Pro Publica has a good story on how the “Blue Dogs” got slaughtered last night. 22 of them lost re-election and there’s good reason to believe that it says more about them than it does about their opposition. That accounts for a third of the Republican gains.
The NYT editorial on this is far less terrible than I would have expected:
Voters in Tuesday’s elections sent President Obama a loud message: They don’t like how he’s doing his job, they’re even angrier at Congressional Democrats and they gave the House back to the Republicans. The Republicans spent months fanning Americans’ anger over the economy and fear of “big government,” while offering few ideas of their own. Exit polls indicated that they had succeeded in turning out their base, and that the Democrats had failed to rally their own.
Americans who voted described themselves as far more conservative than they did in 2006 and 2008 — and than the population as a whole. More than 4 in 10 said that they supported the Tea Party movement. But more than half of the voters said they have an unfavorable view of the Republican Party.
So we have some acknowledgment there’s a little more going on than Red Team vs. Blue Team. Thomas Ferguson and Jie Chen did an analysis of the first “victory” in Massachusetts that predicted what would happen last night pretty well. The following chart plots towns towns by median income on the x axis and decline in voter turnout between 2004 and 2006 (green dots) and between 2008 and 2010 (blue dots).
You can see that turnout in poorer towns declined much more in both periods, but to an even greater degree in in 2008-2010. So we have a one-sided drop in turnout resulting from less than inspiring leadership rather than a “shift” towards Republicans.
Ferguson and Chen concluded:
Quite like a hurricane, this tempest has a clear dual structure. Our study suggests that in the eye of the storm – the old Democratic base – an ominous, unnatural calm is settling in that displaces the near-millenarian enthusiasm of 2008. We have seen how the surge in overall voter turnout in the 2010 Senate race disguised a drop in turnout in lower income towns that previously voted heavily Democratic. Recalling one more time the problems with inferences from aggregate data, we think it is safe to conclude that our data are consistent with the claim put forward by the Democratic campaign’s chief pollster, that Obama administration’s unwillingness to face down the banks and slowness in dealing with the recession have demoralized and outraged the party’s electoral base. The disconnect between these disaffected Democrats and the administration and party leaders looks to be deep.
Not a very pretty picture, but at least Gil Scott Heron understands:
As our elected officials have started to come to terms with what they’ve done:
The financial services industry is growing increasingly concerned as more politicians get behind the idea of a broad moratorium on home foreclosures, which banks and many outside analysts say could be good short-term politics but terrible long-term policy.One senior Wall Street executive told Morning Money over the weekend: ‘President Obama should be very cautious about aligning himself with Congressional leaders who are playing politics with the foreclosure issue. With foreclosed properties comprising one in every four homes sold in the United States, the spreading moratorium could disrupt real estate deals in progress, slow down the process of clearing the backlog of troubled home loans and [endanger] the economic recovery.’
“The recovery” meaning financial markets, not the economy that you and I actually live in, which is stagnant:
Now there are a number of details that have been drowned out by the massive public relations campaign that’s been put forward on this such as this New York Times article. There’s a wonderful quote to describe this: “The most effective propaganda paradoxically uses information to drive information out of circulation.” It was the same thing when the crisis started and we heard about all kinds of derivatives–which are problematic–rather than the massive housing bubble that they filled. Curiously, that will actually help to explain the MERS problem.
MERS is an electronic mortgage registry database that was used to speed up the whole process of securitizing these loans faster than they could keep track of who actually owned the properties they were for. See this NYT article from 2009 describing the system. The key quote is this:
MERS, a tiny data-management company, claimed the right to foreclose, but would not explain how it came to possess the mortgage notes originally issued by banks. Judge Logan summoned a MERS lawyer to the Pinellas County courthouse and insisted that that fundamental question be answered before he permitted the drastic step of seizing someone’s home.
“You don’t think that’s reasonable?” the judge asked.
“I don’t,” the lawyer replied. “And in fact, not only do I think it’s not reasonable, often that’s going to be impossible.”
If they really believed they were worth multiple trillions of dollars, you’d think they’d spend the time to make sure they could take back these valuable properties, but of course they didn’t, which was why it was a multi-trillion dollar bubble. If you’re pawning something off on people, you want them to take it off your hands for more than its worth so they are the ones stuck with it and you’re gone when they realize it’s not worth what they paid. The person in that position is here is the real estate broker, the lender assumes the deed to the property and is supposed to take a loss if the buyer can’t actually pay for it. For assuming this risk they take interest on the loan. What we have been surrounded by is a bizarre “bank always wins” mentality. It’s having your cake and eating it too, then getting another one when it’s gone.
