By William Fisher
The year was 1961. The venue was the spacious, deeply carpeted office of the secretary of a major cabinet department – one of the “best and brightest” recruited by the newly installed administration of President John F. Kennedy.
The audience assembled for this morning meeting consisted of the department’s fifty or so most senior officers – those civil servants we refer to as bureaucrats, the ones who stay at their desks regardless of which party wins the White House.
“Good morning,” began the secretary. “I asked you here this morning because I want to share with you – and get your feedback on – a new policy idea I have.” His idea, he said, “has the potential to make a substantial contribution to our economy.”
Then followed fifteen minutes of way-down-in-the-weeds detail. Finally, having laid out his idea, the secretary concluded his presentation with the question, “What do you think?”
After what seemed an endless silence, the most senior audience member rose, cleared his throat, and said:
“That’s a brilliant idea, Mr. Secretary. In fact, I thought it was brilliant when I heard it from Herbert Hoover when he was Secretary of Commerce.”
Next month, similarly unfortunate meetings could be taking place throughout the government. The presenters of the brilliant new ideas will be some of the 3,000-plus political appointees tapped by President Barack Obama to occupy the top leadership positions in our hundreds of Federal departments, agencies and commissions.
Some of them may indeed present truly new ideas. But the chances are good that many of the brainstorms proffered to these career public servants will have been heard before.
Because, in the heady environment of every new administration, it’s all too easy to persuade yourself that you and your fellow appointees have a monopoly on wisdom.
And that means you are about to miss a huge opportunity. Because the career civil service folks who now report to you are the aggregate repositories of centuries of experience. They know where the machinery is and where the skeletons are buried. They are the folks – the only folks -- who know how to turn good policy into good programs that actually work.
Now, aside from peddlers of sub-prime mortgages, contractors who rip off the government, and governors who demand a quid pro quo before funding a children’s hospital, there are probably few groups as savagely maligned as career public servants. We blame them for Katrina. For torture. For failing to police the greed of Wall Street. For disgracing the Justice Department. For invading Iraq. For cozying up to the world’s worst dictators. For giving Osama his get-out-of-jail card.
But our scorn is sadly misplaced. In the vast majority of cases, the failures we seem so ready to attribute to our civil servants are the failures of their leaders – those “best and brightest” appointed by the president.
Now, no administration in our history has ever been immune from appointing a few total disasters to senior posts. But not since George W. Bush won the White House in 2000 have we have witnessed the magnitude of incompetence, indifference, arrogance, cronyism – even criminality – we have suffered during the past eight years.
The clueless “Brownie” of FEMA infamy became emblematic of the failure of leadership – but only emblematic. The Bush Administration had hundreds of Brownies hard at work giving government a bad name. Arguably, that was the only job at which they were wildly successful.
To be fair, however, the staggering mediocrity of the Bushies was not solely the responsibility of the president. Many of W’s nominees were Senate-confirmable, so Congress shares the blame for confirming them, and also for failing to hold them accountable by exercising any meaningful oversight.
Hopefully, the emphasis the Obama transition team has put on the combination of experience, imagination, and solid track records will help to improve the performance of government – at least that part of it the Bushies haven’t outsourced to private contractors.
We should dare to hope that this combination will bring us political appointees who understand that sound policies and exciting programs are worse than useless without solid implementation.
That means leaning heavily on – and really listening to – those who staff those programs -- the implementers. Our career government cadre.
Max Stier of Bloomberg News reminds us of the way Bush 41 addressed this woefully neglected constituency. He wrote:
Just days after his inauguration 20 years ago, the first President Bush gathered hundreds of the government's senior career executives at DAR Constitution Hall to praise their dedication, extol public service and ask for their help in governing.
"I'm coming to you as president and offering my hand in partnership. I'm asking you to join me as full members of our team. I promise to lead and to listen, and I promise to serve beside you as we work together to carry out the will of the American people," Bush said. "Our principles are clear: that government service is a noble calling and a public trust."
Obama, Stier wrote, “has signaled his own strong commitment to fostering public service -- to "make government cool again." As he begins his presidency, it would be smart for him to follow George H.W. Bush's example, personally meeting with senior civil service executives to explain his priorities, set expectations, and let them know their expertise and hard work will be needed to meet the many daunting challenges ahead.”
I agree.
Except that this job is too big for the president to tackle alone -- our government currently has about 1.8 million civilian employees. So this becomes a task for every one of Barack Obama’s political appointees -- and it can be a richly rewarding task.
Because the men and women of our career public service are weary of being the Bush Administration’s scapegoats. They are eager to be motivated, trained to perform to the highest standards, and ready to be held accountable.
Enlightened leadership can make “Yes We Can” their mantra too.
Saturday, December 27, 2008
Monday, December 22, 2008
OBAMA’s 180 DEGREE TURNABOUT
By William Fisher
Key appointments announced by president-elect Barack Obama suggest that science will soon make a major comeback in the U.S. Government.
The outgoing administration of President George W. Bush has been harshly criticized by many members of the American scientific community for allowing ideology to distort or eliminate findings on such critical subjects as reproductive health, stem cell research, climate change, and a host of other environmental issues.
But Obama’s choices indicate that a hundred-and-eighty degree turn is in the offing. The change can already be seen in the president-elect’s first choices for scientific posts.
These include Steven Chu, head of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Nobel laureate in physics, nominated to be energy secretary; John P. Holdren, a physicist and Harvard professor of environmental policy, who will serve as the president’s science adviser and as director of the White House Office of Science and Technology; Jane Lubchenco, a marine biologist from Oregon State University, who will lead the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), part of the U.S. Department of Commerce, which carries out much of the government’s research on global warming; Eric S. Lander, a professor of biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.), who helped lead the effort to sequence the human genome; Dr. Harold Varmus, a Nobel Prize-winning cancer researcher, former director of the National Institutes of Health, and president of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York; Lisa Jackson, tapped to be administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), who is a former commissioner of the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection and who played a major role in implementing the state's program to stabilize greenhouse gas emissions at 1990 levels by 2020 and reduce emissions to 80 percent below 2006 levels by 2050; and Nancy Sutley, formerly deputy secretary for policy and intergovernmental relations with the California Environmental Protection Agency, to chair the White House Council on Environmental Quality.
Dr. Varmus will also co-chair the President’s Council of Advisers on Science and Technology along with Dr. Holdren.
Numerous other appointments are yet to come for science-based agencies including the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and the U.S. Public Health Service.
In a radio address in which he announced the appointments last week, Obama said, “It’s time we once again put science at the top of our agenda and worked to restore America’s place as the world leader in science and technology.”
“Whether it’s the science to slow global warming; the technology to protect our troops and confront bioterror and weapons of mass destruction; the research to find life-saving cures; or the innovations to remake our industries and create 21st century jobs — today more than ever, science holds the key to our survival as a planet and our security and prosperity as a nation,” Obama said.
Most of the American scientific community has been at odds with the Bush Administration since it won the White House in 2000. In its 2008 statement, one of the most prominent of scientific organizations, the Union of Concerned Scientists, demanded that the U.S. government return to “high standards of scientific integrity in forming and implementing its policies. Breaches of this principle have damaged the public good and the international leadership of the United States.”
“To meet its obligation to serve the public interest, the government must have reliable scientific work and advice at its disposal, and provide the public with reliable scientific information. This requires the government to provide federal scientists with the resources and the professional environment necessary to carry out their missions effectively and honestly,” the organization said.
Among the most controversial scientific issues to confront the Bush Administration is its promotion of abstinence-until-marriage education programs. These programs receive about $158 million annually from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
But an investigation covering ten states by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that these programs are not reviewed for scientific accuracy before they are granted funding. The report found that only half reviewed the programs for scientifically accurate data on contraception, sexually transmitted infections and other information. It concluded that most state and federal efforts to assess the effectiveness of abstinence-until-marriage education programs "do not meet the minimum scientific standards" that experts say are necessary to be scientifically valid.
Commenting on that report, Dr. Michael Stebbins, Director of Biology for the Federation of American Scientists, told us, “Time after time, ideology has trumped science in a very ugly way during the Bush Administration. It is no surprise that the GAO finds major shortcomings in the abstinence only approach of the government. There are very real questions about whether this approach works. The evidence so far is that it does not, and this has an effect on, for example, whether we are fighting the spread of HIV-AIDS in the most effective way. But the White House – and members of Congress under its control – have move in lockstep to block science-based lawmaking.”
The GAO report is part of a multi-year series of findings that the Bush administration has often appointed poorly qualified people to head science-based agencies and has systematically manipulated science to comply with ideology.
For example, in banning federal funding for research on new stem cell lines, President Bush stated that “more than 60 genetically diverse" lines were available for potential research. Soon thereafter, then-HHS Secretary Tommy Thompson acknowledged that the correct number was 24 to 25. Still later, National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Dr. Elias Zerhouni told Congress that only 11 stem cell lines were widely available to researchers.
Global Warming reports by the Environmental Protection Agency on the risks of climate change have also been suppressed. The White House added so many hedges to the climate change section of the EPA's report card on the environment that the then-administrator Christie Todd Whitman deleted the section rather than publish one she felt was scientifically inaccurate.
Defense Department officials presented misleading information on whether a functional Missile Defense System could be quickly deployed. A senior Pentagon official told a Senate panel that by the end of 2004, the system would be 90% effective in intercepting missiles from the Korean peninsula. But a year earlier, in April 2003, the GAO found the President’s plan unworkable and even dangerous. The Pentagon’s claim of 90% effectiveness “is not supported by any publicly available evidence, and it appears not to comport with the Pentagon’s own classified estimates,” the GAO reported.
Comments on Wetlands Policy from scientists at the Fish and Wildlife Service on the destructive impacts of proposed regulatory changes have been withheld. Scientists at the agency, which is part of the Interior Department, prepared an analysis showing that a new proposal from the Army Corps of Engineers would “encourage the destruction of stream channels and lead to increased loss of aquatic functions.” But the then-Interior Secretary failed to submit the scientists’ comments to the Corps. The Corps subsequently issued rules that weakened key wetland protections.
After social conservatives campaigned to require women to be “counseled” about an alleged risk of breast cancer from abortions, the National Cancer Institute revised its web site to suggest that studies of equal weight conflicted on the question, despite the fact that the scientific consensus is that no such link exists.
A report commissioned by Congressman Henry Waxman of California charged that the Bush Administration manipulated many of the government’s numerous Scientific Advisory Committees to advance its political and ideological agenda. Examples include appointing unqualified persons with industry ties, opposing qualified experts, and stacking advisory committees.
The Bush Administration contends that these examples are isolated coincidences.
Key appointments announced by president-elect Barack Obama suggest that science will soon make a major comeback in the U.S. Government.
The outgoing administration of President George W. Bush has been harshly criticized by many members of the American scientific community for allowing ideology to distort or eliminate findings on such critical subjects as reproductive health, stem cell research, climate change, and a host of other environmental issues.
But Obama’s choices indicate that a hundred-and-eighty degree turn is in the offing. The change can already be seen in the president-elect’s first choices for scientific posts.
These include Steven Chu, head of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Nobel laureate in physics, nominated to be energy secretary; John P. Holdren, a physicist and Harvard professor of environmental policy, who will serve as the president’s science adviser and as director of the White House Office of Science and Technology; Jane Lubchenco, a marine biologist from Oregon State University, who will lead the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), part of the U.S. Department of Commerce, which carries out much of the government’s research on global warming; Eric S. Lander, a professor of biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.), who helped lead the effort to sequence the human genome; Dr. Harold Varmus, a Nobel Prize-winning cancer researcher, former director of the National Institutes of Health, and president of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York; Lisa Jackson, tapped to be administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), who is a former commissioner of the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection and who played a major role in implementing the state's program to stabilize greenhouse gas emissions at 1990 levels by 2020 and reduce emissions to 80 percent below 2006 levels by 2050; and Nancy Sutley, formerly deputy secretary for policy and intergovernmental relations with the California Environmental Protection Agency, to chair the White House Council on Environmental Quality.
Dr. Varmus will also co-chair the President’s Council of Advisers on Science and Technology along with Dr. Holdren.
Numerous other appointments are yet to come for science-based agencies including the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and the U.S. Public Health Service.
In a radio address in which he announced the appointments last week, Obama said, “It’s time we once again put science at the top of our agenda and worked to restore America’s place as the world leader in science and technology.”
“Whether it’s the science to slow global warming; the technology to protect our troops and confront bioterror and weapons of mass destruction; the research to find life-saving cures; or the innovations to remake our industries and create 21st century jobs — today more than ever, science holds the key to our survival as a planet and our security and prosperity as a nation,” Obama said.
Most of the American scientific community has been at odds with the Bush Administration since it won the White House in 2000. In its 2008 statement, one of the most prominent of scientific organizations, the Union of Concerned Scientists, demanded that the U.S. government return to “high standards of scientific integrity in forming and implementing its policies. Breaches of this principle have damaged the public good and the international leadership of the United States.”
