Campaign-Promises.com

By Donald F. Kettl
Government Executive
February 1, 2009

The dangers of building a new social contract between government and citizens by making it up as we go along.

In a couple of weeks last September, the Federal Reserve and Treasury Department made more lightning- fast decisions, involving more government money, than at any time in the nation’s history. This was much bigger than a mega-rescue of the nation’s financial system. It was a big step toward redefining the social contract about what government does for all of us – and how it does it. The Fed and Treasury jumped in with the hope that the bailout would be brutally tough but relatively short and antiseptic. Sop up the toxic mortgages, free borrowing that had become frozen, and the Bush administration hoped the economy would right itself. But this plan (think of it as Phase I) didn’t work. As President Bush later confessed, “This is a difficult time for a free-market person.”

That led the administration in its waning days to Phase II: a shift from a hope in a self-correcting market to a conclusion that government not only had to fuel the economy but also to grab its wheel. Then President Obama intensified the shift with his own dramatic plan for the government to devote hundreds of billions of dollars to an economic stimulus program. It’s now clear that we’ve committed ourselves to a process of building a new social contract that will be brutal but also huge and wide. We’re escalating our commitments without a plan about where to go or how to get out.

Phase II is about much more than pumping out lots of cash. We also want to do big things with it. We want to save the banks and help individual mortgage holders. We want to bandage state budgets and rebuild local infrastructure. We want to help the auto companies, save employees’ jobs, and build a new generation of fuel-efficient cars.

That involves more than an all-lobbyists-on-deck call. Everyone realizes this is a historic opportunity to use government’s cash to promote big economic and social goals. But milliseconds after that cash started to flow, demands surfaced for tougher rules to prevent the crisis from happening again. And along with the funding came the irresistible urge to use the money to pursue a wide array of economic and social goals – often laudable, but frequently conflicting.

The New Social Contract

Lots of crosscutting requirements have become attached to federal cash over the years. No one who takes a nickel of Uncle Sam’s money can discriminate on the basis of race, religion, or other factors. Planners using federal funds for projects must first assess the environmental impact of new construction. Government-funded facilities must be handicap-accessible. As the bailout rolled out, giant investment banking firms meekly became banking holding companies, with tighter government regulation, as the price of a cash infusion.

On the one hand, no one actually likes all the rules. Government souvenir shops still sell acrylic-encased bits of genuine government red tape, once used to bind Civil War-era veterans’ files. (Cutting the red tape was the only way to get into the files to determine the benefits for which the vets were eligible.) But on the other hand, when public money starts to flow, we can’t resist the temptation to use red tape to direct what the money does. As we moved from Phase I to Phase II of the financial bailout, we shifted from trusting the market to insisting on government’s firm hand on the wheel. Now that government is in the game, it’s in deep. We’re heading for a public role in private life that’s unlike anything we’ve ever seen before, and many features are likely to be permanent.

We’ve long been sliding into a more expansive government role, of course. From tainted tomatoes to melamine-laced dog food, Americans expect their purchases to be safe. If storms wipe out their towns, they expect government help to rebuild them bigger and better than ever – even if that only gives Mother Nature a fatter target the next time. We want government to protect our airplanes and infrastructure from terrorists.

The financial meltdown has accelerated our expectations that government will keep us safe. And it has brought public officials directly into the big decisions about who wins and loses in the markets. We’ve gone from debates over privatizing the public sector to big steps toward governmentalizing the private sector. We’re writing this new social contract with three guides: more public money in the private economy, more rules to shape how the private sector behaves, and more citizen expectations that govern-ment will manage the risks we face. The problem? We’re making it up as we go along, and we’re not sure where we’re going.

No Exit Strategy

Barack Obama ran as the candidate of “change we can believe in.” Because of the financial crisis, change is inevitable and epic. We’ve drifted into a new brand of government-directed capitalism, in which “neither Adam Smith nor John Maynard Keynes, neither Joseph Schumpeter nor today’s econometricians, give one a clue about how to track, temper or tame it,” University of Pennsylvania political scientist John DiIulio concludes. In just a few months, we’ve gone from debating toxic mortgages to pushing the government into direct decisions about capital flows and subsidies to big financial institutions in which the government now has a substantial ownership stake.

So far, corporations have resisted pressures to unload their private jets and divulge their market decisions. When pressed about what JPMorgan Chase did with federal bailout money, a spokesman said, “We have not disclosed that to the public. We’re declining to.” That position, echoed by 20 other banks that received more than $1 billion each from the government, leaves federal officials with two options: Shovel out hundreds of billions of dollars and hope for the best, or view the bailout money as an investment – expecting certain results and insisting on openness about how the money is being used. Both the Obama administration and Congress have made clear they reject the first position and will insist on the second.

