Campaign-Promises.com

By: Josh Gerstein
January 23, 2009 09:54 AM EST

There may be less than meets the eye to the executive orders President Obama issued yesterday to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay and prohibit the torture of prisoners in American custody. Those pronouncements may sound dramatic and unequivocal, but experts predict that American policy towards detainees could remain for months or even years pretty close to what it was as President Bush left office.

“I think the administration’s commitment to close Guantanamo is heartening; the fact they want to give themselves a year to do it, not so much,”, said Ramzi Kassem, a Yale Law School lecturer who represents prisoners like inmate Ahmed Zuhair, who was captured in Pakistan in 2001. “That would bring men like my client to eight years imprisonment for no apparent reason.”

Here are a few of the delays, caveats and loopholes that could limit the impact of Obama’s orders:

1. Everyone has to follow the Army Field Manual—for now…

Obama’s executive order on interrogations says all agencies of the government have to follow the Army Field Manual when interrogating detainees, meaning the CIA can no longer used so-called enhanced interrogation techniques, which have included waterboarding, the use of dogs in questioning, and stripping prisoners.

However, the order also created an interagency commission which will have six months to examine whether to create “additional or different guidance” for non-military agencies such as the CIA. One group that represents detainees, the Center for Constitutional Rights, deemed that an “escape hatch” to potentially allow enhanced interrogations in the future.

White House counsel Greg Craig told reporters such fears are misplaced. ‚ÄúThis is not an invitation to bring back different techniques than those that are approved inside the Army Field Manual, but an invitation to this task force to make recommendations as to whether or not there should be a separate protocol that’s more appropriate to the intelligence community,‚Äù he said.

The distinction Craig made between “protocols” and “techniques,” though, seems less than clear.

“For now, they’re punting, saying they’ll comply with what’s in the Army manual…but at some point in the future this commission may revert to the executive” to recommend harsher techniques, said Kassem, adding that he was concerned about how transparent the commission’s recommendations would be.

“I’m happy to postpone that discussion [on “enhanced interrogation”]… on the condition that [it] happens transparently,” he said.

A Columbia law professor who worked on detention issues at the State Department under President Bush, Matthew Waxman, said Obama is wise to leave open the possibility of different guidance for the CIA’s experienced interrogators. “I’ve worked on drafts of the Army Field Manual,” Waxman said. “It’s designed to be in the hands of tens of thousands of people who may not have a lot of training or supervision.”

2. Obama ordered a 30-day review of Guantanamo conditions—by the man currently responsible for Guantanamo.

A section of Obama’s order on Guantanamo entitled “Humane Standards of Confinement” orders Secretary of Defense Robert Gates to spend the next thirty days reviewing the current conditions at the Caribbean prison to make sure they’re legal and follow the Geneva Convention. It seems doubtful that Gates, who has been atop the chain of command for Guantanamo for more than two years, will suddenly find conditions that were just fine on Monday of this week are now flagrant violations of the Geneva Convention.

“He’s not exactly impartial,” Kassem said.

Waxman pointed out that adhering to the Geneva Condition is “already the law,” and deemed that section of the order “bizarre.”

3. Obama vowed no torture on his watch, but force-feeding and solitary confinement apparently continue at Guantanamo for now.

It’s possible that the 30-day referral to Gates is simply an effort to buy the Obama team time to deal with two Guantanamo practices that some consider torture, or at least inhumane: force feeding and isolation of prisoners. According to detainee lawyers, about two dozen inmates who refuse to eat as a form of protest are currently being force fed, and about 140 are in some form of solitary confinement.

The Bush administration has argued that the feeding is humane and that the solitary, at least as practiced now, is not the kind of total isolation that amounts to torture. “There’s an important distinction to be made between isolation and separation” from other prisoners,” Waxman said.

As far as we know, the force feeding and solitary practices continued onto Obama‚Äôs watch. Craig dodged a question about the new president‚Äôs views on those issues. ‚ÄúI’m not going to get into the details,‚Äù Craig said.

4. The vast majority of detainees in American custody may see no benefit from Obama’s orders

While Obama ordered a case-by-case review of the 245 prisoners held at Guantanamo, the 600 prisoners held in indefinite American custody in Afghanistan and roughly 20,000 in Iraq won’t get such attention. The general policy review might aid them, eventually, but unless someone was about to torture them it’s unclear how they are better off.

“I think there’s a fairly good chance that on the whole from the perspective of my clients at Guantanamo and Bagram [the site of an American air base and prison in Afghanistan], their lives will be the same until those facilities are shut down, unfortunately,” Kassem said.