“To meet its obligation to serve the public interest, the government must have reliable scientific work and advice at its disposal, and provide the public with reliable scientific information. This requires the government to provide federal scientists with the resources and the professional environment necessary to carry out their missions effectively and honestly,” the organization said.
Among the most controversial scientific issues to confront the Bush Administration is its promotion of abstinence-until-marriage education programs. These programs receive about $158 million annually from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
But an investigation covering ten states by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that these programs are not reviewed for scientific accuracy before they are granted funding. The report found that only half reviewed the programs for scientifically accurate data on contraception, sexually transmitted infections and other information. It concluded that most state and federal efforts to assess the effectiveness of abstinence-until-marriage education programs "do not meet the minimum scientific standards" that experts say are necessary to be scientifically valid.
Commenting on that report, Dr. Michael Stebbins, Director of Biology for the Federation of American Scientists, told us, “Time after time, ideology has trumped science in a very ugly way during the Bush Administration. It is no surprise that the GAO finds major shortcomings in the abstinence only approach of the government. There are very real questions about whether this approach works. The evidence so far is that it does not, and this has an effect on, for example, whether we are fighting the spread of HIV-AIDS in the most effective way. But the White House – and members of Congress under its control – have move in lockstep to block science-based lawmaking.”
The GAO report is part of a multi-year series of findings that the Bush administration has often appointed poorly qualified people to head science-based agencies and has systematically manipulated science to comply with ideology.
For example, in banning federal funding for research on new stem cell lines, President Bush stated that “more than 60 genetically diverse" lines were available for potential research. Soon thereafter, then-HHS Secretary Tommy Thompson acknowledged that the correct number was 24 to 25. Still later, National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Dr. Elias Zerhouni told Congress that only 11 stem cell lines were widely available to researchers.
Global Warming reports by the Environmental Protection Agency on the risks of climate change have also been suppressed. The White House added so many hedges to the climate change section of the EPA's report card on the environment that the then-administrator Christie Todd Whitman deleted the section rather than publish one she felt was scientifically inaccurate.
Defense Department officials presented misleading information on whether a functional Missile Defense System could be quickly deployed. A senior Pentagon official told a Senate panel that by the end of 2004, the system would be 90% effective in intercepting missiles from the Korean peninsula. But a year earlier, in April 2003, the GAO found the President’s plan unworkable and even dangerous. The Pentagon’s claim of 90% effectiveness “is not supported by any publicly available evidence, and it appears not to comport with the Pentagon’s own classified estimates,” the GAO reported.
Comments on Wetlands Policy from scientists at the Fish and Wildlife Service on the destructive impacts of proposed regulatory changes have been withheld. Scientists at the agency, which is part of the Interior Department, prepared an analysis showing that a new proposal from the Army Corps of Engineers would “encourage the destruction of stream channels and lead to increased loss of aquatic functions.” But the then-Interior Secretary failed to submit the scientists’ comments to the Corps. The Corps subsequently issued rules that weakened key wetland protections.
After social conservatives campaigned to require women to be “counseled” about an alleged risk of breast cancer from abortions, the National Cancer Institute revised its web site to suggest that studies of equal weight conflicted on the question, despite the fact that the scientific consensus is that no such link exists.
A report commissioned by Congressman Henry Waxman of California charged that the Bush Administration manipulated many of the government’s numerous Scientific Advisory Committees to advance its political and ideological agenda. Examples include appointing unqualified persons with industry ties, opposing qualified experts, and stacking advisory committees.
The Bush Administration contends that these examples are isolated coincidences.
Saturday, December 20, 2008
RICK WARREN: WHAT WAS OBAMA THINKING?
By William Fisher
Barack Obama’s choice of Pastor Rick Warren to deliver the inauguration invocation was either the most cynical or the most naïve move the president-elect has yet made.
To begin with, this strikes me as a strange move for a careful guy like Obama to make. He didn’t have to make it. If he felt his swearing-in had to have some religious flavor to it, he could have chosen from a field of hundreds of respected clergyman. Like, say, Jim Wallis, or any number of African-American preachers who aren’t Rev. Wright.
So why this choice?
Here’s what the cynics would tell you, as posited by Hillary Rosen in Huffington Post:
“There is a new political reality for LGBT people to deal with and how it works will be a measure of the sophistication and capability of the community. It was never a community that represented more than 6 or 7% of the vote in most campaigns, and it seems the biggest numbers are achieved in districts that are already reliably Democratic. Raising and giving political money always helped the community to play a larger role at the table than its numbers would seemingly offer and yet in this new era of online fundraising, constituent fundraising has diminishing importance. So we saw lots of mollifying and calculating when it came to new Obama Administration appointees for other constituencies but to date not much more than a little handwringing when it came to LGBT appointees”
So the LGBT constituency is not all that important to Obama. It can be thrown under the bus and “change we can believe in” will survive. Where else does this group have to go?
Then there’s the Obama camp’s Cumbaya approach. We may each have fiercely different opinions about issues but we can all come together as Americans. We can, as they say, dialogue.
Now, I’m all for dialogue. It helps us understand where the other fellow stands, and how he/she feels and why.
But then what? Do I change my mind? Does the other fellow? Sometimes, on issues that are highly technical, or those we consider clearly peripheral, maybe. But not about any viewpoint or conviction we consider fundamental to who we are. If I meet a rabid racist who does a great job of explaining to me how he is just a product of his racist parents, I may understand how he got where he is, but would that persuade me to become a racist? Never. There’s a difference between sociology and conviction.
At that level, dialogue is not only irrelevant; it can be damaging. The struggle for civility and understanding can take political correctness to a whole new low. It can have the effect of homogenizing us.
Wouldn’t it be more honest if we just recognized that, on some issues, “getting to yes” just won’t work?
The Rick Warren issue is one of these. He may be doing lots of good works in areas like HIV/AIDS, alleviating poverty, advocating for action on climate change, et cetera. And we should be grateful to him for that. But similar work is being done by hundreds of other bona fide clergymen (and women) who just don’t happen to preach at megachurches.
What Rev. Rick chooses to say on January 20th is irrelevant. It’s all the other stuff we already know about – but won’t hear a peep about on inauguration day – that we’ll remember. It’s Warren’s views on issues like same-sex marriage and a woman’s right to choose that frame this mega-preacher in many minds. To millions who don’t agree with him, he’s little more than Jerry Falwell in a Hawaiian shirt.
Nothing he says is going to change that. And nothing we say is going to change him. Evangelicals will be happy; LBGT-ers will feel the stick in their eye.
Is this important? As Hillary Rosen points out, the LBGT community not an existential constituency for our new president. Moreover, inauguration preachers don’t make public policy; what they say on January 20th is usually forgotten by January 21st, if not sooner.
But symbolism is important, and it’s especially important for this particular inauguration. Regardless of how he may try to nuance it, Rick Warren is part of the constituency that was courted and won over by George W. Bush. And it was the enthusiastic support of this constituency that played such a major role in W’s journey to the White House. We can dialogue with them from now till The Rapture, but many of their ideas will still be anathema to most of those who elected Barack Obama.
So this is not change we can believe in. In fact, it’s not change at all. It’s more of the same. And that’s not what we voted for.
Obama’s choice of Rick Warren is a totally avoidable mistake of considerable proportion. The clergyman or woman who delivers the invocation next month could have been – should have been – a symbol of the values Obama believes in most deeply – the ones that won our support.
Rick Warrren is not that person.
Barack Obama’s choice of Pastor Rick Warren to deliver the inauguration invocation was either the most cynical or the most naïve move the president-elect has yet made.
To begin with, this strikes me as a strange move for a careful guy like Obama to make. He didn’t have to make it. If he felt his swearing-in had to have some religious flavor to it, he could have chosen from a field of hundreds of respected clergyman. Like, say, Jim Wallis, or any number of African-American preachers who aren’t Rev. Wright.
So why this choice?
Here’s what the cynics would tell you, as posited by Hillary Rosen in Huffington Post:
“There is a new political reality for LGBT people to deal with and how it works will be a measure of the sophistication and capability of the community. It was never a community that represented more than 6 or 7% of the vote in most campaigns, and it seems the biggest numbers are achieved in districts that are already reliably Democratic. Raising and giving political money always helped the community to play a larger role at the table than its numbers would seemingly offer and yet in this new era of online fundraising, constituent fundraising has diminishing importance. So we saw lots of mollifying and calculating when it came to new Obama Administration appointees for other constituencies but to date not much more than a little handwringing when it came to LGBT appointees”
So the LGBT constituency is not all that important to Obama. It can be thrown under the bus and “change we can believe in” will survive. Where else does this group have to go?
Then there’s the Obama camp’s Cumbaya approach. We may each have fiercely different opinions about issues but we can all come together as Americans. We can, as they say, dialogue.
Now, I’m all for dialogue. It helps us understand where the other fellow stands, and how he/she feels and why.
But then what? Do I change my mind? Does the other fellow? Sometimes, on issues that are highly technical, or those we consider clearly peripheral, maybe. But not about any viewpoint or conviction we consider fundamental to who we are. If I meet a rabid racist who does a great job of explaining to me how he is just a product of his racist parents, I may understand how he got where he is, but would that persuade me to become a racist? Never. There’s a difference between sociology and conviction.
At that level, dialogue is not only irrelevant; it can be damaging. The struggle for civility and understanding can take political correctness to a whole new low. It can have the effect of homogenizing us.
Wouldn’t it be more honest if we just recognized that, on some issues, “getting to yes” just won’t work?
The Rick Warren issue is one of these. He may be doing lots of good works in areas like HIV/AIDS, alleviating poverty, advocating for action on climate change, et cetera. And we should be grateful to him for that. But similar work is being done by hundreds of other bona fide clergymen (and women) who just don’t happen to preach at megachurches.
What Rev. Rick chooses to say on January 20th is irrelevant. It’s all the other stuff we already know about – but won’t hear a peep about on inauguration day – that we’ll remember. It’s Warren’s views on issues like same-sex marriage and a woman’s right to choose that frame this mega-preacher in many minds. To millions who don’t agree with him, he’s little more than Jerry Falwell in a Hawaiian shirt.
Nothing he says is going to change that. And nothing we say is going to change him. Evangelicals will be happy; LBGT-ers will feel the stick in their eye.
Is this important? As Hillary Rosen points out, the LBGT community not an existential constituency for our new president. Moreover, inauguration preachers don’t make public policy; what they say on January 20th is usually forgotten by January 21st, if not sooner.
But symbolism is important, and it’s especially important for this particular inauguration. Regardless of how he may try to nuance it, Rick Warren is part of the constituency that was courted and won over by George W. Bush. And it was the enthusiastic support of this constituency that played such a major role in W’s journey to the White House. We can dialogue with them from now till The Rapture, but many of their ideas will still be anathema to most of those who elected Barack Obama.
So this is not change we can believe in. In fact, it’s not change at all. It’s more of the same. And that’s not what we voted for.
Obama’s choice of Rick Warren is a totally avoidable mistake of considerable proportion. The clergyman or woman who delivers the invocation next month could have been – should have been – a symbol of the values Obama believes in most deeply – the ones that won our support.
Rick Warrren is not that person.
Friday, December 19, 2008
THAT PESKY TORTURE THING -- STILL
By William Fisher
On the heels of a bipartisan Congressional report blaming high-level officials of the Bush Administration for employing harsh interrogation techniques on detainees captured in the “global war on terror,” many of the world’s most respected civil libertarians called for the establishment of an independent commission to investigate the alleged abuses, and one of them, Amnesty International, released a detailed plan to close the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Amnesty’s four-part plan sets out recommendations for actions the incoming administration of President-elect Barack Obama should take during the current transition period, others immediately upon taking office, and still others to be taken during the first 100 days and in the first eighteen months of the new government.
Among the most problematic questions surrounding the issue is which U.S. courts will have jurisdiction to try alleged terrorists. The military tribunals set up by the Bush Administration are widely considered to be unfair and ineffective. Another thorny issue is where to send prisoners the U.S. government admits were mistakenly taken into custody and those it no longer considers to be national security threats.
Among the latter is a group of Chinese Muslims who have been held at Guantanamo for seven years. A Federal judge recently ordered them immediately released into the U.S. after the government said it could not return them to China for fear they would be tortured and could find no other country willing to accept them. The government is currently appealing that court decision.
Amnesty’s recommendations came as it was revealed that Bush Administration Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates – who has been nominated by President-elect Obama to remain in office – has also ordered the Pentagon to begin drawing up a plan to close the notorious Caribbean prison. During his presidential campaign, Obama said repeatedly that closing Guantanamo Bay would be a top priority of his administration.
In an interview with the television program “60 Minutes” last month, Obama declared “that America doesn’t torture and I’m going to make sure we don’t torture. Those are part and parcel an effort to regain America’s moral stature in the world.”