But even if that’s the case, how will they make the system of accountability work? We know we want to get out quickly, but we haven’t charted the path. In the debate over a potential bailout for automakers, one federal official asked a congressional staffer about how the government’s proposed oversight would function. “We’re too busy to worry about that now,” was the reply.

Three Puzzles

The war in Iraq shows the dangers of jumping in with the hope of a quick, surgical win but without a plan to get out. The broader and deeper the financial rescue gets, the longer the federal government’s role is likely to last and the more money will be at risk. If we care about making the rescue work – if we care about making our entire system of government work – we can’t be too busy to worry about these issues. Three big puzzles loom.

First, we’re inventing new tools on the fly and we haven’t figured out how to use them. For the last half of the last century, the government expanded most of its programs through indirect proxy tools: contracts, grants, regulations, loan programs and tax incentives. We created programs to provide nursing home care and clean the environment, to fund health care for seniors and subsidize home mortgages, to support local schools and create sophisticated military technology, to go to the moon and make airlines safer.

Now government has directly grabbed the wheel. We’re telling banks what kind of investments they can make. We’re imposing new expectations on the auto industry in exchange for financial transfusions. We’re layering government by bailout on top of government by proxy, and we’re not doing either well.

It’s tempting to label this “socialism,” because Karl Marx’s shadow provides at least a point of reference. But in fact it’s very different, with stronger reliance on market forces than Marx would have approved but a stronger government role than Adam Smith or Alexander Hamilton could have imagined.

Moreover, we’re building the new direct tool on top of old ones that simply haven’t worked well. The Government Accountability Office’s “high-risk list” catalogs a host of current programs – most of them of the government-by-proxy variety – that are especially prone to waste and mismanagement. From the conduct of the 2010 census to contract management at agencies ranging from the Energy and Defense departments to NASA and the Federal Aviation Administration, we’ve seen searing examples of government’s failure to update its management strategies to match its ambitious goals.

Building highly ambitious new tools on top of old ones that don’t work well, and doing so without thinking about how the new ones will work, is a prescription for a multibillion- (maybe multitrillion-)dollar crisis. As we seek to reshape the way markets work, we’re focusing on the nails without thinking about the hammers we’ll need to drive them.

Second, our plans frame big and largely unexplored trade-offs. In Phase I of the financial bailout, economists confidently predicted we’d get almost all our money back. As Phase II geared up, however, it became clear that, at best, it will take us a long time to unwind the infusion of public cash, and we haven’t thought much about how to run the process in the meantime.

Just how long will Uncle Sam hold a stake in private companies? How will government exercise its ownership role? Will federal representatives sit at board meetings? Will private plans need to pass muster with a government czar? How much public – including media – scrutiny will private companies have to accept as the price for government cash?

And that’s just the beginning. How will the government balance its fiduciary interest – maximizing return to the taxpayers – with its wide-ranging social and economic goals, from protecting collective bargaining to preserving industries that market competition has punished? How will we address further market failures? How will we set priorities for which businesses to save, and who will make these calls? Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, for example, are required to pay a 10 percent divi- dend on the money the Treasury invested to prop them up. Does the goal of maximizing the return to taxpayers increase the risk the companies will fail?

We’re not very good at asking, let alone answering, such questions. We’re likely to carom along from issue to issue, without confronting the big puzzles until the implications begin to accumulate. We’ll probably slide sideways into a whole new understanding of whom government will help and how it will act. That frames the third puzzle: whether our public institutions have the capacity to act effectively in a world where all important problems are global and where international markets swiftly punish fumbles. In Phase I, the Fed and the Treasury made the key decisions with relatively little oversight. Will Congress continue to allow a White House-Treasury-Fed triumvirate to strip the legislative branch of any real role in some of the most important decisions the country has ever faced? After Congress’ struggle to move on the first stage of the rescue, the bailout of the car companies, and an economic stimulus package, can it deliberate but still govern?

Then there’s the issue of who runs the daily operations. Should we concentrate administrative power in a czar? The history of federal czars – for drugs, homeland security and faith-based programs – is not a happy one. Should we move instead to a multimember board to avoid centering too much power on a single official? Should we put the power in the Treasury, where political pressures could be greater, or in a Fed-like independent agency, where political responsiveness might be less?

