Real National Security Begins at Home, Say Women Leaders

Has defense spending become the new patriotism? Even as homeland security funds dwindle, the Pentagon now sucks up 54 percent of the federal budget. Yet politicians rarely challenge the current formula, fearful of being tagged as “weak.” Meet the leaders who say it will take women to fix our nation’s defense priorities.

By Adele M. Stan
The Media Consortium

Times are tough. Wall Street has tumbled, and Main Street is squeezed. As housing values plummet and people lose income, governments are also feeling the pinch. Despite it all, there’s one area of the federal budget that continues to grow: defense spending.

A growing chorus of women leaders are rising in protest, seeking to educate voters on the perils of a dangerously unbalanced set of priorities. From spending cuts in state budgets in such bread-and-butter areas as public health and sheltering the homeless, to a dangerous underfunding of port security and an exodus of first responders to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, women are seeing the Pentagon’s growing share of the federal budget take a toll on the well-being of their own families. Yet an absence of women in the halls of power helps maintain the status quo, say activists, and a failure to enlist military women as allies in the cause of national security reform has held back the progressive funding agenda.

Women are paying attention to who’s getting federal dollars, says Celinda Lake, the Democratic pollster who leads Lake Research Associates. In focus groups, says Lake, “we do have women volunteering …that they wonder how we could find overnight all the money to fight a war and to bail out Wall Street, but we can’t find enough money to provide national health care reform. And there’s a lot of anecdotal evidence of that.”

Meanwhile, in Washington, a consensus is building among defense experts that something needs to be done to straighten out those priorities for the very sake of what all that spending is supposed to buy us: real national security. While tax dollars are poured into the pockets of defense contractors for projects of debatable value or documentable waste, homeland security budgets are starved, leaving the nation vulnerable in the face of attack. Yet defense spending sops up more than half of the federal discretionary budget.

What’s pie got to do with it?

At Women’s Action for New Directions, field director Bobbie Wrenn Banks has taken to the road with a victual demonstration of the classic pie chart that WAND calls the Great American Pie project.

“We actually use a pumpkin pie — literally, a pumpkin pie,” Banks explains. “And we go into groups and we slice the pie; it represents the discretionary budget.” The discretionary budget is the piece of the federal budget that gets negotiated between the president and Congress (unlike such programs as Social Security and Medicare, whose costs are mandatory expenditures). “And over half of that pie — 54 percent of that pie — that slice goes to the Pentagon,” says Banks. “Then we have very small little slivers of pie that go to environmental concerns, income security, affordable housing…” And that doesn’t even cover the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Banks says. Add in the nearly $200 billion that taxpayers have anted up for the wars in this year alone, and “we’re spending nearly $700 billion a year on the military,” she says.

Banks’ pie show is headed this week to Mississippi, where she’ll visit the district offices of Sen. Thad Cochran, the Republican ranking member of the appropriations committee.

Absent a pie-bearing visit from Banks herself, she advises women to take a look at an effort at reform outlined in the Unified Security Budget proposed by the left-leaning group, Foreign Policy in Focus (part of the Institute for Policy Studies), which looks at how the budget is divided among various security needs. “[W]hen you look at the overall security spending pie, it’s just so staggeringly lopsided, because 90 percent of our security money goes to the offense, with a 6 percent slice of that pie going to… homeland security, and only a 4 percent slice going to (conflict) prevention.” Prevention includes diplomacy, foreign assistance in the form of infrastructure-building, and activities such as those done by the Peace Corps.

States starved for security

As president of the Women Legislators’ Lobby, Nan Grogan Orrock, a state senator in Georgia, knows all too well how the dearth of homeland security funding plays out on the ground. “You’ve got an array of issues around homeland security, around the railroads, and the freight containers, you know, the ports and the whole baggage and cargo screening,” says Orrock. “They need another $ 1.25 billion just to meet what are considered appropriate standards for cargo and baggage screening.”

Earlier this year, 339 women state legislators signed WiLL’s letter [PDF file] to members of Congress, asking them not to increase the Pentagon’s budget. “At least 22 states in the country have budget gaps, and 29 states…have had to cut their budgets to try to balance them,” Orrock says. “We have seen cuts to rape crisis centers and domestic violence shelters, cut anywhere from 38 to 42 percent of their state funding…and yet, under these Bush military budgets, we’re spending more than at any time on the military since World War II.”

But Lorelei Kelly, policy director for the White House Project’s Real Security Initiative and a member of the task force that put together the Unified Security Budget, cautions against riding roughshod on the military itself. “The first thing you shouldn’t say, always, is ‘Cut the military’s budget, cut the military’s budget,’” asserts Kelly, who co-authored, with Army Reserve Lt. Col. Dana Eyre, A Woman’s Guide to Talking About War and Peace [PDF file]. “Talk about the need for national security reform, and within that, that military’s budget has to change. And let’s not just go in with a bunch of hacksaws and blindly start whacking away at things.”

Members of the military, Kelly contends, can be progressives’ best allies when trying to enact reform. Too often, she says, progressives have lumped in with the institutional military everything bad about the military-industrial complex, alienating potential partners. Among the real culprits in the budget dilemma are the procurement process and the contracting out of work that used to be done by soldiers. “It’s appalling, the level of privatization that’s happened within the military budget, and of the service,” Kelly explains. “The institution itself has been very badly damaged in many ways.”

Service members, especially women, are often less than happy with the ways in which contracting and privatization affect their mission, and can be helpful to the cause of reform if asked the right questions in a respectful way, says Kelly. She notes a 2005 House hearing on possible exit strategies for the Iraq war at which former Air Force Under Secretary Antonia Chayse testified. In hearings convened by Sen. Byron Dorgan, chairman of the Democratic Policy Committee, Bunnatine Greenhouse, the highest-ranking civilian in the Army Corps of Engineers, blew the whistle on waste and fraud committed by contractors to the military in Iraq. In fact, if you scroll through the report issued by Dorgan’s committee, you’ll find that in the course of the last three years, many of the the whistleblowers on abuses by military contractors have been women.