The Congressional report, issued last week by the Senate Armed Services Committee, concluded that former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other high-ranking Bush administration officials were responsible for the harsh interrogations against captured terrorist suspects that took place at Guantanamo Bay and at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
Rumsfeld had attributed such abuses to “a few bad apples” -- lower-level members of the military acting on their own. But the Senate report charged that Rumsfeld bears principal
responsibility for the prisoner abuses. Most civil libertarians regard these abuses as torture.
“Attempts by senior officials to pass the buck to low ranking soldiers while avoiding any responsibility for abuses are unconscionable,” committee chairman Sen. Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan, said in a statement. The committee’s most senior Republican member is this year’s candidate for the presidency, Sen. John McCain of Arizona, who concurred in the committee’s findings.
The committee concluded that the prisoner abuses at Abu Ghraib were “not simply the result of a few soldiers acting on their own.” Most of those low-ranking soldiers were found guilty by military courts and are currently serving prison sentences.
Rumsfeld’s “authorization of aggressive interrogation techniques and subsequent interrogation policies and plans approved by senior military and civilian officials conveyed the message that physical pressures and degradation were appropriate treatment for detainees in U.S. military custody," the report said. "What followed was an erosion in standards dictating that detainees be treated humanely.”
“The message from top officials was clear; it was acceptable to use degrading and abusive techniques against detainees,” Levin said.
The report added that Rumsfeld’s authorization of aggressive interrogation techniques for use at Guantanamo Bay was a direct cause of detainee abuse there.”
Following release of the Senate report, Amnesty International joined many other human rights advocates in recommending a thorough investigation of prisoner abuses by a 9/11-type independent commission. Sentiment for such a body appeared to be growing, partly because many in Congress fear that an investigation by Congress could become mired in partisan politics and because some members appear reluctant to risk their political careers by becoming involved in such a divisive and controversial issue.
Amnesty’s recommendations provide a timeline and conditions necessary to best attain truth and accountability.
“Closing Guantanamo, as President-elect Obama has pledged, is just the first step. For real change, the incoming administration and Congress must work together to fully expose the Bush administration policies as a step toward ensuring that the same abuses committed in the name of national security are not repeated,” said Larry Cox, executive director of Amnesty International USA. “Ending these shameful practices is not enough. To demonstrate that the United States is genuinely committed to human rights and to the rule of law, the new administration and Congress must end the secrecy that has obscured human rights abuses from public scrutiny and shielded those responsible from accountability. It is beyond time to finally shut down Guantanamo Bay and push the door open to truth.”
The Amnesty plan urged that, in the transition period and before taking the oath of office, President-elect Obama and his team should examine the options for establishing a comprehensive, independent commission to investigate U.S. detention policies and practices in the war on terror and. consider either establishing a task force in the Attorney General’s office or appointing an independent prosecutor to take action on pressing individual cases. These tasks should be completed during Obama’s first 100 days in office, Amnesty says.
The commission’s investigation should include activities conducted by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and other agencies, as well as the secret transfer of detainees – known as rendition -- between the United States and other countries. It should have access to classified material, subpoena power to compel the appearance of witnesses, and a mandate to make recommendations as to criminal investigations.
The Amnesty plan calls on the president to present a progress report to the nation within 18 months of taking office, and to provide a full report of the commission’s findings and recommendations by 2010.
In introducing its plan, Amnesty president Larry Cox said, “As the nation moves in a new direction, we must not forget the shameful actions of the past. Instead to fully learn from them we must know the extent of the illegality and vow to never repeat mistakes. President-elect Obama has a mandate from the American people for change and that begins with restoring the United States’ reputation as a country guided by the rule of law and human rights.”
The first installment of the Armed Services Committee report was issued last June, but the then-Republican majority on the committee effectively blocked release of the report’s concluding section. But even the first part of the report described a pattern of humiliation, abuse and even torture inflicted on detainees, and charged that these practices were a deliberate policy of the Bush administration – debated by mid-level lawyers at the CIA and the Pentagon, given legal cover at the Justice Department and approved at the highest levels of government.
“The fact is that senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees," the Senate report said.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice admitted for the first time in September that she led high-level discussions beginning in 2002 with other senior Bush administration officials about subjecting suspected al-Qaeda terrorists detained at military prisons to the harsh interrogation technique known as waterboarding, according to documents released by Levin.
"Those efforts damaged our ability to collect accurate intelligence that could save lives, strengthened the hand of our enemies, and compromised our moral authority,” the Senate report said.
The panel’s investigation also suggested that the harsh interrogations methods used against detainees preceded a Department of Justice legal memorandum issued on Aug. 1, 2002 authorizing the CIA to use long outlawed tactics, such as the simulated drowning technique known as waterboarding, against prisoners in apparent violation of the Geneva Conventions.
The committee’s report said an action memorandum signed by President George W. Bush on Feb. 7, 2002 opened the door to “considering aggressive techniques” by signing a memorandum stating that the Third Geneva Convention did not apply to the conflict with al Qaeda and concluding that Taliban detainees were not entitled to prisoner of war status or the legal protections afforded by the Third Geneva Convention,” the report said.
Last April, President George W. Bush told an ABC News reporter that he had approved of meetings of a National Security Council's Principals Committee, whose advisers included Vice President Dick Cheney, then National Security Adviser Rice, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, former CIA Director George Tenet and former Attorney General John Ashcroft, where these officials discussed specific interrogation techniques the CIA could use against detainees.
Civil libertarians are pressing President-elect Obama to make good on his pledge to close Guantanamo Bay and investigate the prisoner abuses that occurred there, at Abu Ghraib and at other locations, including the CIA’s “black sites” – secret prisons believed to have been located in Eastern Europe and elsewhere.
One such advocacy organization, Human Rights First (HRF), prepared a plan to close Guantanamo some months ago. Many other groups, such as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and Human Rights Watch have long advocated the closing of Guantanamo.
Along with Amnesty, these organizations have urged President-elect Obama to implement “an unqualified return to America’s established system of justice for detaining and prosecuting suspects” when he fulfills his pledge to shut down the Guantánamo Bay prison camp and military commissions.”
In a letter delivered to the presidential transition team, the organizations state that they “categorically oppose the creation of any other ad-hoc illegal detention system or ‘third way’ that permits the executive branch to suspend due process and hold suspected terrorists without charge or trial, essentially moving Guantánamo on-shore.”
Prominent Constitutional scholars have voiced similar views. An example is Peter Shane, a law professor at Ohio State University law school. He told IPS, “I think it is critical to the health of American democracy that the historical record of 2001-2009 be set forth accurately and comprehensively with regard to the use and abuse of executive power by the Bush Administration. A congressionally authorized investigation, whether conducted within Congress or by an independent commission with subpoena power and adequate investigative resources is essential.”
Retired military leaders have been among those leading efforts to close controversial prisons and conduct detailed investigations of prisoner abuses. Among them is Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, who led the first investigation of abuses at Abu Ghraib. Taguba said “there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes. The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account.”
On the heels of a bipartisan Congressional report blaming high-level officials of the Bush Administration for employing harsh interrogation techniques on detainees captured in the “global war on terror,” many of the world’s most respected civil libertarians called for the establishment of an independent commission to investigate the alleged abuses, and one of them, Amnesty International, released a detailed plan to close the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Amnesty’s four-part plan sets out recommendations for actions the incoming administration of President-elect Barack Obama should take during the current transition period, others immediately upon taking office, and still others to be taken during the first 100 days and in the first eighteen months of the new government.
Among the most problematic questions surrounding the issue is which U.S. courts will have jurisdiction to try alleged terrorists. The military tribunals set up by the Bush Administration are widely considered to be unfair and ineffective. Another thorny issue is where to send prisoners the U.S. government admits were mistakenly taken into custody and those it no longer considers to be national security threats.
Among the latter is a group of Chinese Muslims who have been held at Guantanamo for seven years. A Federal judge recently ordered them immediately released into the U.S. after the government said it could not return them to China for fear they would be tortured and could find no other country willing to accept them. The government is currently appealing that court decision.
Amnesty’s recommendations came as it was revealed that Bush Administration Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates – who has been nominated by President-elect Obama to remain in office – has also ordered the Pentagon to begin drawing up a plan to close the notorious Caribbean prison. During his presidential campaign, Obama said repeatedly that closing Guantanamo Bay would be a top priority of his administration.
In an interview with the television program “60 Minutes” last month, Obama declared “that America doesn’t torture and I’m going to make sure we don’t torture. Those are part and parcel an effort to regain America’s moral stature in the world.”
The Congressional report, issued last week by the Senate Armed Services Committee, concluded that former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other high-ranking Bush administration officials were responsible for the harsh interrogations against captured terrorist suspects that took place at Guantanamo Bay and at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
Rumsfeld had attributed such abuses to “a few bad apples” -- lower-level members of the military acting on their own. But the Senate report charged that Rumsfeld bears principal
responsibility for the prisoner abuses. Most civil libertarians regard these abuses as torture.
“Attempts by senior officials to pass the buck to low ranking soldiers while avoiding any responsibility for abuses are unconscionable,” committee chairman Sen. Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan, said in a statement. The committee’s most senior Republican member is this year’s candidate for the presidency, Sen. John McCain of Arizona, who concurred in the committee’s findings.
The committee concluded that the prisoner abuses at Abu Ghraib were “not simply the result of a few soldiers acting on their own.” Most of those low-ranking soldiers were found guilty by military courts and are currently serving prison sentences.
Rumsfeld’s “authorization of aggressive interrogation techniques and subsequent interrogation policies and plans approved by senior military and civilian officials conveyed the message that physical pressures and degradation were appropriate treatment for detainees in U.S. military custody," the report said. "What followed was an erosion in standards dictating that detainees be treated humanely.”
“The message from top officials was clear; it was acceptable to use degrading and abusive techniques against detainees,” Levin said.
The report added that Rumsfeld’s authorization of aggressive interrogation techniques for use at Guantanamo Bay was a direct cause of detainee abuse there.”
Following release of the Senate report, Amnesty International joined many other human rights advocates in recommending a thorough investigation of prisoner abuses by a 9/11-type independent commission. Sentiment for such a body appeared to be growing, partly because many in Congress fear that an investigation by Congress could become mired in partisan politics and because some members appear reluctant to risk their political careers by becoming involved in such a divisive and controversial issue.
Amnesty’s recommendations provide a timeline and conditions necessary to best attain truth and accountability.
“Closing Guantanamo, as President-elect Obama has pledged, is just the first step. For real change, the incoming administration and Congress must work together to fully expose the Bush administration policies as a step toward ensuring that the same abuses committed in the name of national security are not repeated,” said Larry Cox, executive director of Amnesty International USA. “Ending these shameful practices is not enough. To demonstrate that the United States is genuinely committed to human rights and to the rule of law, the new administration and Congress must end the secrecy that has obscured human rights abuses from public scrutiny and shielded those responsible from accountability. It is beyond time to finally shut down Guantanamo Bay and push the door open to truth.”
The Amnesty plan urged that, in the transition period and before taking the oath of office, President-elect Obama and his team should examine the options for establishing a comprehensive, independent commission to investigate U.S. detention policies and practices in the war on terror and. consider either establishing a task force in the Attorney General’s office or appointing an independent prosecutor to take action on pressing individual cases. These tasks should be completed during Obama’s first 100 days in office, Amnesty says.
The commission’s investigation should include activities conducted by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and other agencies, as well as the secret transfer of detainees – known as rendition -- between the United States and other countries. It should have access to classified material, subpoena power to compel the appearance of witnesses, and a mandate to make recommendations as to criminal investigations.
The Amnesty plan calls on the president to present a progress report to the nation within 18 months of taking office, and to provide a full report of the commission’s findings and recommendations by 2010.
In introducing its plan, Amnesty president Larry Cox said, “As the nation moves in a new direction, we must not forget the shameful actions of the past. Instead to fully learn from them we must know the extent of the illegality and vow to never repeat mistakes. President-elect Obama has a mandate from the American people for change and that begins with restoring the United States’ reputation as a country guided by the rule of law and human rights.”
The first installment of the Armed Services Committee report was issued last June, but the then-Republican majority on the committee effectively blocked release of the report’s concluding section. But even the first part of the report described a pattern of humiliation, abuse and even torture inflicted on detainees, and charged that these practices were a deliberate policy of the Bush administration – debated by mid-level lawyers at the CIA and the Pentagon, given legal cover at the Justice Department and approved at the highest levels of government.
“The fact is that senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees," the Senate report said.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice admitted for the first time in September that she led high-level discussions beginning in 2002 with other senior Bush administration officials about subjecting suspected al-Qaeda terrorists detained at military prisons to the harsh interrogation technique known as waterboarding, according to documents released by Levin.
"Those efforts damaged our ability to collect accurate intelligence that could save lives, strengthened the hand of our enemies, and compromised our moral authority,” the Senate report said.