The Next Government

The answers to these questions stretch far beyond our experience, but two things are certain. First, since we’re going to be in this for a long time, we need to sort out the governance issues upfront before we drift into game-changing economic decisions without political accountability. Second, if we’re uncertain about the right answers, we should put a big marker on transparency. We’re reinventing accountability on the fly, so the more we know about what’s going on, the better we’ll be able to figure out what institutional and procedural reforms we need.

If history is a guide, once we jump in, we’re unlikely to back out when the economy recovers. In 1979’s Chrysler bailout and the savings and loan rescue of the early 1990s, the government got in and out relatively quickly. But the responses to the really big crises – such as the economic recovery programs of the New Deal, the World War II mobilization, the strategies of the Cold War, and the creation of a homeland security apparatus after Sept. 11 – teach us once we advance government’s power, we tend not to roll it back. So we’re not just figuring out how to get through the next four months or the next four years. In all likelihood, we’re also permanently redefining the social contract between citizens and their government.

Trying to run a 21st century government with clumsy 20th century tactics is a prescription for disaster. But that doesn’t have to happen. We can begin by recognizing that big plans are worthless unless there’s an effective strategy to carry them out. We can follow by understanding that in such a fluid environment, we need to create a foundation of trust and accountability for what we’re doing. Follow the money and we’ll have some sense of where we’re taking ourselves.

The story is hopeful if we’re smart. At each of the big turning points throughout American history, we’ve found a way to step up to the challenges we face. What we now need is the next government of the United States, one that is nimble enough to tackle the challenges we’re facing, smart enough to steer well through the new crises and clever enough to stay half a step ahead of the strategies it is creating.

Donald F. Kettl is Robert A. Fox Leadership Professor at the University of Pennsylvania and a fellow at the National Academy of Public Administration. He is author of The Next Government of the United States: Why Our Institutions Fail Us and How to Fix Them (W.W. Norton, 2009).

Popularity: 47% [?]

By JULIE HIRSCHFELD DAVIS, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON ‚Äì President Barack Obama’s ban on earmarks in the $825 billion economic stimulus bill doesn’t mean interest groups, lobbyists and lawmakers won’t be able to funnel money to pet projects.

They’re just working around it ‚Äî and perhaps inadvertently making the process more secretive.

The projects run the gamut: a Metrolink station that needs building in Placentia, Calif.; a stretch of beach in Sandy Hook, N.J., that could really use some more sand; a water park in Miami.

There are thousands of projects like those that once would have been gotten money upfront but now are left to scramble for dollars at the back end of the process as “ready to go” jobs eligible for the stimulus plan.

The result, as The Associated Press learned in interviews with more than a dozen lawmakers, lobbyists and state and local officials, is a shadowy lobbying effort that may make it difficult to discern how hundreds of billions in federal money will be parceled out.

“‘No earmarks’ isn’t a game-ender,” said Peter Buffa, former mayor of Costa Mesa, Calif. “It just means there’s a different way of going about making sure the funding is there.”

It won’t be in legislative language that overtly sets aside money for them. That’s the infamous practice known as earmarking, which Obama and Democratic congressional leaders have agreed to nix for the massive stimulus package, expected to come up for a House vote this week.

Instead, the money will be doled out according to arcane formulas spelled out in the bill and in some cases based on the decisions of Obama administration officials, governors and state and local agencies that will choose the projects.

“Somebody’s going to earmark it somewhere,” said Howard Marlowe, a consultant for a coalition working to preserve beaches.

Lobbyists are hard at work figuring out ways to grab a share of the money for their clients, but the new rules mean they’re doing so indirectly ‚Äî and sometimes in ways that are impossible to track.

Congressional earmarks have had a bad name since the 2004 scandal that sent superlobbyist Jack Abramoff to prison and earned the congressional spending committees a new nickname: “The Favor Factory.”

Obama, who campaigned promising a more transparent and accountable government, is advocating a system that will eventually let the public track exactly where stimulus money goes through an Internet-powered search engine. In addition, Democratic lawmakers have devised an elaborate oversight system, including a new board to review how the money is spent.

But none of that will happen until after the bill becomes law. Even critics of the earmarks system acknowledge that specifying projects upfront offers some measure of transparency.

“We hate earmarks, but at least it’s a way of tracking where influence is had,” said Keith Ashdown of the watchdog group Taxpayers for Common Sense. “There is a challenge now that projects will be added behind closed doors without a paper trail.”

Indeed, some lawmakers hearing from local groups say they’re doing their own lobbying of governors and state and local officials who could have say-so over the funds.