Asked why the reviews are limited to prisoners at Guantanamo, and those at Bagram or Abu Ghraib, Craig said, ‚ÄúThe president asked us to look at Guantanamo. That’s the answer.‚Äù

5. The orders downplay the possibility that some prisoners might be set free in America.

Obama ordered that when Guantanamo closes, any remaining inmates “be returned to their home country, released, transferred to a third country, or transferred to another United States detention facility in a manner consistent with law and the national security and foreign policy interests of the United States.” But Obama’s wordsmiths seem to have deliberately trimmed out any explicit mention of the explosive possibility of freeing prisoners on American soil.

While Obama’s aides seem to prefer trying prisoners in civil courts or freeing them abroad, there are no obvious charges to be filed against some of the detainees. Once Guantanamo closes, letting them loose in the U.S. may be the only option if other countries won’t take them.

Craig said he was “hopeful” that other governments will take many of the detainees, but some nations may not step up until the U.S. does. “One question a lot of countries keep asking is, ‘How many are you going to take?” Waxman said. “There may be some countries that want to earn some credit [with the] new administration…but I don’t expect this problem to go away.”

6. Military commissions are shut down…. for now

One of the attention grabbing provisions of Obama’s orders calls for military tribunals at Guantanamo to be “halted.” But the Obama administration is not ruling out returning to some sort of military forum to deal with some of the prisoners.

“This order does not eliminate or extinguish the military commissions, it just stays all proceedings in connection with the ongoing proceedings in Guantanamo,” Craig said, making clear that “improved military commissions” were still on the table.

That suggestion exasperates detainee lawyers like Kassem. “That would be a huge mistake, “ he said. “That system [is] set up to launder statements obtained through torture… What’s the point of getting rid of our offshore, improvised, sham, military tribunals in Cuba, only to recreate it here in the United States?”

Popularity: 29% [?]

By: Eli Lake – Washington Post

An al Qaeda affiliate in Algeria closed a base earlier this month after an experiment with unconventional weapons went awry, a senior U.S. intelligence official said Monday.

The official, who spoke on the condition he not be named because of the sensitive nature of the issue, said he could not confirm press reports that the accident killed at least 40 al Qaeda operatives, but he said the mishap led the militant group to shut down a base in the mountains of Tizi Ouzou province in eastern Algeria.

He said authorities in the first week of January intercepted an urgent communication between the leadership of al Qaeda in the Land of the Maghreb (AQIM) and al Qaeda’s leadership in the tribal region of Pakistan on the border with Afghanistan. The communication suggested that an area sealed to prevent leakage of a biological or chemical substance had been breached, according to the official.

“We don’t know if this is biological or chemical,” the official said.

The story was first reported by the British tabloid the Sun, which said the al Qaeda operatives died after being infected with a strain of bubonic plague, the disease that killed a third of Europe’s population in the 14th century. But the intelligence official dismissed that claim.

AQIM, according to U.S. intelligence estimates, maintains about a dozen bases in Algeria, where the group has waged a terrorist campaign against government forces and civilians. In 2006, the group claimed responsibility for an attack on foreign contractors. In 2007, the group said it bombed U.N. headquarters in Algiers, an attack that killed 41 people.

Al Qaeda is believed by U.S. and Western experts to have been pursuing biological weapons since at least the late 1990s. A 2005 report on unconventional weapons drafted by a commission led by former Sen. Charles Robb, Virginia Democrat, and federal appeals court Judge Laurence Silberman concluded that al Qaeda’s biological weapons program “was extensive, well organized and operated two years before the Sept. 11″ terror attacks in the U.S.

Another report from the Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction Proliferation, released in December, warned that “terrorists are more likely to be able to obtain and use a biological weapon than a nuclear weapon.”

British authorities in January 2003 arrested seven men they accused of producing a poison from castor beans known as ricin. British officials said one of the suspects had visited an al Qaeda training camp. In the investigation into the case, British authorities found an undated al Qaeda manual on assassinations with a recipe for making the poison.

The late leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Musab Zarqawi, was suspected of developing ricin in northern Iraq. Then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell referred to the poison in his presentation to the U.N. Security Council in February 2003 that sought to lay the groundwork for the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

Roger Cressey, a former senior counterterrorism official at the National Security Council under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, told The Washington Times that al Qaeda has had an interest in acquiring a poisons capability since the late 1990s.