The panel’s investigation also suggested that the harsh interrogations methods used against detainees preceded a Department of Justice legal memorandum issued on Aug. 1, 2002 authorizing the CIA to use long outlawed tactics, such as the simulated drowning technique known as waterboarding, against prisoners in apparent violation of the Geneva Conventions.
The committee’s report said an action memorandum signed by President George W. Bush on Feb. 7, 2002 opened the door to “considering aggressive techniques” by signing a memorandum stating that the Third Geneva Convention did not apply to the conflict with al Qaeda and concluding that Taliban detainees were not entitled to prisoner of war status or the legal protections afforded by the Third Geneva Convention,” the report said.
Last April, President George W. Bush told an ABC News reporter that he had approved of meetings of a National Security Council's Principals Committee, whose advisers included Vice President Dick Cheney, then National Security Adviser Rice, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, former CIA Director George Tenet and former Attorney General John Ashcroft, where these officials discussed specific interrogation techniques the CIA could use against detainees.
Civil libertarians are pressing President-elect Obama to make good on his pledge to close Guantanamo Bay and investigate the prisoner abuses that occurred there, at Abu Ghraib and at other locations, including the CIA’s “black sites” – secret prisons believed to have been located in Eastern Europe and elsewhere.
One such advocacy organization, Human Rights First (HRF), prepared a plan to close Guantanamo some months ago. Many other groups, such as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and Human Rights Watch have long advocated the closing of Guantanamo.
Along with Amnesty, these organizations have urged President-elect Obama to implement “an unqualified return to America’s established system of justice for detaining and prosecuting suspects” when he fulfills his pledge to shut down the Guantánamo Bay prison camp and military commissions.”
In a letter delivered to the presidential transition team, the organizations state that they “categorically oppose the creation of any other ad-hoc illegal detention system or ‘third way’ that permits the executive branch to suspend due process and hold suspected terrorists without charge or trial, essentially moving Guantánamo on-shore.”
Prominent Constitutional scholars have voiced similar views. An example is Peter Shane, a law professor at Ohio State University law school. He told IPS, “I think it is critical to the health of American democracy that the historical record of 2001-2009 be set forth accurately and comprehensively with regard to the use and abuse of executive power by the Bush Administration. A congressionally authorized investigation, whether conducted within Congress or by an independent commission with subpoena power and adequate investigative resources is essential.”
Retired military leaders have been among those leading efforts to close controversial prisons and conduct detailed investigations of prisoner abuses. Among them is Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, who led the first investigation of abuses at Abu Ghraib. Taguba said “there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes. The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account.”
Monday, December 08, 2008
Hope For Homeowners? Not So Much.
By William Fisher
Amid the Bush Administration’s so-far faltering response to the current financial meltdown, the cause of this catastrophe has been all but forgotten.
In case you’ve lost it in the clouds of smoke and the avalanche of opaque financial jargon emanating from President Bush’s Treasury Department, the root cause was mortgages. Home loans marketed by deception by unregulated cowboy lenders. Loans to people who were encouraged not to understand what they were getting into. Bait-and-switch loans with low introductory interest rates set to balloon into the ionosphere a couple of years later. Loans many should never have had received and predictably were unable to repay.
But not to worry. Didn’t we all know that the credit cup would always runneth over and that the housing market could never go down, only up? Well, that’s the way we behaved and that underlying assumption finally resulted in what we now call the housing bubble.
The busted one!
Most of these toxic mortgage loans were not made by banks. They came from mortgage lenders and mortgage brokers. These entities were not regulated by any government oversight body. They were operating in the wild wild West of the housing industry. Many didn’t even require proof of the borrower’s income; in some cases, the sales pitch included lending you the down payment.
Once these guys sold a bunch of mortgages, they sold them to investors, including the big commercial and investment banks all over the world, which bundled them up and sold them again. It was the unabated greed of these big financial institutions and their advisors that ultimately made them victims as well as perpetrators of the disaster. When their investments turned out to be worthless – or of unknown value – they started worrying about the accuracy of their balance sheets, stopped lending money to anyone, and turned to the government for help.
The government obliged with the most massive bailouts in U.S. history. You still with me? The bankers were a big part of the gang that caused the housing bubble in the first place, yet were the first ones to be rescued with our tax dollars. Seven-hundred-billion of them.
All but forgotten in the Treasury Department’s frenzy to save Wall Street were those millions of homeowners who couldn’t make their mortgage payments and whose homes were being seized in foreclosure at a pace not seen since the Great Depression of 1929.
Treasury’s rationale for pouring its billions into the nation’s largest banks was to end the acute constipation in the credit markets. That bit of government largesse cost $350 billion. It came with no strings attached -- and no results either, unless you count using our tax dollars to acquire other banks and pay out dividends to shareholders. Meantime, these banks are still not lending – even to one another. Many are said to be “hoarding” money while waiting for another shoe to drop, and there is no indication that the flow of credit is likely to restart any time soon.
But there is at least one person who didn’t forget where this mess started. And, for her trouble, she is being quietly dissed by the Bush Administration.
She is Sheila Bair and her job is Chair of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. The FDIC, started by Franklin Roosevelt as one of his recovery weapons after massive bank failures in the Great Depression, is the agency that provides Federal guarantees to depositors of banks that fail. When Washington woke up facing a protracted recession or worse, Bair’s outfit quickly increased that insurance from $100,000 to $250,000 for each bank account. That’s one of the very few positive and successful moves yet made.
Ironically, Sheila Bair was appointed by George W. Bush. The term of this self-described moderate Republican runs through 2011, meaning that W. can’t fire her – though it appears he would if he could. She is currently far more popular with Democrats than she is with her own party’s leaders. Or with Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson.
The reason: Bair has focused like a laser not on propping up banks but on rescuing homeowners. Her objective is to help stem the tsunami of foreclosures now putting people out of their homes and decimating entire neighborhoods as house values continue to drop like stones.
Bair has put forward a proposal to use $24 billion of the government bailout funds to help 1.5 million borrowers avoid foreclosure by guaranteeing modified home loans through the end of next year. This move is being opposed by Paulson and the Bush administration. So now Bair finds herself locked in a so far mild-mannered but potentially ugly duel.
There are two key elements to the Bair proposal.
First, delinquent borrowers who are two months or more late can arrange to have their monthly payments reduced to 31 per cent of their gross monthly income. To achieve that result, mortgage rates could be set as low as 3 per cent for five years. The rate would increase annually by one percentage point until it reached the prevailing market rate. Loan terms could be extended for as long as 40 years.
Second, as an incentive to servicers and investors to get with the program, the government would share up to 50 per cent of losses in the case of a default by a borrower who had been helped by the program. The FDIC would also pay servicers – the people who process mortgages -- $1,000 for each loan they re-worked.
Bair says her plan would initially help some 2.2 million borrowers to get new loans. The FDIC estimates that, after making allowances for re-defaults, 1.5 million borrowers would ultimately be able to keep their homes.
The plan would cost an estimated $24.4 billion, which Bair has proposed to fund with part of the $700 billion bailout fund approved by Congress.
Observers say there is already evidence that the Bair plan works. At IndyMac, a large California federal savings bank that failed last July, a total of 65,000 borrowers, or 10% of IndyMac's loan portfolio, were delinquent when the government took over. The FDIC has already modified 5,000 of these troubled mortgages, and incomes are currently being verified for another 20,000 delinquent borrowers.
Payments on the modified IndyMac loans have been lowered an average of $380 a month, Bair told Congress. In 70 per cent of these cases, affordable payments were achieved through interest rate modifications.
Bair says she is “hopeful that the current or future administration, or perhaps some combination of both" will be able to adopt her plan in hopes of preventing additional foreclosure distress.
President-elect Obama said on Meet the Press last weekend that he would address the foreclosure issue promptly if the Bush Administration failed to act by the date of his inauguration, January 20.
The FDIC has briefed the Obama transition team, but Bair says "We continue to have discussions" with the Treasury Department on the issue. However, her frustration has been barely hidden during various recent public appearances.
Bair’s is not the only plan to address foreclosures. Another is Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd's “Hope for Homeowners” plan, part of the Housing and Economic Recovery Act of 2008. Under that plan, troubled borrowers would be able to refinance into an FHA-insured, fixed-rate loan at 90 per cent of newly appraised home values, or what the borrower can comfortably afford. The government would be compensated with three per cent of the new loan amount for taking on the added risk and borrowers would pay annual insurance premiums of up to one per cent of the loan. Lenders would have to waive all prepayment penalties and late fees.
The Dodd plan, similar to one introduced in the House of Representatives by Rep. Barney Frank of Massachusetts, has generally been rated favorably by consumer protection groups and by lawmakers on both left and right. The Dodd-Frank approach could operate effectively alongside the Bair plan.
Then there’s the “Hope Now” program -- an attempt to streamline and consolidate workout and mitigation procedures used by individual servicers. This initiative was launched last October by a private sector alliance of mortgage servicers, counselors, and investors. The alliance claims that its mortgage industry members prevented 225,000 foreclosures during last October alone, 13,000 more than the record the group says it set in September.
Hope Now claims it assisted approximately 1.7 million homeowners during the first ten months of this year and anticipates that the total by the end of the year will be 2.2 million, 45 per cent more than it says it helped during 2007.
However, considerable doubt has been expressed about the accuracy of these numbers and the overall effectiveness of the program. In a speech in San Francisco last week, the chairman of the Federal Reserve System, Ben Bernanke, characterized private sector initiatives such as Hope Now as “not very successful.”
According to the Mortgage Bankers Association, some 1.2 million homes were in foreclosure during the second quarter of 2008, and that number is expected to increase, with another two million families possibly losing their homes to foreclosure in the next two years. These foreclosures hurt not only the families who lose their homes, but the national economy as well by depressing home values and consumer spending.
Sen. Dodd insists that both the government and the mortgage servicers need to do more to help distressed homeowners. "All of these measures frankly have not produced anywhere near the results we hoped they would," says Dodd, adding it's "terribly regrettable" that the Paulson is not behind the Bair plan.
Consumer advocates as well as most of the nation’s largest banks have also endorsed the Bair plan. Her proposal “is just an absolute no-brainer," said Martin Eakes, head of the Center for Responsible Lending. "There's just no reason why we shouldn't get it done.…”
But without Hank Paulson’s blessing, it’s likely that it will be an Obama Administration that does the doing.
Amid the Bush Administration’s so-far faltering response to the current financial meltdown, the cause of this catastrophe has been all but forgotten.
In case you’ve lost it in the clouds of smoke and the avalanche of opaque financial jargon emanating from President Bush’s Treasury Department, the root cause was mortgages. Home loans marketed by deception by unregulated cowboy lenders. Loans to people who were encouraged not to understand what they were getting into. Bait-and-switch loans with low introductory interest rates set to balloon into the ionosphere a couple of years later. Loans many should never have had received and predictably were unable to repay.
But not to worry. Didn’t we all know that the credit cup would always runneth over and that the housing market could never go down, only up? Well, that’s the way we behaved and that underlying assumption finally resulted in what we now call the housing bubble.
The busted one!
Most of these toxic mortgage loans were not made by banks. They came from mortgage lenders and mortgage brokers. These entities were not regulated by any government oversight body. They were operating in the wild wild West of the housing industry. Many didn’t even require proof of the borrower’s income; in some cases, the sales pitch included lending you the down payment.
Once these guys sold a bunch of mortgages, they sold them to investors, including the big commercial and investment banks all over the world, which bundled them up and sold them again. It was the unabated greed of these big financial institutions and their advisors that ultimately made them victims as well as perpetrators of the disaster. When their investments turned out to be worthless – or of unknown value – they started worrying about the accuracy of their balance sheets, stopped lending money to anyone, and turned to the government for help.
The government obliged with the most massive bailouts in U.S. history. You still with me? The bankers were a big part of the gang that caused the housing bubble in the first place, yet were the first ones to be rescued with our tax dollars. Seven-hundred-billion of them.
All but forgotten in the Treasury Department’s frenzy to save Wall Street were those millions of homeowners who couldn’t make their mortgage payments and whose homes were being seized in foreclosure at a pace not seen since the Great Depression of 1929.
Treasury’s rationale for pouring its billions into the nation’s largest banks was to end the acute constipation in the credit markets. That bit of government largesse cost $350 billion. It came with no strings attached -- and no results either, unless you count using our tax dollars to acquire other banks and pay out dividends to shareholders. Meantime, these banks are still not lending – even to one another. Many are said to be “hoarding” money while waiting for another shoe to drop, and there is no indication that the flow of credit is likely to restart any time soon.
But there is at least one person who didn’t forget where this mess started. And, for her trouble, she is being quietly dissed by the Bush Administration.
She is Sheila Bair and her job is Chair of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. The FDIC, started by Franklin Roosevelt as one of his recovery weapons after massive bank failures in the Great Depression, is the agency that provides Federal guarantees to depositors of banks that fail. When Washington woke up facing a protracted recession or worse, Bair’s outfit quickly increased that insurance from $100,000 to $250,000 for each bank account. That’s one of the very few positive and successful moves yet made.
