Rouge intelligence operations?

Laura Rozen points out a story in today's Washington Post detailing concerns that the Department of Defense may not be following the rules.

Republican members of Congress say there are signs that the Defense Department may be carrying out new intelligence activities through programs intended to escape oversight from Congress and the new director of national intelligence.

The warnings are an unusually public signal of some Republican lawmakers' concern about overreaching by the Pentagon, where top officials have been jockeying with the new intelligence chief, John D. Negroponte, for primacy in intelligence operations

The creation of a National Intelligence Director did not go over well with many in the intelligence community. It doesn't appear these activities were well concealed and so were likely a symptom of bureaucratic infighting and not evidence of activities that Defense Secretary Rumsfeld would like to keep from the Congress. Rumsfeld's publicly announced ideas are problematic enough; we probably don't want to know about the ones he feels he must keep to himself. That said, the activities need to come to a halt until proper oversight is restored.

As part of the intelligence overhaul that Congress ordered last year, Mr. Negroponte, as director of national intelligence, is supposed to oversee 15 intelligence agencies whose activities fall under a budget category known as the National Intelligence Program. Mr. Negroponte has less authority over programs that fall under another category, the Military Intelligence Program, which are intended to provide tactical and strategic support to military commanders.

But the concern expressed by [Representative Peter Hoekstra (R-MI), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee] and others is focused on a third category of programs involving intelligence activity but not labeled as such, and included within the budgets of the individual military services.
…
In the interview, Mr. Hoekstra said the committee had been told that the Pentagon was creating parallel structures "so they don't have to deal with the D.N.I.," the abbreviation for the new intelligence chief.

The two massive changes President Bush has made, the Department of Homeland Security and the creation of a Director of Intelligence have both expanded the government and contributed to confusion and resentment. While some form of streamlined coordination organization or board could have helped the federal government do its work better in both areas, the DHS and the NID have merely added additional levels of bureaucracy. In addition, at least in the case of DHS, it created new patronage positions that should have been filled by experienced professionals.

- Murphy

Delay Indicted on Conspiracy Charges

House Majority Leader Tom Delay (R-TX) has been indicted today by a texas grand jury on criminal conspiracy charges related to illegal campaign funds. The charges stem from an investigation into a political group DeLay founded, Texans for a Republican Majority. The group is believed to have channelled corporate donations to local races; illegal under Texas law.

Besides the enormously important point that DeLay's carefully-balanced Republican graft and pay-for-play operations may spin out of control thanks to this investigation and an investigation into DeLay's close associate, lobbyist Jack Abramoff, this conspiracy investigation may involve the Republican National Committee.

In late September 2002, Colyandro, the executive director of Texans for a Republican Majority, sent a blank check to Ellis, who is DeLay's primary fundraiser in Washington.

According to the money-laundering indictment returned against those two last year, Ellis was accused of having the Republican National Committee launder $190,000 of corporate donations into noncorporate money that was sent to to seven Texas House candidates, including Austinites Jack Stick and Todd Baxter.

There is an enormously complicated web of dependence that links together the current slate of Republican power-brokers and DeLay sits at the center of it all.

With a continuing investigation into Abramoff as well as the ongoing Rove-Plame investigation the DeLay indictment has the potential to finally crack open the door into the unethical and potentially illegal manner in which DeLay and Rove use enormous sums of money controlled by Abramoff and his associates to ensure the GOP marches in lock-step to their orders.

It's a disciplined machine that awes many in politics, but at its core it is based on illegal, corrupt and unethical actions.

- Murphy

The Death of Pat Tillman

Robert Collier details the compelling and tragic story of Pat Tillman's death and his family's strugle to uncover the truth. Tillman abandoned his life as a professional athlete to become a soldier. A dramatic change in life that ultimately resulted in Tillman's death by friendly fire in Afghanistan.

The story describes an individual who surpasses the one-dimensional image of the football player and the soldier, as well as a family that is struggling to uncover why the Army attempted to cover-up the nature of Tillman's death.

The Army initially announced that Tillman's death came at the hands of the enemy as he heroically fought to save his fellow soldiers. The Army eventually came clean with the truth that Tillman was killed in combat but by friendly-fire.

Tillman was a hero to his family and a brave friend to those he served with. His death, accidental though it was, occurred while he was doing what he believed in. The Army did not need to try and cover-up the circumstances of his death or attempt to assuage what could have been negative PR. In fact their efforts, once the truth came out, had the opposite effect.

Tillman's service was by all accounts honorable and remarkable he should be remembered for that and the particular circumstances of his death should not be the focus.

- Murphy

Whose values are they following?

