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

“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.”

See more tagged with: civil liberties, government accountability, iraq, senate armed services and torture

Lost Iraq Funds

An Inspector General report released today confirms what just about everybody already knew–that the Department of Defense has squandered billions of American dollars due to contracting fraud and abuse in Iraq.

In response, House Oversight and Government Reform committee chairman Henry Waxman held a hearing today to spell out some of the reports findings, which include:

• That of the $8.2 billion in contracting funds audited by the IG between April 2001 and June 2006, 95 percent were improperly accounted for, and $1.4 billion in payments “were missing critically important documentation.” Some commercial payments were distributed without the documentation of any promised service. As a result IG officials have referred 28 suspicious cases to criminal investigators
• That of the $2.7 billion congress has appropriated for the Commander’s Emergency Response Program (CERP)–created to help foreign agents to provide humanitarian relief–the IG found that $134.8 million was distributed without a complete audit trail. The IG was “unable to ensure that CERP funds provided to Coalition Partners have been used for their intended purposes. In other words, the money was handed to foreign governments without any meaningful strings.
• That none of the $1.8 billion in seized Iraqi assets–intended for humanitarian purposes, and audited by the IG–was adequately accounted for.

To these findings, Waxman intoned that “there is something very wrong when our wounded troops have to fill out forms in triplicate for meal money while billions of dollars in cash are handed out in Iraq with no accountability.”

Though concerned with the potential for corruption and waste, Republicans on the committee sought to downplay the importance of the IG’s findings, and to divorce the issue of waste from any questions about the conduct of the war itself.

“Few people operating in an active combat zone would refer to the documentation requirements…as ‘mission critical’ work,” said Ranking Member Tom Davis. “Similarly,” he went on, “no one should deny the imperative to tell American taxpayers how their money is being spent. So we need to balance these two truths…. We should not let a focus on the war blind us to the government-wide need for veteran finance officials to watch over large, and growing, expenditures.”

Waxman invited Defense officials to testify at today’s hearing, but the department refused to cooperate. At the end of the hearing, Rep. John Tierney–who chairs the National Security subcommittee–suggested that the committee consider compelling their appearance. “I think we have subpoena power, and I’d ask [Chairman Waxman] and the ranking member at some point in time to consider using it where appropriate so the Department of Defense wouldn’t think they can avoid… public scrutiny.”

Perhaps in an echo of hearings to come, Waxman responded: “I think you make an excellent point. I think we need to hear from the Defense Department. “

See more tagged with: Blackwater, iraq and Rep. John Tierney

No More Security Guarantee

Is the Bush administration backing down on it’s declaration that it will provide Iraq an indefinite security guarantee against foreign and domestic threat? CQ reports that “the administration has backed off its previous assertions that a long-term bilateral agreement with Iraq would include a security arrangement to defend the country from external threats.”

The administration has maintained that the agreement would not rise to the level of a treaty. The “security guarantee” statement appeared in the announcement because Iraqis wanted it on the table, the administration official said. But, he said, the United States does not believe it to be necessary. “We say, look, if you want a security guarantee, that will be a treaty, and a treaty will have to go to our Senate,” endangering the whole agreement, he said.

Of course, the proof will be in the ink, when the agreement is penned in the coming weeks. For now, this is an important win for Congress and, indeed, for the Constitution.

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House Progressives Seek Permanent Bases Hearings

Reps. Barbara Lee, Maxine Waters, and Lynne Woolsey of California have sent a letter to Nancy Pelosi, pushing for an investigation into President Bush’s most recent signing statements, one of which threatens to dismiss a provision of the National Defense Appropriations Act forbidding funding of permanent bases in Iraq. The text of the letter follows.

February 1, 2008

Hon. Nancy Pelosi
Speaker
US House of Representatives
The Capitol
Washington, DC 20515

Dear Speaker Pelosi:

President George W. Bush issued a signing statement on Monday, January 28, 2008 where he signaled his intent to ignore a provision in the FY08 Department of Defense Authorization Bill (PL 110-181) that prohibits permanent military bases in Iraq. We urge you to request the appropriate committee chairs to quickly schedule oversight hearings on this important issue.

We believe this is a particularly contradictory and serious development given that the President has signed similar provisions into law five times before. (PL109-289, PL 109-364, PL 110-28, PL 110-116, and PL 110-161.)

When a majority of the American people are committed to ending our occupation in Iraq on a timeline within a year, in making this proclamation President Bush has only reinforced what we have always known; that he intends our occupation in Iraq to be indefinite.

Sadly, this is a pattern of behavior from a White House that seems intent on cutting Congress out of any decisions relating to the permanent stationing of the US military in Iraq. At the end of last year, without any congressional input, President Bush and Prime Minister al-Maliki signed a “Declaration of Principles for a Long-Term Relationship of Cooperation and Friendship Between the Republic of Iraq and the United States of America” that will set the stage for future agreements on the disposition of US troops in Iraq and other wide-ranging aspects of this important bilateral relationship. (We introduced H.R. 5128, legislation disapproving of any agreement that doesn’t have the approval of both houses of Congress and that of the Iraqi Parliament, too)

We believe that Congress must find out and the American public made aware of the serious consequences of long-term military basing agreements or treaties that bypass congressional action as the ‘Declaration of Principles’. In addition, it is critical to shed light on the implications of the President’s signing statement and intention to ignore the law. At the same time it is also imperative to give greater scrutiny to the Bush administration’s efforts to maintain a long-term or indefinite military presence in Iraq. Holding hearings will complement the 166 hearings on Iraq that Democrats have held since you became our speaker in January 2007.