Ironically, Sheila Bair was appointed by George W. Bush. The term of this self-described moderate Republican runs through 2011, meaning that W. can’t fire her – though it appears he would if he could. She is currently far more popular with Democrats than she is with her own party’s leaders. Or with Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson.
The reason: Bair has focused like a laser not on propping up banks but on rescuing homeowners. Her objective is to help stem the tsunami of foreclosures now putting people out of their homes and decimating entire neighborhoods as house values continue to drop like stones.
Bair has put forward a proposal to use $24 billion of the government bailout funds to help 1.5 million borrowers avoid foreclosure by guaranteeing modified home loans through the end of next year. This move is being opposed by Paulson and the Bush administration. So now Bair finds herself locked in a so far mild-mannered but potentially ugly duel.
There are two key elements to the Bair proposal.
First, delinquent borrowers who are two months or more late can arrange to have their monthly payments reduced to 31 per cent of their gross monthly income. To achieve that result, mortgage rates could be set as low as 3 per cent for five years. The rate would increase annually by one percentage point until it reached the prevailing market rate. Loan terms could be extended for as long as 40 years.
Second, as an incentive to servicers and investors to get with the program, the government would share up to 50 per cent of losses in the case of a default by a borrower who had been helped by the program. The FDIC would also pay servicers – the people who process mortgages -- $1,000 for each loan they re-worked.
Bair says her plan would initially help some 2.2 million borrowers to get new loans. The FDIC estimates that, after making allowances for re-defaults, 1.5 million borrowers would ultimately be able to keep their homes.
The plan would cost an estimated $24.4 billion, which Bair has proposed to fund with part of the $700 billion bailout fund approved by Congress.
Observers say there is already evidence that the Bair plan works. At IndyMac, a large California federal savings bank that failed last July, a total of 65,000 borrowers, or 10% of IndyMac's loan portfolio, were delinquent when the government took over. The FDIC has already modified 5,000 of these troubled mortgages, and incomes are currently being verified for another 20,000 delinquent borrowers.
Payments on the modified IndyMac loans have been lowered an average of $380 a month, Bair told Congress. In 70 per cent of these cases, affordable payments were achieved through interest rate modifications.
Bair says she is “hopeful that the current or future administration, or perhaps some combination of both" will be able to adopt her plan in hopes of preventing additional foreclosure distress.
President-elect Obama said on Meet the Press last weekend that he would address the foreclosure issue promptly if the Bush Administration failed to act by the date of his inauguration, January 20.
The FDIC has briefed the Obama transition team, but Bair says "We continue to have discussions" with the Treasury Department on the issue. However, her frustration has been barely hidden during various recent public appearances.
Bair’s is not the only plan to address foreclosures. Another is Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd's “Hope for Homeowners” plan, part of the Housing and Economic Recovery Act of 2008. Under that plan, troubled borrowers would be able to refinance into an FHA-insured, fixed-rate loan at 90 per cent of newly appraised home values, or what the borrower can comfortably afford. The government would be compensated with three per cent of the new loan amount for taking on the added risk and borrowers would pay annual insurance premiums of up to one per cent of the loan. Lenders would have to waive all prepayment penalties and late fees.
The Dodd plan, similar to one introduced in the House of Representatives by Rep. Barney Frank of Massachusetts, has generally been rated favorably by consumer protection groups and by lawmakers on both left and right. The Dodd-Frank approach could operate effectively alongside the Bair plan.
Then there’s the “Hope Now” program -- an attempt to streamline and consolidate workout and mitigation procedures used by individual servicers. This initiative was launched last October by a private sector alliance of mortgage servicers, counselors, and investors. The alliance claims that its mortgage industry members prevented 225,000 foreclosures during last October alone, 13,000 more than the record the group says it set in September.
Hope Now claims it assisted approximately 1.7 million homeowners during the first ten months of this year and anticipates that the total by the end of the year will be 2.2 million, 45 per cent more than it says it helped during 2007.
However, considerable doubt has been expressed about the accuracy of these numbers and the overall effectiveness of the program. In a speech in San Francisco last week, the chairman of the Federal Reserve System, Ben Bernanke, characterized private sector initiatives such as Hope Now as “not very successful.”
According to the Mortgage Bankers Association, some 1.2 million homes were in foreclosure during the second quarter of 2008, and that number is expected to increase, with another two million families possibly losing their homes to foreclosure in the next two years. These foreclosures hurt not only the families who lose their homes, but the national economy as well by depressing home values and consumer spending.
Sen. Dodd insists that both the government and the mortgage servicers need to do more to help distressed homeowners. "All of these measures frankly have not produced anywhere near the results we hoped they would," says Dodd, adding it's "terribly regrettable" that the Paulson is not behind the Bair plan.
Consumer advocates as well as most of the nation’s largest banks have also endorsed the Bair plan. Her proposal “is just an absolute no-brainer," said Martin Eakes, head of the Center for Responsible Lending. "There's just no reason why we shouldn't get it done.…”
But without Hank Paulson’s blessing, it’s likely that it will be an Obama Administration that does the doing.
Sunday, December 07, 2008
THE END OF COWBOY JUSTICE?
By William Fisher
Since the start of George Bush’s war of choice in 2003, an army of private contractors in Iraq has enjoyed virtually total impunity from prosecution. They have been accused of killing Iraqi civilians, participating in the torture of prisoners, and committing countless acts of waste, fraud and abuse.
But the contractors’ get-out-of-jail card may be about to expire.
Under the new Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) approved by the Iraqi government last week, U.S. contractors will be subject to Iraqi law for the first time. Moreover, some observers believe that Iraq may even be able to hold them legally accountable for offenses allegedly committed before the SOFA was approved.
And, at the other end of the U.S-Iraq equation, after months of seeming inactivity – marked by continuing doubts about whether the U.S. even has legal jurisdiction over its contractors -- the U.S. Department of Justice will finally bring charges against a group of contractor-employed security guards for their involvement in the shooting of 17 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad in September 2007.
The guards are employees of Blackwater Worldwide, the largest and most high-profile player in the massive army of private contractors employed by the U.S. in Iraq.
The complexity of this prosecution is revealed in the likely basis of the charges against the Blackwater employees -- a Reagan-era anti-drug law, even though drugs were not involved in the Blackwater shooting. The Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988, passed to help stem the nation's crack epidemic, calls for 30-year prison terms for using machine guns to commit violent crimes of any kind, even where drugs are not involved. Machine guns were. So prosecutors are reportedly reviewing draft indictments for manslaughter and assault.
The Blackwater guards -- decorated military veterans hired to protect U.S. diplomats overseas -- were responding to a car bombing when a shooting erupted at a crowded Baghdad intersection. The guards allegedly opened fire with government-issued machine guns and turret guns mounted on their armored trucks. Blackwater claims its convoy was ambushed by insurgents. But a Pentagon investigation concluded that the guards were unprovoked.
But prosecuting the guards will nevertheless be an uphill battle because it remains unclear whether contractors can be charged in the U.S., or anywhere, for crimes committed overseas, a contention that will certainly be made by defense lawyers. The defendants would need to be charged under a law covering soldiers and military contractors, but Blackwater works for the State Department, not the military. Thus it has yet to be determined whether that law applies to its guards.
Making the case even more complicated is the promise of immunity the State Department reportedly extended to several Blackwater guards in exchange for their sworn statements shortly after the shooting. Prosecutors cannot use these statements to support their case.
Blackwater and other security contractors might well also face prosecution by Iraqi authorities for acts committed during an earlier time when they supposedly had immunity from Iraqi law. In June of 2004, the Coalition Provisional Authority that ran Iraq after the U.S. invasion in 2003 granted contractors’ immunity from prosecution. But the new U.S.-Iraq SOFA does not explicitly prevent Iraqi officials from bringing criminal charges retroactively.
The Bush Administration has pulled out all the stops to conceal the activities of its private army, including an effort by Republicans in Congress to abolish the office of the special inspector-general for Iraq, who is charged with rooting out waste, fraud and abuse committed by contractors and others there.That IG, Stuart Bowen, has done an outstanding job, uncovering billions in misspent, stolen or missing American taxpayer dollars and referring a score of alleged wrongdoers to the Justice Department for possible prosecution.
For a time immediately after the Iraq shootings, the issue sparked interest among Democrats in Congress to enact tougher rules for overseas security contractors. The most comprehensive legislation was introduced last year by Barack Obama, then an Illinois Democratic Senator and now America’s president-elect. The Obama measure would have extended the jurisdiction of U.S. law to cover contractors in Iraq, placed the FBI in charge of investigating their crimes, and required the Defense Department to reveal the size and makeup of its security contractor force and define the boundaries of its activities. Republicans in Congress, along with the White House, opposed the legislation. Then the presidential campaign began and swept away everything in its path, leaving the legislation stillborn.
The Congressional Budget Office estimates that more than $10 billion has been spent on security contractors thus far in 2008 and estimated that about 25,000-30,000 employees of security firms were in Iraq as of early this year. It posits that, if spending for contractors continues at about the current rate, $100 billion will have been paid to military contractors for operations in Iraq.
It revealed that about 20 percent of funding for operations in Iraq has gone to contractors. Currently, it said, there are at least 190,000 contractors in Iraq and neighboring countries.
One such contractor, a Kuwaiti company acting as a subcontractor to the U.S. firm KBR, was accused this week of holding approximately 1,000 men from Bangladesh, India, Nepal and Sri Lanka for one to three months without pay in crowded warehouses near the Baghdad airport waiting to begin the jobs they were brought to Iraq to perform. The jobs evidently never materialized.
Najlaa International Catering Services, the Kuwaiti company that hired them to work in Iraq, agreed to pay the men and repatriate them following a raucous protest they staged last week outside their makeshift shelters.
KBR is a former subsidiary of the Halliburton Corporation, the largest and arguably the most notorious of the American private contractors in Iraq. It is widely accused of multiple instances of waste, fraud and abuse in implementing the wide range of services it carries out for the U.S. military in Iraq.
In a related development, 16 Indiana National Guard soldiers are suing KBR for knowingly exposing them to a toxic chemical in Iraq in 2003. The soldiers, who were providing security for KBR during repairs of a water treatment plant in southern Iraq after the U.S. invasion, claim the site was contaminated by hexavalent chromium, “one of the most potent carcinogens.” It alleges that KBR knew the plant was contaminated but concealed the danger.
U.S.-based contractors working in Iraq have been the subjects of numerous lawsuits brought in American courts. In one such suit, filed last May in Los Angeles federal court, Emad Al-Janabi, a 43-year-old Iraqi blacksmith, alleged he was wrongly imprisoned, beaten and forced from his home by people in U.S. military uniforms and civilian clothing in September 2003. He was released from Abu Ghraib without charge in July 2004.
The defendants are contractors CACI International Inc. and CACI Premier Technology, Inc., of Arlington, Va.; L-3 Communications Titan Corporation, of San Diego, Calif.; and former CACI contractor Steven Stefanowicz, a Los Angeles resident known at Abu Ghraib as “Big Steve.”
The suit charges that the contractors subjected Al-Janabi to physical and mental torture in sessions where the defendants acted as interrogators and translators. It alleges the contractors transported him to a detainee site in a wooden box and covered with a hood; scarred on his face when his eyes were clawed by an interrogator; exposed him to a mock execution of his brother and nephew; hung upside down with his feet chained to the steel slats of a bunk bed until he lost consciousness; and repeatedly deprived of food and sleep and threatened with dogs.
In October 2003, during a surprise inspection of Abu Ghraib, the International Committee of the Red Cross reportedly discovered Mr. Al-Janabi naked, chained and bruised in a cell in the “hard site” of the prison. The lawsuit says he was a so-called “ghost detainee” who was intentionally hidden from the Red Cross on subsequent inspections and held without appearing on the prisoner lists.
The suit noted that CACI provided interrogators used at Abu Ghraib and that L-3 employed all translators used there. Mr. Stefanowicz was linked to Abu Ghraib abuses in military court martial proceedings and was said to have directed low-level U.S. military personnel in detainee interrogations.
Despite scores of similar allegations, the use of private contractors in Iraq has remained a centerpiece of George W. Bush’s opaque and unaccountable government. The reason is partly ideological – the Bushies simply believe the private sector is more competent than the government. But at a more practical level, the U.S. military simply does not have enough personnel to do all the jobs now being done by contractors.
Despite the commendable work of some of these companies – particularly those involved in civil development -- a World War Two-type Truman Commission would already have sent many of their people to the slammer. Now, contractors will be under the legal control of the Iraqis and it will be up to them to see justice done. But, given the fragile state of that country’s judiciary and grave doubts about its respect for the rule of law, who in the world would want to volunteer to work there?