Women could change the national security equation

One could argue that the lopsidedness in the federal budget that favors defense contractors exists in inverse relationship to the number of women in the halls of power. (Among the 188 countries listed in the International Parliamentary Union’s index of Women in National Parliaments, the U.S. ranks number 69 in its representation of women in the national legislature; Afghanistan’s rank is 27.) “While there’s nothing being biologically special about women being able to champion peace, I do believe that the life experiences and perspectives that women bring serve these issues well,” Banks says. When it comes to domestic spending, she says, women tend to lean to the progressive side.

Then there’s the matter of Iraq itself. “You have a pretty big gender gap on the war,” Lake explains, who co-authored, with Republican pollster Kellyanne Conway, the book, What Women Really Want. “You have men thinking it was worth it to go in, women thinking it wasn’t — which is interesting, given that both men and women are against the war…”

In an August Lake Research Partners/Tarrance Group Battleground poll, likely voters were asked the question: “All in all, do you think the war in Iraq is worth fighting, or not?” Among men, 50 percent said the war was worth fighting, 45 percent said it was not. However, only 35 percent of women said it was worth fighting, while 57 percent said it was not — a double-digit spread on either side of the equation.

Even women in the military see the war differently from their male counterparts. As early as 2005, a poll by Military Times found that 63 percent of men among the active service members they surveyed “said they believe(d) the United States should have gone to war in Iraq, but only 42 percent of the women believe(d) that.” Less than half of the women service members said they approved of the way President Bush was “handling the war,” while 65 percent of the servicemen did.

If more women were in Congress, says Banks, you’d see a difference in the ordering of priorities. “Women in Congress vote more progressively on many issues,” Banks says. In the 109th Congress, WAND reports, women voted for progressive policies in 67 percent of those votes, compared to 48 percent for men. The votes WAND examined fell within the categories of national security, and legislation affecting children, women, and the environment.

Women are naturals at the sort of skills required to effect real security, Kelly asserts. In Afghanistan, the U.S. counterinsurgency plan calls for the creation of constituencies that have a stake in seeing democracy succeed, she explains. “Women are really good at creating stakeholder constituencies in the public,” Kelly says. “Doesn’t everybody know a woman who holds the neighborhood together? That’s a strategic security skill in today’s world.”

# # #

This article is part of The Media Consortium’s Live From Main Street series, and is published in conjunction with the next Live From Main Street program, “Beyond Hockey Moms and Palin Politics: Women on Real National Security.” Hosted by Laura Flanders of GRITtv, the town hall will feature a number of progressive women leaders, including Ports Commissioner Gael Tarleton; Erin Solaro, author of Women in the Line of Fire: What you should know about Women in the Military, Carol Kessler, director of Center for Global Security for Pacific Northwest National Lab and co-chair of Women in International Security; Rep. Maralyn Chase, Washington’s 32nd D;strict and Washington State director for the Women Legislators’ Lobby; Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner, executive director of Moms Rising; Rosalinda Guillen, co-founder and executive director, Community to Community Development; Martha Burk, author and money editor at Ms. magazine; Sarah Van Gelder, executive editor at Yes! magazine.

This edition of Live From Main Street will tape on Sunday, October 26, 2008, at 7:00 p.m. EDT/6:00 p.m. CDT/4:00 p.m. PDT in Seattle. The town hall will be streamed live and can be viewed at www.livefrommainstreet.org. The taping is open to the public: click here for more details; Click here to RSVP to this event.

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Iraq Former P.M. Says Surge Not so Great

When it comes to Iraq, the surge is a great success, right? Well, according to Ayad Allawi, Iraq’s former prime minister, that depends on what you mean by “success”.

In a briefing before members of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs yesterday, Allawi answered questions from members of he subcommittee on international organizations, human rights, and oversight. When asked by Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif., the subcommittee’s ranking member, for Allawi’s “assessment of of what’s come of the surge,” Allawi all but said, not much.

Reminding Rohrabacher that the original objective of the surge was to create a safe environment for a process of national reconciliation, Allawi said, “Now, militarily, the surge has achieved some of its goals. Politically, I don’t think so.”

Allawi rattled off a laundry list of perils that still confront the Iraqi people: internal displacement of large numbers of people, millions of refugees outside Iraq, security forces he described as sectarian militias dressed in national uniforms and no regime for enforcement of the national constitution, which he described as a “divisive” document.

The former prime minister, who is now a member of the Iraqi parliament, also alleged that the process known as “deBaathification” is “being used to punish people.” Originally designed to purge Saddam Hussein’s loyalists from military and security forces, Allawi said the process has become politicized and can be used against virtually anybody, since Saddam Hussein’s “Baath party ruled for 35 years, and every individual had to join…”

“So, if you measure the surge from a military point of view, it has succeeded,” Allawi said. “But I don’t think this was the [prime] objective, because soon you will have reversals. Security has not prevailed, and the key element in security is reconciliation, and building national institutions for the country. If this does not happen, then the surge will go in vain.”

Despite his role as arch-rival to current Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki (whose party defeated Allawi’s in Iraq’s 2005 elections), Allawi seems to concur with Maliki’s call for a plan for withdrawal of U.S. troops. In his opening statement, Allawi told the subcommittee, “As we think about moving to the next stage of our relationship, it is appropriate to discuss a time frame for reduction of U.S. forces.”

He cautioned, however, against any withdrawal that would take place before non-sectarian institutions and defense forces took shape, or before a reconciliation process, which he noted as being high on Congress’s list of benchmarks, is under way in earnest.

Nonetheless, leaders of Allawi’s political party, the Iraqi National List, were among the 31 leaders in the Iraq parliament who signed a letter (PDF file) presented to Congress on May 29 for withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq to be part of any future agreement between the two countries. The 31 signatories signed as representatives of their political parties, collectively speaking for a majority of Iraq’s 275 members of parliament.

The Bush administration has been negotiating with the Maliki government an agreement based on a “declaration of principles“, which the two leaders signed November without the approval of their respective legislatures. This coming December, the U.N. mandate that protects U.S. forces in Iraq will expire, and the administration apparently seeks to replace it with a bilateral agreement that takes the U.N. out of the equation.