“I’ve talked to my governor and suggested some things I think are important in our area,” said Republican Rep. C.W. Bill Young, who represents St. Petersburg, Fla. “He knows what the needs are.”

Democratic Rep. Ed Pastor of Arizona suggested it’s not entirely accurate to say there will be no earmarks in the measure. “There are and there aren’t,” Pastor said. “A lot of it depends on what the formula looks like.”

For instance, the House measure, which includes $358 billion for road, water and energy programs among others, gives priority to transportation projects in high-unemployment areas that could be begun and completed quickly and that state and metropolitan transportation authorities have included in their long-term plans.

In California, Buffa, now board chairman of the Orange County Transportation Authority, said he’s changed his strategy from asking for specific projects to pleading for more favorable general guidelines, including more money for infrastructure projects overall and a formula that lets cities ‚Äî not states ‚Äî decide how to spend it.

His organization has enlisted Potomac Partners, a large firm that specializes in lobbying for project spending, to help.

In most cases, lawmakers know exactly which projects in their districts can benefit from the money, even though the legislation won’t spell them out. State and local officials have released lists of projects that could start quickly and be completed within a few years.

In Orange County, they include freeway improvements and the Placentia Metrolink station. The American Shore and Beach Preservation Association, which is pushing for more water projects to be funded, wants repair and restoration of beaches from Sandy Hook, N.J., to Newport Beach, Calif.

Members of Congress are privately outlining their priorities, too.

“Everybody’s making their list and checking it twice,” said Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., the minority leader. “You are inevitably going to have a lot of projects that are not going to pass the smell test.”

Some groups are careful not to get too specific, fearing that public scrutiny could draw unwelcome attention to projects easily caricatured as special-interest goodies, such as a 2007 earmark for spinach growers that found its way into an Iraq war spending bill or the now-infamous “Bridge to Nowhere” in Alaska.

The United States Conference of Mayors released a 300-plus-page list of some $150 billion in “ready-to-go” projects that quickly became fodder for criticism. It included money for the Miami water park, which McConnell has ridiculed publicly, and a skate park in Portland, Maine.

The American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials was more guarded about its list of 5,000 projects totaling $64 billion. No specific projects were mentioned — just the number in each state and an overall dollar amount — making it impossible for lawmakers, advocacy groups or members of the public to criticize any one item.

Peter J. “Jack” Basso, an association executive, said it’s up to states to decide what goes on their “ready-to-go” wish lists, but that the projects must meet rigorous tests including clearing environmental reviews.

“We really rely on them to pick things that, frankly, are not bridges to nowhere,” Basso said.

Popularity: 46% [?]

By: Michael Calderone
January 23, 2009 10:42 AM EST

A growing media frustration with Barack Obama’s team spilled into the open at Thursday’s briefing, with reporters accusing the White House of stifling access to his oath re-do and giving Obama’s first interview as president to a multi-million dollar inauguration sponsor.

Veteran CBS newsman Bill Plante was one of the most vocal critics, questioning the White House’s handling of Wednesday night’s second swearing in – which was covered by just a four-reporter print pool that didn’t include a news photographer or TV correspondent.

He also asked new press secretary Robert Gibbs why ABC, which paid millions to host the DC Neighborhood Ball, was granted the only inauguration day interview with President Obama – a move he equated to “pay to play.”

“We have a tradition here of covering the president,” said Plante, who is covering his fourth administration.

Gibbs defended the White House’s moves, insisting aides acted in a “way that was upfront and transparent” in allowing the standard pool into the swearing-in. And Obama himself seemed mindful of making a good impression, paying a surprise visit to the White House pressroom a few hours after the briefing.

It’s been a bumpy 24 hours for Gibbs and company, as members of the White House press corps have publicly expressed frustration with an administration promising openness and transparency.

At the same time, some members of the Obama administration’s press team have signaled that they plan to shake up some of the old traditions of White House coverage, some of the longest-standing – and most jealously guarded – in town.

In recent weeks, New York Times editors complained that its White House team hadn’t gotten a sit-down with Obama during the transition, breaking an unofficial tradition whereby recent president-elects have free-wheeling exchanges with the Gray Lady before the inauguration.
In the case of the second swearing-in, however, it seemed to give reporters a chance to lay down an early marker on questioning whether Obama would live up to one of his key campaign pledges, at least when it comes to the media.

“It is ironic, the same day that the president is talking about transparency, we were not let in,” CNN’s Ed Henry said on the air Wednesday night after news of the second swearing-in broke.

