Government Executive - Authors - Jason Vest

Maverick Moves On

Jason Vest — Sat, 15 Apr 2006 00:00:00 -0400

Pentagon whistleblower Ernie Fitzgerald hangs up his spurs after a career fighting government waste.

For most veteran Defense Department civil servants, the Pentagon would be the logical place for a retirement ceremony. But in the case of A. Ernest "Ernie" Fitzgerald, 80, it seemed only fitting that on Feb. 27, the symbolic finish to a unique career in federal service would not be there but in a hearing room at the Dirksen Senate Office Building.

It was in a similar room in 1968, that Fitzgerald, then a civilian Air Force analyst, candidly told Sen. William Proxmire's Joint Economic Committee about a likely $2.3 billion cost overrun in the Air Force's C-5 cargo aircraft program. And it was there on Capitol Hill that Fitzgerald's real career-as Washington's most famous and tenacious whistleblower-began.

Having previously been advised to "play dumb" during the C-5 hearing, Fitzgerald said, he was subjected afterward to all manner of harassment by the Air Force, ranging from being shut out of meetings to having his mail opened and his life investigated. Once directed to review some of the Air Force's highest profile programs, his new assignments included such esteemed endeavors as auditing a Defense Department bowling alley construction project in Thailand. And all that happened before Richard Nixon became president. Not long after he took office in 1969, it was reported that Nixon told aides to "get rid of that son of a bitch." In short order, Defense Secretary Melvin Laird fired Fitzgerald.

But Fitzgerald's termination hardly shut him up. In fact, it fired him up, prompting him to write the muckraking classics The High Priests of Waste (Norton, 1972) and The Pentagonists: An Insider's View of Waste, Mismanagement and Fraud in Defense Spending (Houghton Mifflin, 1989). He lectured nationally on Pentagon profligacy and the lack of congressional oversight. After several years, with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union and devoted pro bono attorneys, Fitzgerald succeeded in getting back his job.

Over the years, Fitzgerald inspired zealous congressional overseers-including Proxmire, the late Democratic senator from Wisconsin, and Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa-through testimony and sometimes on detail to their staffs. Although hardly as visible in recent years as in his heyday, Fitzgerald nonetheless managed to draw the ire of the current administration. Last year, after reviewing his complaint that his small staff of analysts had been decimated, the federal judge who restored him to his job ruled that the Air Force no longer had any obligations to the court or Fitzgerald.

After Fitzgerald decided that at 79 it was time to leave government service, acting Defense Inspector General Thomas F. Gimble personally intervened to ensure that Fitzgerald's files and pension were in order. At Fitzgerald's retirement gathering, Gimble awarded him the Defense IG's Distinguished Civilian Service Medal.

The award was perhaps a nice capstone to Fitzgerald's career, but there was an appropriately maverick and marginal quality to the ceremony. Grassley, who officiated, was eloquent and his words heartfelt: "To Ernie, saving the taxpayers' money was never just a goal-it was more than that. It was more like a calling. It was a matter of faith to him-keeping the faith with taxpayers."

Only two reporters were on hand to cover the event. And mere minutes after Fitzgerald began to accept the hand and congratulations of longtime friends and colleagues, he and his well-wishers were all but herded out of the room by a coterie of Senate staffers. It was an indicator, perhaps, that on the road of the whistleblower, it's always night-but certainly not one Fitzgerald has gone gently into.

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Uncle Sam Blogs You

Jason Vest — Sat, 01 Apr 2006 00:00:00 -0500

The Army Reserve provides content to attract and keep soldiers.

Early this year, the Army Reserve dipped a toe into the blogosphere. The move came well after active-duty soldiers, especially those deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, and military families and retirees had created a large and lively community of military Web logging. After administratively punishing some soldiers for their blogging, and informally citing others for operational security violations, the Army finally developed a policy governing what soldiers can and cannot do on their blogs in March 2005.

Now, the Reserve is embracing military bloggers as a conduit for news designed to persuade soldiers to lengthen their tours of duty. In January, a handful of military bloggers received variations of an e-mail from Charlie Kondek of Haas MS&L, a Detroit public relations firm. The service hired the company to "test a new outlet for public information," Kondek wrote in his e-mail. "The Army believes that military blogs are a valuable medium for reaching out to soldiers," Kondek added. "The Army plans to offer you and selected bloggers exclusive editorial content on a few issues you're likely to be interested in."

What this "exclusive editorial content" might be wasn't specified, but it wasn't long before bloggers began a spirited, contentious debate on Kondek's e-mail. "I'm not sure I know what to think of this," wrote William M. Arkin on Early Warning, his national and homeland security blog on The Washington Post's Web site. "The 'content' under discussion, an Army public affairs officer tells me, is not the nitty-gritty of deployments and living conditions overseas. It is planned to be an official counter to the perceived unwillingness of the mainstream media to report the 'good news' from Iraq," Arkin reported. His observation spawned a number of posts and ripostes discussing whether the nascent PR effort was ethical, legal, necessary, unnecessary, benign, insidious, part of a plot initiated by the dreaded MSM (mainstream media), a threat to a free press, and a threat to the culture of blogging, among other things.

Kondek declined to answer questions about his e-mail, referring all queries to Lt. Col. Jon Dahms, the chief of recruitment communications for the Army Reserve. According to Dahms, the Reserve's first foray into blogging is part of an effort to attract and keep reservists. "We're trying to communicate that you can still serve in the reserves and have a civilian life and continue to serve the nation proudly," Dahms says. "We look for stories that show this from a variety of sources, and if there's a real good story we can bump up to the national level, we're interested in doing that. We ID those stories and have MS&L make contact with the news media, networks, magazines, to arrange interviews with soldiers. And now we're focusing on military blogs, the ones most frequented by military members."

Dahms says it's too early to know whether the blog outreach has produced results, adding that the Army Reserve doesn't really have a measure of success. "I think we'll look at responses, see how it's received by bloggers based on the buzz it's generating and make the determination from there if it's meeting our needs," he says. "But the key thing is for us to inform soldiers that are serving that the Army Reserve is an option."

Spc. Jason Christopher Hartley, a 14-year veteran of the Army National Guard, is amused that the Army's first foray into the blog world would be via a public relations agency, especially for purposes of retention and recruitment. Hartley started his Web log, justanothersoldier.com, after deploying to Iraq in 2003.

Almost immediately, his commanding officer ordered him to take it down. Hartley complied, and instead mass e-mailed his observations and musings to readers. But in the waning days of his tour, he put his blog back up, and in no time was pulled out of combat and sent back to Fort Drum, N.Y., to face a disciplinary hearing on more than a dozen blog-related charges, including disobeying a direct order, violating operational security and conduct unbecoming a noncommissioned officer. The latter charge, Hartley says, was due to a picture posted to his blog of him sitting on a toilet.

In Hartley's view, the charges against him had less to do with security and protocol concerns and more to do with matters of taste. Hartley's observations were sometimes darkly comic in content and sarcastic in tone. What's so ironic about the new Haas MS&L effort, he says, is that he regularly gets e-mails from young people telling him that justanothersoldier.com has inspired them to join the Army, or asking him for advice about enlisting-which he almost always recommends.

"You don't need to make it all nice-you can give kids the straight poop and say, 'Look, I don't like hurting people but I like combat; I want to be a good person but I like shooting stuff;' and they can process those statements of duality pretty well," he says.

"It's smart that the Army is finally coming around and realizing the people read blogs, but I don't know that they understand how people read them . . . there are a lot of bloggers out there who are already shining examples of having success in the life of a reservist."

But echoing the concern of Arkin and others, the Army isn't just doing blog outreach in the name of recruiting and retention. In a February speech, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld revealed that a special public affairs unit at U.S. Central Command has been active in blog outreach as well.

The three-man unit-whose motto is "Engage"-offers materials written by the military to bloggers and encourages them to link to CENTCOM's Web site. The unit also writes to bloggers to correct or take issue with information it considers incomplete or inaccurate. According to critics such as Christopher Simpson, an intelligence and propaganda scholar at American University, some of CENTCOM's efforts merit further scrutiny and discussion, especially since the bulk of its interaction is with bloggers the command considers favorable. "There is a variety of things the military can promote, but they can't promote partisan politics, particularly on the taxpayers' dime," Simpson says. "Where exactly the line is here seems hazy, and people should look at this closely and debate it."

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Past Trumps Present

Jason Vest — Sat, 01 Apr 2006 00:00:00 -0500

Politics keeps Cold War weapons alive, sucking resources from the battles at hand.

Up to its ears in insurgents in Iraq and terrorists worldwide, the Bush administration issued a comprehensive military strategy and a spending plan focused primarily on fighting other nations using traditional, even outdated, weapons. First came the Feb. 3 release of the third Pentagon Quadrennial Defense Review, and a few days later, the fiscal 2007 Defense budget. Carl Conetta, Project on Defense Alternatives co-director, points out that the 2005 QDR is supposed to "connect our military strategy with our force development plans and, in turn, connect these with current and future budgets." But, he says, the latest version "is long on assertion and short on quantification-'short' as in utterly lacking."

Despite the likelihood that future U.S. conflicts will resemble the unconventional warfare of Iraq and Afghanistan, the QDR tends to treat these as anomalies. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld cast the QDR as a "roadmap for change, leading to victory" as the United States enters the "fifth year of this global war [on terrorism]." Yet it puts at least as much emphasis on a possible threat posed by China, which would require costly weapons systems to rebuff.

Some notions in the latest QDR and the fiscal 2007 Defense budget were widely applauded. Recommended boosts for Special Forces weapons and personnel are examples. But the Pentagon's nearly $440 million request contained some shockers, especially the increase in spending on major weapons programs-including Cold War-era holdovers-by $8 billion.

Defense Policy Board member Newt Gingrich wrote in a March 4 op-ed in The Washington Post that a focus on the continued funding for these weapons systems hampers the QDR process and unfairly "reduces change in national security to a narrow and inaccurate calculation." Among the most controversial line items was a $2.2 billion down payment for 60 Air Force F-22s. At $339 million per plane, the F-22 is an awesome piece of machinery. With pilot-customized flat-screen displays, super-stealth ability, next-generation tracking radar and the capability to go supersonic without using afterburners, the F-22 defines tactical air superiority.

But even a few proponents will concede that whatever its merits, the F-22 is still in the mix because it's also a masterpiece of political engineering. As a recent Congressional Research Service report (RL31673) noted, the threat the F-22 was designed to take on-the Soviet Air Force-is gone and isn't coming back soon. But with 30 major subcontractors and 4,500 suppliers spread out over 48 states directly accounting for 28,000 jobs and indirectly accounting for more than 100,000 others, the report said, the F-22 is congressionally bulletproof despite its astronomical costs.

The F-22 has experienced cost overruns well past the $1 billion mark, forcing the Air Force to scale back the program. The Government Accountability Office has found that the Air Force couldn't account for $1.3 billion and that the F-22 program needs a new financial model. But the QDR and Defense budget treat the program as sacrosanct-even adding four more planes. This despite the fact that insurgent forces, which draw most of the military's attention today, do not "train, enlist or use fighter pilots [or] employ fighter forces," as notes retired Air Force Col. Everest Riccioni, who helped with the design of the F-16.

But F-22 advocates, including Gingrich, contend the aircraft is necessary in the event of a potential war with China, North Korea or Iran. Its utility has less to do with air-to-air combat than "survivability against anti-aircraft missiles," he says. The QDR doesn't even entertain the notion that such a costly program born of a bygone era should be reconsidered. In fact, the F-22 merely gets one line: "Restructure the F-22A program and extend production through fiscal year 2010 with a multiyear acquisition contract, to ensure the department does not have a gap in fifth-generation stealth capabilities." This means prime contractor Lockheed Martin Corp. of Bethesda, Md., would stretch out production. After the budget was released, Lockheed's stock hit its highest mark since mid-2002.

The QDR and budget debates have begun to give some previous boosters pause. "I think it's a crying shame we're dumping money into something we're probably never going to use at a time when it's better spent somewhere else," says a recently retired senior Air Force officer. Adding to his hesitation and that of other backers was a recent revelation by Air Combat Command chief Gen. Ronald E. Keys. At the Air Force Association's Air Warfare Symposium in early February, Keys said the Air Force is seriously considering a Lockheed proposal to sell F-22s to a few overseas allies.

"This is the most high-tech plane with super-secret, gee-whiz gizmos we've ever designed and built, and if anyone suggested it was proper to sell it overseas even a year ago, they'd have been thrown out of the room," says a veteran civilian Air Force official who asked not to be identified. "Sell this overseas and you could very easily end up with the following situation: The fighter we've been building to go up against China is the one we end up flying against after the technology has been stolen from someone else we sold it to and then reverse-engineered and produced by the [Chinese] Air Force."

Off the Chopping Block

Some of the most controversial weapons systems escaped cuts in the fiscal 2007 Defense budget request.

F-22 Raptor: $2.8 billion: The Air Force gets four more aircraft than last year, bringing the total on order to 183.
SSN-774 Virginia-Class Submarine: $2.6 billion: The Pentagon says two new ships a year are necessary even though many argue the United States already has achieved post-Cold War submarine supremacy.
DD(X) Destroyer: $3.4 billion: Experts find this a low estimate of the cost of constructing two ships, expecting the real price to come closer to $4 billion apiece.
CVN-21 Aircraft Carrier: $1.1 billion: This ship will replace the USS Enterprise when it is retired in eight years. Critics ask whether the Navy can't make do with the remaining 11 carrier groups.
Missile Defense: $10.4 billion: Although still not operational after decades of development, the program would get double the Special Forces increase.

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Haunted by Abu Ghraib

Jason Vest — Sat, 01 Apr 2006 00:00:00 -0500

Having helped reveal abuse at the notorious prison, former interrogator Torin Nelson opens up about why it happened and how it has wrecked his career.

On Oct. 3, 2005, Torin Nelson walked off a U.S. C-5 aircraft at Manas Air Base just outside Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, feeling like all was right with the world. For most of his adult life, Nelson, 36, had been an interrogator, first as a noncommissioned officer in the Army and National Guard, then as a civilian contractor. His most recent job had been as an instructor helping to train new interrogators. But after several months at "the schoolhouse"-the Army Intelligence Center and School at Fort Huachuca, Ariz.-Nelson concluded that he wasn't quite ready to hang up his spurs. His passion still lay in real-world interrogations.

So he couldn't have been happier last September when Doylestown, Pa., defense contractor SYTEX Inc., owned by Bethesda, Md.-based Lockheed Martin Corp., hired him and told him to start packing his bags. (Lockheed did not return phone calls seeking comment on this story.) Come October, according to his project manager, Nelson would be winging toward Afghanistan as part of a contract with the Army, interrogating suspected Taliban cadre. So on Oct. 1, 2005, with his 6-foot-5, 260-pound frame wedged into a seat on a military flight out of Ramstein Air Base in Germany, Nelson was feeling like he was back in the saddle. Aside from his inaugural Afghan interrogation-with luck, about 36 hours away-the only thing on his mind was being able to stretch his legs and check his e-mail during a refueling stop at Manas, a lily pad of an air field on the Kyrgyzstan-Kazakhstan border.

Though he had no way of knowing, the stop at Manas would not, in fact, be his transit point to Afghanistan. Rather, it would be the first in a series of stops in what has become an occupational limbo, one that seems to Nelson a warning that no good deed goes unpunished.

It all had to do with his work at a place called Abu Ghraib.

Sucker Punched

Checking his e-mail while the plane refueled, Nelson felt like he'd been sucker punched as he read a note from his project manager. "I must inform you," it began, "that your contract has been terminated by the client." No explanation, no apology for any inconvenience, just an order to return stateside immediately, underscored by a stark final line: "Do not go to Bagram, Afghanistan."

Nelson quickly began going over events-first, from the past few days; next, over his entire career-in an effort to figure out what would cause the Army to send him packing. He'd taken a flight out of Germany a day later than originally planned; surely that wasn't a firing offense. Beyond that, what else could there be? No one had ever questioned his qualifications. He was a decorated, honorably discharged noncommissioned officer with 13 years of field experience that included interrogations in the former Soviet Union, the Balkans, Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, and Iraq. He'd been hired to work at Fort Huachuca. Lockheed Martin had hired him for Afghanistan. And the Army certainly hadn't objected after the company forwarded his résumé to its Intelligence and Security Command.

Anxious and perplexed, Nelson wrote back saying he wasn't returning stateside without a more detailed explanation. By the time he reached Incirlik Air Base in Turkey, he had one. He was stunned by what he read: "The decision was based on your association with the high-profile issues surrounding Abu [Ghraib]," his project manager e-mailed. "I've been informed CJTF-76 [Combined Joint Task Force-76, the U.S. military authority in Afghanistan] have expressed concern about employing anyone who was involved in any way with the Abu [Ghraib] incident."

Nelson's eyes went back over one phrase again and again: "involved in any way." If he had been one of those at Abu Ghraib who had violated everything from common decency to international law by beating and terrorizing Iraqi prisoners, he could understand being thrown off the contract. But Nelson says he wasn't one of those people. Abuse by American soldiers at the Abu Ghraib prison became public in April 2004, after The New Yorker magazine exposed it and CBS News broadcast photographs. In fact, as a contractor for Arlington, Va.-based defense contractor CACI International Inc. at Abu Ghraib, he had been one of the first to provide evidence to Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba's investigators, who began looking into abuse allegations in early 2004.

Nelson gave investigators leads about alleged prisoner mistreatment he had just begun to develop after he discovered one of his prisoners had been abused by another interrogator. In a report delivered in February 2005, Taguba found that between October and December 2003, "numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant and wanton criminal abuses were inflicted on several [Abu Ghraib] detainees." Among those cited as perpetrators and recommended for punishment were John Israel and Stephen Stephanowicz, two CACI contractors. Nelson told Taguba's investigators he believed they merited scrutiny.

Compared with the indignities showcased in the infamous Abu Ghraib photo-graphs, what Nelson witnessed was comparatively tame. When a detainee showed Nelson a badly bruised arm he claimed came from being thrown into a wall by another interrogator, Nelson was skeptical. But as Nelson, at the time a new arrival to Abu Ghraib, began to look around him, the detainee's claims began to seem more credible.