Subcommitee Chairman Bill Delahunt , D-Mass., yesterday conducted the seventh in his series of hearings on the declaration of principles. Allawi did not appear as part of that hearing, but rather in a briefing held afterwards. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., Delahunt’s co-sponsor on the U.N. mandate for another six months, sat in for the “conversation”, as it was called, with Allawi, commiserating over the lack of transparency by their respective executives about agreements under discussion via the declaration of principles.

“When you said you don’t know what the substance of that agreement is — that’s the same for us,” DeLauro said.

Once seen as a tool of the Bush administration (especially during the 2004 campaign against John Kerry), Allawi today is singing a different tune from the cheerful notes he once struck in favor of Bush’s Iraq policy. His eyes are clearly trained on the 2008 U.S. presidential election — and Iraq’s 2009 national elections.

See more tagged with: Ayad Allawi, Bill Delahunt, Dana Rohrabacher, Declaration of Principles, iraq and Rosa DeLauro

Afghan Ambassador Calls for More U.S. Troops

From the stage of a synagogue, Afghanistan’s ambassador to the United States last night called on the U.S. to supply more forces and a greater commitment to his nation, which has recently seen an abrupt by members of the Taliban movement. At a an event taking place at the 6th & I Synagogue, an historic Washington, D.C., venue, Ambassador Said T. Jawad and his wife, Shamim, answered questions from Steve Coll, author of the Pulitzer prize-winning book, Ghost Wars, which chronicles the CIA’s involvement in the Afghan civil war. Coll currently leads the New America Foundation.

“The NATO troops are not fighting as hard as they should,” said Jawad, who also bemoaned the current capacity of U.S. and international forces.

Though Jawad’s assessment of the situation in Afghanistan almost certainly stems from his first-hand experience of events in his country, his call for a greater U.S. commitment comes just days before Sen. Barack Obama, in the heat of the presidential campaign, is expected to arrive in Afghanistan on a Senate fact-finding mission. Obama contend that the war in Iraq diverted U.S. attention from where he believes it is most needed: Afghanistan.

Yesterday CNN reported, “Since May, the deaths of U.S. and allied troops have far outpaced the toll in Iraq. On Thursday, the toll in Afghanistan was 21, compared with six in Iraq.”

Asked by Coll if a larger footprint by U.S. troops would serve to breed resentment among the Afghan people, Jawad emphatically said no. “The real intruders in Afghanistan are the Taliban,” he said. “We are very pragmatic… the U.S. presence in Afghanistan is the most important hope. The concern in Afghanistan is not how long [is the U.S.] going to be here; it’s that [the U.S.] will leave before institutions are in place.”

Of those institutions, Jawad expressed particular concern about the police force, whose ineffectiveness ultimately serves to undermine the government in the eyes of the Afghan people. “They are not sure of our ability to protect them,” he said.

While the Taliban has become most famous in the U.S. for its activities in Southern Afghanistan, the of Pakistan is Taliban country, as well, with the fabled silk-road city of Peshawar currently in the throes of a power struggle between the Taliban and Pakistani government forces. Yet the peril of extremism in Pakistan finds only tangential expression in the U.S. presidential contest.

On both sides of the Afghan-Pakistan border, the dominant ethnic group is Pashtun, a people who don’t necessarily accept the line drawn on a map by an Englishman 50 years ago that divides tribal lands between the two countries. I asked Jawad why that area has lent itself to the Taliban and their sympathizers. It’s not that there’s a native Pashtun affinity with the Taliban, Jawad said; it’s that the extremists acquired resources that enabled them to elbow out traditional elders. “The true tribal leaders have been pushed aside,” he said.

In Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier Province, of which Peshawar is the capital, the Army and the intelligence agencies, said Jawad, actively aid insurgents, who often cross the border to contact attacks inside Afghan territory. When an audience member questioned the rationale of the generals and the spymasters, Jawad suggested that they are still looking to India as their greatest threat, and see the extremists as their forward line in any potential subcontinental conflict. “Most of the intelligence agencies lack wisdom,” he said.

The event, “A Conversation with Mr. & Mrs. Jawad,” was designed to highlight an exhibit of Afghan treasures, rescued from the Taliban by Afghan curators and government workers, that is currently traveling the U.S. Questions to Mrs. Jawad addressed cultural matters and the situation of women and children in Afghanistan.

See more tagged with: 6th & I synagogue, Afghanistan, Barack Obama, National Gallery of Art, new america foundation, Peshawar, Said Jawad, Shamim Jawad, Steve Coll and Taliban

What Next For Guantánamo?

Now that detainees held by the U.S. at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, have the right of habeas corpus, members of one congressional body are asking, how will that work?

While the Supreme Court, with its decision in Boumediene v. Bush, granted prisoners held as enemy combatants at Guantánamo the right to their day in court, many questions remain unanswered — including whether the Boumediene decision applies to “enemy combatant” prisoners held by the U.S. in facilities other than the famed prison camp in Cuba. The Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, an entity of Congress also known as the Helsinki Commission, yesterday asked the guidance of three experts in a packed hearing room.

Both Sen. Ben Cardin, D-Md., and Rep. Alcee Hastings, D-Fla., who co-chair the commission, spoke of the damage done to the U.S. image among its European allies by virtue of the fact of the Guantánamo, a place where prisoners have been subject to indefinite detentions and interrogation methods classified as torture in international law. Other commissioners spoke of “getting an earful” about U.S. detention and interrogation policies when they travel abroad on commission business.

“[I]n light of the latest defeat for the administration’s detention policies at the hands of the Supreme Court…” said Cardin, “I think it is high time to stop tinkering with a failed system and re-open entirely the question of how we handle terrorism suspects.”

“The fact that Gitmo is still open is testament to the genuine challenges we face in relocating its residents…,” Hastings said, “but it also speaks to a lack of political leadership in fixing the problems there.”