The U.S. has spent $600 million building a sprawling, highly fortified embassy in Baghdad. Its 21 reinforced buildings, located on a 104-acre site along the Tigris River includes 619 blast-resistant apartments, all manner of recreational facilities, plus shops and fast-food restaurants in its own mall-style food court. It is by far the largest and most expensive embassy in the world – roughly the size of Vatican City.
This monument to W’s war of choice currently employs some 5,500 Americans and Iraqis -- leaving folks like Secretary of State-designate Hillary Clinton with a huge question: Absent private contractors, who will protect, supply and service these thousands of civilians?
Answer: Blackwater, with which the State Department recently signed yet another multi-million dollar contract extension.
Your tax dollars at work. Again.
Since the start of George Bush’s war of choice in 2003, an army of private contractors in Iraq has enjoyed virtually total impunity from prosecution. They have been accused of killing Iraqi civilians, participating in the torture of prisoners, and committing countless acts of waste, fraud and abuse.
But the contractors’ get-out-of-jail card may be about to expire.
Under the new Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) approved by the Iraqi government last week, U.S. contractors will be subject to Iraqi law for the first time. Moreover, some observers believe that Iraq may even be able to hold them legally accountable for offenses allegedly committed before the SOFA was approved.
And, at the other end of the U.S-Iraq equation, after months of seeming inactivity – marked by continuing doubts about whether the U.S. even has legal jurisdiction over its contractors -- the U.S. Department of Justice will finally bring charges against a group of contractor-employed security guards for their involvement in the shooting of 17 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad in September 2007.
The guards are employees of Blackwater Worldwide, the largest and most high-profile player in the massive army of private contractors employed by the U.S. in Iraq.
The complexity of this prosecution is revealed in the likely basis of the charges against the Blackwater employees -- a Reagan-era anti-drug law, even though drugs were not involved in the Blackwater shooting. The Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988, passed to help stem the nation's crack epidemic, calls for 30-year prison terms for using machine guns to commit violent crimes of any kind, even where drugs are not involved. Machine guns were. So prosecutors are reportedly reviewing draft indictments for manslaughter and assault.
The Blackwater guards -- decorated military veterans hired to protect U.S. diplomats overseas -- were responding to a car bombing when a shooting erupted at a crowded Baghdad intersection. The guards allegedly opened fire with government-issued machine guns and turret guns mounted on their armored trucks. Blackwater claims its convoy was ambushed by insurgents. But a Pentagon investigation concluded that the guards were unprovoked.
But prosecuting the guards will nevertheless be an uphill battle because it remains unclear whether contractors can be charged in the U.S., or anywhere, for crimes committed overseas, a contention that will certainly be made by defense lawyers. The defendants would need to be charged under a law covering soldiers and military contractors, but Blackwater works for the State Department, not the military. Thus it has yet to be determined whether that law applies to its guards.
Making the case even more complicated is the promise of immunity the State Department reportedly extended to several Blackwater guards in exchange for their sworn statements shortly after the shooting. Prosecutors cannot use these statements to support their case.
Blackwater and other security contractors might well also face prosecution by Iraqi authorities for acts committed during an earlier time when they supposedly had immunity from Iraqi law. In June of 2004, the Coalition Provisional Authority that ran Iraq after the U.S. invasion in 2003 granted contractors’ immunity from prosecution. But the new U.S.-Iraq SOFA does not explicitly prevent Iraqi officials from bringing criminal charges retroactively.
The Bush Administration has pulled out all the stops to conceal the activities of its private army, including an effort by Republicans in Congress to abolish the office of the special inspector-general for Iraq, who is charged with rooting out waste, fraud and abuse committed by contractors and others there.That IG, Stuart Bowen, has done an outstanding job, uncovering billions in misspent, stolen or missing American taxpayer dollars and referring a score of alleged wrongdoers to the Justice Department for possible prosecution.
For a time immediately after the Iraq shootings, the issue sparked interest among Democrats in Congress to enact tougher rules for overseas security contractors. The most comprehensive legislation was introduced last year by Barack Obama, then an Illinois Democratic Senator and now America’s president-elect. The Obama measure would have extended the jurisdiction of U.S. law to cover contractors in Iraq, placed the FBI in charge of investigating their crimes, and required the Defense Department to reveal the size and makeup of its security contractor force and define the boundaries of its activities. Republicans in Congress, along with the White House, opposed the legislation. Then the presidential campaign began and swept away everything in its path, leaving the legislation stillborn.
The Congressional Budget Office estimates that more than $10 billion has been spent on security contractors thus far in 2008 and estimated that about 25,000-30,000 employees of security firms were in Iraq as of early this year. It posits that, if spending for contractors continues at about the current rate, $100 billion will have been paid to military contractors for operations in Iraq.
It revealed that about 20 percent of funding for operations in Iraq has gone to contractors. Currently, it said, there are at least 190,000 contractors in Iraq and neighboring countries.
One such contractor, a Kuwaiti company acting as a subcontractor to the U.S. firm KBR, was accused this week of holding approximately 1,000 men from Bangladesh, India, Nepal and Sri Lanka for one to three months without pay in crowded warehouses near the Baghdad airport waiting to begin the jobs they were brought to Iraq to perform. The jobs evidently never materialized.
Najlaa International Catering Services, the Kuwaiti company that hired them to work in Iraq, agreed to pay the men and repatriate them following a raucous protest they staged last week outside their makeshift shelters.
KBR is a former subsidiary of the Halliburton Corporation, the largest and arguably the most notorious of the American private contractors in Iraq. It is widely accused of multiple instances of waste, fraud and abuse in implementing the wide range of services it carries out for the U.S. military in Iraq.
In a related development, 16 Indiana National Guard soldiers are suing KBR for knowingly exposing them to a toxic chemical in Iraq in 2003. The soldiers, who were providing security for KBR during repairs of a water treatment plant in southern Iraq after the U.S. invasion, claim the site was contaminated by hexavalent chromium, “one of the most potent carcinogens.” It alleges that KBR knew the plant was contaminated but concealed the danger.
U.S.-based contractors working in Iraq have been the subjects of numerous lawsuits brought in American courts. In one such suit, filed last May in Los Angeles federal court, Emad Al-Janabi, a 43-year-old Iraqi blacksmith, alleged he was wrongly imprisoned, beaten and forced from his home by people in U.S. military uniforms and civilian clothing in September 2003. He was released from Abu Ghraib without charge in July 2004.
The defendants are contractors CACI International Inc. and CACI Premier Technology, Inc., of Arlington, Va.; L-3 Communications Titan Corporation, of San Diego, Calif.; and former CACI contractor Steven Stefanowicz, a Los Angeles resident known at Abu Ghraib as “Big Steve.”
The suit charges that the contractors subjected Al-Janabi to physical and mental torture in sessions where the defendants acted as interrogators and translators. It alleges the contractors transported him to a detainee site in a wooden box and covered with a hood; scarred on his face when his eyes were clawed by an interrogator; exposed him to a mock execution of his brother and nephew; hung upside down with his feet chained to the steel slats of a bunk bed until he lost consciousness; and repeatedly deprived of food and sleep and threatened with dogs.
In October 2003, during a surprise inspection of Abu Ghraib, the International Committee of the Red Cross reportedly discovered Mr. Al-Janabi naked, chained and bruised in a cell in the “hard site” of the prison. The lawsuit says he was a so-called “ghost detainee” who was intentionally hidden from the Red Cross on subsequent inspections and held without appearing on the prisoner lists.
The suit noted that CACI provided interrogators used at Abu Ghraib and that L-3 employed all translators used there. Mr. Stefanowicz was linked to Abu Ghraib abuses in military court martial proceedings and was said to have directed low-level U.S. military personnel in detainee interrogations.
Despite scores of similar allegations, the use of private contractors in Iraq has remained a centerpiece of George W. Bush’s opaque and unaccountable government. The reason is partly ideological – the Bushies simply believe the private sector is more competent than the government. But at a more practical level, the U.S. military simply does not have enough personnel to do all the jobs now being done by contractors.
Despite the commendable work of some of these companies – particularly those involved in civil development -- a World War Two-type Truman Commission would already have sent many of their people to the slammer. Now, contractors will be under the legal control of the Iraqis and it will be up to them to see justice done. But, given the fragile state of that country’s judiciary and grave doubts about its respect for the rule of law, who in the world would want to volunteer to work there?
The U.S. has spent $600 million building a sprawling, highly fortified embassy in Baghdad. Its 21 reinforced buildings, located on a 104-acre site along the Tigris River includes 619 blast-resistant apartments, all manner of recreational facilities, plus shops and fast-food restaurants in its own mall-style food court. It is by far the largest and most expensive embassy in the world – roughly the size of Vatican City.
This monument to W’s war of choice currently employs some 5,500 Americans and Iraqis -- leaving folks like Secretary of State-designate Hillary Clinton with a huge question: Absent private contractors, who will protect, supply and service these thousands of civilians?
Answer: Blackwater, with which the State Department recently signed yet another multi-million dollar contract extension.
Your tax dollars at work. Again.
Friday, December 05, 2008
END OF THE WILD WILD WEST?
By William Fisher
The virtually total impunity from prosecution accorded to private contractors in Iraq may be coming to an end.
Under the new Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) approved by the Iraqi government last week, U.S. contractors will be subject to Iraqi law for the first time. Moreover, some observers believe that Iraq may be able to hold them legally accountable for offenses allegedly committed even before the SOFA was approved.
And, at the other end of the U.S-Iraq equation, after months of seeming inactivity – marked by continuing doubts about whether the U.S. even has legal jurisdiction over the contractors -- the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) may soon bring charges against three to six contractor-employed security guards for their involvement in the shooting of 17 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad in September 2007.
The guards are employees of Blackwater Worldwide, the largest and most high-profile player in the massive army of private contractors employed by the U.S. in Iraq
American media is reporting that charges against the Blackwater employees may be based on a Reagan-era anti-drug law, even though drugs were not involved in the Blackwater shooting. The Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988, passed to help stem the nation's crack epidemic, calls for 30-year prison terms for using machine guns to commit violent crimes of any kind, even where drugs are not involved. Prosecutors are reportedly reviewing draft indictments for manslaughter and assault.
The Blackwater guards –decorated military veterans hired to protect U.S. diplomats overseas -- were responding to a car bombing when a shooting erupted at a crowded Baghdad intersection. The guards allegedly opened fire with government-issued machine guns and turret guns mounted on their armored trucks. Blackwater claims its convoy was ambushed by insurgents. Eyewitnesses say the guards were unprovoked.
But prosecuting the guards will be an uphill battle because it remains unclear whether contractors can be charged in the U.S., or anywhere, for crimes committed overseas. They would need to be charged under a law covering soldiers and military contractors, but Blackwater works for the State Department, not the military. Thus it remains to be determined whether that law applies to its guards.
Making the case even more complicated is the promise of immunity the State Department reportedly extended to several Blackwater guards in exchange for their sworn statements shortly after the shooting. Prosecutors cannot use these statements to support their case.
Blackwater and other security contractors might well also face prosecution by Iraqi authorities for acts committed during an earlier time when they supposedly had immunity from Iraqi law. In June of 2004, the Coalition Provisional Authority that ran Iraq after the U.S. invasion in 2003 granted contractors’ immunity from prosecution. But the new U.S.-Iraq SOFA does not explicitly prevent Iraqi officials from bringing criminal charges retroactively.
The Blackwater shooting of Iraqi civilians has sparked interest among Democrats in Congress to enact tougher rules for overseas security contractors. The most comprehensive legislation was introduced last year by Barack Obama, then an Illinois Democratic Senator and now America’s president-elect. The Obama measure would have extended the jurisdiction of U.S. law to cover contractors in Iraq, placed the FBI in charge of investigating their crimes, and required the Defense Department to reveal the size and makeup of its security contractor force and define the boundaries of its activities.
Republicans in Congress, along with the White House, have consistently opposed such legislation.
The Congressional Budget Office estimates that more than $10 billion has been spent on security contractors thus far in 2008 and estimated that about 25,000-30,000 employees of security firms were in Iraq as of early this year. It estimates that, if spending for contractors continues at about the current rate, $100 billion will have been paid to military contractors for operations in Iraq.
It revealed that about 20 percent of funding for operations in Iraq has gone to contractors. Currently, it said, there are at least 190,000 contractors in Iraq and neighboring countries.
Craig Jennings, an analyst for OMB Watch, a private government watchdog group, told us, "I think advocates of unaccountable privatization are beginning to reap what they have sown: defending privatization of warmaking on such an enormous scale is becoming tenuous. It's hard to paint a picture of contractors providing taxpayers value when so many instances of contractor misconduct have found their way into the public's consciousness."
One such contractor, a Kuwaiti company acting as a subcontractor to the U.S. firm KBR, was accused this week of holding approximately 1,000 men from Bangladesh, India, Nepal and Sri Lanka for one to three months without pay in crowded warehouses near the Baghdad airport waiting to begin the jobs they were brought to Iraq to perform. The jobs evidently never materialized.