"I saw one guy who had his hands cuffed through the bars of a cell door, and a stereo was facing him so he had to listen to heavy metal music; this was someone's idea of a proper interrogation technique," Nelson says. "I watched another interrogator, a complete amateur, start screaming at a subject and then order him thrown in isolation for being uncooperative. Many of the Army interrogators were fresh out of school or without a lot of experience, and some of the contract interrogators just weren't qualified."

Even so, when Nelson heard about a detainee being thrown from a vehicle and then dragged by his handcuffs, he had a hard time believing standards could have fallen so far. But when he mentioned what he'd heard to a young soldier, the soldier confirmed that he'd seen it while on guard duty. Deeply troubled, Nelson began quietly pulling files and actively looking for signs of malfeasance. About the same time, Army Criminal Investigation Command investigators working for Taguba arrived at the prison. Nelson shared his observations and what little hard information he had.

David R. Irvine, a friend of Nelson's in Salt Lake City and a retired Army brigadier general and former interrogation instructor at the now defunct 6th Army Intelligence School, finds it bizarre that anyone in the Army wouldn't want Nelson with them in the field. "If I were commanding [a military intelligence] interrogation unit, he is exactly the person I would want as a supervisor and mentor for every interrogator assigned to that unit, because I have absolute confidence that he would give me unvarnished information, that he would set and maintain a rigorous standard of lawful operation for himself and those he would direct," Irvine wrote in a letter of recommendation for Nelson last December. "His practical experience in the field is probably unexcelled-he's interrogated all kinds of folks from a variety of backgrounds and nations-and he has a particularly keen ethical sense," Irvine says now.

Inexperienced, Overwhelmed

Nelson's position is that a well-trained, well-disciplined interrogator doesn't need to lay a finger on anyone. Rather, interrogators must hone approaches grounded in patience and cunning. Like many professional interrogators, Nelson is a serious student of interrogation history. Like many pros, he worships at the altar of Hanns Joachim Scharff, a German corporal whose highly effective methods of extracting information from captured Allied pilots in World War II included such techniques as having protracted philosophical discussions with his subjects while strolling through the woods. "He'd get little bits of information each day, so small the prisoners didn't even realize what they'd given up," Nelson says.

Indeed, as South Carolina trial attorney and former Army interrogator David Swanner noted last year on his South Carolina Trial Law blog, "The interrogation course at the U.S. Army Intelligence Center and School in Fort Huachuca, Ariz., was (at the time I was teaching there) based on the techniques that Hanns Scharff developed. . . . All that seems to have gone out the window in favor of torture now."

Based on his experiences as an interrogator first in the 1990s and later at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, Nelson says a number of factors have converged to replace the very real Hanns Scharff with the very unreal character Jack Bauer of television's 24 as interrogator icon for a new generation.

For today's professional interrogator, says Nelson, popular culture is as much an enemy as terrorists. "I'd say that Holly- wood is partially to blame for some of the bad stuff that's happened in interrogations since 9/11," he says. "At Fort Huachuca, there's a number of kids whose only frame of reference for interrogation is 24. They see someone getting slammed into a wall on TV and it works. But in real life, it doesn't."

That's partly due to the fact that for the war on terrorism, there simply haven't been enough interrogators. According to a 2004 Army inspector general's report, these shortages directly contributed to problems and abuses at Abu Ghraib. An added problem, Nelson says, is that most Army interrogators have been trained not to interrogate terrorists or insurgents, but enemy soldiers fighting a conventional war. "I saw very clearly at [Guantanamo] the idea in action that an interrogator is an interrogator is an interrogator, and nothing could be further from the truth. There's a big difference between interrogating someone about how many tanks and men are coming though the Fulda Gap, and an Islamist who you have nothing in common with," he says. Most Army interrogators are junior enlisted personnel, not necessarily the most mature or worldly bunch, he notes, and just when they start getting seasoned, they get promoted and become administrators.

Irvine also echoes Nelson's view that young interrogators who show promise rarely get to fully develop it because interrogation doesn't offer much in the way of career advancement. "Soldiers are like anyone else-they want to get promoted and want to have a career path that has some promise of advancement or taking them in the direction they want to go," he says.

If the only way to advance is to accept promotion out of the interrogation booth, or if the only way to stay fulfilled is not to accept promotion, then interrogators either move up or laterally into new jobs. Which brings up another problem: Noncommissioned officers overseeing interrogators are either too inexperienced or too overwhelmed to provide mentoring. "I've talked with a number of interrogators who've left the specialty because they were extremely unhappy with the way they were managed," he says. What's more, many officers running interrogation operations have no background in the area. "When officers came through the courses I was involved in, it was primarily to give them a taste of what was involved in the interrogation process with an eye toward their functioning as managers, not so they would actually be doing interrogations," Irvine says.

Nelson says Army units in the field often are slow to corroborate captives' information. And U.S. troops frequently rounded up innocent people, overwhelming the understaffed and flawed system. "In Iraq we referred to [the 4th Infantry Division, then stationed in the Sunni triangle] as the "grab-'em-all-4th ID [because] they were so adamant that at least someone in every group of people they encountered had to be bad," he recalls.

Nelson also is concerned that the Army's new hybrid occupational specialty for interrogators-97E, human intelligence collector-removes the requirement that interrogators become fluent in a foreign language. The Army recently retired the 97E interrogator specialty and merged it with what was the 97B counterintelligence agent specialty. While this might not be a bad thing, Nelson says the Army would be well-advised to consider choosing interrogators from among officers, not from enlisted ranks. "Officers are older, more mature, better educated. I think you could do this without necessarily making it only for officers, but the key is placing a premium on those qualities and real-world experience," he says.

Death Threats

Since last October, Nelson has been solicited or applied for dozens of overseas contract interrogation jobs. He has gotten none. Army Lt. Col. Maricela G. Alvarado, an intelligence staff officer, told Nelson in a recent e-mail that the Army knows that he was "not involved in any incident of wrongdoing" at Abu Ghraib. But, she added, it's "commanders on the ground" who "ultimately make the final decision" about which contractors they allow in theater. And according to an executive who has gone to the mat for him, Nelson provokes someone, whether it's commanders on the ground or Army brass, to move the goal posts. "[Our company] is apparently being asked to be able to 'certify' that deploying you forward would not cause an adverse circumstance at some point in the future," the executive wrote in a recent e-mail to Nelson. "I don't know what that means . . . [but the] basic feeling is that any attention would be unwanted, and they do not wish to accept the risk." Nelson shared this and similar e-mails on the condition that the privacy of companies and executives be honored.

His attempts to ascertain how he would gain certification-and whether it's a legal requirement-have come to naught. "They're saying there's no blacklisting policy, but there's clearly a blacklist," Nelson says. "It's like the word has gone out to blackball me."

Nelson believes he was at best a very minor player in the Abu Ghraib drama. Unlike Army Spc. Joseph Darby, who slipped Army investigators a CD-ROM of abuse pictures, Nelson wasn't the trigger for the investigation. Unlike Spc. Samuel Provance, he didn't go public with his view that the Army's investigation of military intelligence officers, headed by Maj. Gen. George Fay, was defined more by pulled punches and less by a desire to get the whole truth.

All Nelson did was pass on what little he had heard and had been able to document. And as far as he was concerned, he'd already paid a fair price for doing the right thing. It was bad enough that word of his meeting with investigators leaked almost immediately at Abu Ghraib. The ostracization that followed was far from pleasant. Worse were the thinly veiled death threats that convinced even as formidable a man as Nelson that he had no choice but to flee not just Abu Ghraib, but Iraq.

Comparatively speaking, Nelson hasn't had the worst of it. Darby and his family, for example, had to be taken into protective custody after receiving death threats. After Provance spoke to the media about Abu Ghraib and the Fay investigation, his superiors ordered him to cease contact with the press, and subsequently suspended his security clearance, reassigned him and demoted him. Through the graces of Provance's home state senator, torture opponent Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., Provance did address a congressional subcommittee on whistleblower protection in February.

By contrast, outside of a cursory letter to the Army's legislative liaison, Nelson says his senators, Utah Republicans Robert Bennett and Orrin Hatch, haven't been particularly helpful. A letter from Hatch was forwarded to the Defense Department inspector general's office in mid-February, and "We're looking at it to see what we can do," says Gary M. Comerford, an IG spokesman.

When veteran national security correspondent David Martin recently proposed a piece on Nelson for the CBS Evening News, the producers turned it down. Martin did, however, discuss the unproduced story on a CBS blog. "I think part of the reason [the story was turned down]," he wrote "was not the news value, but the fact that nobody wants to put those awful pictures [from Abu Ghraib] on television again."

On March 16, Nelson filed as a Democratic candidate for Congress, in Utah's 3rd District, for the seat now held by Republican Christopher Cannon.

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Getting an Earful

Jason Vest — Wed, 15 Mar 2006 00:00:00 -0500

The fight over domestic intelligence surveillance is more about legal loopholes than illegal listening.

After leaving the National Security Agency in 1976, Joseph J. Tomba had no contact with his former employer until 2004. Then, for the first time in almost three decades, the super-secret signals intelligence agency called to ask him to come back to headquarters to be interviewed for an in-house training film. Though long retired from government service, Tomba, a former technical specialist for NSA, proceeded to Fort Meade, Md., home of the agency. The film, however, had nothing to do with instruction about technical specialist work. It was a primer for NSA employees on how to deal with congressional inquiries and subpoenas. Tomba has a unique perspective on the subject. On Feb. 25, 1976, the West Virginia-born engineer became the first, and so far the only, NSA employee subpoenaed by Congress for his role in a domestic surveillance program. And because he was a less-than-cooperative witness before a House Government Operations subcommittee, he also became the only NSA employee to be recommended for a citation for contempt of Congress. The lack of cooperation wasn't entirely his idea. As part of a sweeping assertion of executive privilege by President Gerald Ford, then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld ordered Tomba not to answer legislators' questions, particularly those about Project Shamrock, under which NSA had spent the previous three decades intercepting almost all outgoing U.S. telegram traffic.

Tomba says the 2004 training film shows that NSA was preparing for a collision over its domestic activities even before the current and still not fully understood surveillance program authorized by President Bush. "What they were doing was building a training film for . . . what's happening right now," he says. The program shows NSA staffers how to handle such situations, he says, good evidence that the agency had reason to expect the problem might recur.

The Bush administration has vigorously defended, in practical and legal terms, the existence of an NSA program operating without authorization from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court-the judicial body that secretly reviews and authorizes physical searches and electronic surveillance in national security investigations. Exactly what the NSA program is and how it works are still far from clear. In some cases, it appears that international communications to (and possibly from) individuals or organizations in the United States have been collected, monitored and analyzed. In other cases, people communicating with each other within the United States might have had either the content of those communications-or the transactional data that describes them, such as call times, durations and phone numbers-collected, monitored or analyzed. It also appears that private telecommunications companies voluntarily have been giving transactional data to NSA for analysis, and that some companies have given the agency direct access to "switches," devices that route all manner of domestic and international communications among consumers. According to the president, the common denominator in all these cases is a clear connection between the interception targets and al Qaeda.

A former U.S. counterterrorism official with direct knowledge of NSA programs, who asked to remain anonymous, says some of the information gathering takes place at 32 Sixth Ave. in Manhattan, where San Antonio, Texas-based AT&T operates an international switch. Additionally, a veteran senior intelligence official who participated in the surveillance now under fire says the NSA's efforts "ran the gamut" of practices, from data-mining and analysis of transactional data to interception and monitoring of communications.

"It [involved] simply identifying a connection between two parties, with one party overseas, and then possibly following up on connections between the person here and, say, other people everywhere else," the official says, "like, 'If A talks to B and B talks to C and C to D, is there a relationship between A and D?' [and] not even collecting or looking at the substance of communications at all. [And it ranged] to, what was the substance of the connection or communication, and this was in turn used for analysts and others to identify the type of communication as benign or not so benign. A lot of the time, it wasn't something to worry about. In terms of stuff we did need to further explore, the contributions were important," he continued. "I was never aware of any abuse of the program. We just focused on that which merited scrutiny. . . . I guess the best way to put it is this: If you're not an al Qaeda sympathizer or part of its support mechanism, the government has much better things to do."

Catalyst for Controversy

But according to coverage that began in The New York Times Dec. 16, 2005, government officials' reservations about the surveillance kicked off the controversy. According to one set of scholars and lawyers, NSA's actions are clearly in contravention of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and the president has abused executive powers and privilege both by initiating the program and keeping its details secret. According to another set of scholars and lawyers, there are multiple potential legal and constitutional justifications for the president's actions.

Perhaps most critical, as Newsweek reported on Jan. 29, is the fact that a number of conservative lawyers appointed to the Justice Department by the Bush administration-including former Deputy Attorney General James Comey, former Assistant Attorney General Jack Goldsmith and former senior Justice aide Patrick Philbin-were overruled in their analysis that in authorizing NSA's domestic surveillance, the administration was on very thin constitutional ice. Nevertheless, a group of current and former career national security officials with varying degrees of knowledge or participation in the contested NSA efforts all emphasized the same point during interviews: The surveillance in question has produced invaluable information, and complete revelation of details, including sources and methods, would be disastrous to ongoing counterterrorism efforts.

But this does not mean the entire effort should be given a pass, they say. "We did have better things to do than spend our time on a bunch of 'connections' that were tenuous at best, like someone whose connection to a phone number wasn't nearly as solid or direct as NSA thought," a veteran FBI official says, adding that "everyone from agents in the field to the top tier of Justice has had concerns about how parts of this have been run." And even those who believe in the necessity of the NSA effort nonetheless have concerns about the constitutionality of the administration's actions. "The career professionals who run this would never let it be abused, but there is no denying that if this was ever turned on the domestic population, it would be scary as hell," says one. Yet they wonder if, in Washington's current highly charged partisan atmosphere, a sober, considered investigation of the realities and issues surrounding the NSA program is possible.

If history from Tomba's era is any indicator, the result of congressional hearings and possible investigations won't be subpoenas for career professionals or prosecutions for transgressors or new and tougher laws, but simply new laws with new loopholes. "What's likely to happen is hearings will go into executive session, [the intelligence community] will lay it out fully and say, 'You want to shut it down?' and they won't," says a retired intelligence official familiar with the NSA program. "They'll just make it more formal."

Loose Laws

Indeed, the dubious aspects of the NSA's efforts actually might have less to do with actual practices than reporting requirements. Though FISA theoretically exists to provide U.S. citizens with layers of protection from government intrusion, those intimately familiar with it have long been leery. The libertarian Electronic Frontier Foundation-which maintains some of the most useful FISA background at www.eff.org/Censorship/Terrorism_ militias/fisa_faq.html-considers FISA dangerous because its language is too broad and vague. Jonathan Turley, a law professor at The George Washington University in Washington, casts it as "so full of holes it's like Swiss cheese." Indeed, Congress left some of the finer points of FISA to the executive branch. Under U.S. Signals Directive 18-the rule book that governs NSA's intercept practices-both the NSA director and the attorney general have considerable latitude for warrantless surveillance. After Sept. 11, the 2001 Patriot Act made certain FISA sections even more expansive.

But from the perspective of an administration that long has believed in the most expansive definitions of executive prerogative and privilege, both the pre- and post-Patriot Act FISAs are potentially irksome. Even NSA's signals directive mandates a variety of exemption-reporting requirements to everyone from the NSA general counsel to the Justice Department to Congress to the FISA court. And while the FISA court rarely turns down an application for a warrant, according to Justice Department annual FISA reports to Congress, the law also allows the court to tell the subject of any rejected surveillance that they were being monitored by the government.

"These are exactly the kinds of things that [people in the Bush administration] hated 30 years ago, and that they hate now, because they conflict with a very deeply held view that the president should have unconditional latitude to act," says a former high-ranking intelligence community official whose career encompassed the Ford administration, when Dick Cheney was chief of staff and Rumsfeld was first chief of staff and later Defense secretary. "Between the Patriot Act and other authorized exemptions before the Patriot Act, there isn't much the NSA can't do, under the right circumstances. The catch is, other people, however few, elsewhere in government eventually have to know, and might, however unlikely, say 'no.' "

There is, however, a very critical technological Achilles' heel in NSA's operations: All the digital signals the agency intercepts are captured just as they're conveyed-in computer codes of 0s and 1s. As The Baltimore Sun reported on Jan. 29, with increased text messaging, BlackBerry use and phone calls via the Internet, the sheer volume of those 0s and 1s has NSA effectively looking for needles in "a haystack that doubles in size every few months." So, according to the Sun story, "an estimated 95 percent of the information gathered is discarded without being translated into an understandable form." Unfortunately for NSA, Trailblazer, a sorting/translating program designed to bring order to the chaos, has been in a state of plodding development for six years.

It could be that part of Bush's program is intended to avoid relying on the needle-in-a-haystack approach by using existing resources to more rapidly and directly target certain personal digital communications. Nevertheless, the veteran intelligence community official who participated in the NSA program remains supportive, but also concerned. "To me," he says, "there are two very separate issues here. One is the worthiness of the program from the intelligence officers' perspective-what was the type of information being pursued, what threads were being pulled. In that sense, the collection activity was not only very justifiable, [but] I can say without partisan leanings that the need for these types of insights is in fact important for security. The second issue is whether or not the president had the statutory or constitutional authority to authorize this collection activity, and that is certainly a debatable issue. Constitutional scholars certainly don't agree, and I think this is definitely worthy of review."

Lessons from the 1970s

And it's here that Tomba's experiences can provide insight as to what any current review might yield. Recruited by NSA out of West Virginia University's engineering program in 1960, Tomba eventually was assigned a senior role in a highly classified signals intercept program that, as far as he or anyone else knew, was legal, having been approved at the highest levels of government. That was Operation Shamrock, which intercepted telegraphic communications.

Over time, NSA began to accept requests from other federal intelligence and law enforcement agencies to use Shamrock to intercept U.S. residents' incoming or outgoing international cables. It also developed a set of protocols, code-named Minaret, specifically to cover the NSA's tracks in maintaining these records. When the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations With Respect to Intelligence Activities, called the Church committee after its chairman, Sen. Frank Church, D-Idaho, began to hold hearings on U.S. intelligence operations in 1973, the Ford administration repeatedly lobbied to prevent any mention of Shamrock in public. Church, however, decided against this. But while the cat was out of the bag, the committee's questions stopped with the most senior NSA officials.