The three witnesses who appeared before the commission concurred with Hastings’ conclusion that Guantánamo should be closed. The witness list need not have been so stacked, Hastings implied, noting that the commissioners invited representatives from the Departments of Justice, Defense and State. “…in light of the vital implications of this subject for our country,” he said, “I sorely regret the absence of administration witnesses.” The commission’s membership includes representatives from Defense and State, but neither attended the hearing.

Much of the argument against granting full rights under U.S. and international law to those detained as enemy combatants centers on the possibility of that prisoner’s “return to the battlefield” if he is released. While that’s an acknowledged risk, said Jeremy Shapiro, research director for the Brookings Institution’s Center on the United States and Europe, there’s more to consider.

“The question of whether a returned detainee poses a danger needs to be weighed against the danger that the existence of Guantánamo is doing every day in creating recruits for terrorism,” said Shapiro. “It is not simply the case that you will release somebody into a static pool of terrorists. The problem of Guantánamo, the image of Guantánamo, is creating in Europe and the world is, I would argue, on a daily basis adding to our terrorism problem.”

Matthew Waxman, now a Columbia Law School professor, served as the Pentagon’s chief legal adviser on detainee issues, where he earned the ire of David Addington, the famed enforcer for Vice President Dick Cheney. Waxman’s transgression? Insisting that Pentagon guidelines on detainee treatment incorporate language from the Geneva Conventions prohibiting cruel, humiliating and degrading treatment. At yesterday’s hearing, he advised lawmakers not to seek an easy fix to a complicated problem.

“When I say that there’s no simple and ready alternative, what I’m really getting at is there’s no easy solution out there that’s gonna take care of the whole problem on its own….,” Waxman told the commission. “[R]ather than looking for a one-size-fits all solution, such as ’send them all to their home countries,’ ‘bring them all into the United States’, ‘prosecute them all,’ the solution to Guantanamo probably lies in a combination of all of those things.”

Then he added another option to add to the list, one he conceded was “controversial”: “new legislation that might create what’s sometimes called administrative detention or preventive detention authority — to hold somebody inside the United States.”

Hmmm…I’m no lawyer, but I’m not sure how that would jibe with the whole rationale for habeas.

Rounding out the panel was Gabor Rona, international legal director for Human Rights First, and former legal adviser for the International Committee of the Red Cross, which monitors the treatment of prisoners at Guantánamo. (See Brian’s coverage of how Pentagon advisers and Guantánamo officials hoped to evade ICRC detection of cruel and inhumane practices used in prisoner interrogations there.)

Rona took on the very notion of the “enemy combatant” and the standards — which sounded unconstitutional to me — of what constitutes “hostile acts” against the U.S.

“The definition of enemy combatant encompasses a huge swath of activities, many of which that have nothing to do with the battlefield — associating with terrorists, for example,” Rona explained. “So when the United States releases [an individual] and declares that they are no longer an enemy combatant, that doesn’t mean that they had made the correct decision in the first place that this person had engaged in hostilities against the United States.” In one case, Rona said, a detainee was deemed to have engaged in hostilities against the U.S. for having published an op-ed critical of “U.S. policies and practices.”

Rona also contended that no new legal architecture is needed in the face of the Supreme Court’s decision. “If we continue to look for the perfect, we will never find a solution and it will continue to be the enemy of the good,” Rona said. “The good is the federal criminal justice system.”

By the end of the two-hour hearing, the once-full room was more than half-empty. Even the two women from the anti-war group, Code Pink — one sporting a spectacular, hot-pink hair ornament — had made their exit before the closing gavel.

See more tagged with: alcee hastings, ben cardin, guantanamo, habeas corpus and helsinki commission

The Torture Taint

Even as they worked out the details of how interrogation techniques widely regarded as torture would be used on detainees held at Guantanamo Bay, Pentagon officials sought to keep the blood off Defense Department hands.

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Before the Pentagon’s detainee interrogation policy was finalized in 2002, military officials — both supporters and opponents of the controversial techniques it condoned — concerned themselves primarily with protecting their organizations from scrutiny rather than with preventing the techniques from being instituted in the first place. One senior Pentagon official even recommended removing detainees from the U.S. detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, so that techniques that appeared to violate the U.S. Code of Military Justice could not be attributed to his agency.

On November 4, 2002, Sam McCahon, chief legal adviser to the Defense Department’s Criminal Investigation Task Force, raised objections to a legal opinion authored by Lieutenant Colonel Diane Beaver of the Army’s Judge Advocate General Corps that greenlighted a number of controversial interrogation tactics. In a memo to CITF Commander Brittain Mallow, McCahon wrote: “Any policy decision to use [techniques that could violate the Constitution’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment] will be contrary to my recommendation.”

McCahon was particularly concerned about the harshest techniques outlined in the Beaver memo, including waterboarding, cold weather or water exposure, “the use of non-injurious physical contact,” or “scenarios designed to convince the detainee that death or severely painful consequences are imminent for him and/or his family”.

“Nonetheless,” McCahon went on, “if the application of the requested measures is approved, I recommend the following actions to mitigate the adverse impact on the CITF.”

McCahon suggested first that detainees subjected to harsh treatment be interrogated at a facility other than Guantanamo. In addition, though, he recommended that those selected for harsh interrogations “not be a (sic) considered for referral to the Military Commission” in order to “reduce the risk that the more aggressive techniques used against a few detainees [will] be revealed.” His last request was that “CITF personnel should not participate in aggressive techniques… [to] preserve the integrity of our investigations [and] insulate CITF personnel from potential administrative or criminal liability.”

The goal, in other words, was to keep blood off CITF’s hands.

McCahon wasn’t alone in this thinking. On October 2, 2002, just one month before he sent off his own memo, military and government attorneys — including Beaver — met in Cuba with the official purpose of discussing what they called “counter resistance strategy” with Guantanamo officials. In reality, though, they negotiated the implementation and legality of a series of controversial detainee interrogation tactics that would soon become the official policy of the Department of Defense.

“We may need to curb the harsher operations while ICRC is around,” Beaver told the group, according to minutes of the meeting. “It is better not to expose them to any controversial techniques…. They will be in and out, scrutinizing our operations, unless they are displeased and decide to protest and leave. This would draw a lot of negative attention.”

