists.”

Lucky for me, I had gotten my fill of working at IBM every summer in college.

I took two things away from this exchange.

First, the exchange reinforced my strongly held belief that our society devalues the humanities to its significant cost. Read more →

The WaPo’s Very Funny Idea of Source Protection

/34 Comments/in , /by

So on the same day that WaPo accepted Dave Weigel’s resignation for the unauthorized publication of emails that were off the record, it also published an article relying on anonymous sources–with no discussion of whether these sources have a motive for their comments–claiming Rolling Stone journalist Michael Hastings violated journalistic rules by publishing comments that were off the record. Mind you, the article itself supports the conclusion that the Bud Lite Lime imbibing blabbermouths just assumed their comments were off the record but never asked for them to be, particularly given the several other comments which they explicitly asked to be treated as off the record.

But that’s not the weirdest thing about the WaPo’s funny treatment of sources today.

In addition to the article beating up on the Rolling Stone for what appear to be unsubstantiated anonymous charges, they also post the entirety of a fact-checking exchange between an editor at Rolling Stone and Duncan Boothby, the McChrystal press aide who was fired after the article came out. And that exchange gives a fairly detailed description of who the Bud Lite Lime-imbibing blabbermouths were.

2.) Are the following people on McChrystal’s staff, and, are these titles correct:

a. Col. Charlie Flynn, McChrystal,s chief of staff — NO,CHARLIE IS HIS ‘XO’ OR EXECUTIVE OFFICER

b. Brig. Gen. Bill Mayville, McChrystal,s chief of operations–NO, MAJOR GENERAL, DEPUTY CHIEF OF STAFF, OPERATIONS

c. Gen. Mike Flynn, McChrystal,s second-in-command — NO, MAJOR GENERAL, DIRECTOR OF INTELLIGENCE

3.) The reporter doesn,t name the following people, but he does give a list of vague descriptions for other people on McChrystal’s team. Can the following be found on McChrystal’s team: FINE, NO NAMES PREFERED

a. A Navy SEAL (TWO NAVY SEALS)

b. A British Special Forces officer (NO – NOT ON HIS TEAM, BUT THE FORMER HEAD OF BRITISH SPECIAL FORCES, THE SPECIAL AIR SERVICE (RETIRED) IS ON HIS TEAM)

c. An Afghan Special Forces commando (YES WHO IS HIS AIDE DE CAMP)

d. A lawyer (SPECIAL FORCES LAWYER)

e. Two fighter pilots (YUP)

Read more →