Rep. Bella Abzug, D-N.Y., felt differently. During an early 1976 probe by the House Government Operations Subcommittee on Government Information and Individual Rights, which she headed, investigators somehow got Tomba's name. Despite a congressional subpoena, not only did the Ford administration say Tomba couldn't be compelled to testify, on the basis of executive privilege, but the White House held that the heads of the telecommunications companies involved also were shielded.

Though contempt citations were recommended for Tomba and others, the full House Government Operations Committee never took up the matter, thus leaving unresolved how far the president's executive privilege extended. More important, however, is what happened at the Justice Department after all the congressional committees finished their investigations. The results are contained in two Top Secret reports that, though briefly declassified with heavy redactions in 1979, were retroactively reclassified in 1981.

In 1976, a handpicked team of career Justice Department lawyers began to review all of the committee and commission findings for possible violations of the law. Of 23 "different categories of questionable activity," the task force concluded that five had expired under the statute of limitations and seven "clearly possess no prosecutive potential." While the remaining 11 did have "potential," in each of those cases, the task force recommended against going forward, as "there appears to be little likelihood, if any, that convictions could be obtained on the basis of currently available evidence or evidence which might be reasonably developed."

Why? A central reason was the law itself. In many of the instances the task force reviewed, there simply wasn't adequate case law or precedent to assure victory, and the language of certain statutes was open to interpretation. Another concern was the likelihood of long battles with agencies over declassifying documents. Figuring out who to prosecute also was a concern. "There is likely to be much buck-passing," the report said, anticipating an effort by defendants "to subpoena every tenuously involved government official and former official to establish legitimate authorization or convoluted theories or purported authorization." Instead of prosecution, the task force recommended a number of suggestions for an eventual legislative remedy. That was FISA, which ended up having a lot of loopholes.

So as this latest controversy over NSA's activities unfolds, a number of political and national security observers with long memories predict that history likely will repeat itself: Congress will hold hearings, some subpoenas might be issued. Perhaps material will end up at Justice for review, possibly by a special counsel. Maybe a few court cases will be won at the District Court level. But ultimately, an absence of precedent or a lack of clear law on minor but critical points will lead everyone, however reluctantly, to eschew the punitive in favor of the legislative solution. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C.-though critical of the Bush administration's arguments in defense of its actions-admitted as much to Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez in Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on Feb. 6. "I would love to engage in a collaborative process with the administration to see if we can resolve this tension. . . . you'll have Congress on board, you'll be stronger in courts and the enemy will be weaker. How does that proposition sit with you?" Gonzalez said the administration would be "happy to listen to your ideas."

In mid-February, Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee shot down a Democratic motion that would require Justice to turn over documents pertaining to the legality of NSA's operations. On Feb. 16, the Senate Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence voted to forestall an investigation into the NSA's activities, with committee chairman Pat Roberts, R-Kan., pushing instead for changes to FISA. The Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility announced on Feb. 15 a probe that might produce some critical assessment of Justice's mechanisms for vetting the NSA program. In the end, it's likely that more details and pressure for greater action are likely to come from legal actions initiated by the American Civil Liberties Union, the Electronic Privacy Information Center and the National Security Archive, which in mid-February succeeded in getting Justice to begin declassifying pertinent documents, which were expected to be released beginning in early March. The Electronic Frontier Foundation also is suing major telecommunications firms in an effort to determine the specifics and extent of their roles in NSA surveillance.

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Shots Across the Bow

Jason Vest — Wed, 01 Mar 2006 00:00:00 -0500

Chuck Spinney has retired to his sailboat, but he's still taking aim at Defense waste.

The scene on a recent Friday evening train from Washington to New York City was familiar: Businessmen in ties and shirt sleeves pecking away at laptops, businesswomen fielding calls on mobile phones, workweek-weary travelers heading to the club car in search of a post-sundown counter to flagging blood sugar. Seeming a bit out of place was Franklin "Chuck" Spinney. Bereft of laptop or cell phone and clad in a distinctly unbusinesslike ensemble of khakis (wrinkled), red plaid shirt (threadbare) and brown cardigan sweater-vest (battered), Spinney hardly looked like someone on his way to a TV interview with Bill Moyers, let alone someone who would be featured in a provocative new documentary by award-winning filmmaker Eugene Jarecki, who's best known for The Trials of Henry Kissinger.

But as the retired Defense Department analyst spoke about his turn in Jarecki's Why We Fight-a film that includes perspectives ranging from Democrat to Republican, neoconservative to liberal, about the current state of the "military-industrial complex" that President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned of in his 1961 farewell address-it wasn't hard to understand Spinney's appeal to Moyers, Jarecki and their audiences.

For most of his 26-year career as an analyst in the Tactical Air Division of the Pentagon's Office of Program Analysis and Evaluation, Spinney was a formidable force in the service of anyone seeking to decipher the complexities of Defense arcana. Indeed, says Jarecki, "I think anybody who's decided to make a study of the inner workings of the Pentagon hasn't done his homework if he hasn't talked to Chuck-so many roads lead to him, which is why I knew it was essential to have him in the film."

First, however, Jarecki had to track down the analyst-no small task. There was a time when it wouldn't have been a challenge. After Spinney landed on the cover of Time magazine in 1983-for congressional testimony in which he critically parsed the systematic problems and excesses of the Defense budget-a wrathful Caspar Weinberger, then Defense secretary, wanted Spinney fired. Though a bipartisan crew of congressmen (including then-Rep. Dick Cheney) successfully stayed Weinberger's hand, he attempted to mete out a punishment of sorts by not only freezing Spinney at the GS-15 level, but even going so far as to order a plaster cubicle built around him (colloquially known as the "Spinney Wall"), lest his fiscally conservative influence corrupt younger, more impressionable analysts in earshot.

Though many might find the situation disappointing, Spinney thrived over the next 20 years. He produced scores of formal and informal studies and briefings for Pentagon officials, congressional staff, private industry and journalists on everything from the dangers of doctrinal intransigence to the avoidable costs of unnecessary weapons systems and dubious acquisition and procurement practices. But in 2003, after nearly 34 years of government service (seven and a half as an Air Force officer, 26 as a civilian Defense analyst), Spinney decided he had done his bit for military reform.

Not only did he retire, but he practically expatriated, setting sail with his wife, Alison, on their 40-foot sailboat and effectively severing contact with the mainland. Happy to talk about defense issues but unwilling to interrupt the first phase of his retirement to return to shore, Spinney forced Jarecki to hopscotch down the Atlantic coast in pursuit of an interview. "By the time I got to him, I felt like I was following an international man of mystery," says Jarecki. "He was on a boat somewhere in the Bahamas, and I had to get myself out there, which I did, Dramamine and all, to interview him."

Jarecki filmed nearly 12 hours of conversation with Spinney, then distilled it into much shorter snippets. Though Spinney doesn't command the most screen time, he is, says Jarecki, a linchpin of the film. He appears on camera to cogently and succinctly explain how a culture of cost-plus contracting unnecessarily bloats the defense budget. He talks about why precision-guided munitions aren't consistently precise and about the adverse impact of enlisted recruitment practices. His comments, in tandem with the film's visual images, serve to update the themes of Eisenhower's famous speech.

Briefly forsaking Spain and his sailboat, Spinney returned to the United States in January for the New York City première of Why We Fight as well as for his second appearance in three years on Bill Moyer's PBS series NOW.

Though happy to make the rounds of old friends and colleagues, Spinney was saddened by the news and intelligence they brought him. "Everything is worse than it was before; the QDR (Quadrennial Defense Review, which was released in early February) still [has us] spending more and on the wrong stuff than we need to," he sighed. "Get me back to my boat."

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The Cunningham Web

Jason Vest — Wed, 01 Feb 2006 00:00:00 -0500

CORRECTION: The version of this article in the February print edition incorrectly included a photo of Brent A. Wilkes, the executive director of the League of United Latin American Citizens, instead of Brent R. Wilkes, the contractor involved with Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham. LULAC's Wilkes has no connection with the scandal, and we deeply regret the error.

Investigations and potential targets multiply in bribery scandal.

Though the holiday season theoretically is a time of peace on Earth and good will toward men, the end of 2005 in Washington was anything but. And thus far in 2006, the season of rancor and scandal shows little sign of abating.

Between the snowballing controversy over domestic spying by the National Security Agency, the contentious Samuel Alito Supreme Court nomination hearings and the Jack Abramoff lobbying mess, an air of the ethically dubious hangs over all branches of government. Also still developing is the investigation centering on former Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham, R-Calif.

Cunningham pleaded guilty on Nov. 29, 2005, to receiving at least $2.4 million in bribes. But his tearful elocution before Judge Larry A. Burns of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California was not the end of the San Diego U.S. Attorney's Office's public corruption probe in the case.

Still in the cross hairs are four alleged co-conspirators: previously convicted felon Thomas Kontogiannis; his nephew-in-law, financier John T. Michael; and San Diego-area national security contractors Brent Wilkes, founder of defense contractor ADCS Inc., a system integrator for government and industry specializing in information management; and Mitchell Wade, formerly chief executive officer and president of MZM Inc., a Washington-based firm with offices in San Diego that provides intelligence-gathering, technology and homeland security analysis and consulting for government and the private sector. Of particular interest to federal investigators are not just Wilkes and Wade-who Cunningham said had bribed him in exchange for using his post on the House Appropriations Defense Subcommittee to steer lucrative contracts to them-but also other Congress members the contractors might have sought to influence. Cunningham is to be sentenced Feb. 27.

In Washington, another Cunningham probe initiated by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence chairman, Rep. Peter Hoekstra, R-Mich., is getting under way. Before Congress' December recess, committee Republicans and Democrats agreed that a yet-to-be-hired special committee counsel and two staffers will begin reviewing Cunningham's service on the panel for improprieties, possibly including corrupt dealings with contractors or national security violations.

The Intelligence Committee probe might examine Cunningham's recent championing of Saudi Arabia. For most of his congressional career, Cunningham said few kind words about the country. In 1990, he trounced an Arab-American primary challenger by casting him as "influenced by Arab oil interests." But in 2004, Cunningham made two trips to Saudi Arabia and came back lavishly praising the Saudis and making impassioned pleas for better Saudi-U.S. intelligence relations. Addressing the then-State Department counterterrorism coordinator, Ambassador Cofer Black, during an Aug. 4, 2004, Intelligence Committee hearing, Cunningham noted his fear that Saudi intelligence cooperation might erode. In October 2004, he spoke of the need to help Saudi Arabia, "a nation that is trying to help itself" with regard to intelligence.

Shortly after his appointment to the House Intelligence Committee, Cunningham sent a Feb. 8, 2001, letter to San Diego-area contractors touting his new "greater opportunities" to "represent the nation's top technological talent in the 'black' world."

In light of this letter, as well as ties between Cunningham and a Saudi family in a joint venture with a San Diego defense contractor, the Project on Government Oversight, a nonprofit Washington-based group that investigates federal corruption, wonders whether Cunningham was laying the groundwork to steer Saudi-oriented U.S. intelligence contracts or help companies establish inroads to the Saudi market. Given Cunningham's track record, "it seems investigators should be looking into whether he inappropriately used his position to stir up Saudi-related work for his friends," says Beth Daley, POGO's communications director.

What's more, in a story in the San Diego-area North County Times on Jan. 10, Rep. Ken Calvert, R-Calif., who accompanied Cunningham on one of the Saudi trips, said Kontogiannis was along too, and joined Cunningham in meetings with senior Saudi officials. Exactly what role Kontogiannis, a real estate businessman, played on a trip focused on counterterrorism is unclear. But after discovering Kontogiannis' previous bribery and visa fraud convictions, Calvert said, "If I had known his background, I wouldn't have felt very comfortable."

And then there's the matter of the person who paid for Cunningham's Saudi expeditions, as well as Calvert's. Cunningham's trips cost about $10,000, and were paid for by a person Cunningham referred to in a speech as simply "a constituent." House travel records show the constituent to be a naturalized American citizen named Ziyad Abduljawad, identified by Southern California media as a Saudi-American real estate developer.

Abduljawad's father has turned up on a list of Osama bin Laden financial supporters. As part of a multinational investigation into an Islamist charity called Benevolence International Foundation in 2002, Bosnian authorities raided the group's Sarajevo office and retrieved a document, dubbed the "Golden Chain," listing 15 Saudis from whom bin Laden sought or received money. Salahuddin Abduljawad, father of Ziyad, was one of the 15.

According to Peter Bergen, author of the best seller Holy War Inc.: Inside the Secret World of Osama bin Laden (Free Press, 2002) and the just-released The Osama bin Laden I Know: An Oral History of al Qaeda's Leader (Free Press, 2006), being on the Golden Chain does not necessarily make Abduljawad's father a fund- er of al Qaeda. Rough consensus holds that the list names people who helped bin Laden obtain funding for his pre-al Qaeda work with the Afghan mujahedin. "The allegation that some have made saying it's support of al Qaeda, I'm not sure is the case," Bergen says. Yet former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for International Law Enforcement Jonathan M. Winer says Cunningham's decision to accept a trip to Saudi Arabia from someone with even a distant Golden Chain connection raises serious concerns. "Trips like this are almost always funded by a foreign government, a charity, a nongovernmental organization, someone with a recognized history of involvement," he says. "When you have an American congressman taking funds from someone for foreign travel who's not regularly in the business of doing that, it would raise eyebrows. If I had been staffing the congressman in this case, I would have done some research on the Golden Chain and said, 'You have a real potential problem here.' "

The Abduljawad family business also appears to have ties with a San Diego-based U.S. defense contractor. The Abduljawad Group operates primarily in Saudi Arabia, with diverse interests including automotive imports and the local Mail Boxes Etc. franchise. But it also has an American venture listed on its Web site, a La Jolla, Calif.-based wireless communications company called GlobTel Inc. Papers filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission indicate that GlobTel operates as a joint venture under the name Ellumina with San Diego contractor SYS Technologies, which provides wireless communications, applications development, integration and data visualization to the Defense and Homeland Security departments.

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Radical Reformer

Jason Vest — Wed, 01 Feb 2006 00:00:00 -0500

Real Defense changes could mean contracting out military units, warfare expert says.

There are those who hope the Pentagon's Quadrennial Defense Review, due in February, will help galvanize the military's transformation efforts, but one prominent military reformer suggests it will be too little too late. His proposal: Blow up the Defense Department. Metaphorically, that is.

Retired Air Force Reserve Col. Chet Richards doesn't want anyone to think he's advocating the Pentagon's physical destruction. But, he says, it might be time to recast the Defense Department into something radically different and smaller.

Richards is the editor of the independent Web site Defense and the National Interest at www.d-n-i.net, a well-read and respected online forum on military reform. "I don't think many people high up in DoD are going to like [my] suggestion at all, but there's just no way to transform it into something we need that will do the job we need for now and the future," he says.

He broaches his provocative ideas in "Neither Shall the Sword: Conflict in the Years Ahead," the latest in an ongoing series of monographs published by the Center for Defense Information's Straus Military Reform Project. He was a close collaborator of the legendary Pentagon maverick Air Force Col. John Boyd from the mid-1970s until Boyd's death in 1997. In his 2001 book, A Swift, Elusive Sword (Center for Defense Information, 2003), Richards argued that it was high time for the U.S. military to embrace "manuever" or "third-generation" warfare, which emphasizes smaller, more agile forces and cheaper equipment. He contended that the approach would require the military to adapt to new times and threats by completely shedding conventional doctrines, force structures, equipment and procedures.

While the initial phases of U.S. incursions into Afghanistan and Iraq have validated his views on third-generation warfare, Richards isn't pleased that the Pentagon is still dragging its feet on tactical, strategic and grand strategic thinking that would move the military beyond maneuver warfare into the era of fourth-generation warfare: asymmetric and unconventional conflict that isn't exclusively military in nature. Doctrine and people, not huge weapons systems, are the driving forces of this new kind of warfare, he says. Richards sees dangerous inefficiency and marginalization in spending hundreds of billions of dollars to equip and maintain forces for older types of war he views as unlikely to be fought again.

He isn't alone in his skepticism about Defense transformation, or in recommending the Pentagon pull the plug on a plethora of costly-but-unproven weapons systems (including missile defense and other high-tech systems). In December 2004, the Government Accountability Office issued a scathing assessment of the Pentagon's efforts (GAO-05-70), citing Defense leaders' "lack of transparency and appropriate accountability across all of DoD's major business areas [that] results in billions of dollars in annual wasted resources in a time of increasing fiscal constraint."

Richards notes that "any transformation runs into the problem that the people responsible for leading it are the very ones who have been rewarded and promoted by the existing system. Extrapolate from the experience of large commercial organizations since the end of World War II. Most of them will go out of business before they make the changes necessary to survive," he writes. "All of our military departments were established to conduct war against organizations similar to themselves; conflict that did not fit this pattern was called 'special,' and until recently relegated to the backwaters of the Defense establishment.

"The [Pentagon] system of spending massive resources to deter the Soviets year after year proved to be remarkably stable," he continues, "so much so that DoD has continued to develop the same weapons and at roughly the same average level of spending. . . . The world has changed to such a degree that the old models don't work, or at least don't work nearly well enough to justify their enormous cost."

Few have gone as far as Richards in their proposals for change. In developing options for grand strategy, he parses the recent work of leading military reformers and thinkers, including Thomas X. Hammes, Martin van Creveld, William Lind and Thomas P.M. Barnett. Ultimately, Richards concludes, it's a choice between very new and substantially different versions of the Cold War staples of "containment" and "rollback." Whichever variations are adopted will require different models for reconfiguring American forces. In one proposal, Richards boldly calls for large portions of missions now performed by the uniformed military to be outsourced to private companies. Such firms-including MPRI, Blackwater and DynCorp, for example-have taken on many military duties in Iraq.

He recommends that fourth-generation warfare elements of the military-Special Forces, for example-stay within the Defense Department. But third-generation units that are likely to be less necessary, he writes, should be outsourced to private military companies under a rigorous licensing and oversight system. Those companies, he says, would be "creating and maintaining a capability for short-duration, episodic deployment into developing countries. In other words, get in quickly, get the job done, turn the place over [to official elements] and then get out." And as the private military sector thrives, Richards theorizes, "the abundance of competition should help avoid the huge cost overruns that plague major hardware procurement programs." Under this scheme, Defense would buy and provide contractors with any necessary large weapons systems.