The ICRC refers to the International Committee of the Red Cross, which monitors the conditions in which detainees at Guantanamo are kept.

Although Beaver, now retired from the military, was strongly of the opinion that the techniques under discussion were legally permissible, her advice echoed concern over the potential for a public relations disaster expressed by military and law enforcement officials who opposed the use of harsh interrogation techniques.

Bernard Barrett, spokesperson for the ICRC in Washington, DC, said leaders of his organization knew that the military was not providing the group access to all prisoners when they began meeting with detainees at Guantanamo Bay in January, 2002.

To maintain access to the detainees and a working relationship with the government, he said, the ICRC doesn’t divulge to reporters its findings or deliberations with officials. But, he added, “any attempt [on the part of the government] to mislead us is not conducive” to maintaining a cooperative relationship. He also said the ICRC is confident that the situation was rectified in September 2004 — almost two years after the harsh interrogation regime was first approved by the Pentagon.

Guantanamo officials weren’t the only ones hoping to distance themselves and their organizations from the so-called coercive techniques. A May 2008 Department of Justice inspector general audit found that senior officials at the Federal Bureau of Investigation had raised concerns about detainee treatment as early as 2002, instructing FBI agents not to participate in questioning sessions alongside military or CIA interrogators using controversial techniques.

However, the FBI did not require agents to report incidents of abuse until the Abu Ghraib scandal broke in 2004. The IG report showed “a failure of leadership on the part of senior FBI officials,” according to Jameel Jaffer, national security director of the American Civil Liberties Union.

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“If the Detainee Dies, You’re Doing it Wrong”

When former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld approved the use of harsh techniques, he did so over the objections of senior military attorneys from all branches of the armed services. Before the Senate Armed Services Committee, key players in the drama that led to the use of torture in Guantanamo answered questions.

Over the objections of senior lawyers across the military, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, acting on the advice of Department of Defense General Counsel William “Jim” Haynes, approved the use of 15 harsh interrogation techniques requested by officials at the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to be used on alleged “enemy combatants.”

Rumsfeld’s December 2, 2002, decision has been widely reported, but the fact that the techniques he approved were heavily questioned just one month earlier — including by senior military officials in the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines — was revealed at a Tuesday hearing before the Senate Armed Services committee.

“While it has been known for some time that military lawyers voiced strong objections to interrogation techniques in early 2003,” said committee Chairman Carl Levin, D-Mich., “these November 2002 warnings from the military services — expressed before the Secretary of Defense authorized the use of aggressive techniques — were not publicly known before now.”

At the hearing, former defense officials, including Haynes and Richard Shiffrin, former deputy general counsel for intelligence, as well as retired Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Baumgartner, faced tough questioning from Democratic members of the panel about their roles in institutionalizing those very techniques. According to documents distributed by the committee, Shiffrin, acting on Haynes’ behalf in 2002, called upon Baumgartner to provide defense attorneys with a list of harsh interrogation methods — specifically, methods deployed against American soldiers during training to prepare them for the possibility that they may one day be captured by a torturing regime. Both Shiffrin and Baumgartner denied knowing that the information they provided to Haynes would be used as the basis for detainee interrogations in three countries. Haynes said he could not recall the details of his role in the process.

Also testifying on Tuesday was retired Lieutenant Colonel Diane Beaver, who in October 2002 penned a legal opinion in which she “concluded that certain aggressive interrogation techniques…were lawful.” “I have been vilified by some because of it,” she told the panel, “and discounted and forgotten by many others.”

Under questioning from Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., about the legal soundness of her memo, Beaver, whose writings greenlighted the use of techniques like waterboarding and sleep deprivation, demurred. “If I asked you if the UCMJ [Uniform Code of Military Justice] prohibited waterboarding, what would you say?” asked Graham, a former attorney for the Judge Advocate General of the Air Force. “It’s difficult to say,” Beaver responded.

In that memo, though, Beaver writes that, in order to circumvent various legal prohibitions to techniques like waterboarding, “[i]t would be advisable to have permission or immunity in advance from the convening authority, for military members utilizing these methods.” Nonetheless, her opinion, which panelist and former Navy General Counsel Alberto Mora described as “an inadequate treatment of very serious and sensitive issues,” met almost no opposition from civilian and military officials and, for a short time, became the legal basis for the DOD’s use of harsh interrogation tactics. In his testimony before the committee, Mora referred to the techniques as “cruel,” saying they “could easily rise to the level of torture.”

During a brief recess, I asked Mora how the U.S. government can mitigate the harm done to the country by these policies, and how best to hold the architects accountable for their actions. Mora suggested that the government leaders need to “create a common language with our allies that goes beyond the protections of Geneva,” referring to the United Nations Agreements on Human Rights known as the Geneva Conventions. How to hold former public officials accountable for implementing these methods, he added, “is a difficult question. Politically speaking, achieving an agreed-upon framework with our allies going forward may require forgiving past transgressions. And that’s a concern. That’s a problem.”

In his opening statement — an unusually long and thorough statement for a congressional hearing — Levin provided an exhaustive history of the origins of the government’s program of torturing prisoners at Guantanamo Bay — a program that later spread to Afghanistan, and finally to Iraq.

In 2002, senior Pentagon officials, including Shiffrin, sought and received information from the Defense Department’s Joint Personnel Recovery Agency about techniques used in the military’s Survival Evasion Resistance and Escape training schools, or SERE. At those facilities, members of the military are subjected to mock interrogations, to prepare them for the possibility that they’ll one day be captured and detained by governments that do not adhere to the Geneva Conventions.

The schools’ training guidelines — which, at some facilities, include waterboarding — quickly became the practical basis for the department’s own methods of interrogating prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. Under questioning from Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., Shiffrin admitted that “there was probably some discussion at some point about ‘reverse engineering’ SERE techniques.” And, indeed, on December 30, 2002, two Navy SERE instructors arrived in Cuba to teach approximately two dozen interrogation personnel how to question detainees. Some of those trained by the SERE teachers were later instructed by their own superiors not to use those methods. Others were not.

