Month: May 2006

by hilzoy

Frank Rich’s column in today’s NYT is, as everyone says, worth reading. Raw Story has excerpted part of it, mostly from the beginning of the column. But there are three other points I wanted to flag.

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by hilzoy

In the crush of scandal-related news, there’s one story I didn’t want to overlook. Via TPM, the LATimes reports:

“Wilkes and his associates made their largest federal campaign donations to House Appropriations Committee member Rep. John T. Doolittle, a Republican from Sacramento, who received $82,000. Cunningham received $76,500, and $60,000 went to Appropriations Committee Chairman Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-Redlands). (…)

The Pentagon was slow to pay Wilkes because Army officials in the field preferred Audre’s rival system, according to an inspector general’s report. So in July 1999, co-conspirator No. 1 faxed Cunningham “talking points” on how to bully a Pentagon manager into releasing more government funds. These documents were included in Cunningham’s sentencing hearing.

The memo instructed the lawmaker to demand that the Defense Department official shift money from another program to cover funds designated for ADCS. “We need $10 m[illion] more immediately,” Cunningham was to tell the official.

If the official didn’t cooperate, Cunningham was to say his next calls would be to two high-ranking Pentagon officials. The script called for Cunningham to add: “This is very important and if you cannot resolve this others will be calling also” — two names in this passage are blacked out in the memo. Despite Cunningham’s threats, the Pentagon manager was unmoved, according to grand jury testimony.

A week later, Cunningham and Lewis called a Washington news conference to announce that they had slashed $2 billion in funding for the F-22 Raptor fighter jet, one of the Pentagon’s prized programs, citing cost overruns. Both congressmen had been key supporters of the project, and their comments shocked Pentagon officials.”

So: Brent Wilkes, otherwise known as “co-conspirator No. 1” in the Duke Cunningham indictment, needs more money. In order to get it, he begins by giving Cunningham explicit instructions, in writing, on how to deal with the Pentagon. When that doesn’t work, Cunningham and Lewis, the head of the House Appropriations Committee, threaten to slash funding for fighter jets.

I am delighted to note that federal prosecutors have opened an investigation into Lewis’ dealings with lobbyists.

I want to note a few points about this.

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by hilzoy

Via Kevin Drum and the Carpetbagger Report, an article in the WSJ (sorry, subscription wall):

“The Senate last week approved $109 billion in additional spending for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, including $1.5 billion in added Iraq reconstruction money. The administration has spent $20.9 billion to reconstruct Iraq’s infrastructure and modernize its oil industry, but the effort hasn’t restored the country’s electricity output, water supply or sewage capabilities to prewar levels.

A behind-the-scenes battle among legislators has made a crucial distinction between the new reconstruction money and that already spent: The new funds won’t be overseen by the government watchdog charged with curbing the mismanagement that has overshadowed the reconstruction.

The administration’s main vehicle for rebuilding Iraq has, in the past, been designated “Relief and Reconstruction” funds, which by law are overseen by a special inspector general, Stuart Bowen. The new money going toward similar reconstruction goals will be classified as coming from “Foreign Operations” accounts. The State Department is responsible for spending both pools of money.

By law, Mr. Bowen can oversee only relief and reconstruction funds. Because the new money technically comes from a different source, Mr. Bowen, who has 55 auditors on the ground in Iraq, will be barred from overseeing how the new money is spent. Instead, the funds will be overseen by the State Department’s inspector general office, which has a much smaller staff in Iraq and warned in testimony to Congress in the fall that it lacked the resources to continue oversight activities in Iraq.

Exactly how and why the change was made isn’t clear. Republican Appropriations Committee aides say legislators shifted the Iraq money to the foreign operations accounts at the request of the White House, not to curb oversight. They say administration officials sought the change to streamline accounting so the Iraq reconstruction would be incorporated into the State Department’s operations and budget rather than kept in stand-alone accounts. (…)

A fight in Congress over the money flared in the final hours before the spending bill was approved, when a group of senators wrote an amendment that would have given Mr. Bowen oversight responsibility for the new money.

What happened next is a matter of dispute. The measure’s sponsors say they asked Republican Sen. Thad Cochran of Mississippi, chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, to allow the measure to be brought to a vote but were turned down. Mr. Cochran denies receiving such a request and says the amendment’s sponsors could have formally introduced the measure but chose not to, according to his spokeswoman, Margaret Wicker.

The bill passed the Senate without the amendment. As the House version of the spending bill makes the State Department inspector general responsible for the new money, it is likely the funds ultimately will be treated that way. “This is nothing more than a transparent attempt to shut down the only effective oversight of this massive reconstruction program which has been plagued by mismanagement and fraud,” said Sen. Patrick Leahy (D., Vermont).”

Some background on Bowen (from the WSJ again):

“Mr. Bowen is a Texas lawyer who parlayed a job on George W. Bush’s first gubernatorial campaign into senior posts in Austin and Washington. He began the Iraq war lobbying for an American contractor seeking tens of millions of dollars in reconstruction work. Last October, California Democratic Rep. Henry Waxman singled him out in a report on “The Politicization of Inspectors General” in the Bush administration. The report suggested that such auditors wouldn’t be “independent and objective.”