Richards' fellow reformers don't consider the outsourcing of combat functions to private companies to be quite the magic bullet that he does. "He has to convince me about this every time it comes up," says Straus Project head Winslow Wheeler. And Richards concedes there's no shortage of potential problems and details to be worked out under his privatization scenario. But, he reminds, this suggestion applies only to one proposed military construct. The primary task of actually acknowledging shortcomings in how we conceive of warfare-and retooling forces accordingly-remains the most important one.

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Thin Ranks

Jason Vest — Sun, 01 Jan 2006 00:00:00 -0500

We lack enough spies in the right places, and intelligence reform isn't producing them.

To secure America, advance intelligence about terrorists' intentions arguably is our most potent weapon. As John MacGaffin, a former senior CIA official and now a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, observes: "Think how different the world would be if, years ago, the CIA had only recruited two spies-one in Afghanistan right next to bin Laden, another in Iraq in charge of destruction of weapons of mass destruction."

But our arsenal is frighteningly low on the kind of spies who could pull that off. "Probably the most important thing in human intelligence is not a failure to connect dots, but having-or not having-enough dots to connect. It's about being able to recruit the right spies in the right places," MacGaffin adds. Unfortunately, the United States' capacity to collect intelligence about terrorists is startlingly weak. And many former spies and experts say the reforms intended to bolster human intelligence are falling short.

In theory, the Sept. 11 commission launched a renaissance in human intelligence collection. In the wake of its July 2004 report, observers anticipated a robust flowering of institutions and operations. New multiagency, multidisciplinary organizations such as the National Counterterrorism Center sprung up. New CIA director Porter J. Goss, who took the helm Sept. 24, 2004, vowed to quickly field hundreds of new case officers and recast the agency's spy-running and covert operations wing, the Directorate of Operations, as the National Clandestine Service. CIA human intelligence (HUMINT) already had garnered initial successes. CIA clandestine collectors reportedly were instrumental in aiding the United Nations' inquiry into the Feb. 14, 2005, assassination in Beirut of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri. And relations between the CIA and other intelligence services improved.

But for many intelligence veterans, the state of HUMINT isn't comforting. They point in particular to two sad ironies: Some 9/11 commission-driven reforms such as the creation of specialized centers, have exacerbated existing problems; and any unique insight Goss might have brought to the CIA directorship from his time as an agency officer has been undermined by a destructive staff and poor leadership. "Right now the CIA has had a hemorrhaging of Directorate of Operations people leaving. From my perspective, if I'm [Director of National Intelligence John D.] Negroponte, it's grounds for firing Goss," says Marvin Ott, former deputy staff director for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, now on the faculty at the National Defense University. "The very fact that so many people are voting with their feet tells me he and his staff are alienating the people we need most."

Former Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet was largely liked and respected by the rank and file. But current and recently retired officers say Tenet's executive director, former investment banker A.B. "Buzzy" Krongard, hurt human intelligence by bringing in private sector concepts such as having administrative units charge for services. Officers say the scheme slowed support for operations. "If case officers and stations don't get everything they need, or [don't] get it promptly because someone has reorganized the support system that worked for 40 years, it makes it harder to do what we do: recruit spies and steal secrets," says a retired administration directorate officer.

Tenet talked a lot about operations, but he never was entirely comfortable with the DO, observers say. "[With] much of the day-to-day operations being left to Buzzy, operations suffered," says the former chief of one of the agency's larger overseas operations. What's more, during the 1990s, the intelligence community's budget, and that of every division at the CIA, got cut. A mid-1990s exodus of Senior Intelligence Service grade officers, who retired or quit in frustration, also hurt. In Denial and Deception: An Insider's View of the CIA From Iran-Contra to 9/11 (Nation Books, 2004), Melissa Boyle Mahle cites the loss of officers.

As the operations directorate lost veteran agents and money, the CIA leadership was moving toward a new model of collection. Specialized centers focusing on subject-specific areas-terrorism, counterproliferation, environment, counternarcotics-took over as the drivers of field officers' work. While not a bad idea in theory, the approach was seriously flawed in practice, in the view of veteran field officers. A Senior Intelligence Service officer who recently quit says the centers lacked talent. "It would be one thing if you have the most knowledgeable, best and brightest experts on subject matter. But in many cases, the analysts didn't have any grounding in the subject matter, so they didn't know what they wanted. It was a disaster."

On top of that, says a recently retired division head, even before the 9/11 commission advocated it, "the operational budget was increasingly being defined by centers and not individual divisions and operations. Case officers in the field were literally being told, 'Only propose operations that you can give a budget for and that can be matched up with the centers.' These are not the things case officers have traditionally thought about, or should. Their time is supposed to be spent figuring out how to penetrate targets and steal secrets, and leave budget concerns to higher-ups. . . . I literally had to tell my officers, 'Under no circumstances should you be thinking about budget concerns.'

"I testified before the 9/11 commission several times, and every time they kept on coming back to center-oriented thinking, saying, 'Well, how about a center with something like a [commander in chief] for this and that,' " he continues. "And I said, 'We already have CINCs. They're called division chiefs and chiefs of station.' . . . When I started as a case officer . . . there [were] basically only two people between you and the director-the station chief and the division chief. Now, there's a load of center directors, special assistants, task force heads," says the former division chief, whose 9/11 commission interviews and testimony were not conducted publicly.

The situation has worsened, he adds, since reforms began. In addition to a proliferation of new centers, concessions to turf battles have created rivalries and redundancies. While there is a new National Counterterrorism Center under the authority of the director of national intelligence, the CIA still maintains its own counterterrorist center. As former CIA official John Brennan-whose last assignment in government was as interim director of NCTC-noted in a November 2005 column in The Washington Post, the intelligence community is having a difficult time "trying to figure out how to hard-wire two very dissimilar centers."

A longtime CIA officer, now retired but still on contract with the agency, puts it this way: "If you want a better HUMINT ability, you put the [administration directorate] back together so its purpose is what it always saw itself as, to serve [the operations directorate].You find a way to get the best people who know about things into the centers; you mean it when you say you want station chiefs to take risks [in recruiting spies and undertaking operations]. . . . We're at a point now where [the director] can't just say, 'More officers, more [people under nonofficial cover],' and think that's a magic bullet. There are really serious things that need to be reconsidered and discussed, like the challenges of creating effective cover platforms in the 21st century, and of how we run operations. Running off or alienating what little institutional memory is left hasn't helped." By his count, nearly 200 senior CIA personnel have left in the past year.

"We have to rethink how we do things," he says. For example, some CIA insiders have argued that all truly secret operations-those unknown to the countries in which they are taking place-should be run out of headquarters in Langley, Va., and that CIA stations should function almost exclusively with the knowledge of other countries' intelligence services. Others have called for better temporary cover mechanisms or greater flexibility in cover, not more centers. They also have contended that even after 9/11, the CIA still focuses on quantity to the detriment of quality in recruiting spies.

Many say all that's happened is a renaming and theoretical reorientation of the operations directorate without much real or philosophical change for the CIA or the rest of the intelligence community. "The National Clandestine Service should mean, in effect, that you can never say again, 'We weren't able to focus on the most important recruitments,' " says MacGaffin. "You don't necessarily need more people to do that, it's how you use them. And it's not about having people work one thing or be in one place for one to two years, but 10 to 20 years. The National Clandestine Service was intended to be the core for doing this kind of thing." How real the difference will be between what it is and what came before remains to be seen.

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Contracting probe could extend to CIA

Jason Vest — Sun, 04 Dec 2005 00:00:00 -0500

"Though everyone has been talking about what Cunningham did for contractors from his position on [the House] Defense Appropriations [subcommittee], you also have to remember that he had a seat on [the Permanent Select Committee on] Intelligence too, which is also a good position to help contractors from, particularly if they want to do business with the CIA," says a veteran CIA officer. "But the real question I think is, if those contractors were doing business with the CIA, did they need Cunningham? And even if they didn't, the question is, even if he didn't do anything, did one the highest-ranking agency officials have any idea what his friends were up to?"

According to past and present CIA officials interviewed over the past month, CIA executive director Kyle "Dusty" Foggo--whose career duties have encompassed letting CIA contracts--has had a long, close personal relationship with two contractors identified (though not explicitly named) in court papers as bribing Cunningham: Brent Wilkes of the Wilkes Corp., whose subsidiaries include defense contractor ADCS; and former ADCS consultant Mitchell Wade, until recently president of defense contractor MZM, Inc. It is a relationship, the CIA officials say (with some putting a particular emphasis on Wilkes), that has increasingly been of concern.

One current and two retired senior CIA officials told Government Executive that (as noted last week by reporter Laura Rozen in The American Prospect's TAPPED blog) the relationship of Wilkes and Foggo--who the CIA's Web site declares is "under cover and cannot be named at this time," even though he is pictured and identified on a federal charity web page--has been a subject of increasing concern by some at Langley.

Another recently-retired senior agency official, while not naming Wilkes or Wade by name, also noted concerns borne out of both personal experience with and reports from colleagues about Foggo. "If you were a case officer and worked with him, you'd be saying to yourself, 'I've got to watch this guy,'" says the former official. "There is one contractor with whom he enjoys a very, very, very close relationship."

According to several of the officers interviewed for this article, Foggo and Wilkes have been friends since at least their college years at San Diego State University in the 1970s, where they were roommates. According to several regulars at Washington's Capital Grille, the two jointly lease one of the restaurant's private wine lockers.

A CIA spokesperson would not comment on any aspect of this story and said Foggo was not available for interviews.

After a brief stint in law enforcement, Foggo entered the CIA through the Presidential Management Intern program, and began work in what was then known as the Directorate of Administration (DA), the CIA organization that, among other things, handled a significant portion of the agency's contracting.

Foggo belonged to the DA's Management General Services unit, whose personnel, while not case officers who directly recruit and oversee spies, nonetheless received the same training as covert-action oriented Directorate of Operations officers.

MGS officers ran operational support programs in the field, a critical job directly below the agency's station chiefs. MGS officers had unique powers, including sole access to and oversight of a station's funds, as well as handling a station's accounting and contracting.

"The MG guy is the station's contracting authority, and is responsible for acquiring whatever a station needs to function, and to keep it running---the glue the holds it all together and gets anyone anything they need," says a veteran logistics officer.

While most federal government contracts are openly solicited, competitively bid and have their details publicly available, by virtue of its mission the CIA is not subject to the same rules. MG officers in particular have historically had great leeway.

"While the process is the same as anywhere else--in theory, you go to the place you can get the best deal--you're not going to find our stuff on the federal schedule, and the payment will come either through a company we set up or some other governmental cover," says a recently-retired MGS veteran. "Historically MG officers have been able to sole-source, and for smaller contracts, in some cases up to the half-million range, have not needed Langley's approval. A lot of smaller sole-source contracts can add up for a contractor."

Prior to becoming executive director, Foggo's postings included stations in Latin American and Europe. One of his first assignments was Honduras in the early 1980s, where one now-retired CIA officer recalls seeing him at least once with a visiting Brent Wilkes, who was there with "some kind of congressional delegation" in a "kind of vague" capacity.

Directly before coming executive director, Foggo was chief of the CIA's support base in Germany, which provides its Middle East stations, including Baghdad, with logistical support. While there, according to a recently retired CIA official, he let at least one contract to Wilkes. A veteran CIA administrative officer also noted that while Foggo has spent most of his career as an MGS officer, he also did a stint in the agency's Directorate of Science and Technology, "where a lot of really big contracts are handled."

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Missed Perceptions

Jason Vest — Thu, 01 Dec 2005 00:00:00 -0500

No one is sure how well psychological operations have worked in Afghanistan or Iraq, but that's not stopping efforts to step them up, using contractors to do it.

From the State Department to the Pentagon, winning hearts and minds is an increasingly important element of U.S. national security strategy. But while Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs Karen Hughes has been the highest-profile example of U.S. public relations in action, the Defense Department quietly has been tinkering with its own systems of overseas influence.

Among these are psychological operations, or PSYOPS. But after-action reports on the invasion of Iraq are skeptical about PSYOPS' success, and a psychological operations unit in Afghanistan recently tried to "demoralize" the enemy by desecrating Islamic corpses. Questions about these matters have led some policymakers to wonder how enhancing PSYOPS will complement other elements of military information operations, such as public diplomacy and public affairs. In addition, increasing reliance on contractors to conduct these operations is raising eyebrows, especially because the contract prices aren't small and some firms hired have murky pasts.

Psychological operations, defined by the military as the "systematic process of conveying messages to selected foreign groups to promote particular themes that result in desired foreign attitudes and behaviors," traditionally have been the nearly exclusive purview of the 4th PSYOPS Group (Airborne) of the Army's Civil Affairs and Psychological Operations Command. Since the Sept. 11 attacks, the military services have shown renewed interest in mass persuasion. For example, two-and-a-half years ago at Fort Bragg, N.C., the Army unveiled its Special Operations Forces Media Operations Complex, a 51,756-square-foot facility replete with all the tools 4th PSYOPS requires-printing presses, studios and digital audiovisual production facilities-in the service of producing materials to win hearts and minds wherever the U.S. military finds itself in the world.

Col. James A. Treadwell, the 4th's commander, said at the time that the facility's opening "marks PSYOPS as a growth field." But PSYOPS had entered a boom phase well before the new complex's ribbon was cut. From the post-9/11 involvement in Afghanistan to the end of what have been termed "major combat operations" in Iraq, Army PSYOPS units produced a deluge of media, including but not limited to 150 million flyers and leaflets and more than 20,000 radio broadcasts in Afghanistan and Iraq. And in the wake of Baghdad's collapse, there was a tremendous sense of satisfaction that a virtually uninterrupted flow of PSYOPS material had played a critical role in hastening the almost anticlimactic end of Iraq's military.

But when the Army's mammoth Operation Iraqi Freedom lessons-learned report was published in 2004, it revealed that PSYOPS weren't all they were cracked up to be. Part of this had nothing to do with quality; some PSYOPS units had been incredibly useful, but failed in their duty as "force multipliers" simply because there weren't enough of them. This was hardly surprising, as PSYOPS accounts for only 4,800 soldiers, 76 percent of whom are reservists. But the report also concluded that, for reasons that had nothing to do with numbers, PSYOPS simply hadn't had as profound an effect as some had thought. Not long after the lessons-learned report, the Pentagon's Defense Science Board-echoing an earlier Defense Planning Guidance report and a somewhat neglected 2003 Pentagon "Information Operations Roadmap"-concluded that when it came to conception and coordination of strategic communications, including PSYOPS, the military's efforts had languished. The board strongly endorsed a number of nascent structural and philosophical efforts at Defense and elsewhere to win a global battle of ideas.

So about two years ago, Treadwell was ordered from piney Fort Bragg to subtropical Tampa, Fla., where, from MacDill Air Force Base, he now commands one of the newest and perhaps least known elements of Special Operations Command: the Joint Psychological Operations Support Element (JPSE, or more colloquially, "gypsy"). Described in official literature as a unit comprising "more than 50 senior military and civilians with a deep knowledge of psychological operations," JPSE's raison d'être isn't to horn in on the Army's PSYOPS turf, but rather to spare commanders across services and commands the agony of going through multiple layers of bureaucracy for support. And, according to a press release earlier this year, JPSE is devoting itself not to the darker aspects of psychological warfare but to propagating truthful messages.

In addition to facilitating more agile PSYOPS support, JPSE also is beginning to do something psychological operations traditionally hasn't: consider the big picture, according to Professor Philip M. Taylor of England's University of Leeds. "PSYOPS has really only worked in tactical/operations contexts, but in today's global infosphere, there's no longer any such thing as tactical information-everything has a strategic capability. This is where PSYOPS has traditionally been weak," says Taylor, one of the world's leading experts on psychological operations, public diplomacy and propaganda, and a consultant to the American and British governments. "JPSE is a recognition that 4th PSYOPS has been quite effective at the tactical/operational levels but less so at the strategic, and is part of the roadmap by which all components of information operations are to become more closely coordinated than they have thus far."

Policymakers have realized, he adds, that mechanisms of delivery and the messages themselves have to be integrated. Nancy Snow, senior research fellow at the University of Southern California Center on Public Diplomacy and adjunct assistant professor with USC's Annenberg School for Communication, adds that when it comes to trying to create a unified front in the practice of strategic communications, it's not uncommon for each tactical element to see itself as holding the magic strategic bullet. Thus, it's devilishly difficult to bring order to communications chaos, leading Taylor to wonder whether such integration, including that of PSYOPS, can be accomplished.

A Mixed Bag

PSYOPS have been a part of American military and intelligence endeavors since World War II. They range from above-board and even earnest to devious and mendacious. One of the problems with persuasion and perception manipulation is that success is not always easy to gauge and can become the subject of fierce debates. Policymakers and practitioners alike are grappling with this reality as they seek to figure out the PSYOPS part of a larger strategic communications equation.

Pre-invasion airdropped leaflets, for example, historically have been intended to affect a population by countering disinformation, promoting ideology and image, and appealing to the survival instincts of soldiers and civilians. Studying the leafleting efforts of the Army's 4th Psychological Warfare Group in 2002-2003, two University of Texas professors found that the majority of leaflets dropped on Iraq were of the survival motif, exhorting Iraqi soldiers to quickly surrender and imploring Iraqi civilians to shelter in place during the invasion, as well as to preserve their oil facilities. Given the quick collapse of the Iraqi military and the lack of refugee crisis that certain Pentagon planners were convinced was inevitable, some observers, including the Texas professors, posited that the 4th's leafleting efforts played a key role in the successful invasion.

Yet as some in the military noted then and later, there was no metric for objectively determining this. "In retrospect, [the leaflets] did seem to have the effect intended," wrote Lt. Col. Steven Collins in "Mind Games," a paper published in the summer 2003 issue of NATO Review. But, he added, just as PSYOPS is geared to slant perceptions, so too, can perceptions slant the analysis of psychological operations. The problem with the leaflets was "the problem with all PSYOPS actions: the difficulty in determining the cause of behavior during a war. Did the Iraqi military melt away primarily as a result of PSYOPS, or of bombing by coalition aircraft, or of lack of logistical support, or a combination of all three?" At best, Collins concluded, PSYOPS' role "remains an important variable to determine."