Henry’s main gripe was that television reporters weren’t permitted to cover a historic moment, when Obama once again raised his right hand and took the oath before Justice John Roberts. The only images came from White House photographer Pete Souza.

Three wire services — The Associated Press, Reuters and Agence France-Presse – refused to move those images, in protest of the White House’s handling of the event.

The wire services’ photographers were also denied access to photograph Obama sitting in the Oval Office on the first day, and similarly refused to move the White House approved photos.

Michael Oreskes, the AP’s managing editor for U.S. news, told his own news outlet that “we are not distributing what are, in effect, visual press releases.”

Later, in a statement to Politico, Oreskes said that the AP believes “access for news photographers has been a time-honored tradition at the White House through many administrations and needs to be continued.”

“We are working diligently with the White House staff to ensure this access,” he added.

Jennifer Loven, the AP‚Äôs White House correspondent and president of the White House Correspondents’ Association, said she and the group’s board “are addressing this aggressively with the White House‚Äîour strong objections to both the issue of them releasing photo handouts from events that the press should be able to cover, and the issue of how the pool was structured last night.”

Providing access is probably the easiest ways to appease the White House press corps, which feeds on it. So by not allowing the three wire services in the Oval Office for day one—a ritual that typically yields flattering shots of a new president writing at his desk or chatting with aides—the press team picked a fight that could have been avoided.

But those weren’t the only issues of access to come up in Thursday’s roughly 50-minute briefing.

Before Gibbs took the podium, reporters were given a background briefing under an agreement to only attribute information to “senior administration officials”—a policy some news organizations object to as a matter of policy.

But when Gibbs let slip the name of one briefer, Greg Craig, a couple times, The Wall Street Journal’s Jonathan Weisman asked, “Are we allowed to repeat that name?”

During the earliest days of the Clinton administration, such abrupt changes in the traditional press access were often met with harsh criticism from the briefing room pack, most notably, the blocking off of access to the office of then press secretary George Stephanopoulos.

Former Clinton press secretary Dee Dee Myers, who succeeded Stephanopoulos, said in PBS’s “The Clinton Years” that the move “made the press very angry because they lost access to a part of the building that they had had access to.”

‚ÄúAnd it didn’t serve us,‚Äù she continued. ‚ÄúAnd it was stupid and didn’t last very long. I can’t remember when the decision was made and the door was finally reopened but it was a complete waste of energy. It alienated people for no purpose. It served nothing. It served no one. And it was a rookie, rookie mistake.‚Äù

Myers said Thursday that the Obama team’s decision to bar widespread access to the re-do of the oath wasn’t in the same category as shutting access to the press office, but wouldn’t help in relations with the media.

“I think not letting video, that’s a bit of a rookie mistake,” Myers said, adding that “when you can, it’s better to err on the side of inclusiveness with the press.”

On balance however, she said of Obama’s press team, “I think generally speaking they’re doing very well so far,” said Myers.

There have been a handful of rocky moments so far. Some press staffers found their name cards misspelled on Wednesday and phone lines weren’t properly hooked up. Reporters trying to reach the press staff got emails bounced back.

Also, press aides informed reporters that the doors of the lower press office will be locked until 8:30 am, an inconvenience for those on the early shift. Following a USA Today blog item, there was confusion about whether the Whitehouse.gov site would regularly publish pool reports since there was a “pool report” link on the site. And in the hours before Gibbs’ briefing, the northwest gate of the White House started running out of temporary passes.

Now, given the expected learning curve, most of these wrinkles should be ironed out in time. But on broader issues of access, it remains to be seen if the Obama press team is making rookie mistakes, or simply asserting a new protocol, not bound to past traditions that White House reporters have grown accustomed to. While the press corps balks at changes in access, these rules aren’t written in stone. It may chafe veterans of the briefing room, but it’s the administration’s prerogative on such matters.

Of course, the media landscape has changed significantly over the 16 years, and getting one’s message across through establishment media isn’t the only option for the new administration.

The Obama campaign proved that one could skirt around the mainstream media at times, whether by blasting out text messages to millions of supporters (the Biden pick), or leaking to select news outlets and blogs as a means of getting out the day’s talking points out.

But even if the press team is keeping reporters and photographers at bay, perhaps the President will draw them a bit closer.

After Obama signed an executive order Thursday morning to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay within a year, “press office staffers began to shoo the pool out the door, and the camera lights were dimmed,” wrote Scripps Howard’s Bartholomew Sullivan in a pool report.

However, Obama stopped the reporter from being ushered out, saying, “there are three of these.” The lights came back on.

Popularity: 37% [?]

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% [?]

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% [?]