Najlaa International Catering Services, the Kuwaiti company that hired them to work in Iraq, agreed to pay the men and repatriate them following their raucous protest last week outside the warehouses.
KBR is a former subsidiary of the Halliburton Corporation, the largest and arguably the most notorious of the American private contractors in Iraq. It is widely accused of multiple instances of waste, fraud and abuse in implementing the wide range of services it carries out for the U.S. military in Iraq.
In a related development, 16 Indiana National Guard soldiers are suing KBR for knowingly exposing them to a toxic chemical in Iraq in 2003. The soldiers, who were providing security for KBR during repairs of a water treatment plant in southern Iraq after the U.S. invasion, claim the site was contaminated by hexavalent chromium, “one of the most potent carcinogens.” It alleges that KBR knew the plant was contaminated but concealed the danger.
U.S.-based contractors working in Iraq have been the subjects of numerous lawsuits brought in American courts. In one such suit, filed last May in Los Angeles federal court, Emad Al-Janabi, a 43-year-old Iraqi blacksmith, alleged he was wrongly imprisoned, beaten and forced from his home by people in U.S. military uniforms and civilian clothing in September 2003. He was released from Abu Ghraib without charge in July 2004.
The defendants are contractors CACI International Inc. and CACI Premier Technology, Inc., of Arlington, Va.; L-3 Communications Titan Corporation, of San Diego, Calif.; and former CACI contractor Steven Stefanowicz, a Los Angeles resident known at Abu Ghraib as “Big Steve.”
The suit charges that the contractors subjected Al-Janabi to physical and mental torture in sessions where the defendants acted as interrogators and translators. It alleges the contractors transported him to a detainee site in a wooden box and covered with a hood; scarred on his face when his eyes were clawed by an interrogator; exposed him to a mock execution of his brother and nephew; hung upside down with his feet chained to the steel slats of a bunk bed until he lost consciousness; and repeatedly deprived of food and sleep and threatened with dogs.
In October 2003, during a surprise inspection of Abu Ghraib, the International Committee of the Red Cross reportedly discovered Mr. Al-Janabi naked, chained and bruised in a cell in the “hard site” of the prison. The lawsuit says he was a so-called “ghost detainee” who was intentionally hidden from the Red Cross on subsequent inspections and held without appearing on the prisoner lists.
The suit noted that CACI provided interrogators used at Abu Ghraib and that L-3 employed all translators used there. Mr. Stefanowicz was linked to Abu Ghraib abuses in military court martial proceedings and was said to have directed low-level U.S. military personnel in detainee interrogations.
The virtually total impunity from prosecution accorded to private contractors in Iraq may be coming to an end.
Under the new Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) approved by the Iraqi government last week, U.S. contractors will be subject to Iraqi law for the first time. Moreover, some observers believe that Iraq may be able to hold them legally accountable for offenses allegedly committed even before the SOFA was approved.
And, at the other end of the U.S-Iraq equation, after months of seeming inactivity – marked by continuing doubts about whether the U.S. even has legal jurisdiction over the contractors -- the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) may soon bring charges against three to six contractor-employed security guards for their involvement in the shooting of 17 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad in September 2007.
The guards are employees of Blackwater Worldwide, the largest and most high-profile player in the massive army of private contractors employed by the U.S. in Iraq
American media is reporting that charges against the Blackwater employees may be based on a Reagan-era anti-drug law, even though drugs were not involved in the Blackwater shooting. The Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988, passed to help stem the nation's crack epidemic, calls for 30-year prison terms for using machine guns to commit violent crimes of any kind, even where drugs are not involved. Prosecutors are reportedly reviewing draft indictments for manslaughter and assault.
The Blackwater guards –decorated military veterans hired to protect U.S. diplomats overseas -- were responding to a car bombing when a shooting erupted at a crowded Baghdad intersection. The guards allegedly opened fire with government-issued machine guns and turret guns mounted on their armored trucks. Blackwater claims its convoy was ambushed by insurgents. Eyewitnesses say the guards were unprovoked.
But prosecuting the guards will be an uphill battle because it remains unclear whether contractors can be charged in the U.S., or anywhere, for crimes committed overseas. They would need to be charged under a law covering soldiers and military contractors, but Blackwater works for the State Department, not the military. Thus it remains to be determined whether that law applies to its guards.
Making the case even more complicated is the promise of immunity the State Department reportedly extended to several Blackwater guards in exchange for their sworn statements shortly after the shooting. Prosecutors cannot use these statements to support their case.
Blackwater and other security contractors might well also face prosecution by Iraqi authorities for acts committed during an earlier time when they supposedly had immunity from Iraqi law. In June of 2004, the Coalition Provisional Authority that ran Iraq after the U.S. invasion in 2003 granted contractors’ immunity from prosecution. But the new U.S.-Iraq SOFA does not explicitly prevent Iraqi officials from bringing criminal charges retroactively.
The Blackwater shooting of Iraqi civilians has sparked interest among Democrats in Congress to enact tougher rules for overseas security contractors. The most comprehensive legislation was introduced last year by Barack Obama, then an Illinois Democratic Senator and now America’s president-elect. The Obama measure would have extended the jurisdiction of U.S. law to cover contractors in Iraq, placed the FBI in charge of investigating their crimes, and required the Defense Department to reveal the size and makeup of its security contractor force and define the boundaries of its activities.
Republicans in Congress, along with the White House, have consistently opposed such legislation.
The Congressional Budget Office estimates that more than $10 billion has been spent on security contractors thus far in 2008 and estimated that about 25,000-30,000 employees of security firms were in Iraq as of early this year. It estimates that, if spending for contractors continues at about the current rate, $100 billion will have been paid to military contractors for operations in Iraq.
It revealed that about 20 percent of funding for operations in Iraq has gone to contractors. Currently, it said, there are at least 190,000 contractors in Iraq and neighboring countries.
Craig Jennings, an analyst for OMB Watch, a private government watchdog group, told us, "I think advocates of unaccountable privatization are beginning to reap what they have sown: defending privatization of warmaking on such an enormous scale is becoming tenuous. It's hard to paint a picture of contractors providing taxpayers value when so many instances of contractor misconduct have found their way into the public's consciousness."
One such contractor, a Kuwaiti company acting as a subcontractor to the U.S. firm KBR, was accused this week of holding approximately 1,000 men from Bangladesh, India, Nepal and Sri Lanka for one to three months without pay in crowded warehouses near the Baghdad airport waiting to begin the jobs they were brought to Iraq to perform. The jobs evidently never materialized.
Najlaa International Catering Services, the Kuwaiti company that hired them to work in Iraq, agreed to pay the men and repatriate them following their raucous protest last week outside the warehouses.
KBR is a former subsidiary of the Halliburton Corporation, the largest and arguably the most notorious of the American private contractors in Iraq. It is widely accused of multiple instances of waste, fraud and abuse in implementing the wide range of services it carries out for the U.S. military in Iraq.
In a related development, 16 Indiana National Guard soldiers are suing KBR for knowingly exposing them to a toxic chemical in Iraq in 2003. The soldiers, who were providing security for KBR during repairs of a water treatment plant in southern Iraq after the U.S. invasion, claim the site was contaminated by hexavalent chromium, “one of the most potent carcinogens.” It alleges that KBR knew the plant was contaminated but concealed the danger.
U.S.-based contractors working in Iraq have been the subjects of numerous lawsuits brought in American courts. In one such suit, filed last May in Los Angeles federal court, Emad Al-Janabi, a 43-year-old Iraqi blacksmith, alleged he was wrongly imprisoned, beaten and forced from his home by people in U.S. military uniforms and civilian clothing in September 2003. He was released from Abu Ghraib without charge in July 2004.
The defendants are contractors CACI International Inc. and CACI Premier Technology, Inc., of Arlington, Va.; L-3 Communications Titan Corporation, of San Diego, Calif.; and former CACI contractor Steven Stefanowicz, a Los Angeles resident known at Abu Ghraib as “Big Steve.”
The suit charges that the contractors subjected Al-Janabi to physical and mental torture in sessions where the defendants acted as interrogators and translators. It alleges the contractors transported him to a detainee site in a wooden box and covered with a hood; scarred on his face when his eyes were clawed by an interrogator; exposed him to a mock execution of his brother and nephew; hung upside down with his feet chained to the steel slats of a bunk bed until he lost consciousness; and repeatedly deprived of food and sleep and threatened with dogs.
In October 2003, during a surprise inspection of Abu Ghraib, the International Committee of the Red Cross reportedly discovered Mr. Al-Janabi naked, chained and bruised in a cell in the “hard site” of the prison. The lawsuit says he was a so-called “ghost detainee” who was intentionally hidden from the Red Cross on subsequent inspections and held without appearing on the prisoner lists.
The suit noted that CACI provided interrogators used at Abu Ghraib and that L-3 employed all translators used there. Mr. Stefanowicz was linked to Abu Ghraib abuses in military court martial proceedings and was said to have directed low-level U.S. military personnel in detainee interrogations.
Wednesday, December 03, 2008
Retired Officers Urge Obama to Erase the "Stain of Torture"
By William Fisher
As a group of retired military leaders prepared to urge U.S. President-elect Barack Obama to quickly put an end to the harsh interrogation practices inflicted on security prisoners, a new United Nations report charged that Iraqi authorities were committing “grave human rights violations” in their treatment of thousands of detainees.
"Grave human rights violations ... remain unaddressed," the UN report said. It cited "ongoing widespread ill-treatment and torture of detainees by Iraqi law enforcement authorities, amid pervasive impunity of current and past human rights abuses."
The UN report cast doubt on whether Iraq will be prepared to professionally manage control over thousands of security detainees now in U.S. custody under a new security pact that would end the U.S. mission here by 2012. Approved by Iraq's parliament last week, the agreement mandates that American forces transfer to Iraqi custody all detainees believed to be a major threat and to release the rest "in a safe and orderly manner."
As an example, the UN report said that 123 men crammed had been into a single 540-square-foot cell — about the size of a studio apartment. It urged the Iraqi government to speed up legal reforms and strengthen the judicial system as it asserts more control over its own affairs. The report also renewed concern about the U.S. detention of suspects for prolonged periods without judicial review of their cases.
The U.N.'s special representative in Iraq estimated that there were now a total of 40,000 detainees, including some 15,800 being held by the U.S. military.
Meanwhile, the issue of detainee treatment continued to be a front-and-center issue for the newly elected U.S. president.
Today (Wednesday) members of the Obama team will meet with more than a dozen retired military leaders who will urge the new president “to restore a U.S. image battered by allegations of torturing terrorism suspects.”
"We need to remove the stain, and the stain is on us, as well as on our
reputation overseas," said a member of the group, retired Vice Adm. Lee Gunn, former Navy inspector general.
The group plans to suggest a list of anti-torture principles, including making the Army Field Manual the single standard for all U.S. interrogators, revoking presidential orders allowing the CIA to use harsh treatment, giving the International Red Cross access to all prisoners held by intelligence agencies and declaring a moratorium on “rendering” prisoners to third countries for harsh interrogations.
The Army Field Manual requires humane treatment and forbids practices such as waterboarding -- a form of simulated drowning widely condemned as torture.
"If he'd just put a couple of sentences in his inaugural address, stating the
new position, then everything would flow from that," said retired Maj. Gen. Fred Haynes, whose regiment in World War Two raised the American flag on Iwo Jima.
Obama has denounced waterboarding and other forms of harsh questioning allowed by secret orders.
"Torture is how you create enemies, not how you defeat them," he said in October 2007. He has also vowed to close the Guantanamo Bay prison for terrorism suspects, an international symbol of prisoner abuse.
The retired military officers have previously met with Vice President-elect Joseph Biden and with Senator Hillary Clinton, who has been nominated b y Obama to be his Secretary of State.
U.S. President George W. Bush has repeatedly denied condoning torture, but his denials have been widely doubted at home and abroad. A Justice Department report this year found the White House ignored reports it received that FBI agents viewed some Guantanamo interrogations as "borderline torture."
While the issues of Guantanamo’s closing, rendition, and harsh interrogation techniques pose ongoing challenges for President-elect Obama, the administration of George W. Bush is being accused of continuing such abuses.
In the latest allegation, A Muslim American, Hossam Hemdan of Los Angeles, charged that he was tortured and beaten into confessing to a terrorism-related charge by the security services of Abu Dhabi – part of the oil-rich United Arab Emirates (UAE) -- which he said held him for nearly three months at the request of the U.S. government.
Hemdan, a 42-year-old naturalized U.S. citizen, told his brother by telephone this week that he confessed to terror-related charges after continually being beaten and subjected to harsh treatment. "They beat him very badly. They stood on his back and another person pulled his feet. They beat him on the bottoms of his feet," he charged. "He said he had a liver problem. They beat him on his liver on the right side (of his body)" until he lost consciousness.
Following his confession, he was placed in the custody of the Abu Dhabi criminal justice system, where he is currently being detained.