In early 2004, the Army Command General and Staff College's Combined Arms Research Library published a detailed study of major combat operations in Iraq. Its conclusion: PSYOPS were at best a mixed bag. "PSYOPS units can point with satisfaction to success in minimizing damage to the oil fields and keeping civilians off roads," it said. "However, they do so with risk since there is very little evidence available yet to support that contention. . . . Moreover, the PSYOPS effort enjoyed far less success in encouraging Iraqi units to surrender. . . . PSYOPS produced much less than expected and perhaps less than claimed."

Such considerations have led some to wonder whether military efforts such as JPSE are neglecting ways to improve PSYOPS in its strongest areas, tactical and operational, by beginning to dabble in the strategic. In a 2004 briefing, Marine Col. G.I. Wilson and two retired military officers observed that the problem with PSYOPS has less to do with the operations themselves and more to do with how they are, or are not, integrated into existing combat forces. Holding that psychological and information operations should be incorporated into every basic military consideration, Wilson and his colleagues suggested that in places such as Iraq, "regional fusion centers" should be established where the tactical and strategic mission specialists could work together to help frame and guide ongoing operations. Similarly, a recent National Defense University study held that the priority for PSYOPS should be doctrinal and structural reforms focused on the tactical level, because it's impossible for military PSYOPS to adequately compensate for a weak national strategic communications program.

And, says Taylor, even the most ambitious and effective PSYOPS reform can be easily undermined by soldiers' actions, for example, desecrating Afghan bodies or the Koran. "Democracies are their own worst enemies in this field," he says. "It's true, though rarely recognized in the control-freakery world of the military, that full spectrum dominance is impossible in the global information environment," even over U.S. soldiers.

'Sorry, It Wasn't Us'

Further, Taylor adds, groups contracted by the government to do PSYOPS or related work and analysis also can do damage. "There are plenty who have messed up and been fired; there are risks," he says. "But if the attitude is 'Something has to be done,' who is going to do it? There are so many PR firms willing to take bucks from the U.S. government.

"Outsourcing is either a sign of recognition that the military is not terribly good at certain types of persuasion, or a way of distancing the U.S. government from the messages. If that company then does something which is controversial, the government can say, 'Sorry, it wasn't us, but we'll fire the company that did this supposedly in our name.' "

Those concerned about the state of both PSYOPS and contracting paid close attention to JPSE's June announcement that it was giving indefinite delivery/ indefinite quantity contracts to three contractors for media approach planning, prototype product development, commercial quality product development, product distribution and dissemination, and media effects analysis. While JPSE commander Treadwell said the initial contracts were likely to be in the $250,000 range, the potential maximum value of each tender, $100 million, stirred great interest as did the choice of contractors. It wasn't necessarily surprising that Arlington, Va.-based defense contractor SYColeman got one of the JPSE tenders, based on its formidable number of existing contracts with the Pentagon; media work, however, is not something the company lists among its core competencies.

Similarly, while San Diego-based Science Applications International Corp. has dozens of offices worldwide devoted to administering its Pentagon contracts, most of SAIC's work has been in the areas of engineering, systems and quantitative analysis, not media. Indeed, the last time it won a contract for media work-specifically, setting up post-Saddam television operations in Iraq-it performed with such ineptitude that the company was excoriated not just by the Pentagon inspector general and Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Richard G. Lugar, R-Ind., but also by its former project manager. SAIC ultimately lost that contract. Also inviting curiosity has been Lincoln Group, which despite having virtually no public profile and no demonstrable history in strategic communications-and having gone through multiple changes in name and orientation in less than three years-has landed two major media contracts with the U.S. military in the past year.

"A lot of these things go on if not in secret, [then] kind of out of view with very little tracking or public accountability, and as such, we don't really know when things go wrong," says USC's Snow. "But none of it really addresses whether any of this will have any impact if the people they're trying to reach just won't have any of it because we have unpopular policies."

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CIA veterans speak out against torture

Jason Vest — Wed, 23 Nov 2005 00:00:00 -0500

One way this notion has played out in practice is the CIA's use of "extraordinary rendition," in which terror suspects overseas are kidnapped and delivered to third-party countries for interrogation -- which, not uncharacteristically, includes some measure of torture, and sometimes fatal torture.

Details about the extent and excesses of the U.S. government's interrogation practices have been ably documented by the media and human-rights organizations. Many thought that extraordinary rendition would be the worst of the revelations, but on November 2, The Washington Post revealed that the CIA has been running its own system of secret overseas detention and interrogation centers, known as "black sites."

Coming at a moment when both CIA Director Porter Goss and Vice President Cheney have been crusading to exempt the CIA from pending legislation authored by Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., that would ban U.S. government personnel from using torture, and other abusive conduct, in interrogations, the story has been particularly resonant -- especially when at least one prisoner under CIA supervision at the now-defunct Afghanistan "salt pit" black site died as a result of abuse.

Although outrage has focused on the existence and symbolism of the black sites, comparatively little attention has been paid to the concerns -- if not outright objections -- of many distinguished CIA veterans about these sites and the use of torture in general. It's not just that such behavior is largely impractical, they say; it's that even by the morally ambiguous standards of espionage and covert action, the abuse is simply wrong.

Some perennially high-profile retired CIA officers like Bob Baer, Frank Anderson, and Vincent Cannistraro recently spoke out to Knight Ridder about their opposition to torture on practical grounds (Cannistraro said that detainees will "say virtually anything to end their torment"). But over the past 18 months, several lesser-known former officers have been trying, publicly and privately, to convince both the agency and the public that torture and other unduly coercive questioning tactics are morally wrong as well.

Speaking at a College of William and Mary forum last year, for example, Burton L. Gerber, a decorated Moscow station chief who retired in 1995 after 39 years with the CIA, surprised some in the audience when he said he opposes torture "because it corrupts the society that tolerates it."

This is a view, he confirmed in an interview with National Journal last week, that is rooted in Albert Camus's assertion in Preface to Algerian Reports that torture, "even when accepted in the interest of realism and efficacy," represents "a flouting of honor that serves no purpose but to degrade" a nation in its own eyes and the world's.

"The reason I believe that torture corrupts the torturers and society," Gerber says, "is that a standard is changed, and that new standard that's acceptable is less than what our nation should stand for. I think the standards in something like this are crucial to the identity of America as a free and just society."

The moral dimensions of torture, Gerber adds, are inextricably linked with the practical; aside from the fact that torture almost always fails to yield true or useful information, it has the potential to adversely affect CIA operations.

"Foreign nationals agree to spy for us for many different reasons; some do it out of an overwhelming admiration for America and what it stands for, and to those people, I think, America being associated with torture does affect their willingness to work with us," he says. "But one of my arguments with the agency about ethics, particularly in this case, is that it's not about case studies, but philosophy. Aristotle says the ends and means must be in concert; if the ends and means are not in concert, good ends will be corrupted by bad means."

A similar stance was articulated last year by Merle L. Pribbenow, a 27-year veteran of the agency's clandestine Directorate of Operations. Writing in Studies in Intelligence, the CIA's in-house journal, Pribbenow recalled that an old college friend had recently expressed his belief that "the terrorist threat to America was so grave that any methods, including torture, should be used to obtain the information we need." The friend was vexed that Pribbenow's former colleagues "had not been able to 'crack' these prisoners."

Pribbenow sought an answer by revisiting the arcane case of Nguyen Van Tai, the highest-ranking Vietcong prisoner captured and interrogated by both South Vietnamese and American forces during the Vietnam War.

Re-examining in detail the techniques used by the South Vietnamese (protracted torture that included electric shocks; beatings; various forms of water torture; stress positions; food, water, and sleep deprivation) and by the Americans (rapport-building and no violence), Pribbenow reached a stark conclusion: "While the South Vietnamese use of torture did result (eventually) in Tai's admission of his true identity, it did not provide any other usable information," he wrote. In the end, he said, "it was the skillful questions and psychological ploys of the Americans, and not any physical infliction of pain, that produced the only useful (albeit limited) information that Tai ever provided." But perhaps most noteworthy was Pribbenow's conclusion: "This brings me back to my college classmate's question. The answer I gave him -- one in which I firmly believe -- is that we, as Americans, must not let our methods betray our goals," he said. "There is nothing wrong with a little psychological intimidation, verbal threats, bright lights and tight handcuffs, and not giving a prisoner a soft drink and a Big Mac every time he asks for them.

There are limits, however, beyond which we cannot and should not go if we are to continue to call ourselves Americans. America is as much an ideal as a place, and physical torture of the kind used by the Vietnamese (North as well as South) has no place in it."

Retired since 1995, Pribbenow spends most of his time writing on Vietnam War history and translating Vietnamese works. With the exception of participating in a documentary series on the Vietnam War, he has never spoken to the press. But last week in an exclusive interview with National Journal, he revealed that part of what prompted him to write his piece was his own experience in Vietnam, where as an interpreter participating in CIA interrogations, he had occasion to interact with South Vietnamese torturers and their victims.

"If you talk to people who have been tortured, that gives you a pretty good idea not only as to what it does to them, but what it does to the people who do it," he said. "One of my main objections to torture is what it does to the guys who actually inflict the torture. It does bad things. "I have talked to a bunch of people who had been tortured who, when they talked to me, would tell me things they had not told their torturers, and I would ask, 'Why didn't you tell that to the guys who were torturing you?' They said that their torturers got so involved that they didn't even bother to ask questions."

Ultimately, he said -- echoing Gerber's comments -- "torture becomes an end unto itself."

Pribbenow also said he was moved to write down his thoughts out of concern for the current generation of intelligence officers. "I don't personally know of any cases where an agency officer ever [tortured] anyone; that was always taboo, something we just didn't do," he said.

"But I had been seeing stuff in the news, on TV, TV commentators, that sort of thing, in favor of torture," he said, "and I thought, 'I know there are a lot of new intelligence officers, new guys who don't have a lot of experience,' and thought maybe something like this will help them make their own decisions as to how to handle themselves in these situations, especially when people in authority are saying things that are unclear."

Indeed, Pribbenow, Gerber, and other veterans interviewed all noted that one of their greatest worries is that the proposed exemption to McCain's legislation will institutionalize something that has historically been an exception in CIA culture: CIA officers actually doing physical harm to interrogation suspects.

One longtime case officer asks, "Are there instances throughout history when we have known, and in some cases, at least, turned a blind eye to, that allied or friendly intelligence services are torturing people? Yes," he says. "Is it something our own officers have done? Almost never."

What has many veterans worried, he said, is the fact that while case officers aren't actually trained in interrogation techniques ("I'm not sure I ever knew anyone who was a 'professional interrogator' in the agency," says Pribbenow), in recent years officers have been getting the worst combination of no training plus ambiguous signals from management on the ethics of interrogation.

From 1972 to 1975, Frank Snepp was the CIA's top interrogator in Saigon, where he choreographed elaborate, protracted sessions with Nguyen Van Tai and, at one point, seven other senior Vietcong captives. To the question of whether torture or abusive behavior by interrogators is justified, Snepp's answer is unequivocally no. And the fact that this point isn't understood at the agency today, Snepp says, is a sign of serious problems.

"One of the big lessons for the agency was that the South Vietnamese torturing people got in the way of getting information," he says. "One day, without my knowledge, the South Vietnamese forces beat one of my subjects to a pulp, and when he staggered into the interrogation room, I was furious. And I went to the station chief and he said, 'What do you want me to do about it?'

"I told him to tell the Vietnamese to lay off, and he said, 'What do you want me to tell them in terms of why?' I said, 'Because it's wrong, it's just wrong.' He laughed and said, 'Look, we've got 180,000 North Vietnamese troops within a half hour of here -- I can't tell them, don't beat the enemy. Give me a pragmatic reason.' I said, 'He can't talk. He's a wreck. I can't interrogate him.' He said, 'That, I can use with them.'

"The important lesson for me was that moral arguments don't work," Snepp says. "But if you have pragmatic reasons, that will work. But the most important thing is that the only time you can be sure that what you're getting from someone is valid is through discourse. In Tai's case, the idea was to develop absolute trust, which you do not do by alienating and humiliating someone. He liked poetry; I brought him books of poetry, and in many sessions we sat and discussed poetry, nothing else.

The most extreme thing I did was a disorientation technique, where I would keep jumping from one subject to another so rapidly that he might not remember what he'd told me the day before, or not remember that he had not, in fact, told me what I was saying he'd told me. Little by little, I drew him into revelations. And I was highly commended for this work."

But today, according to case officers, younger CIA operatives have no formal training. No qualified old hands are around to informally mentor them, or to even swap collegial notes, on the practical or the ethical in interrogations.

"We're not trained interrogators -- to be honest, in those situations I really had no idea what I'm doing, and I'm not the only one who has had this experience," says a decorated active case officer with nearly 25 years of experience, who on several occasions in recent years has participated in interrogations of Islamist radicals conducted by foreign intelligence services.

"The larger problem here, I think, is that this kind of stuff just makes people feel better, even if it doesn't work.... I'm worried that this is becoming more institutionalized," the officer says. "There are other officers I know who I think are coming to take on faith that the only way to get anything out of a suspected terrorist is beating it out of him, because he's in an entirely different category, so fanatical that it's the only thing that'll work."

According to a 30-year CIA veteran currently working for the agency on contract, there is, in fact, some precedent showing that the "gloves-off" approach works -- but it was hotly debated at the time by those who knew about it, and shouldn't be emulated today.

"I have been privy to some of what's going on now, but when I saw the Post story, I said to myself, 'The agency deserves every bad thing that's going to happen to it if it is doing this again,'" he said. "In the early 1980s, we did something like this in Lebanon -- technically, the facilities were run by our Christian Maronite allies, but they were really ours, and we had personnel doing the interrogations," he said.

"I don't know how much violence was used -- it was really more putting people in underground rooms with a bare bulb for a long time, and for a certain kind of privileged person not used to that, that and some slapping around can be effective.

"But here's the important thing: When orders were given for that operation to stand down, some of the people involved wouldn't. Disciplinary action was taken, but it brought us back to an argument in the agency that's never been settled, one that crops up and goes away -- do you fight the enemy in the gutter, the same way, or maintain some kind of moral high ground?

"I think as late as a decade ago, there were enough of us around who had enough experience to constitute the majority view, which was that this was simply not the way we did business, and for good reasons of practicality or morality. It's not just about what it does or doesn't do, but about who, and where, we as a country want to be."

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Assessing Acquisition

Jason Vest — Wed, 23 Nov 2005 00:00:00 -0500

He said, "Many programs continue to increase in cost and schedule even after multiple studies and recommendations that span the last 15 years." England announced the creation of the Defense Acquisition Performance Assessment Project to review the acquisition system and develop a "clear alignment of responsibility, authority and accountability."

But since the six-member assessment team was impaneled in June, watchdog groups, including the Project on Government Oversight, have been wondering whether the endeavor is really a catalyst for reform, or a cosmetic effort likely to produce no more than a report that will languish on the shelf.

Part of their concern involves the project's principals. It makes sense to have some industry representatives on the panel, says POGO investigator Eric Miller, but the panel is made up almost entirely of either flag officers-turned-contractor executives or consultants. All but one of the panel members now hail from the private sector. The exception is Gerald W. Abbott, director of industry studies at the Industrial College of the Armed Forces.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, a senior professional staffer for the panel said its members were "carefully chosen because they have all been successful at what they did," and added that he was "confused" by the notion that anyone would perceive the panel as in any way industry-heavy.

Concern also has arisen about how the panel's choice of witnesses is shaping its analysis.

In a Sept. 2 letter to Kadish, POGO Executive Director Danielle Brian praised the panel for its "vigor . . . in pursuing the very broad and challenging mission you have been given." But, she said, "The vast majority of public testimony you have heard has come from representatives of the defense contractor industry. It appears there are no plans to interview nongovernmental organizations whose mission is to protect taxpayers."

In the acquisition panel's five public meetings, testimony has come almost exclusively from industry executives and Defense officials. Conspicuously absent have been groups such as POGO and tough critics like retired Defense analyst Franklin C. "Chuck" Spinney - whose study of perilous acquisition practices, "Defense Death Spiral," has been required reading in military reform circles for years - and former Defense Operational Test and Evaluation chiefs Thomas P. Christie and Philip E. Coyle III.

"I haven't talked to anyone with the panel or been asked to, but I'd be happy to," says Coyle, now an adviser with the Center for Defense Information. The question is whether the panel would be glad to hear from Coyle, who is a bit leery of the whole exercise. "The problem is not with acquisition reform, because there have been many acquisition reforms put in place or proposed over the past 35 years - the problem is that they don't implement them," he says.

But that is not the real problem, he says. "The problem is that DoD gets into very big, very complicated acquisition programs that are not well understood when they start, and there's nothing wrong with that, because development is part of the process. But because they don't implement reforms they continue not to be well understood, and they don't do an adequate job of oversight."

After a second letter to the panel, POGO's Miller and Brian finally got a lengthy meeting with panel staffers. They were "really receptive and pretty interested in what we had to say," Miller says. POGO is "cautiously optimistic" about the panel's efforts, he says, but "even if a good report is produced, the real question is will it lead to anything meaningful, or gather dust on a shelf."

When asked to address concerns that the project may have been insufficiently aggressive in seeking the views of nonindustry and nongovernmental personnel or those with a more detached standing, the senior official responded, "The people who are detached don't know anything, they don't know how to comment about acquisition one way or the other."

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Fall From Grace

Jason Vest — Wed, 16 Nov 2005 00:00:00 -0500

Byrnes, legally separated, was on the verge of finalizing his divorce, and his affair was with a civilian. It was hardly surprising that the coverage surrounding Byrnes' premature end as TRADOC's chief focused almost exclusively on the affair, and whether the punishment meted out by Army Chief of Staff Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker was fair. But according to a number of officers-including those who historically have not been Byrnes fans-an equally big story in the wake of his departure is what he accomplished at TRADOC. "He was actually trying to do some good stuff," says one senior officer. "He became something of a radical among the four stars, and did some things I never would've expected, like hiring a certain prematurely retired Army major. That might end up being his real legacy."