Once greenlighted for use in Guantanamo, the SERE techniques were forwarded to U.S. military officials in Afghanistan and shown to interrogators in January 2003, just one month after Rumsfeld approved them. Several weeks later, after the Iraq war had begun, the techniques became standard operating procedure for all U.S. forces there, including those stationed at Abu Ghraib.

A month after he approved them, Rumsfeld rescinded his approval of the 15 techniques, at least in part because of objections Mora brought to Haynes. But, just as quickly, Rumsfeld established a “working group” to examine interrogation techniques and erect a legal framework that would protect military and defense officials from reprisals in the event that their conduct was later deemed to be torture. Shortly after the working group completed its report, Rumsfeld authorized another set of techniques — 24 in all– and this time he included some wiggle room: “If, in your view,” the secretary wrote, “you require additional interrogation techniques for a particular detainee, you should provide me… a written request describing the proposed technique, recommended safeguards, and the rationale for applying it with an identified detainee.”

It’s difficult, therefore, to know precisely what limits governed DOD-approved interrogation for months thereafter. But if the DOD took the advice of the Central Intelligence Agency, there may have been very few. On October 2, 2002, senior CIA attorney Jonathan Fredman met with staff at Guantanamo Bay to discuss harsh interrogation. “It’s basically subject to perception,” Fredman said, according to minutes of the meeting. “If the detainee dies, you’re doing it wrong.”

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The Stuff Congressional Hearings Are Made Of

Divulged in memos, but largely undiscussed at yesterday’s bombshell Senate Armed Services hearing about the origins of American torture, was a September 25, 2002, meeting at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, between Major General Michael Dunlavey — who at the time was overseeing interrogations at the detention facility there — and several of the administration’s top lawyers, including William “Jim” Haynes, then general counsel to the Department of Defense, John Rizzo, acting CIA general counsel, David Addington, counsel to the vice president, and Michael Chertoff, then head of the Criminal Division at the Department of Justice.

The trip report is suspiciously short. It notes for the most part that the group received “briefings on Intel successes, Intel challenges, Intel techniques, Intel problems and future plans for facilities,” and that its members participated in “private conversations.”

But, through interviews with Dunlavey and Lieutenant Colonel Diane Beaver, author Philippe Sands got to the bottom of that trip. In his new book, Torture Team, Sands writes that the Washington gang came down, in part, to learn how the military was treating a suspect named Mohammed al-Qahtani. “They wanted to know what we were doing to get to this guy,” recalled Dunlavey. Beaver said that the message was loud and clear: do “whatever needed to be done.” In Sands’s words, “a green light from the very top — from the lawyers for Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and the CIA.

That message was crucial, because just one week later, on October 2, nine people, including Beaver and CIA attorney John Fredman convened at Guantanamo for a “Counter Resistance Strategy Meeting,” where they discussed the implications of the green light, asking questions like, “What techniques can we use?” and, “What constitutes torture?” The answers — written up in meeting minutes and obtained by the Senate Armed Services committee — are pretty straightforward.

“We may need to curb the harsher operations while ICRC [the International Committee of the Red Cross] is around,” Beaver told the group, according to the minutes. “It is better not to expose them to any controversial techniques.”

One attendee, Dave Becker, who oversaw interrogations for the Defense Intelligence Agency, noted, “We have reports from Bagram [Airfield in Afghanistan] about sleep deprivation being used.”

Beaver responded, “True, but officially it is not happening. It is not being reported officially. The ICRC is a serious concern. They will be in and out scrutinizing our operations, unless they are displeased and decide to protest and leave.”

Fredman later chimed in, “Under the Torture Convention, torture has been prohibited by international law, but the language of the statutes is written vaguely. Severe mental and physical pain is prohibited. The mental part is explained as poorly as the physical…. It is basically subject to perception. If the detainee dies you’re doing it wrong…. When the CIA has wanted to use more aggressive techniques in the past, the FBI has pulled their personnel from the theatre. In those rare instances, aggressive techniques have proven very helpful.”

To which Beaver responded, “We will need documentation to protect us.”

Fredman also provided a constitutional rationale for the aggressive interrogation techniques — a pre hoc justification for the United States to abuse all enemy combatants, supposedly without falling afoul of the Geneva conventions. “The Torture Convention prohibits torture and cruel, inhumane, and degrading treatment. The US did not sign up on the second part, because of the 8th amendment…. This gives us more license to use more controversial techniques.”

In response, Beaver asked about the applicability of the “wet towel” technique, known now to most as waterboarding. Fredman responded, “If a well-trained individual is used to perform this technique it can feel like you’re drowning. The lymphatic system will react as if you’re suffocating but your body will not cease to function.”

When Mark Fallon, then the deputy commander of the Defense Department’s Criminal Investigation Task Force, received the minutes of the meeting from Sam McCahon, his chief legal advisor, he wrote, “This looks like the kinds [sic] of stuff Congressional hearings are made of…. Talk of ‘wet towel treatment’…would in my opinion; [sic] shock the conscience of any legal body looking at using the results of the interrogations or possibly even the interrogators. Someone needs to be considering how history will look back at this.”

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The Friendship Offensive

Peace activists on Capitol Hill hope to stave off war with Iran through cross-cultural contact between ordinary citizens. Leaders of the Congressional Progressive Caucus show their support.

As George W. Bush focused his final presidential visit to Europe on Iran’s nuclear program, members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus joined a group of peace activists on Capitol Hill at an event designed to foster dialogue between everyday Iranians and Americans.

On Tuesday afternoon, the activist groups Enough Fear and Campaign for a New American Policy on Iran set up a phone bank outside the Cannon House office building, inviting activists, reporters, and passersby to speak with people in Iran. Leaders of the two groups seek to build lasting person-to-person ties between Iranians and Americans in the hope of building sentiment against a military confrontation between the two nations.

“The main idea is that if more people in this country have friends in Iran the two countries are less likely to go to war,” explained Nick Jehlen, co-founder of Enough Fear. “It’s as simple as that.” The event, called “Time to Talk to Iran,” was Jehlen’s brainchild.