Hemdan was arrested in Los Angeles last August after several years of surveillance by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). The FBI has acknowledged that the case involved counterterrorism but has denied asking the UAE to hold him. How he got to Abu Dhabi is unclear.
The American Civil Liberties Union has filed a lawsuit in Federal Court charging that the administration illegally asked the UAE security services to hold Hemdan in order to avoid granting him his constitutional protections against illegal and unlimited detention.
The lawsuit named President Bush, Attorney General Michael Mukasey and FBI Director Robert Mueller as defendants and asked that the administration be ordered to demand Hemdan's release.
As a group of retired military leaders prepared to urge U.S. President-elect Barack Obama to quickly put an end to the harsh interrogation practices inflicted on security prisoners, a new United Nations report charged that Iraqi authorities were committing “grave human rights violations” in their treatment of thousands of detainees.
"Grave human rights violations ... remain unaddressed," the UN report said. It cited "ongoing widespread ill-treatment and torture of detainees by Iraqi law enforcement authorities, amid pervasive impunity of current and past human rights abuses."
The UN report cast doubt on whether Iraq will be prepared to professionally manage control over thousands of security detainees now in U.S. custody under a new security pact that would end the U.S. mission here by 2012. Approved by Iraq's parliament last week, the agreement mandates that American forces transfer to Iraqi custody all detainees believed to be a major threat and to release the rest "in a safe and orderly manner."
As an example, the UN report said that 123 men crammed had been into a single 540-square-foot cell — about the size of a studio apartment. It urged the Iraqi government to speed up legal reforms and strengthen the judicial system as it asserts more control over its own affairs. The report also renewed concern about the U.S. detention of suspects for prolonged periods without judicial review of their cases.
The U.N.'s special representative in Iraq estimated that there were now a total of 40,000 detainees, including some 15,800 being held by the U.S. military.
Meanwhile, the issue of detainee treatment continued to be a front-and-center issue for the newly elected U.S. president.
Today (Wednesday) members of the Obama team will meet with more than a dozen retired military leaders who will urge the new president “to restore a U.S. image battered by allegations of torturing terrorism suspects.”
"We need to remove the stain, and the stain is on us, as well as on our
reputation overseas," said a member of the group, retired Vice Adm. Lee Gunn, former Navy inspector general.
The group plans to suggest a list of anti-torture principles, including making the Army Field Manual the single standard for all U.S. interrogators, revoking presidential orders allowing the CIA to use harsh treatment, giving the International Red Cross access to all prisoners held by intelligence agencies and declaring a moratorium on “rendering” prisoners to third countries for harsh interrogations.
The Army Field Manual requires humane treatment and forbids practices such as waterboarding -- a form of simulated drowning widely condemned as torture.
"If he'd just put a couple of sentences in his inaugural address, stating the
new position, then everything would flow from that," said retired Maj. Gen. Fred Haynes, whose regiment in World War Two raised the American flag on Iwo Jima.
Obama has denounced waterboarding and other forms of harsh questioning allowed by secret orders.
"Torture is how you create enemies, not how you defeat them," he said in October 2007. He has also vowed to close the Guantanamo Bay prison for terrorism suspects, an international symbol of prisoner abuse.
The retired military officers have previously met with Vice President-elect Joseph Biden and with Senator Hillary Clinton, who has been nominated b y Obama to be his Secretary of State.
U.S. President George W. Bush has repeatedly denied condoning torture, but his denials have been widely doubted at home and abroad. A Justice Department report this year found the White House ignored reports it received that FBI agents viewed some Guantanamo interrogations as "borderline torture."
While the issues of Guantanamo’s closing, rendition, and harsh interrogation techniques pose ongoing challenges for President-elect Obama, the administration of George W. Bush is being accused of continuing such abuses.
In the latest allegation, A Muslim American, Hossam Hemdan of Los Angeles, charged that he was tortured and beaten into confessing to a terrorism-related charge by the security services of Abu Dhabi – part of the oil-rich United Arab Emirates (UAE) -- which he said held him for nearly three months at the request of the U.S. government.
Hemdan, a 42-year-old naturalized U.S. citizen, told his brother by telephone this week that he confessed to terror-related charges after continually being beaten and subjected to harsh treatment. "They beat him very badly. They stood on his back and another person pulled his feet. They beat him on the bottoms of his feet," he charged. "He said he had a liver problem. They beat him on his liver on the right side (of his body)" until he lost consciousness.
Following his confession, he was placed in the custody of the Abu Dhabi criminal justice system, where he is currently being detained.
Hemdan was arrested in Los Angeles last August after several years of surveillance by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). The FBI has acknowledged that the case involved counterterrorism but has denied asking the UAE to hold him. How he got to Abu Dhabi is unclear.
The American Civil Liberties Union has filed a lawsuit in Federal Court charging that the administration illegally asked the UAE security services to hold Hemdan in order to avoid granting him his constitutional protections against illegal and unlimited detention.
The lawsuit named President Bush, Attorney General Michael Mukasey and FBI Director Robert Mueller as defendants and asked that the administration be ordered to demand Hemdan's release.
FROM THOSE WONDERFUL FOLKS WHO BROUGHT YOU THE TORTURE MEMOS
By William Fisher
You may have heard that the Bush Administration is in a frenzied race to lock in its favorite policies before Barack Obama takes office.
So far, Bushies have managed to use Executive Orders to savage regulations that trash environmental protections, give early Christmas gifts to business interests, and yet again submerge science under ideology.
And it may not be so easy for the Obama Administration to undo this potpourri of hundreds of regulations.
But not all the Bushies’ assaults on the Constitution began with the election of a new president.
One shining example: In 2007, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel issued a memorandum concerning one of the most troubling aspects of W’s faith-based initiative.
This memorandum says it’s OK for organizations that are recipients of grants from the faith-based initiative to openly discriminate against hiring people on religious grounds. It reached that dubious conclusion despite existing antidiscrimination laws and Congress’ resounding refusal to change those laws.
The consequence is that charities affiliated with Catholic, Jewish, Muslim, or whatever faiths, can now legally refuse to hire job applicants – or accept volunteers -- simply because they are not of the same faith.
Maybe I’m missing something, but what that says to me is that my tax dollars might just be flowing to some outfit I couldn’t work for or benefit from.
Then there’s that pesky issue of Constitutionality. Doesn’t our Constitution say something about Congress making no law respecting an establishment of
Religion?
Now if you’re just hearing about this for the first time, it’s not surprising. That’s because the OLC regulation, while issued in 2007, was only recently posted on the Office of Legal Counsel’s website.
One has to wonder why, if the Bushies are so proud of their faith-based programs, they spirit this good news onto their website, as it were, in the dead of night in a way that suggests they’re trying to keep it well under the radar.
The OLC ruling grows out of a $1.5 million grant to a Christian relief and development organization called World Vision, Inc., founded in 1950. The grant came from the Office of Justice Programs pursuant to the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act of 1974.
Now, the law says that, as a condition of receiving grants pursuant to the JJDPA, recipients must refrain from discriminating on the basis of religion in “employment in connection with any programs or activity” funded by the grant.
But World Vision wasn’t thrilled with that law, so it asked the Department of Justice to waive it.
In World Vision’s application for a waiver, the group said it has made it a policy to hire only “Christian staff to assist with the mission of the organization.” It said it has done so in order to “maintain [its] identity and strength, which [are] at the core of [its] success,” and because it “can only remain true to [its] vision if [it] ha[s] the freedom to select like-minded staff, which includes staffing on a religious basis.” It stated that the work of the Vision Youth program is “very staff intensive.” And its staff all “share a faith, passion and commitment to [World Vision’s] mission.”
The OLC responded: “You (World Vision) have asked whether the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (“RFRA”) -- which prohibits the Government from “substantially burden[ing]” religious exercise unless that burden “is the least restrictive means of furthering [a] compelling governmental interest -- …requires OJP to exempt World Vision from the religious nondiscrimination provision. We conclude that RFRA is reasonably construed to require that such an accommodation be made for World Vision, and that OJP would be within its legal discretion, under the JJDPA and under RFRA, to exempt World Vision from the religious nondiscrimination requirement.”
What should be our take-away from all this? Well, it should come as no surprise that for the last eight years the Bush Administration has been pulling out all the stops to lower our traditional barriers between church and state. And succeeding.
But arguably the credibility of the OLC decision should be informed by that office’s recent history and twisted record. After all, why should we believe anything from the office that ruled it was OK for American investigators to use harsh interrogation techniques – torture, that is?
A ruling whose tortured logic will exact a price our country will be paying for decades.
But have faith; there’s a light at the end of this dark tunnel. Two lights, to be exact. The first is that, in less than two months, the Bushies will be gone – and, with them, one of the most divisive administrations in our country’s history. The second is that President-elect Obama has made it clear that, while he too will have a faith-based initiative, under no circumstances will it allow its beneficiaries to decide whom to hire on the basis of religion.
Faith-based organizations do a huge amount of good in our society. But they shouldn’t be allowed to use our tax dollars to adopt an ideology contrary to the most basic tenets of their own faith in order to execute their programs.
You may have heard that the Bush Administration is in a frenzied race to lock in its favorite policies before Barack Obama takes office.
So far, Bushies have managed to use Executive Orders to savage regulations that trash environmental protections, give early Christmas gifts to business interests, and yet again submerge science under ideology.
And it may not be so easy for the Obama Administration to undo this potpourri of hundreds of regulations.
But not all the Bushies’ assaults on the Constitution began with the election of a new president.
One shining example: In 2007, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel issued a memorandum concerning one of the most troubling aspects of W’s faith-based initiative.
This memorandum says it’s OK for organizations that are recipients of grants from the faith-based initiative to openly discriminate against hiring people on religious grounds. It reached that dubious conclusion despite existing antidiscrimination laws and Congress’ resounding refusal to change those laws.
The consequence is that charities affiliated with Catholic, Jewish, Muslim, or whatever faiths, can now legally refuse to hire job applicants – or accept volunteers -- simply because they are not of the same faith.
Maybe I’m missing something, but what that says to me is that my tax dollars might just be flowing to some outfit I couldn’t work for or benefit from.
Then there’s that pesky issue of Constitutionality. Doesn’t our Constitution say something about Congress making no law respecting an establishment of
Religion?
Now if you’re just hearing about this for the first time, it’s not surprising. That’s because the OLC regulation, while issued in 2007, was only recently posted on the Office of Legal Counsel’s website.
One has to wonder why, if the Bushies are so proud of their faith-based programs, they spirit this good news onto their website, as it were, in the dead of night in a way that suggests they’re trying to keep it well under the radar.
The OLC ruling grows out of a $1.5 million grant to a Christian relief and development organization called World Vision, Inc., founded in 1950. The grant came from the Office of Justice Programs pursuant to the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act of 1974.
Now, the law says that, as a condition of receiving grants pursuant to the JJDPA, recipients must refrain from discriminating on the basis of religion in “employment in connection with any programs or activity” funded by the grant.
But World Vision wasn’t thrilled with that law, so it asked the Department of Justice to waive it.
In World Vision’s application for a waiver, the group said it has made it a policy to hire only “Christian staff to assist with the mission of the organization.” It said it has done so in order to “maintain [its] identity and strength, which [are] at the core of [its] success,” and because it “can only remain true to [its] vision if [it] ha[s] the freedom to select like-minded staff, which includes staffing on a religious basis.” It stated that the work of the Vision Youth program is “very staff intensive.” And its staff all “share a faith, passion and commitment to [World Vision’s] mission.”
The OLC responded: “You (World Vision) have asked whether the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (“RFRA”) -- which prohibits the Government from “substantially burden[ing]” religious exercise unless that burden “is the least restrictive means of furthering [a] compelling governmental interest -- …requires OJP to exempt World Vision from the religious nondiscrimination provision. We conclude that RFRA is reasonably construed to require that such an accommodation be made for World Vision, and that OJP would be within its legal discretion, under the JJDPA and under RFRA, to exempt World Vision from the religious nondiscrimination requirement.”
What should be our take-away from all this? Well, it should come as no surprise that for the last eight years the Bush Administration has been pulling out all the stops to lower our traditional barriers between church and state. And succeeding.
But arguably the credibility of the OLC decision should be informed by that office’s recent history and twisted record. After all, why should we believe anything from the office that ruled it was OK for American investigators to use harsh interrogation techniques – torture, that is?
A ruling whose tortured logic will exact a price our country will be paying for decades.
But have faith; there’s a light at the end of this dark tunnel. Two lights, to be exact. The first is that, in less than two months, the Bushies will be gone – and, with them, one of the most divisive administrations in our country’s history. The second is that President-elect Obama has made it clear that, while he too will have a faith-based initiative, under no circumstances will it allow its beneficiaries to decide whom to hire on the basis of religion.
Faith-based organizations do a huge amount of good in our society. But they shouldn’t be allowed to use our tax dollars to adopt an ideology contrary to the most basic tenets of their own faith in order to execute their programs.
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