That retired major was Donald Vandergriff, an award-winning ROTC instructor at Georgetown University. He is a leading military reformer whose penetrating indictment of the Army's personnel system, Path to Victory: America's Army and the Revolution in Human Affairs (Presidio Press, 2002), attracted a serious following both inside and outside the Army. Despite, or perhaps because of, the favorable attention Vandergriff's book received, fellow retired military reformer the late Col. David Hackworth presciently called the pull-no-punches Path to Victory a "career-ending" endeavor.

Vandergriff went on to receive plaudits, including ROTC Instructor of the Year and the Legion of Merit, but it came as no surprise when he was passed over for promotion.

As his final day in uniform neared earlier this year, Vandergriff, like most retiring officers, was mulling over offers from various contractors. But at the annual Association of the United States Army breakfast in March, Vandergriff had a surprisingly pleasant encounter with Byrnes. "He apologized for not personally thanking me for a copy of Path to Victory, and then asked what I'd been working on," says Vandergriff. He then handed Byrnes a copy of his latest work in progress, a critical study of the Army's ROTC system and curricula titled "Raising the Bar," noting that it might be helpful with developing the Army's new Basic Officer Leadership Course.

Gratified as Vandergriff was for the brief exchange, his expectations that Byrnes would read the draft report were slim. He also was unsure about how his criticisms of the gestating Basic Officer Leadership program would go down. But three days later, Byrnes ordered his senior subordinates to read the report with an eye toward integrating elements from it into the program.

Not long after, Vandergriff had an offer to come to work at TRADOC's Futures Center (Forward) in Crystal City, Va., where he and others have been tinkering with the Basic Officer Leadership Course. According to several sources, their efforts at the Futures Center, headquartered at Fort Monroe, Va., had been well-received by both Byrnes and Lt. Gen. Robert L. Van Antwerp, head of Army Accessions Command, the TRADOC unit whose tasks include new officer training.

According to a number of active-duty officers, Byrnes wasn't considered a thoughtful innovator before going to TRADOC, but once there he seemed to grasp the importance of the human dimension of the Army's transformation" effort.

"While everyone from the Army Research Institute to instructors saw the flaws in BOLC, it was the beginning step in the right direction," says one officer. "And at the enlisted level, things aren't being done the way they always have. Drill sergeants aren't just barking orders, but are leading, more noncombat specialists are getting combat training, and more emphasis is being put on critical thinking and the importance of adaptation."

Byrnes laid a good foundation for his successor, Lt. Gen. William S. Wallace, who, pending Senate confirmation, will get his fourth star and command of TRADOC in October. Just as Byrnes hired Vandergriff, Wallace-coming from a billet as chief of the Army's Command General and Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kan.-last year hired retired Brig. Gen. Huba Wass de Czege, one of the Army's brightest military reformers from the 1980s, as an analyst at the staff college. "There's been no word if he's coming with Wallace to Fort Monroe," says one officer. "But if Wallace has had him on the payroll, it means he's serious about making the training system one that really puts an emphasis on leadership, thinking and adaptability."

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Assessing Acquisition

Jason Vest — Tue, 01 Nov 2005 00:00:00 -0500

Skeptics wonder whether new panel can fix Defense procurement.

When it came to light in 2003 that former Air Force acquisition chief Darleen Druyun had secured her post-government job with Boeing Co. by rigging the KC-135 tanker leasing deal for the contractor before she left the Pentagon, legislators and the public were outraged. To critical observers of the Pentagon, the Druyun scandal was the most egregious example of a flawed acquisition system long in need of serious reform.

This summer, the Pentagon seemed to acknowledge this reality. In a June 5 memo to senior Pentagon officials, Acting Deputy Secretary of Defense Gordon England noted a "growing and deep concern within the Congress and the Department of Defense leadership team about the DoD acquisition process." He said, "Many programs continue to increase in cost and schedule even after multiple studies and recommendations that span the last 15 years." England announced the creation of the Defense Acquisition Performance Assessment Project to review the acquisition system and develop a "clear alignment of responsibility, authority and accountability."

Concern also has arisen about how the panel's choice of witnesses is shaping its analysis.

In the acquisition panel's five public meetings, testimony has come almost exclusively from industry executives and Defense officials. Conspicuously absent have been groups such as POGO and tough critics like retired Defense analyst Franklin C. "Chuck" Spinney-whose study of perilous acquisition practices, "Defense Death Spiral," has been required reading in military reform circles for years-and former Defense Operational Test and Evaluation chiefs Thomas P. Christie and Philip E. Coyle III.

"I haven't talked to anyone with the panel or been asked to, but I'd be happy to," says Coyle, now an adviser with the Center for Defense Information. The question is whether the panel would be glad to hear from Coyle, who is a bit leery of the whole exercise. "The problem is not with acquisition reform, because there have been many acquisition reforms put in place or proposed over the past 35 years-the problem is that they don't implement them," he says.

Coyle fears that the Defense Acquisition Performance Assessment Project will become another exercise in which "contractors complain that they're overregulated, have too much paperwork and that testing is too hard." But that is not the real problem, he says. "The problem is that DoD gets into very big, very complicated acquisition programs that are not well understood when they start, and there's nothing wrong with that, because development is part of the process. But because they don't implement reforms they continue not to be well understood, and they don't do an adequate job of oversight."

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Fall From Grace

Jason Vest — Tue, 01 Nov 2005 00:00:00 -0500

Gen. Kevin Byrnes' real legacy might be shaking up the status quo in Army leadership training.

Despite a career spanning 26 years and tours ranging from Vietnam to Bosnia to the Pentagon, Gen. Kevin Byrnes was never a particularly high-profile figure. That changed in August, when Byrnes-the third-highest ranking four-star general in the Army and head of the service's Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC)-made headlines as the first flag officer ever to be relieved of duty for failing to comply with a direct order to end an extramarital affair.

Vandergriff went on to receive plaudits, including ROTC Instructor of the Year and the Legion of Merit, but it came as no surprise when he was passed over for promotion.

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Clean Sweep

Sat, 15 Oct 2005 00:00:00 -0400

Katrina will spawn the biggest relief effort in recent history, a massive public works project and a major reassessment of emergency response. It also could restructure government at every level.

As the nation attempts to sort out the lessons of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, government, in both its political and bureaucratic aspects, is hunkering down and sorting out as well. In a variety of areas, politicians, policies, agencies and first responders have been found wanting. Now comes the question: What next? Government Executive takes a preliminary look at key failings, challenges and problems ahead for federalism, intergovernmental coordination, contracting, public health preparedness, energy and environmental protection through the eyes of government historians, experts, and federal, state and local officials.

Who's in Charge?

What does the response to Hurricane Katrina say about the state of federalism and governmental organization under the Bush administration? According to scholars and state, local and federal officials, it is an illuminating case study in the contradictions of Bush-style conservatism. It may be less surprising than it appears that a president whose political base is hostile to big government has expanded both bureaucracy and spending.

But, says Pulitzer Prize-winning presidential historian James MacGregor Burns-who counts himself a Bush admirer for both having an ideology and running a disciplined political operation-Katrina illustrates the peril of centralizing power on key issues (in this case, homeland security and emergency management), while retaining the traditional conservative distrust of professional civil servants at any level. "[Bush administration officials] mainly view civil service as 'bureaucracy,' something to be condemned, something they don't really have much respect for," he says. "I think this is rather tragic, because whatever bureaucracy's failings, there are some really wonderful people at every level of government trying to avert and address problems."

Some state and local officials say Washington has insisted on calling the shots on emergency management issues for which they have little appreciation. Rob Harper, public information officer at Washington state's Emergency Management Division, says that since Sept. 11, the Bush administration has decided that in the case of homeland security, the federal government automatically knew better, and has since shown little interest in state-specific nonterrorist matters.

This is no abstraction to Harper: In a recent meeting, he recalls, a Washington-based official at the Homeland Security Department derided the state's emergency management officials for being inadequately receptive to a lecture on bioterrorism. "My response was, well, we have some natural hazards that are probably greater than the threat terrorism poses and that other places won't ever have to worry about. We have the offshore Cascadia earthquake fault that rivals the one of Sumatra that caused the tsunami. We have a hazard off of Mount Rainier that could bury tens of thousands in minutes. Those are serious things."

William L. Waugh Jr., a public administration professor at Georgia State University who studies and consults on terrorism, natural disasters and emergency management, says Harper's sentiments are hardly unique. "One would think it would be the case with the Bush administration that a lot of attention or deference would be paid to states and localities on these issues, yet people have voiced concerns repeatedly that the Department of Homeland Security has not been inclusive or proactive about seeking out the opinions of state and local officials, or sensitive to their specific issues," he says.

The sad irony of all this, says R. Scott Fosler, a past president of the National Academy of Public Administration, is that emergency management a decade ago was based on assertively federalist thinking.

As head of a NAPA team assigned to produce a report that addressed the federal government's failures in August 1992 in responding to Hurricane Andrew, Fosler and his colleagues found that what was needed was not a massive federal response or hierarchy. "What we concluded was that the problem was not just FEMA per se, but the definition and mission of placing emergency management within a broader context of national networks," Fosler says. "And that gets exactly to the federalism issue-there is no way one single agency, state or federal, can hope to take responsibility in a catastrophic situation. One of the keys was to clarify and define the mission in a way that determines what the proper roles for governments, the private sector, NGOs and charitable organizations are."

And that, he says, led to another key matter-the importance of having not only experienced, professional leadership at FEMA, but leadership that, in addition to understanding the network concept with FEMA as a coordinating hub, also could apply an "all hazards" approach, which recognizes that emergency management operates on a continuum. It makes little difference who or what causes disasters, Fosler says; what matters is who's responsible for what. And to address that, he says, equal consideration has to be given to prevention, mitigation, response and recovery.

Part of the problem with the administration's notion of homeland security, he says, is that it's focused so much on preventing terrorism that it has marginalized the importance of the mitigation/response/recovery elements. It is DHS' duty to balance terrorism and other hazards and to effectively coordinate prevention and response among all levels of government. So far, things appear quite out of balance.

Fosler holds that suddenly pulling FEMA out of Homeland Security likely would be just as bad as it was to thrust FEMA into Homeland Security. "The important thing is to figure out why DHS did not perform the role it should have," he says. "And if it's not just about the personnel and management but the structure, the administration and Congress need to act swiftly to determine what the structure should be."

This could argue for either restoring FEMA to independent agency status operating with its late 1990s-era philosophy or rewiring DHS to accommodate a FEMA that takes a more network-centric approach to disasters, Fosler says. But, he emphasizes,"If you don't put people in charge of agencies who believe in them, who have the capacity and experience, it's not going to work."

Watching the Money

Reconstruction in the wake of Hurricane Katrina looks familiar to anyone witnessing the rebuilding of Iraq during the past two-and-a-half years. The government is relying largely on private contractors to complete huge projects quickly. But there's one big difference: During this latest emergency, lawmakers, auditors and even ordinary citizens are watching the contractors like a well-trained baby sitter would a child.

"The public, who has never cared about contracting at all, is outraged," says Danielle Brian, executive director of the Washington-based nonprofit Project on Government Oversight, referring to concern that contracts are being awarded without competition. If that's true, then it's probably a consequence of widespread reporting of waste and abuse in Iraq reconstruction. "Iraq is a cautionary tale for Katrina," says Gordon Adams, professor of international affairs at The George Washington University.

This time, the watchdogs were ready. The legislation Congress passed on Sept. 8 provided $51.8 billion for Hurricane Katrina relief efforts and set aside $15 million for the DHS inspector general's office. In addition, lawmakers, including Sens. Susan Collins, R-Maine, and Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., and Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., have proposed a variety of oversight and auditing bills. Homeland Security's inspector general opened a new unit to oversee hurricane-related spending. And the media and nonprofit groups have covered contracting in the region so heavily that taxpayers also are tuned in.

Waxman, an outspoken critic of contracting abuse in Iraq, says he already sees similar problems emerging from the Gulf Coast. He points to no-bid contracts, used by FEMA and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, as a danger sign. "That's how we got in to so much trouble with our contracts in Iraq," he says.

James Mitchell, spokesman for the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, says many of the 61 criminal cases under investigation originate from the early days of reconstruction, before the office was set up. Early oversight is essential, he says, which is why Mitchell thinks the Gulf Coast needs the immediate attention of an inspector general.

Not everyone agrees. Barbara Bodine, a former ambassador who spent three months in 2003 as American coordinator for the reconstruction of Baghdad, warns against auditing excess. "The one thing I remember in Iraq, in the middle of high chaos, is that seven auditors showed up. I was like, 'This is really not the time. We have a crisis on our hands.' " The auditing, she says, needs to be done afterward. In the midst of a crisis, Bodine says a contracting coordinator should check contracts and look for signs of duplication or waste.

For now, contracting offices in Gulf Coast states are consumed with their immediate cleanup tasks. "There's not enough time to do anything but a limited competition," says Rich Johnson, director of contracting for the Army Corps' Mississippi Valley division. The Army Corps is responsible for ice and water delivery, water removal, temporary power, debris removal, temporary housing and roofing repair contracts in Hurricane Katrina's cleanup. A FEMA spokesman also says that competition is limited out of necessity to get contracts in place quickly.

Lessons for the next emergency already are emerging, such as the need for better planning. The Army Corps had pre-competed contracts for ice and debris removal, but had to quickly award contracts without competition when they ran out of capacity, says Johnson. FEMA had some pre-competed contracts, but not for many essential emergency services, such as trailers for temporary housing. "It looks like a lack of planning, a lack of foresight . . . a lack of imagining," says Bodine. No-bid contracts should be the exception because many emergency needs are predictable, she says.

Still, James Nagle, a lawyer and author of A History of Government Contracting (The George Washington University, 1992), says it's impossible to hold contracts to the same competitive standards used during normal times. "So the government will probably have to do what they did after Pearl Harbor and every other major catastrophe," he says. "But these methods are often criticized later."

Anemic Medical Response

While Katrina spread destruction across much of the Gulf Coast region, it seemed to cause relatively few injuries and deaths, at least compared with initial estimates by New Orleans officials that fatalities could top 10,000. The most critical challenges facing medical personnel were associated with trying to evacuate hospitals that lost power and communications. Delivery of medical assistance to those who stayed in the area, while uneven, appeared largely competent.

But the unprecedented emergency evacuation of the area has strained the health care services of the surrounding major cities, which absorbed hundreds of seriously ill patients from Gulf Coast hospitals as well as the tens of thousands of people who evacuated on their own, but required some form of medical care once they arrived.

In Atlanta, an estimated 30,000 displaced people sought care in the days after Katrina, putting a tremendous strain on the city's medical infrastructure. "On any given night, Atlanta can't handle our own 911 calls," says Dr. Arthur Kellerman, chairman of the Department of Emergency Medicine at Emory University.

Ambulances with patients are redirected two, three or more times before finding an emergency room that can take them. "You've got patients who are in ER hallways waiting for a nonexistent inpatient care bed," says Kellerman. "How are we supposed to handle [such] extraordinary stress on the system?"

Atlanta coped by diverting patients from hospitals to specialized care facilities, Kellerman says. "We're meeting their health needs by [sending] people who need it to primary care [providers], dialysis centers and other places to keep them from going to the ER." It wasn't easy, he says.

Kellerman has tried to get state and federal officials to collect data on the effect of Katrina victims on the health care systems in the major cities to which they have flocked. Such information would be invaluable to improving the national response to a medical disaster, he says. But he has faced a widespread reluctance to collect those numbers-in part, he believes, because the statistics won't be pretty.

"I've been trying to get officials to monitor on a daily basis what's going on," he says, "so we could see what's happening with the numbers of ambulance diversions, the numbers of people in hallways. Here we have a natural experiment unfolding, but nobody's looking at that. I find that dumbfounding. This is a real-world test of our ability to handle a crisis, not a tabletop exercise."

The nightmare medical disaster for most emergency planners isn't a hurricane but a pandemic or bioterror attack. The United States' ability to respond is worrisome to many, at least in part for the weaknesses Kellerman is trying to highlight.

"We're about 5 percent as prepared for bioterror as we were for Katrina," says Chuck Ludlam, who as counsel to Sen. Lieberman developed a bioterror-preparedness program, which was the basis for President Bush's Bioshield initiative.

For one thing, says Ludlam, the federal government has no "boots on the ground" to respond to a medical catastrophe. In such an event, the government will be forced to rely on an untested cadre of volunteers and the same state and local health systems Kellerman says have trouble handling their own emergency calls.

Energy Vulnerability Continues

Hundreds of offshore oil and gas platforms dot the waters of the Gulf of Mexico and hundreds of oil-industry facilities and refineries line the coast. "There's a reason for this geographic concentration in a high-risk hurricane area," says Red Cavaney, president and chief executive officer of the American Petroleum Institute, a trade association of the oil and gas industry. "Government policies have limited offshore exploration and production to the central and western Gulf Coast, and our offshore facilities have been welcomed in communities in the region," he says. Offshore drilling is largely prohibited elsewhere in the Gulf Coast, and along the Atlantic and Pacific coasts.

Those restrictions, and the fact that nobody wants a refinery in their backyard (and only the poorest citizens will tolerate one), mean that the nation's energy infrastructure is highly concentrated and highly vulnerable to hurricanes such as Katrina and Rita. With 29 percent of domestic oil production and 19 percent of domestic natural gas production coming from the Gulf of Mexico, a blow to energy operations there has far-reaching consequences.

"It is ironic that we talk so much about diversifying the sources of our energy supplies from abroad, yet we have done so little to geographically diversify our oil and natural gas presence here at home," Cavaney says.

Before Hurricane Katrina struck at the heart of oil and gas operations in Louisiana and Mississippi, officials in the Interior Department's Minerals Management Service, which oversees offshore oil and gas operations, implemented its continuity-of-operations plan and moved critical operations to Houston.

But on Sept. 22, before MMS could even locate all 600 employees displaced by Katrina, it was forced to close its temporary Houston office, this time on account of Rita. By then the cumulative oil and gas production shutdown over the previous four weeks equaled 5.2 percent and 3.6 percent, respectively, of annual oil and gas production in the Gulf of Mexico, according to MMS. And that was before Rita made landfall.