Instead, Mr. Bowen has become one of the most prominent and credible critics of how the administration has handled the occupation of Iraq. In a series of blistering public reports, he has detailed systemic management failings, lax or nonexistent oversight, and apparent fraud and embezzlement on the part of the U.S. officials charged with administering the rebuilding efforts.”

So, to recap: Bush appoints someone from his campaign to an important job: auditing Iraq reconstruction funds. That person turns out to be surprisingly independent, and discovers a lot of fraud. I discussed one of his reports earlier; here’s a summary of what it found:

“A new audit of American financial practices in Iraq has uncovered irregularities including millions of reconstruction dollars stuffed casually into footlockers and filing cabinets, an American soldier in the Philippines who gambled away cash belonging to Iraq, and three Iraqis who plunged to their deaths in a rebuilt hospital elevator that had been improperly certified as safe.”

Our government’s response? Recategorize Iraqi reconstruction funds so that he doesn’t get to audit them anymore. Opponents try to introduce an amendment that would prevent this; it vanishes under suspicious circumstances. Result: no more of those inconvenient reports about what this administration is doing with our money.

Which brings us to the question of investigations.

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by hilzoy

Via Mark Kleiman, a horrible story:

“Jared Guinther is 18. Tall and lanky, he will graduate from high school in June. Girls think he’s cute, until they try to talk to him and he stammers or just stands there — silent.

Diagnosed with autism at age 3, Jared is polite but won’t talk to people unless they address him first. It’s hard for him to make friends. He lives in his own private world.

Jared didn’t know there was a war raging in Iraq until his parents told him last fall — shortly after a military recruiter stopped him outside a Portland strip mall and complimented his black Converse All-Stars.

“When Jared first started talking about joining the Army, I thought, `Well, that isn’t going to happen,”‘ said Paul Guinther, Jared’s father. “I told my wife not to worry about it. They’re not going to take anybody in the service who’s autistic.”

But they did. Last month, Jared came home with papers showing that he had not only enlisted, but signed up for the Army’s most dangerous job: cavalry scout. He is scheduled to leave for basic training Aug. 16.

Officials are now investigating whether recruiters at the U.S. Army Recruiting Station in southeast Portland improperly concealed Jared’s disability, which should have made him ineligible for service.”

More below the fold.

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by hilzoy

Via firedoglake, what Bush is really thinking about these days: his legacy:

“President Bush had dinner last month on the Stanford University campus at the home of George P. Shultz, who was President Ronald Reagan’s secretary of state, and the topic of conversation was not, as might be expected, the war in Iraq. Instead, guests said, Mr. Bush spent the evening focused on how he could create a public policy center with his presidential library after he leaves office in 2009. (…)

So far Mr. Bush has said little publicly about his plans, although he told Bob Schieffer of CBS News in an interview in January that he wanted to create a policy center focused on the spread of democracy and Alexis de Tocqueville’s vision of America as a nation made better by its “associations,” or community groups.

“I would like to leave behind a legacy or a think tank, a place for people to talk about freedom and liberty, and the de Tocqueville model, what de Tocqueville saw in America,” Mr. Bush told Mr. Schieffer. “I would like for there to be a place where young scholars come and write and think and articulate and opine and teach.””

News flash, Mr. President: there are already lots of places where young scholars come and write and think and articulate and opine and teach. We call them “universities”. You’ve been to several, although we understand you might not remember much from your time there.

But seriously: who would have thought that George W. Bush was a fan of de Tocqueville? Nothing about him suggests a special respect for those free and independent American citizens, jealously guarding their right to participate fully in public life, that de Tocqueville so admires. His conduct does not reveal anything like de Tocqueville’s concern for the separation of powers, his wariness of excessively concentrated power, or his fear that Americans might one day be rendered servile and acquiesce in their own enslavement.

In fact, the idea of Bush as an admirer of de Tocqueville is so odd that it occurred to me that he might be confusing de Tocqueville with someone else entirely. So, as a public service, I present a few excerpts from de Tocqueville for Bush to reflect on.

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by hilzoy

From today’s Washington Post:

“The recent White House shake-up was an attempt to jump-start the administration and boost President Bush’s rock-bottom approval ratings, but have those efforts come too late to salvage the presidency? A prominent GOP pollster thinks that may be the case.

“This administration may be over,” Lance Tarrance, a chief architect of the Republicans’ 1960s and ’70s Southern strategy, told a gathering of journalists and political wonks last week. “By and large, if you want to be tough about it, the relevancy of this administration on policy may be over.”

A new poll by RT Strategies, the firm headed by Tarrance and Democratic pollster Thomas Riehle, shows that 59 percent of Americans disapprove of Bush’s job performance, while 36 percent approve — a finding in line with other recent polls.

Tarrance said it would be extremely difficult for any president to bounce back this late in his administration and reassert influence on Capitol Hill when his approval rating barely exceeds his party’s base support and half of all adults surveyed said they “strongly disapprove” of his performance. An overwhelming 73 percent of independents disapprove of Bush’s performance, and two-thirds of those “strongly disapprove.””

It would be ‘extremely difficult’ for any president to bounce back now. But it would be impossible for George W. Bush.

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