“This is something that al Qaeda still aspires to do, and the infrastructure to develop it does not have to be that sophisticated,” he said.

Mr. Cressey added that he also is concerned about al Qaeda in the Land of the Maghreb, which refers to the North African countries of Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia.

“Al Qaeda in the Maghreb is probably the most operationally capable affiliate in the organization right now,” he said.

Popularity: 28% [?]

Obama’s Weekly Address 01/17/09

Popularity: 24% [?]

By: David Rogers
January 15, 2009 09:00 AM EST

Top Obama advisers met late Wednesday with Senate Republicans in hopes of defusing a messy fight over bank bailout funds — a first test of strength for the new president and his ability to deliver on his larger economic recovery plan.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) remains confident that Obama can win the crucial vote, which could come as early as late Thursday or Friday. But Republican support for the Treasury program has plummeted, and Democratic freshmen — who campaigned against the rescue effort in the fall — could be required to step in to help Obama.

“Circumstances have changed,” Sen. Tom Udall (D-N.M.) told Politico.

At issue is the release of $350 billion, the second half of the $700 billion Treasury rescue fund enacted in October to help stabilize credit markets. But more is at stake than just dollars.

Obama already has his eye on a much larger economic recovery plan approaching $850 billion. Anxious Democrats have warned labor allies that if the incoming president loses on this round, it will endanger both the stimulus bill and separate legislation making it easier for unions to organize workers.

The president-elect is slated to tour an Ohio manufacturing company and speak on his recovery plan on Friday, by which point Democrats hope to have completed a draft of their two-year package to go before House and Senate committees next week.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) still hopes to uphold a cap in the vicinity of $850 billion or slightly lower, and the tax cuts included will probably be somewhat less than the 40 percent share envisioned by the Obama team. After a leadership meeting Wednesday, it appeared less likely that the bill will include a costly $70 billion provision related to the alternative minimum tax. But Democrats predicted that an Obama-backed business tax break allowing an accelerated write-off of a company’s net operating losses will survive, despite criticism from some liberals.

“We have to make choices as to what creates the most jobs. That’s the standard: Create jobs, grow the economy,” Pelosi told Politico. “We have to go with our first priorities, which are investments and those tax credits and tax cuts that help middle-income people and stay within our cap.”

“If we do all of that, then we can decide what else we can do,” she added.

State aid commands an ever-increasing share of the package, which will use health care and education programs to pump tens of billions of dollars to governors struggling with their own deficits and layoffs.

An estimated $90 billion would help reduce the cost of Medicaid, the joint federal-state health care program for the poor and disabled. And another $80 billion in funds would be channeled to states and localities with the requirement that at least 60 percent goes for education.

The massive government intervention bets heavily on the economic theory that by pumping up demand, Washington can create jobs to stave off rising unemployment. But given the economy’s condition, Obama has warned that the jobless rate will still grow in the coming months, and a big part of the package includes new health and unemployment benefits for those thrown out of work.

The current program of extended unemployment benefits will be authorized through the end of 2009, and Pelosi is pressing for what could be up to a $50 increase in the weekly benefit. An estimated $20 billion is budgeted for increased food stamp and nutrition spending, and about $35 billion is allocated to preserve some health insurance coverage for those who have lost their jobs.

Many of these expenditures are unprecedented in scale. It’s estimated that total federal aid to education could increase by as much as $140 billion over two years, virtually doubling the annual rate today.

But the same investments could help Obama navigate between the Wall Street vs. Main Street politics that so dominated last fall’s debate over the financial rescue package. Congress was urged then by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson to make the $700 billion commitment to avert a credit meltdown, but voters were angered by the cost and the failure to do more to help homeowners deal with the threat of foreclosure.

Thirty-four Senate Republicans, led by Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, were pivotal to passing the bailout bill in October, but the mood has soured dramatically since November’s elections.

After a tough campaign in Kentucky, McConnell returned to Washington in a much more skeptical frame of mind. In a speech Wednesday on the Senate floor, he warned he would “find it exceedingly difficult to support additional taxpayer funds without serious assurances from the incoming administration that the taxpayers will be protected.”

Those remarks set the stage for Obama to send his senior economic adviser, Lawrence Summers, as well as the incoming White House chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, to meet with Senate Republicans in the late afternoon. In the time remaining before the floor vote, a key issue will be how far Obama will go to assure Republicans that he won’t use the Treasury funds as a tool for industrial policy.