Jehlen invited every member of Congress to attend this week’s event, but only five, all from the House of Representatives, participated: Lynne Woolsey and Barbara Lee, both California Democrats, joined Marcy Kaptur, D-Ohio, and Sheila Jackson-Lee, D-Texas. All are members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, which Woolsey and Lee co-chair. Ron Paul, the Republican presidential contender from Texas, crossed the aisle to appear with the congresswomen.

Barbara Lee has long advocated person-to-person contact as the solution to the current stand-off with Iranian leaders over their nuclear program, which President Bush and Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice contend is a precursor to weapons development. In January, Lee, who also sits on the foreign affairs committee, introduced the Iran Diplomatic Accountability Act of 2008, which, she told the gathering, “directs the president to appoint a high-level envoy empowered to seek to conduct direct, unconditional, bilateral negotiations with Iran for the purpose of easing tensions and normalizing relations between the United States and Iran.” Her legislation has idled in committee for the last six months with 14 cosponsors. Proposals in both houses of Congress intended to block the administration from using force against Iran have similarly stalled.

The Washington, D.C., event marked the third staging of a “Time To Talk” phone bank. The first took place in Boston in November 2007, and the second in New York in January. “Having congresspeople here [at a ‘Time to Talk’ event] is really an aberration for us,” Jehlen explained. “If we can facilitate dialogue between members of the American and Iranian governments in the future, we’d like to.”

At each event, a bank of four or five old-fashioned red desk phones takes center stage, though the phones are actually fed through hand-held wireless devices. The set-up is designed to resemble the crisis lines that connected officials in Washington with their Moscow counterparts during tense moments in the Cold War. About 50 people — including students and Code Pink activists — braved wilting heat and humidity to participate Tuesday’s event. Many relied on interpreters, young volunteers fluent in both English and Farsi, who joined them on the line.

The conversations tended to be brief, and were often beset by technical problems. But they were substantive, too. Friendly chats quickly developed from exchanges of simple pleasantries (How’s the weather? What do you do?) into earnest discussions about the deteriorating political situation between the two countries.

The organizers put me on the line with Morteza Rassul-Shirazi, a 60-year-old engineer in Tehran who agreed to speak on the record with an American reporter. The connection was poor (the line dropped twice), but Shirazi, along with many of his peers, he said, is concerned that U.S.-Iran hostilities could mushroom into a violent conflict. “We should not talk about war at all,” he told me. “Instead, we should try to show Americans that we are peaceful people.” Rassul-Shirazi and his friends and family in Tehran are understandably nervous. Visiting with European leaders this week, Bush sent mixed signals, focusing his early remarks on rallying European support for sanctions on Iran if it did not agree to stop enriching uranium, leading some to speculated that he was backing off from earlier saber-rattling. Then, before he left the continent, he added, “All options are on the table.”

These latest remarks capped off several weeks of escalating anti-Iran rhetoric from the administration. In a last week’s meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert at the White House, Bush said, “It is very important for the world to take the Iranian threat seriously.” Speaking this week in Europe, Secretary Rice accused the Iranian regime of evading international oversight, saying,”I think that no one is of a mind to allow them to stall very much longer.”

A December National Intelligence Estimate found that the Iranian government suspended its nuclear weapons program in 2003. Iran does, however, continue to pursue a uranium enrichment program, which its leaders contend is for use in peaceful projects, such as energy production.

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A General’s False Testimony on KBR

Sen. Byron Dorgan, in a May 21, 2008, meeting with reporters, speaking about the April 2007 testimony of Major Gen. Jerome Johnson - 29 seconds.

Will the Pentagon correct Major Gen. Jerome Johnson’s tainted testimony on the contaminated water KBR provided to the troops?

By Brian Beutler, The Media Consortium

When Major Gen. Jerome Johnson appeared under oath before a congressional
committee last year, he told enough untruths about KBR’s work for the
military that the US Army took the unusual step of retracting a portion of
his testimony. Now it appears that Johnson also misled members of the Senate Armed Services Committee on another KBR-related matter: its provisioning of contaminated water to U.S. troops in Iraq.

Nearly three months ago Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., chair of the
Democratic Policy Committee, sent a letter to Defense Secretary Robert Gates
on the subject of Johnson’s testimony, but he has yet to received a reply.
“This was either an attempt by General Johnson to deliberately deceive the
Congress, or a display of negligent disregard for facts,” Dorgan wrote in
the March 12 letter. “I hope you will review this matter and take
appropriate action.”

In April 2007, Johnson, then the commanding general of the US Army
Sustainment Command, which is responsible for providing food, lodging, and a
range of logistical support to the troops, appeared before the Senate Armed
Services Committee to answer questions about the Pentagon’s primary
logistics contract in Iraq. During the hearing, the committee’s chairman,
Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., alleged that the Army had reimbursed KBR, then a
Halliburton subsidiary, for the cost of overpriced trailers the company had
purchased through a subcontractor.

“[T]he [Defense] department has not paid KBR the $100 million for the
trailers,” Johnson told Levin. “As a matter of fact, KBR’s cost is still
suspended.” Johnson when on to say that the DOD document from which Levin
drew his information was “inaccurate.” But it was Johnson who didn’t have
his facts straight.

More than seven months passed before the Army acknowledged Johnson’s
misstatement. “We sincerely regret the confusion that arose during the
testimony and apologize for any impact to the Committee’s deliberations,”
wrote Claude Bolton, assistant secretary of the Army, to Levin. In his
“correction for the record,” Bolton wrote that the Army had indeed paid KBR
for the trailers, even though the Defense Contract Audit Agency had called
the purchase “unreasonable due to KBR purchasing the [trailers] from someone other than the low bidder without…adequate justification.”

The media paid little attention to the slip-up and subsequent correction,
perhaps in part because, as the Army Times noted, “Bolton’s letter ends the argument between the Army and Levin’s committee because there is no way to recoup the money.”