We appreciate your strong leadership and commitment in ending the US occupation of Iraq and look forward to working with you on this matter.

Sincerely,

BARBARA LEE
Member of Congress

LYNN WOOSLEY
Member of Congress

MAXINE WATERS
Member of Congress

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In Iraq Until When?

Close followers of the Iraq mess might remember that on November 28 of last year, President Bush and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki signed a statement of intent–called a Declaration of Principles–to “frame the future relationship between the two countries.”

The Declaration itself was vague and unbinding, but it left open the possibility that future negotiations between Washington and Baghdad could result in a commitment of sorts, from the White House to Maliki, that the United States will commit troops to the defense of the Iraqi state from both internal and external threats for years to come.

For instance:

1. Providing security assurances and commitments to the Republic of Iraq to deter foreign aggression against Iraq that violates its sovereignty and integrity of its territories, waters, or airspace.

2. Supporting the Republic of Iraq in its efforts to combat all terrorist groups, at the forefront of which is Al-Qaeda, Saddamists, and all other outlaw groups regardless of affiliation, and destroy their logistical networks and their sources of finance, and defeat and uproot them from Iraq. This support will be provided consistent with mechanisms and arrangements to be established in the bilateral cooperation agreements mentioned herein.

3. Supporting the Republic of Iraq in training, equipping, and arming the Iraqi Security Forces to enable them to protect Iraq and all its peoples, and completing the building of its administrative systems, in accordance with the request of the Iraqi government.

The language here doesn’t necessarily imply a coming commitment of U.S. troops. But, historically, that’s what the term “security commitment” means in the non-binding language of diplomacy. So, what’s the time-frame, then? The Iraqi defense minister, Abdul Qadir has suggested that Iraq won’t be ready to defend itself until 2018. A quick decade or thereabouts.

Of course, only a lame-duck commander-in-chief gone mad would promise the Iraqi government 10 years of military protection (perhaps even from rebel factions within Iraq) during his last year in office. But that just might happen. And that’s where Congress steps in. Today, Rep. William Delahunt (D-Mass.) chaired a joint subcommittee hearing devoted to examining whether such a commitment would be Constitutional without the ratification of a treaty by the U.S. Senate. (A treaty requires a two-thirds vote in the Senate for passage, and would, in this instance, almost surely fail).

That would be the theoretical avenue by which the Congress could block the president from making this sort of agreement with Maliki. But this is the realm of foreign affairs, and as such, words like “legal” and “binding” don’t apply as usual. In absence of a treaty the president could provide similar assurances informally, leaving the future president–Democrat or Republican–in a tricky diplomatic position if he or she decides not to honor Bush’s promise.

Fortunately, there are other constraints. One is time: The Declaration lays out a framework for negotiations that will begin in February with the goal of reaching an agreement of some sort by the end of July. In the meantime, Congress could, for instance, consider legislation floated by Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) which would “require the Bush Administration to consult with Congress before moving forward with any agreement that could lead to long term security arrangements… and makes clear that any such agreement must come in the form of a treaty.”

The other constraints, though, come from within Iraq. On the one hand, those within the Iraqi government who would like a long-term commitment from the United States may not sign on to anything that doesn’t have the force of U.S. law behind it (a treaty, for instance). And on the other hand–according to Iraq expert Kenneth Katzman, who testified at today’s hearing–any agreement of any kind between the U.S. and Iraq would meet “tremendous difficulty passing the Iraqi parliament”. So this is far from a done deal. But it’s also a situation, which, if ignored, could make the Iraq problem even more complicated for the next president than it already promises to be.

See more tagged with: iraq, president bush and william delahunt

Ambassador Crocker’s Kooky Economics

The long-anticipated joint congressional testimony of Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker is now history, and the event’s few fireworks have by now been widely documented. Of them, perhaps the most noted was the men’s relative dispositions—one cavalier, the other more so.

The conventional wisdom had been to expect kinder depictions of broad progress from the general than from the ambassador. What we saw instead was precisely the opposite. Both men were optimistic—more so than Democrats, moderate Republicans, and many other critics thought reasonable. But it was Crocker, not Petraeus, who painted over his mission’s most pressing concerns.
Read the full report…

See more tagged with: ambassador crocker, general petraeus and iraq

Reporting from Yearly Kos 2007: A Progressive Foreign Policy

The past few years have been host to a fascinating phenomenon: Progressives have come together and settled upon a practically singular foreign policy vision, pasted together from a series of ideas–diplomacy, human rights, cooperation, prudence–that are decidedly non-revolutionary. And yet, despite its conservative-sounding origins, what they’ve come up with is a foreign policy ideal that’s both embarrassingly obvious but also compelling–one rooted in engagement with the world, an interest in the internal realities of other countries and regions, but with a humility about our ability or right to affect them. In short, a progressive realism.

Because of this unity of vision, the progressive foreign policy panel at YearlyKos–though comprised of experts not normally affiliated with the netroots–was one of the most engaging at the conference thus far. Moderator Ken Baer of Democracy, and featured guests Steven Clemons of the New America Foundation and Peter Beinart of The New Republic discussed an array of foreign policy problems–Iraq, military spending, global warming–currently facing the United States. [Disclosure: Clemons is a friend and former colleague of mine.]

Read the full report…

See more tagged with: foreign policy, global warming and iraq