This is why the bizarre decision to preserve the debts that couldn’t be paid by doing a creditor bailout was so terrible, not “taxpayer dollars” which were far less than they’ve gotten in loan guarantees and access to the fed’s discount window. The recipients of that money often pay a 15% capital gains tax rate on their alleged “investments” compared to the 25% income tax anyone who makes more than $34k a year pays and all of the sales taxes people pay for necessities. Even people who have been able to keep up with their mortgage payments are in “negative equity” and paying for a loan on a house at bubble levels despite the bubble bursting.
Only under such a uniform standard could we so easily determine who the houses belong to. Only under an effective media blackout could the NYT print a story attributing the “foreclosure issue” to something so mundane without embarrassment.
A good Washington DC contact told me that a public relations/media push to demonize those who decide to walk away from mortgages they can still afford to pay (aka “strategic defaulters”) is underway. Expect to see a good bit of moral fervor as those who choose to cut their losses are attacked as immoral, irresponsible, and abusive.
There is a wee problem with the “blame the ruthless borrower” narrative. Banks who acted in a ruthless manner have trained their customers to behave the same way. This shift in prevailing attitudes is the logical and inevitable result of financial firms taking an increasingly predatory posture toward their customers. Borrowers are responding in kind, by taking a cold-blooded and legalistic look at their agreements with lenders.
In retrospect, that was a huge understatement. Oh yeah, there was the line about “the recovery” too:
Here’s a provocative thought: what if ‘extend and pretend’ within our nation’s troubled mortgage markets is actually providing a lift to consumer spending? It’s not as far-fetched as the idea might initially sound, and it might help explain some interesting data we’ve seen as of late — and it also might explain why the statistical recovery we’re seeing now doesn’t really feel like a recovery to most Americans.
And, if I’m right, it also explains why we may very well slip right back into the throes of recession all over again as we head into 2011.
So the story went that people were leaving their houses to go on a shopping spree or something. I never said it was reasonable, just that it was out there. The peak was a column titled: “Honey, I Lost the House. Let’s Party”
“What a relief, Marge, not to have that huge mortgage payment hanging over our head anymore.”
“You can say that again, Harry. Let’s celebrate. Maybe take a nice vacation. Or buy a new car.”
“What if the bank forecloses on our house? We could be living on the street next year.”
“Exactly. Which is why we need a new car. Maybe something roomy like a Chevy Suburban.”
By now you’ve probably seen the analysis, if you can call it that, on how mortgage defaults are driving consumer spending.
Yes, you read that correctly. Those deadbeat homeowners, facing possible eviction and in some cases unemployed, are throwing caution to the wind — and money at retailers.
Yeah, the problem was that it wasn’t something that could be defined, let alone actually requiring scrutiny. The Federal Reserve even did a study that concluded:
After distinguishing between defaults induced by job losses and other income shocks from those induced purely by negative equity, we find that the median borrower does not strategically default until equity falls to -62 percent of their home’s value. This result suggests that borrowers face high default and transaction costs. Our estimates show that about 80 percent of defaults in our sample are the result of income shocks combined with negative equity.However, when equity falls below -50 percent, half of the defaults are driven purely by negative equity. Therefore, our findings lend support to both the “double-trigger” theory of default and the view that mortgage borrowers exercise the implicit put option when it is in their interest.
“Negative equity” meaning underwater, paying more than the home was even worth and “income shock” meaning unemployment. In other words, mostly people losing their jobs and homes at the same time. There was another study that was going to be used to come up with a technical definition to punish people, but concluded that only 20 percent of the defaults were attributable to people not putting all their income into their mortgage payments and whatever else was apparently to be budgeted for them by the financial sector. Then, the New York Times commissioned another study, discovering that people with the most income above their capacity to pay their mortgages probably just had higher incomes. The whole thing was really disgraceful, especially considering the fact that there were a lot of cases where they didn’t even know who owned which properties because they were pumping up the housing bubble so fast they had to contract other companies to try to track all of the little tiny mortgage bits scattered across the four corners of the earth and seize them back for the Bank Collective.
All that may have died, but it’s pretty strange to reflect on now that they’ve been caught just saying they owned the property anyways. A contract is a contract and all of that.
Virtually everyone has had the experience of being forced to pay a late fee or a bank penalty because of some fine-print provision that we overlooked. Sometimes, begging by good customers can win forbearance, but usually we are held to the written terms of the contract, no matter how buried or convoluted the clause in question may be.