Many, like McConnell, were upset when the outgoing Bush administration reversed itself and tapped Treasury funds to help Detroit automakers facing bankruptcy. Sen. Judd Gregg (R-N.H.) said Bush’s decision opened a Pandora’s box for conservatives. Prodded by Gregg, Summers and Emanuel emphasized that Obama had no desire to expand Treasury’s commitment to new industries.

“It hopefully gave people some comfort,” said Gregg, who has been a valuable ally for Obama given his standing on fiscal issues. “They made very clear that they aren’t going to use [the Treasury] money outside the financial industry except for what’s committed to auto and maybe something additional under a major reorganization plan for auto.”

Summers and Emanuel left without comment, but McConnell said he would also want something beyond closed-door assurances from the administration. And a second decisive vote could come from Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain, Obama’s defeated presidential rival.

Much as this is a first test for Obama, it could also be a first test of that relationship with McCain. The Arizonan’s office refused to comment on his stand, but Gregg said hopefully of McCain: “When I last asked him, he said he was still listening.”

Popularity: 48% [?]

By Julie Hirschfeld Davis, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON ‚Äì A Capitol Hill grilling is likely for Timothy Geithner, President-elect Barack Obama’s pick to head the Treasury Department, after public revelations he failed to pay $34,000 in taxes several years ago.

Senate Democrats are pressing to schedule a quick confirmation hearing for Geithner on Friday, hoping to tee up swift approval of his nomination on Inauguration Day. But newly released information about the tax goofs by Geithner, regarded as a brilliant financial markets specialist well-positioned to deal with the nation’s considerable economic problems, could complicate the process.

Republicans have yet to sign off on expediting the hearing, although senior Democrats expressed confidence that the disclosures would do little to slow Geithner’s path to confirmation.

“I think this is an honest mistake,” Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., a member of the Senate Finance Committee, which is considering the selection, told NBC’s “Today” on Wednesday. “Obviously it’s an embarrassment. One wishes it wasn’t there, but I don’t think it’s going to stop his moving forward.”

At least one Republican, Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah, said he had “no problem” with Geithner. Still, the disclosures virtually guarantee a tough hearing for Geithner.

Geithner failed to pay self-employment taxes for money he earned from 2001 to 2004 while working for the International Monetary Fund, according to materials released by the committee Tuesday.

He paid some of the taxes in 2006, after an IRS audit discovered the discrepancy for taxes paid in 2003 and 2004. But it wasn’t until much later ‚Äî days before Obama tapped him to head Treasury late last year ‚Äî that Geithner paid back most of the taxes, incurred in 2001 and 2002. He did so after Obama’s transition team found that Geithner had made the same tax mistake his first two years at the IMF as the one the IRS found he made during his last two years there.

The panel’s report also noted that Geithner briefly employed a housekeeper in 2005 whose legal immigrant work status had lapsed.

Taken together, the disclosures cast a cloud over what otherwise had appeared to be a smooth road to confirmation for Geithner. Obama’s transition team told Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont., and senior Republican Charles E. Grassley of Iowa of the tax problems in early December, but most rank-and-file members of the panel only learned of them recently.

Some heard about them for the first time at a closed-door committee meeting on Capitol Hill on Tuesday afternoon. Later, Geithner joined the huddle to defend himself and address questions about what he and Obama’s team called a mistake.

“These errors were not intentional; they were honest mistakes,” Baucus said after the session.

Grassley, who pressed for the irregularities to be made public, hasn’t said whether he considers them grounds for opposing Geithner’s nomination.

Grassley regards the disclosure as “serious, and whether or not it’s disqualifying is to be determined,” said Jill Kozeny, a spokeswoman.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., dismissed the events as “a few little hiccups,” and said he was “not concerned at all” about the impact.

Obama reiterated his support for Geithner.

“He’s dedicated his career to our country and served with honor, intelligence and distinction,” incoming White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said. “That service should not be tarnished by honest mistakes, which, upon learning of them, he quickly addressed.”

Obama’s team says his mistake was a common one for people hired by international organizations and foreign embassies that don’t pay the employer share of Social Security taxes. The IRS estimated in 2006 that as many as half those employees had made tax-filing mistakes, and offered a group settlement to let them correct the errors.

But some tax experts said the problem is not that common.

Tom Ochsenschlager, vice president of tax for the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants, said it would be difficult for someone preparing a tax return for a self-employed person to skip the Social Security and Medicare tax lines.

“It’s such a basic mistake that I kind of wonder if we know all the facts,” Ochsenschlager said.

Popularity: 34% [?]

Obama’s Weekly Address 01/10/09

Popularity: 17% [?]