The National Review Online reposted an article written in January 1989 on the then potential collapse of the Soviet Union. The article was written by Radek Sidorski who was just elected to the Polish Senate. The article itself details the extensive rot that riddled the Soviet empire and would lead to its collapse. Sidorski didn't pick '89 as the year of the fall, but he knew knew it was soon, and that it would fall with a sigh, not with a bang.

He posed a question to his conservative audience, how should the west manage the decline of the Soviet empire? A question there were no clean answers for but a situation the United States handled reasonably well during the first Bush administration and the Clinton administration. It has been a far from perfect dismantling, but it proceeded far more peacefully than many expected.

In considering the question, however, Sidorski raised a point that conservatives who support the current administration would have been wise to spend more time on, and should perhaps be debated anew today:

We must not fall into the conservative trap of believing that if only the Soviet Union would transform itself into traditional "Russia" everything would be well-Russia being a long-established entity capable of abiding by the international rules. By the milder standards of its time czarist Russia was also a tyranny and a prison of nations. We would be forsaking our values if we betrayed the subject nations of Eastern Europe simply because the idiom of domination changed. The attempts to suppress Eastern Europeans' national aspirations have already caused two world wars. Their future is on the agenda again now.

Then, the focus was on conservative concepts of freedom and governance. While there may be disagreements over tactics and philosophies, conservatives and everyone else agreed that ending the tyranny of the USSR was a noble goal and would obviously be undercut if they simply supplanted an imperial dictatorship with a home-grown one. [The role of the U.S. in fighting socialist and marxist movements in South and Central America were linked to this struggle by bellicose conservatives, but the origins of the U.S. proxy fights there go back as far as the origins of the U.S. itself.]

This is a perspective that could use some dusting-off in the conservative circles of today. The potential for despotic rule is great in Iraq and growing every week.

Much of the post-invasion rationalization of the war consisted of some version of, "We got rid of Saddam, didn't we?" If the final outcome is not some form of modern civil society that reasoning will seem like small compensation.

- Murphy

Who's got the loot?

The venerable Getty Museum has allegedly been collecting looted art pieces for years. The evidence is pretty damning despite their claims they, "didn't know it was looted.":

•  A 1985 memo shows that Getty officials learned from dealer Giacomo Medici that three objects the museum was acquiring had been taken from ruins near Naples decades after Italian law made it illegal. The Getty completed the $10.2-million acquisition anyway.

•  An acting curator accused the Getty in a 1986 resignation letter of turning a blind eye to problems in the antiquities department. With eerie prescience, he said the museum's "curatorial avarice" would someday lead to an external investigation and demands from a foreign government for the return of looted artifacts.

This is one of the dirty secrets of the art community. Art theft and trade in looted objects is nothing new, much of it is driven by private collectors who secret their stashes and presumably gaze upon them behind closed doors while fiendishly twirling a mustache. Art museums have for decades held themselves as above such trade, but the reality is, as the Italian law first states, "all ancient objects uncovered from Italian soil after 1902 were state property and could not be sold or exported without government permission," much of the older collections in some of the great museums fall into this questionable category. There is an ongoing legal fight between Egypt and Germany over the famous bust of Nephertitti.

Much of the artifacts that were looted from Iraq following the invasion are already on the market though there is an ongoing effort to return as much as possible. In that case, much of the documentation on the objects was destroyed during the looting.

It is hard to know what to do about the objects that were collected during the years when documenting an objects' origin was only thought of in terms of determining an objects authenticity and thus its worth. The Indiana Jones, "That belongs in a museum," mentality was a quaint idea then. Private collections were the destination for most of the world's priceless objects, in fact most of the public museums' collections are made up of privately held objects either donated or on loan to the museum.

The public good argument can be used to justify questionable actions, such as the Getty's. Yet it is also a public good to ensure that a nations treasures and their ownership of such objects are respected.

- Murphy

Hand up not a hand out; any hand at all?

A piece in today's L.A. Times (via Josh Marshall) describes the shifting plans to assist those displaced by hurricane Katrina. The article sub-head says that President Bush prefers not to boost existing programs, but in looking at what appears to be the White House's idea of a solution, there seems to be some disconnect. Even former House Speaker Newt Gingrich is publicly questioning the White House's efforts

WASHINGTON — Two days after Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast, the Department of Housing and Urban Development announced plans to issue emergency vouchers aimed at helping poor storm victims find new housing quickly by covering as much as $10,000 of their rent.