Katrina was a significant enough blow to prompt the Bush administration to release oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. It is only the second time the reserve has been tapped since it was created by the 1975 Energy Policy and Conservation Act following the 1973 to 1974 oil embargo by Arab states. The first time was during the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

While there is widespread agreement that the nation's oil dependence poses enormous economic and national security risks, there is little agreement on what to do about it. The 1,724-page Energy Policy Act of 2005 calls for a comprehensive inventory and analysis of oil and gas reserves for all areas of the Outer Continental Shelf-85 percent of which is now off limits to development-but did little to address the nation's growing demand for oil.

Interior Secretary Gale Norton said in an Aug. 22 statement: "With our reliance on imports of foreign oil climbing each year, we would be irresponsible if we did not consider how we might develop these abundant domestic resources."

Norton's view is not universally shared. In a post-Katrina letter, Natural Resources Defense Council President John Adams wrote to members of the council: "Our nation simply does not have enough oil reserves to affect world oil prices. The only way out of this mess is to reduce our appetite for oil by improving the fuel economy of our vehicles [which consume 40 percent of our oil] and by relying on smarter, cleaner and renewable ways to power our economy."

Whatever approach Congress and the Bush administration take, it won't do much, if anything, to ease near-term vulnerability and economic pain. And that pain will be felt most keenly by those citizens who call the Gulf coast home and fuel the rest of the nation.

"We don't sunbathe on our coast. We produce energy to light up Chicago and New York and California," says Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., whose summer home on Lake Pontchartrain and the homes of four of her siblings in New Orleans were destroyed in Katrina's wrath. "We have most of the pipelines in the nation under this state. We provide natural gas and oil, and we are proud of that contribution, but as you can see there are costs associated with that . . . and we expect the nation to help us out at this time."

Ignoring the Environment

For the federal government, one of the most enduring lessons of Hurricane Katrina might be the importance of environmental considerations in large-scale public works programs. The chemical pollution in the Gulf of Mexico-which helped trigger a fishery failure declaration from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration on Sept. 9-wasn't unexpected. "That is the price of drilling for oil on your coast," says Landrieu.

Another environmental disaster-the noxious, watery soup of raw sewage and petroleum products the New Orleans flood created, was a consequence of levee failures that might have been mitigated with wiser investment.

Or so says Walter Maestri, the outspoken emergency management coordinator of suburban Jefferson Parish, who saw many of his flood mitigation programs suspended during the past five years as federal funds were redirected to homeland security priorities. Louisiana fights "terrorists like Katrina" that come back year after year, says Maestri. "When you don't fund awarded grants for draining projects and elevation of homes . . . you're going to end up in many cases with what occurs here."

While New Orleans siphons out the last of the fetid swill and starts shoveling up the toxic sludge, experts with the benefit of an arm's-length perspective on the worst natural disaster in U.S. history are thinking and talking about what constitutes an environmentally sound plan for rebuilding.

Once the debris is cleared away, local, state and federal governments will have what amounts to a blank slate for decisions about land use and public infrastructure for the first time in two centuries. Hydrologist Debra Knopman, a Clinton-era Interior Department administrator who directs the infrastructure, safety and environment division of RAND Corp., hopes decision-makers at all levels will take advantage of the opportunity to coordinate their plans. She says it's difficult for the U.S. political system to take the long view that these kinds of projects require.

"There is a critical path of decision-making in this reconstruction effort, and it's a values decision about how much protection Louisiana and New Orleans want and need. That is going to then set the stage for all the other decisions that need to get made in that region related to rebuilding or redevelopment," Knopman says. "I'm not sure we're going to get that sequence right because there's so much pressure now to act quickly."

The federal government is responsible for flood control because it's an interstate problem. There's high demand for federal flood protection all across the country, but there's a large pool of unmet needs because so many local governments are unwilling or unable to contribute more than a small portion of the cost. There's also no national priority-setting process for public flood works, and local bickering about how to build projects often causes budget-busting delays.

What happened in New Orleans is the product of this entrenched, piecemeal approach to satisfying the nation's infrastructure needs. The city was built below sea level, in a bowl rimmed with levees to keep Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi River from pouring in. It sinks deeper by the day-an unintended consequence of keeping it dry.

The levees disrupt the natural replenishment process for the soil on which New Orleans and its environs sit. Restraining the river pushes silt deposits too far into the Gulf of Mexico, starving the marshes south of New Orleans. Three miles of marsh can absorb a foot of storm surge. But the marshes are disappearing. The Corps of Engineers has a comprehensive plan to restore the marshes and improve flood control in New Orleans with a new system of levees that will cost $14 billion. It's stalled in Congress in part because the price is so high.

Considering the level of economic development in New Orleans, a fresh look at the idea of protecting only for a Category 3 storm is long overdue. But other cities should take a lesson from Hurricane Katrina, says Knopman. "All around major metropolitan areas," she says, "we need to revisit the level of protection given the economic assets and economic damages that could result from flooding."

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Ex-CIA officer heads to court for second time over proposed book

Jason Vest — Thu, 13 Oct 2005 00:00:00 -0400

According to filings with the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, Gary Berntsen, the CIA's top officer in Afghanistan during al Qaeda's 2001 escape from Tora Bora, submitted his book to the CIA's Publications Review Board on May 17, 2005, one month before he left the agency after a nearly 23-year career. The book, to be published by Random House, is tentatively titled Jawbreaker, a reference to the code name for CIA Counterterrorist Center teams operating in Afghanistan between 1999 and 2001.

Like all CIA employees, Berntsen is bound by secrecy agreements that mandate a PRB review of materials for publication. Though the PRB is supposed to return manuscripts with any necessary changes or redactions after 30 days, Bernsten, according to the filings, received nothing by June 17. On July 28, Berntsen and his attorney, Roy W. Krieger, sued the agency for release of the manuscript, and asked that the CIA be forced to respond to the suit within five days instead of the customary sixty.

That motion was denied, but on August 23, a full 98 days after the manuscript was submitted for review, Jawbreaker was finally returned to Berntsen---accompanied by a 22 page list of redactions desired by the PRB. Though much of the material the PRB wanted cut--everything, according to Krieger, from "single words to nine full pages of text"--has been previously declassified and has already appeared in other publications, Bernsten amended his manuscript, and sent it back to the PRB on Sept. 1.

But well over another 30 days later, Berntsen is once again still awaiting word from the CIA. Jawbreaker's original Oct. 27 publication date has been pushed back to at least Dec. 27. According to Krieger, the case is not just about violations of administrative procedure, but constitutional issues as well.

"One of the central purposes of the First Amendment is to allow publication to serve as both a critical source of information for the public as well as an important government watchdog," Krieger wrote in yesterday's filing. "[Berntsen] has written a book that contains unique information regarding his experiences. Although [Berntsen] properly and fully abided by the pre-publication review requirements imposed by his secrecy agreement, [the CIA] has...frustrated the publication of the book by failing to timely deliver his draft manuscript and by asserting unsupportable classification decisions."

Citing the pending publication review, Berntsen and his attorney have remained largely silent about the book's content. However, in late July and early August interviews with the Associated Press and Newsweek and a more recent interview with Newsday, Berntsen has revealed that part of his book refutes assertions made by President Bush and Gen. Tommy Franks, former head of U.S. Central Command, that U.S. forces weren't sure whether Osama bin Laden was present at Tora Bora, Afghanistan, in Dec. 2001. (Though some administration officials continue to cast Tora Bora as a minor setback in the war on terrorism--often citing the uncertainty of bin Laden's presence--the battle is widely regarded as one of the U.S. military's greatest post-9/11 failures, in which Pentagon leaders ignored CIA critiques of its battle plan and subsequently allowed most of al Qaeda to escape.)

According to a July 28 AP dispatch, Bernsten took issue with assertions made by in a 2004 presidential debate by both Bush and Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry about Tora Bora, saying their debate "did not represent the reality of what happened on the ground." In its Aug. 15 edition, Newsweek reported that "Berntsen says he had definitive intelligence that bin Laden was holed up at Tora Bora--intelligence operatives had tracked him--and could have been caught." Similarly, in an Aug. 8 CNN interview, Krieger said that "there were a variety of intelligence collection methods that were used to establish [bin Laden's] presence" in Tora Bora, and that as the "ground senior intelligence commander, if anyone would know if Mr. Bin Laden was in Tora Bora, it would be my client, Mr. Berntsen." Berntsen's book is not devoted exclusively to Afghanistan, but his whole 23-year career. According to open sources and interviews with intelligence community figures, Berntsen, a Smithtown, N.Y., native, became a case officer in the CIA's directorate of operations in Oct. 1982, and went on to receive two of the agency's highest awards, including one for his role in preventing the assassination of India's prime minister in 1996. A Farsi speaker who worked the agency's Iranian account for a number of years, Berntsen was also posted to several Middle East stations, and was a key player in the agency's efforts after the 1988 East Africa embassy bombings. Berntsen also frequently is mentioned--as "Gary 2"-- in the last 75 pages of fellow ex-CIA officer Gary Schroen's First In: An Insider's Account of How the CIA Spearheaded the War on Terror in Afghanistan. Berntsen, who was trained by Schroen at the CIA's Camp Perry, Va., training facility, took over from him as Jawbreaker team leader in late Oct. 2001.

"A lot of people are looking forward to reading Berntsen's book, because it has to pick up where Schroen's left off," said one veteran CIA officer.

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Calling In The Cavalry

Katherine McIntire Peters and Jason Vest — Sat, 01 Oct 2005 00:00:00 -0400

It was America's biggest disaster since Sept. 11, 2001. So where was the military after Katrina?

It will be months before official post-mortems detail the minutiae of how the federal government's response to a disaster became a disaster itself. But it's not premature to say that at least part of the horrific downward spiral in Hurricane Katrina's wake was due to how narrowly policymakers and the public have considered "homeland security" in the post-9/11 world. The phrase is applied almost exclusively to countering and responding to acts of terrorism perpetrated by humans. Low-probability, high-risk natural disasters became at best a secondary consideration-even though many of their effects and challenges in prevention and response aren't dissimilar from terrorist scenarios that have driven policy concerns during the past four years.

Hurricane Katrina was nothing if not a weapon of mass destruction. She obliterated 90,000 square miles of U.S. territory and forced more than 1 million people from their homes, hundreds of thousands of which are destroyed or uninhabitable. She took out the regional electrical grid, telephone lines and cellular communications systems, plunging a huge swath of the country into literal and figurative darkness. With wind and water as her primary weapons, she spewed toxic waste for miles, erased whole communities from Gulf Coast maps and drowned New Orleans in a flood of misery and criminality. And in a gut-punch to the economy, she took out 11 percent of the nation's oil-refining capacity, sending gas prices soaring from Maine to California.

So how is it that a nation whose security apparatus purportedly is focused significantly on unconventional, catastrophic events occurring here in the homeland seemed utterly unprepared to respond in the aftermath of a hurricane? Why weren't active-duty troops called upon sooner to stem the tide of despair in what might be the most devastating natural disaster to hit the United States? While much scrutiny rightly has focused on the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Homeland Security Department, comparatively little attention has been paid to the Katrina-related role and relationships of the only federal department that has the experience, equipment and structure appropriate for responding to a disaster, man-made or natural, on such a massive scale: the U.S. military-in particular, its Northern Command, created after 9/11. NORTHCOM's stated mission includes supporting natural disaster response.

In his Sept. 15 address to the nation about Katrina response, President Bush said he would seek a larger role for the military in future disasters: "It is now clear that a challenge on this scale requires greater federal authority and a broader role for the armed forces-the institution of our government most capable of massive logistical operations on a moment's notice."

In the days after Katrina's wrath, both civilian and uniformed leadership defended the military's response as swift, anticipatory and proper. On Sept. 6, for example, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Richard Myers noted that "not only was there no delay, I think we anticipated, in most cases, the support that was required and we were pushing support before we were formally asked for it." This was, to some extent, true. Under the 1984 Robert T. Stafford Disaster Relief Act, amended in 1988, active-duty soldiers can be deployed under the direction of FEMA once a state governor requests a presidential declaration of a state of emergency. President Bush did just that on Aug. 27 as Katrina was barreling through the Gulf of Mexico, two days before making landfall east of New Orleans. The military was proactively operating before the storm hit, and once given the green light to actually respond, the resources brought to bear were both formidable and indispensable.

Some military comments and actions, leave room for questions, however, particularly about how serious the Pentagon, lawmakers and policymakers take the natural disaster part of NORTHCOM's and the Pentagon's portfolio. All the parties seem to have missed many lessons learned from similar military operations at home and abroad. What's more, although the Defense Department does not, as Myers, noted, "have lead responsibility with respect to natural disasters," in certain instances, it's the only agency capable of effective response.

"There are two fundamental things at issue here," says a retired senior Defense official turned contractor who, per contract requirements, can't be quoted by name. "First is the apparent inability of the people who drafted the National Response Plan to both understand what the military, and only the military, can do in certain situations and to have written it and designed an actual system in such a way that they could have done it. The other is just how serious NORTHCOM, or how serious the Pentagon or anyone else is, about NORTHCOM handling these kind of things."

Late last year, the Homeland Security Department issued a mammoth National Response Plan, 426 pages that in theory provide a reliable road map for inter-agency cooperation in every kind of emergency. To those in military circles with disaster operations experience, at first blush the plan seemed to embrace and encompass insights and recommendations by the military from more than a decade ago. Back in 1992, for example, Army Forces Command (FORSCOM), now NORTHCOM's land component, stated in one of its Hurricane Andrew after-action reports that while the response plan's predecessor, the Federal Response Plan, had Defense as a support agency to FEMA and other civilian agencies, Andrew's scale was so far beyond what the FRP conceived that the military had no choice but to take the de facto lead in almost every area. "DoD has the organization and ability to provide rapid, massive initial relief, but it does not now have a mission to do so," the report stated. "If DoD and FORSCOM are expected to provide the initial response in a catastrophic disaster, ours and FEMA's plans need to reflect DoD's initial response requirements."

Defense had the capabilities and exercised them in Andrew. But the report noted in language that eerily presages New Orleans 2005 that what could have been a faster reaction was hampered because "gridlock among local, county, state and federal governments delayed massive response two to three days." FORSCOM's proposed solution was a new massive-disaster policy that would allow the military to respond to the fullest as soon as the government realized a huge disaster was in the offing. "We need provisions for an automatic response to a catastrophic disaster," it concluded. "Based on pre-established criteria, we would begin automatically responding until directed otherwise. For example, any Category 4 or 5 hurricane hitting a populous area or any 7.0 earthquake in a populous area would trigger an automatic federal and DoD response."

A 1993 GAO report reached a similar conclusion, holding that the military "is the only organization capable of providing, transporting and distributing sufficient quantities of items needed" to combat Andrew-level natural disasters (RCED-93-186). While last year's DHS-authored National Response Plan kept DHS and FEMA firmly in the driver's seat for catastrophic responses, it also granted Defense "immediate response capability." Echoing the Hurricane Andrew after-action review, the NRP noted that "imminently serious conditions resulting from any civil emergency may require immediate action to save lives, prevent human suffering, or mitigate property damage," and, in such circumstances, gives Defense the green light to act.

But the IRC clause can be activated only in "response to requests of civil authorities." And, as Katrina demonstrated, if the communication systems of local and state civil authorities are wiped out, or if civil authorities at the federal level fail to assign Defense specifically, or if confusion or animosity-hallmarks of state-federal discussions about responsibility and resources-inhibit a request, technically, there's little the military can do.

Retired Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni, a former commander in chief of Central Command, is nothing short of appalled at how the NRP has-or rather, hasn't-worked in the case of Katrina. "Look, we have troops on standby alert at [Fort] Bragg, N.C., and [Camp] Pendleton, Calif., and within a handful of hours you can have planes that would be going anywhere in the world being turned in domestically; you can be loading up aircraft before, you can be moving helicopters nearby-none of that stuff is hard," Zinni says. "This is about what decision-makers did and didn't do in terms of figuring out how and when to call in the military. This is about the failure of a mechanism that should be designed to make judgments and assessments quickly to get the military elements in there.

"Having run a number of these types of operations around the world," he continues, "I can tell you the key is assessing immediate needs and responding immediately. To run across the Katrina situation is really surprising to me-you'd think after 9/11 that this would have been the major fix. The federal level has to create the command, control and communications not just in practicing with the states, but when a situation like this happens. And the military is particularly good at that, because we pretty much have everything we need and we know how to set up the logistics spine."

Posse Comitatus

But Zinni says he and most other commanders never have been particularly comfortable using troops domestically, where there's potential to violate the Posse Comitatus Act. The 1878 Reconstruction-era law was designed to prevent soldiers from interfering with voting. It bars active-duty troops from enforcing the law on U.S. soil.

In the days after Katrina, Posse Comitatus seemed to be the pre-eminent concern in federal officials' minds. Once New Orleans descended into chaos, after the levees were breached in the wake of the storm and armed looters began roaming the streets and shooting at rescue workers, law enforcement became a central issue in the deployment of active-duty troops. While Bush could have federalized the response by invoking the Insurrection Act, administration officials were loath to do so for political reasons, according to a Pentagon official familiar with the deliberations. The prospect of a Republican president seizing control of a situation from a Democratic governor who explicitly resisted federalizing the military response was deemed politically unpalatable, the official says.

"The preference is always to use National Guard troops in state status, working for the governor. The general perception is that the state National Guard will be better received and [they] better understand the nature of the local situation," says the Pentagon official. "This is one of the things that makes us different from other nations-we don't send in the military when something goes wrong-but it also makes us inefficient."

The last president to invoke the Insurrection Act was President George H.W. Bush to quell rioting that broke out April 29, 1992, in Los Angeles after a jury there acquitted white police officers in the high-profile beating of Rodney King, an African-American. On May 1, at the request of the California governor, the president authorized the use of active-duty troops, along with National Guard troops under federal authority, to restore order. On May 3, a convoy of troops from the 7th Infantry Division, then stationed at Fort Ord, Calif., and Marines from Camp Pendleton rolled into the city to join federalized California National Guard troops in stemming the violence.