Overlooked entirely, though, was a different part of Johnson’s testimony,
when he claimed the Army was unaware of reports that KBR had also been
supplying military bases with contaminated water. Because of their
negligence, a 2006 investigation by Dorgan’s policy committee found,
soldiers had unwittingly bathed in and brushed their teeth with water that,
by the senator’s account, was more polluted than the Euphrates river. The
committee’s findings prompted Dorgan to request an investigation by the
Pentagon’s Inspector General.

When Levin raised Dorgan’s charge that water provided to troops in Iraq
had tested positive for E. coli and other bacteria common to animal feces,
Johnson disputed the allegations
[PDF]. Acknowledging the inspector general’s then-ongoing investigation,
Johnson told the committee, “No issues have been found thus far that I’m
aware of.” Johnson did confirm that allegations had been raised about
contaminated water at Camp Ar-Ramadi, a base about 70 miles west of Baghdad, but said “we found no issues with the water there. After an inspection, we did not confirm the allegations that were made.”

Johnson even denied that KBR had anything to do with the provision of
water to troops at the base. “KBR was not operating the water site,” he told
the panel. But this March, when the inspector general’s office released its
report, investigators noted that the Pentagon had been notified on March 31,
2007 — three weeks before Johnson’s testimony — of KBR’s role in
providing polluted water to military bases, which “may have degraded to the
point of causing waterborne illnesses among US forces.”

Investigators found that KBR was indeed in control of water quality at Camp Ar-Ramadi, and that at three of four US bases subject to inspection, including Ar-Ramadi, KBR had shirked its contractual obligation to test the water it supplied.

At a meeting with reporters last month, Dorgan described his efforts to
uncover the extent of the unsanitary water conditions at US bases in Iraq in
the face of denials from both the Army and its contractor, KBR. “It’s clear
everyone was lying, including [Gen. Johnson], who came to the Senate
committee and deceived the committee,” Dorgan said.

At press time, Levin had not responded to a request for comment.

Johnson now serves as deputy chief of staff at the U.S. Army Forces Command in Fort McPherson, Georgia. The Pentagon declined to comment on Johnson’s testimony or why Dorgan’s letter to Gates has gone unanswered.

More from Sen. Dorgan’s May 21 meeting with reporters - 1:51

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Looking For a Few Good Republicans:
Byron Dorgan’s Quest For Wartime Oversight

The North Dakota senator has made investigating contractor corruption his mission, but will he succeed in creating a congressional committee devoted to it?

By Brian Beutler

In the wake of a recent Defense Department report from the Office of Inspector General that documents (PDF file) the improper accounting of billions of dollars in war contracting funds, the issue of waste, fraud, and abuse in Iraq is once again in the spotlight on Capitol Hill.

Those findings were amplified on Tuesday when the Project on Government Oversight, a Washington-based watchdog group, obtained a separate inspector general report that found that the number of Pentagon auditors overseeing military contracts has not kept pace with defense spending, which has doubled under the Bush administration — creating conditions that are ripe for corruption and abuse.

While Congress has launched sporadic inquiries into contracting fraud, one legislator, Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., has made it his mission to investigate contractor corruption.

Dorgan chairs the Democratic Policy Committee, a Senate entity tasked with gathering and distributing policy, strategy, and oversight information to congressional staff and other Democratic officials. (There is also a Republican Policy Committee.) Since 2003, the DPC has held 14 hearings dedicated to exposing the corruption of the Iraq reconstruction effort, and last month the committee released an encyclopedic report detailing major examples of fraud.

When the war in Iraq began, says Dorgan, “no one really [decided] to say, ‘All right, now we’re going to be an investigative committee so there’s accountability.’” In order to fill the void, Dorgan decided to use his committee for that purpose — though its oversight authority is somewhat diminished by the fact that the panel, as a partisan committee, lacks subpoena power. In light of this, since 2005 Dorgan has attempted to establish a congressional committee with full oversight clout to oversee military contracting. Dubbed the Special Committee on War and Reconstruction Contracting, the proposed panel is modeled on the Senate Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program (commonly known as the Truman committee), which was charged with investigating the waste and corruption of billions of dollars of World War II-era defense contracts.

So far legislation to create a committee to oversee contracting for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq hasn’t gained traction. During the previous Congress, which ended in December 2006, Dorgan’s resolution was swatted down three separate times along partisan lines. (In each case, presumptive GOP presidential nominee John McCain voted with the Republican majority to nix the committee.)

A Dorgan aide says that the third-term senator plans to introduce his proposal again within the year, and is currently looking for Republican co-sponsors, which he believes will improve his chances of passing the bill. In the past, the only Republican to vote in favor of the commission was Lincoln Chaffee of Rhode Island, who lost his seat during the Democratic landslide in November of 2006. So Dorgan’s contracting committee is still a long shot.

Other senators have taken a milder approach to the idea of a modern-day Truman committee. Last year, Sen. Jim Webb, D-Va. — along with all of his fellow freshman Democrats in the Senate — sponsored a measure mandating the creation of an independent bipartisan commission (distinct from a congressional committee, which has subpoena power) to “investigate U.S. wartime contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan.” The measure passed unanimously last September as an amendment to the Defense Authorization Act, only to be written out of existence by a presidential signing statement when the bill hit President Bush’s desk in January.

If Dorgan gets his way, it could substantially bolster the Democrats’ efforts to uncover and deter acts of fraud and corruption in war contracting. Currently those efforts have been driven almost exclusively by House Oversight Committee Chairman Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., and Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin, D-Mich. Since taking the House oversight gavel in January 2007, Waxman has held a host of hearings on defense contracting fraud, with a particular emphasis on the companies, like Blackwater and KBR, that have been some of the biggest beneficiaries of the war in Iraq.

Levin has spotlighted the issue of contractor fraud on a number of occasions, but, like Waxman, the focus of his committee extends well beyond contracting oversight. The existing congressional committees, Dorgan says, “have not had the investigators and the time,” to give this issue the focus it deserves. “So, we have held these hearings, and the waste, the fraud, and the abuse is staggering.”

——–
Brian Beutler is the Washington correspondent for The Media Consortium, a network of progressive media organizations.

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