But the department suddenly backed away from the idea after White House aides met with senior HUD officials. Although emergency vouchers had been successfully used after the 1994 Northridge earthquake, the administration focused instead on a plan for government-built trailer parks, an approach that even many Republicans say would concentrate poverty in the very fashion the government has long sought to avoid.
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Instead of depending on long-running programs for such services as housing and healthcare, the president has generally tried to create new, one-shot efforts that the administration apparently hopes will more easily disappear after the crisis passes. That has meant relying on the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which has run virtually all of the recovery effort.

"FEMA can help fill some immediate needs after a disaster, like giving grants to help people repair their roofs or pay for temporary housing," said John P. Sucich, a former senior FEMA official who oversaw the recovery from the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. "But it is not the agency to turn to to ensure the kinds of continuing help that families need to begin putting their lives back together.
…
At least in the case of housing, critics say that the president's unwillingness to rely on existing programs could raise costs. Instead of offering $10,000 vouchers, FEMA is paying an average of $16,000 for each trailer in the new parks it is contemplating. Even many Republicans wonder why the government would want to build trailer parks when many evacuees are now living in communities with plenty of vacant, privately owned apartments.

"The idea that — in a community where we could place people in the private housing market to reintegrate them into society — we would put them in [trailer] ghettos with no jobs, no community, no future, strikes me as extraordinarily bad public policy, and violates every conservative principle that I'm aware of," said former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a Republican.

Gingrich is not known for his fondness for government programs, but he has tended to be a pragmatist and has been increasingly vocal about the way in which the current administration runs its operations.

Philosophies aside, good governance and rational, helpfull public policy is in everyone's best interest.

- Murphy

The Great Bus Question

Will we finally find an answer to the question implied by the famous photo of a lot full of buses sitting in water up to their seats? Kevin Drum at Washington Monthly picks up on a piece by Michelle Millhollon in the Baton Rouge Advocate that gets Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco's side.

It does raise the question, will anyone care?

- Murphy

Royale's new Website

The hippest spot on Kingshighway now has a hip new website, check out The Royale.

- Murphy

Government? We don't need no stinkin' government

Columnist Tom Friedman does not often pen a column that I agree with. It is not so much that I think he is wrong so much as I question his reasoning, even when he does advocate positions or ideas I agree with.

Today's column, however, is an exception.

Friedman sees Hurricane Katrina as stripping away the veneer of the Bush administration's and modern Republican claims of good governance and responsible leadership. It is representative of the abandoning of the basic principles of governance. The often critical question posed by administration critics. "Where are the adults?" comes to mind as more and more evidence of complete administrative collapse comes to light.

One of the most recent examples is that despite the heaped criticism upon the hapless former head of FEMA, Michael Brown, it turns out that the ultimate call had to be made by the Department of Homeland Security Chief, Secretary Michael Chertoff.

WASHINGTON - The federal official with the power to mobilize a massive federal response to Hurricane Katrina was Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, not the former FEMA chief who was relieved of his duties and resigned earlier this week, federal documents reviewed by Knight Ridder show.

Even before the storm struck the Gulf Coast, Chertoff could have ordered federal agencies into action without any request from state or local officials. Federal Emergency Management Agency chief Michael Brown had only limited authority to do so until about 36 hours after the storm hit, when Chertoff designated him as the "principal federal official" in charge of the storm.

DHS is a Bush administration creation, one that occurred over the resistance of the administration. Their first appointment as Secretary of DHS, Bernie Kerik, was perhaps a sign of the administration's opinion of the importance of qualified leadership in an agency they seemingly had little interest in. Kerik withdrew his name after numerous questions arose over his past including a New Jersey warrant, possible criminal ties, and the employment of an illegal immigrant as a nanny. There was also the general perception that what Kerik has done best in his time in government service was to promote Kerik.

Friedman ends his column quoting a Singapore columnist:

Janadas Devan, a Straits Times columnist, tried to explain to his Asian readers how the U.S. is changing. "Today's conservatives," he wrote, "differ in one crucial aspect from yesterday's conservatives: the latter believed in small government, but believed, too, that a country ought to pay for all the government that it needed.

"The former believe in no government, and therefore conclude that there is no need for a country to pay for even the government that it does have. ... [But] it is not only government that doesn't show up when government is starved of resources and leached of all its meaning. Community doesn't show up either, sacrifice doesn't show up, pulling together doesn't show up, 'we're all in this together' doesn't show up."

- Murphy

White House plays the Blame Game Best

Via Josh Marshall, Time Magazine takes a close look at the reality of the Bush White House.

The White House has sent delegates to meetings in Washington of outside Republican groups who have plans to blame the Democrats and state and local officials. In the meantime, it has no plans to push for a full-scale inquiry like the 9/11 commission, which Bush bitterly opposed until the pressure from Congress and surviving families made resistance futile.

From Mike Allen's Time article.

- Murphy