That operation hardly went smoothly. Col. Thomas R. Lujan, a military lawyer writing in the Autumn 1997 issue of the Army War College quarterly Parameters, describes in great detail many of the problems encountered. Soldiers and Marines were hastily (and ineffectively) trained in responding to civil disturbances, and rules of engagement were not uniformly understood. "There was a widespread misunderstanding of the role of the active-duty military and federalized National Guard in this kind of operation," Lujan wrote in "Legal Aspects of Domestic Employment of the Army." The military commander mistakenly believed he was constrained by Posse Comitatus. The county sheriff believed military forces were to be allocated to police units and follow orders in a "rent-a-soldier" fashion, Lujan found. Such misperceptions seriously degraded the effectiveness of the operation.

"The lesson is clear. By the stroke of a pen, within a single day, the underlying framework for the authorized use of military force within the United States can be completely changed," Lujan wrote. He advocated that senior government leaders must rethink the issue of domestic military force. It's an admonition that's likely to resonate today: "Given the scarcity of resources, our nation can ill afford to have the effectiveness of its military assets artificially constrained by a misunderstanding of the law."

Lt. Col. Craig T. Trebilcock, a judge advocate general lawyer specializing in Posse Comitatus, says misunderstanding the law is common in both military and civilian circles. After Katrina, that misunderstanding undeniably hampered military response.

According to Trebilcock, the law was not an impediment to immediately deploying military forces for rescue, humanitarian and other operations that would have helped stabilize the situation. And, he says, there was ample precedent for the Bush administration to push the envelope further. "If you take what they're saying at face value, it seems decision-makers were operating off myths, rather than the reality of what Posse Comitatus is," he says. "The other explanation is they fumbled the ball completely and are trying to use Posse Comitatus after the fact to explain why they were so ineffectual in the first 96 hours."

Unlearned Lessons

In examining the Katrina response, it's fair to ask how much attention military commanders and civilian officials paid to lessons learned from Los Angeles, Hurricane Andrew and other similar disasters, domestic or foreign. NORTHCOM made much, for example, of the deployment of the hospital ship USNS Comfort. But the Comfort wasn't given the order to get under way until Aug. 31, days after the storm, and didn't move out until Sept. 2. It didn't arrive in the Gulf Coast region until Sept. 9-12 days after Katrina. Yet as the 1992 FORSCOM Andrew review makes clear, resources such as the Comfort are best used in a fairly finite window. "The first 72 hours immediately following a catastrophic disaster is the most critical time for saving lives," the report said. "After 72 hours, survival rates of trapped victims go down dramatically . . . during this time period, we must rapidly assess the extent of the disaster, determine response requirement and provide critical life-support aid."

And while the closest ship already in the stricken region, the USS Bataan, quickly moved toward New Orleans and began helicopter and landing craft operations, it was almost immediately diverted to Mississippi. The Chicago Tribune reported that the Bataan's captain was unhappy that her crew and hospital facilities were being underused.

Response to two cyclones that hit Southeast Africa in 2000 causing damage comparable to that done by Katrina-thousands of square miles, including virtually all of Mozambique, were flooded, displacing hundreds of thousands of people-offer unheeded lessons. In that case, the U.S. European Command (EUCOM) quickly stood up Joint Task Force Atlas Response, a military-led interagency effort that coordinated a multi-national relief and rescue effort. It was founded on the understanding that rapid rescues had to be effected and could only be done with rotary air support. Within 48 hours, EUCOM cargo planes began loading and delivering scores of helicopters; ultimately, EUCOM pilots flew more than 600 rescue, relief and reconnaissance sorties, moving more than a million pounds of humanitarian equipment and tens of thousands of people ranging from victims to nongovernmental organization workers and military assistance teams.

Not unlike critics of the Katrina response, some involved in the 2000 operation considered it a case of too little too late. Critics charged that the Agency for International Development, the State Department and other lead agencies lost critical days as the situation went from bad to worst-case while interagency discussions focused on bureaucratic procedures set up to deal with smaller-scale disasters. And while Defense Department assessment teams were sent in well in advance of the worst of it, they too could have been quicker in anticipating a likely rapid deterioration in the situation.

"We did an excellent job once we were in there, but I and others believe we could and should have done better across the board," says a senior Defense official who worked on Atlas Response. "In many ways, it would have been a great case study to apply to domestic policy; the material is certainly there. But I don't think too many people noticed, and [I don't think] that those who did really gave it much thought after 9/11."

When it comes to dealing with the natural disaster part of its mission, NORTHCOM still seems of two minds. On the one hand, its Web site clearly notes its disaster and civil assistance duties, and the command on numerous occasions has proudly emphasized its role in monitoring hurricanes and preparing for them. Its uniformed leaders and civilian overseers repeatedly have mentioned its disaster role in congressional testimony.

Yet the majority of NORTHCOM training exercises across the country have been devoted to theoretical terrorist events. The natural disaster models usually get second billing as one of many unfolding situations in a worst-case scenario in which NORTHCOM must respond to a half-dozen simultaneous events. NORTHCOM's then-chief of operations, Air Force Maj. Gen. Lee McFann, seemed to leave little to the imagination last year when he told Armed Forces Journal, "Our mission is not to respond to fires and floods and hurricanes, although we do that. Our mission is to respond to terrorist attack."

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Ex-Army Corps officials say budget cuts imperiled flood mitigation efforts

Jason Vest and Justin Rood — Thu, 01 Sep 2005 00:00:00 -0400

Mike Parker, the former head of the Army Corps of Engineers, was forced to resign in 2002 over budget disagreements with the White House. He clashed with Mitch Daniels, former director of the Office of Management and Budget, which sets the administration's annual budget goals.

"One time I took two pieces of steel into Mitch Daniels' office," Parker recalled. "They were exactly the same pieces of steel, except one had been under water in a Mississippi lock for 30 years, and the other was new. The first piece was completely corroded and falling apart because of a lack of funding. I said, 'Mitch, it doesn't matter if a terrorist blows the lock up or if it falls down because it disintegrates -- either way it's the same effect, and if we let it fall down, we have only ourselves to blame.' It made no impact on him whatsoever."

Daniels, now governor of Indiana, did not respond to a request for comment.

Parker -- who, along with members of his family, was forced to evacuate his Mississippi farm on Sunday night -- drew media attention (and the White House's ire) in 2002 by telling the Senate Budget Committee that a White House proposal to cut just over $2 billion from the Corps' $6 billion budget request would have a "negative impact" on the national interest. Parker also noted that cuts would mean the end of scores of contracts and the loss of tens of thousands of jobs.

After Parker's Capitol Hill appearance, Daniels wrote an angry memo to President Bush, writing that Parker's testimony "reads badly. . . on the printed page," and that "Parker. . . [was] distancing [himself] actively from the administration." Parker, a former Republican congressman from Mississippi, was forced to resign shortly thereafter.

The Corps of Engineers handles many of the nation's largest infrastructure projects, such as draining and restoring wetlands, dredging ports and harbors, building dams, bridges and waterways, and preparing for and responding to natural disasters. In Katrina's wake, those functions have attracted the interest of policymakers and citizens alike.

The Corps' efforts have won it mixed reviews over the years. The New Orleans Times-Picayune wrote in 2002, "No one has been more responsible for keeping Louisiana habitable over the past 200 years than the Army Corps of Engineers. But the Corps has also caused the most problems."

The Bush administration consistently has pushed to trim the Corps' budget. But Congress has been reluctant to follow its lead, and regularly hands the organization several hundred million dollars more than the White House requests.

Amid the largesse, however, Congress and the administration have made targeted cuts, some of them in Louisiana. As New Orleans City Business noted earlier this year, the Corps' construction budget for the district has gone from $147 million in fiscal 2001 to $82 million in fiscal 2005. Scores of projects, from efforts to build levees, canals and pumping stations to bridge improvements -- all of which deal with flood mitigation -- are incomplete. (The administration's fiscal 2006 budget proposal cut construction funding for the district even further, to $56 million.)

The Southeast Louisiana Flood Control Project has felt the pinch particularly hard. After receiving $36.5 million for fiscal 2005, the project was cut to $10.4 million in the fiscal 2006 White House budget. The House has endorsed that funding level, while the Senate voted to boost funding to $37 million.

In a conference call with reporters Thursday, Lt. Gen. Carl A. Strock, the Corps' chief of engineers, denied that funding problems contributed to the crisis in New Orleans. "It is my opinion that based on the intensity of this storm, the flooding of the central business district and the French Quarter would still have occurred. I do not see that the level of funding was really a contributing factor in this case."

Some veteran Corps officials note that there's been a downward trend in funding since the Carter administration. But it's been more pronounced in recent years, and the New Orleans District has been particularly affected.

Among those who echo Parker's sentiments on budget priorities is Joseph Corrigan, who spent 2002-2004 as the deputy engineer for the Corps' Mobile, Ala., District. "We've had a number of really tough floods in recent years, but we have not been investing in levees, or flood damage reduction projects, the way we used to, even as populations have been exploding," Corrigan said. But, he adds, the lack of adequate preparation for the hurricane isn't exclusively about funding levels and priorities.

There is, for example, the issue of levee responsibility. "Not all of the levees, particularly in Mississippi and around the country, are federal," he said. "You may have a county or a local levee run by a local levee board, and private levee, and a federal levee that all have to work together, because if you have one fail, it can be disastrous." The coordination process is "excruciatingly difficult," he said, because the expertise and ability of local levee boards varies greatly. He also noted that projects frequently get delayed for years because of conflicts between state and federal agencies and environmental-related litigation, or because states and municipalities aren't able or interested in contributing to projects that have to be cost-shared.

Corrigan said that while the Corps both plans and trains extensively for disaster response, the affected Gulf Coast geography and scale of damage presents a unique challenge in effectively deploying resources.

"We go through exercises every year, and each Corps district has teams that are ready to roll when something happens, recognizing that the affected district's headquarters may be wiped out along with our people's homes," he said. "Right now, for example, I understand there's only 45 New Orleans District personnel on hand out of a 1,000-person district, so the Corps is shipping people in from all over to deal with every aspect of this. And we have open-ended contracts with contractors to be activated. The problem is figuring out if the contractors can still respond, and getting all the necessary equipment there. We have, for example, the Deployable Tactical Operations Center, essentially a mobile emergency headquarters. When I talked to guys two days ago trying to get it where it needs to be, they were having to use chainsaws every 200 yards to clear the way."

-- Senior correspondent Katherine McIntire Peters contributed to this story.

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London's Lessons

Jason Vest — Mon, 01 Aug 2005 00:00:00 -0400

Reorganizing intelligence agencies and beefing up their budgets might not be enough.

In the wake of the July 7 bombings in London, the British authorities' response-including scrutiny of closed-circuit TV footage, scene-scouring for forensic evidence and close attention to phone tips-was a textbook example of good investigative methodology. But if there's a lesson for the U.S. counterterrorism community after last month's U.K. attacks, it might be that buffed-up budgets and agency reorganizations don't amount to much if they still fail to resolve differences over assessments and use of resources before a terrorist attack.

Just as America has ramped up its counterterrorism spending and started reorganizing its intelligence community, so too has the United Kingdom. After Sept. 11, almost $350 million in additional spending went to MI5 and MI6 (Britain's internal and external intelligence agencies), the London Metropolitan Police special-operations units, SO12 and SO13, which focus on terrorism, and the eavesdroppers at the Government Communications Headquarters. By 2004, almost 40 percent of British signals intelligence resources were directed toward counterterrorism, and Scotland Yard had a budget of $91 million that included, among other things, 700 additional officers detailed to terrorism.

Just as Congress passed the USA Patriot Act and other expansions of law enforcement and intelligence powers after 9/11, Britain's Parliament retooled parts of its already formidable Prevention of Terrorism Act.

Presaging various U.S. independent agency and commission-driven initiatives, in Britain, MI5 quickly reconfigured part of its counterterrorism operation to become the Counter-Terrorism Analysis Centre-which subsequently went interagency and became the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre, not unlike the recent U.S. evolution of the Terrorist Threat Integration Center into the National Counter-terrorism Center. Before the U.S. system of color-coded terrorist warnings, Britain instituted its own scheme. And just as a June 29 presidential executive order created the National Security Service-a semiautonomous, MI5-like unit within the FBI-the British two years ago began recombining MI5's organized crime functions with other agencies to create the Serious Organized Crime Agency so the Metropolitan police specialist units and MI5 could focus more exclusively on terrorism. Not unlike the U.S. creation of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Britain's Cabinet Office intelligence staff has expanded both its members and mission. And just as U.S. intelligence reforms place a premium on better analytical mechanisms that challenge assumptions and methodologies, earlier this year MI6 resurrected a formal operation to do that, too.

Yet, in the weeks leading up to July 7, the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre held that a terrorist attack, while inevitable, wasn't likely anytime soon. And almost immediately after the bombing, British officials were admitting that-unlike the Spanish authorities in 2004's Madrid bombings-they had no leads on who the perpetrators were or where they might have come from. So why the blind spots? In part, it was because reforms still have failed to adequately reconcile intelligence assessments and resource decisions, say active and retired U.S. and British security service officers.

Since early this year, the British press has carried reports focusing on disagreements over what the most likely threats were and how best to deal with them-both within agencies and among agency heads and policy- makers. Echoing points made at a public conference earlier this year, an MI5 report expressed concern that small numbers of "cleanskins"-British Muslims, mostly radicalized at home, with no traceable history of extremism and the savvy not to engage in suspicious behavior-pose a likely threat to security. The report also drew attention to an increase in the small but burgeoning number of British Muslims leaving to fight jihad in Iraq and the future threat they might pose to British troops abroad and Britons at home. Not only did British intelligence mandarins find that a more compelling threat, they also reasoned that acts of terror were most likely to come from external teams dispatched from abroad or highly trained sleeper cells acting on direct orders from al Qaeda higher-ups. And, as the Guardian newspaper reported, because the joint analysis center concluded that al Qaeda's leadership has been weakened to the point that it doesn't have the ability to order such an attack, Britain's threat level was reduced from "severe-general" to "substantial."

To those experienced with violent Islamist radicalism in general and al Qaeda in particular, this seems, as the British would say, a bit daft. It appears ever clearer that the increasingly transnational, yet decentralized, cellular structure of Islamist terrorism doesn't necessitate orders from on high. "The idea out there that bin Laden and these guys are still getting together to have a conference to decide what's going to happen is just bizarre," says Jack Cloonan, a retired 27-year FBI veteran. Cloonan investigated the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania and other terrorism cases as part of the bureau's bin Laden squad in New York. "Thousands of the guys who went through the training camps in Afghanistan were instructed to go back to their countries and do what they were going to do. The sheik doesn't have to give a specific order," he says.

While the efforts of British intelligence services in Islamist counterterrorism have come a long way in recent years, they still suffer from resource and orientation problems in addition to threat interpretation difficulties, says Cloonan. He has worked closely with British security services, including on Operation Challenge, a joint 1998 U.S.-British endeavor that apprehended United Kingdom-based terrorists connected with the embassy bombings. British budgets are paltry compared with those of their American counterparts, he says, and while some individuals and elements quickly grasped the nuances of Islamist terrorism, institutional adaptation hasn't been as fast. "When I first visited SO13's offices in the late 1990s, everything on their walls had to do with IRA terrorism. When I was there last year, a lot of the same stuff was still there," he says. "And there's also a history of rotating people every three to four years, which is a problem in terms of institutional knowledge."

In addition, while British agencies have powers and, in some cases, even resources that are the envy of their American counterparts, they might not always use them effectively. Earlier this year, Parliament approved, with minor tweaks, Home Secretary Charles Clarke's proposal authorizing "control orders" to keep tabs on terrorism suspects for whom evidence that warrants arrest is lacking. Conceived as both a tool of intelligence gathering and of disruption after Britain's highest judicial authority ruled that the government can't hold terrorist suspects indefinitely without trial, these protocols give MI5 and Scotland Yard near-total authority to constantly watch over and inhibit British subjects and foreign nationals with possible terrorist ties.

But according to British press accounts earlier this year, career professionals considered the way they were being directed to apply control orders to be counterproductive. At one point, each of 10 terror suspects with control orders was being watched by three shifts of 20-member teams-600 officers for 10 people, at an estimated cost of $87,500 a day. "There's a feeling within the services that things like this are likely to come at the expense of other more useful endeavors, like investigation, infiltration and intelligence gathering in the corners of London's Islamist community we don't know enough about," a former British security services official says.

Also complicating matters are conflicts between Prime Minister Tony Blair and intelligence agencies, which have grown increasingly resentful of instances when Blair has, in their view, exaggerated threats and sought to put security services' imprimatur on his claims. Earlier this year, the prime minister asserted that "hundreds" of potential terrorists were on the loose, a number the services have no evidence to support, and which was considered a bit of pre-election political pandering.

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Threat interpretation may be biggest barrier to warding off attacks

Jason Vest — Wed, 20 Jul 2005 00:00:00 -0400

But if there's a lesson for the U.S. counterterrorism community after last month's U.K. attacks, it might be that buffed-up budgets and agency reorganizations don't amount to much if they still fail to resolve differences over assessments and use of resources before a terrorist attack.

By 2004, almost 40 percent of British signals intelligence resources were directed toward counterterrorism, and Scotland Yard had a budget of $91 million that included, among other things, 700 additional officers detailed to terrorism.

Since early this year, the British press has carried reports focusing on disagreements over what the most likely threats were and how best to deal with them-both within agencies and among agency heads and policy- makers. Echoing points made at a public conference earlier this year, an MI5 report expressed concern that small numbers of "cleanskins"-British Muslims, mostly radicalized at home, with no traceable history of extremism and the savvy not to engage in suspicious behavior-pose a likely threat to security. The report also drew attention to an increase in the small but burgeoning number of British Muslims leaving to fight jihad in Iraq and the future threat they might pose to British troops abroad and Britons at home. Not only did British intelligence mandarins find that a more compelling threat, they also reasoned that acts of terror were most likely to come from external teams dispatched from abroad or highly trained sleeper cells acting on direct orders from al Qaeda higher-ups. And, as the Guardian newspaper reported, because the joint analysis center concluded that al Qaeda's leadership has been weakened to the point that it doesn't have the ability to order such an attack, Britain's threat level was reduced from "severe-general" to "substantial."

-- Jason Vest has written extensively on national security affairs for publications including Harper's, The Atlantic Monthly, The American Prospect and The Boston Phoenix.

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