That is the way it works for the rest of us, but apparently this is not the way the banks do business, at least when those at the other end of the contract are ordinary homeowners. As a number of news reports have shown in recent weeks, banks have been carrying through foreclosures at a breakneck pace and freely ignoring the legal niceties required under the law, such as demonstrating clear ownership to the property being foreclosed.
It gets even better:
GMAC, the former financing arm of General Motors and now called Ally Financial, has become the poster-child for these sorts of practices. Jeffrey Stephan, a leader of one of its foreclosure units, acknowledged that he had signed thousands of affidavits claiming that he had reviewed documents he had never seen.
In addition to being a major sub-prime lender during the heyday of the housing bubble, Ally Financial also has the notoriety of being primarily owned by the federal government following its collapse last year. This fact may ensure greater accountability at Ally, but there is no reason to believe that its practices are qualitatively different than those of other servicers carrying through foreclosures.
And Fanny Mae, the GSE the financial sector occasionally uses to either blame or attempt to punish poor people depending on the circumstances, is at their service on this one as well:
“We are disturbed by the increasing reports of predatory ‘foreclosure mills’ in Florida working for Fannie Mae servicers,” Frank, D-Mass, wrote in a letter also signed by Grayson and Brown. “Why is Fannie Mae using lawyers that are accused of regularly engaging in fraud to kick people out of their homes?”
And lastly, here’s a video of some jackass pining for the days of debtors’ prisons for you.
In a country with almost 15 million people out of work, it is amazing that any economists still have jobs. This one is their fault first and foremost. Economists are supposed to know about the economy and provide advice on how to avoid disasters before they happen and help us recover from the bad things happen in spite of good advice.
The economics profession has not done well on this simple scorecard. Remarkably, rather than improve their game, economists are now busy dampening down expectations so that the public will not hold them responsible for the state of the economy.
….
Having failed to prevent disaster, economists are now anxious to tell us that there is nothing that they can do to remedy the situation. The story they are pushing is that unemployment is structural, not cyclical – a refrain now echoed by op-ed columnists. This means that people are not unemployed because of a lack of demand in the economy, but rather they are unemployed because there is a mismatch between the available jobs and the skills and location of the available workers.
….
In short, there really is no evidence for a problem of structural unemployment. The problem is that because of bad policy, we don’t have enough demand in the economy. If there is any mismatch of jobs and skills, it is between economists’ positions and the people who fill them.
First off, don’t defer your judgment to someone because they’re “an economist” and sound like they know something. That said, Dean Baker is an economist who has managed to publish a number of books, help draft legislation, and appear on the almighty television on a pretty regular basis despite his tendency to veer from the party line. In the article quoted above, he links a study done by the Federal Reserve that concluded that economists could not have been expected predict the current financial crisis, citing him as one of the people who did predict it:
One of the first prominent housing pessimists was Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, who in 2002 wrote that:
“In the absence of any other credible theory, the only plausible explanation for the sudden surge in home prices is the existence of a housing bubble. This means that a major factor driving housing sales is the expectation that housing prices will be higher in the future. While this process can sustain rising prices for a period of time, it must eventually come to an end. (Baker 2002, p. 116).
However Dean Baker and the others that made surprisingly accurate predictions were actually wrong because:
The “Fundamental Theorem of Asset Pricing” implies that the evolution of asset prices is, to a first approximation, unpredictable.
That’s pretty offensive, but it gets even better in a footnote:
[E]conomists both inside and outside academia may have been reticent to make any sort of predictions, for fear of damaging their reputations if they were wrong.
However if they neglected to do so and there was a massive financial crisis, their reputations are just great and they shouldn’t shy away from making policy recommendations that will affect the livelihood of millions. I’m not sure if it’s outright contempt for people, extreme insularity or both, but this is pretty clearly a problem. They’ve divided themselves into camps on how to view the unemployment problem, which pushes policy predictions into the future so they can avoid a little embarrassment despite the predictable consequences on the most vulnerable. It’s very telling that both camps have a point and bad policy could come out of either view though it’s absolutely certain for the ones that believe that the only solution to a “structural problem” is just sort of creating unpeople who are just going to have to use the income they don’t have to buy some bootstraps.
KABUL, Afghanistan — Gen. David Petraeus on Wednesday ratcheted up his condemnation of plans by a small Florida church to mark the anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks by burning copies of the Quran, likening the popular outrage that would follow in Afghanistan to the reaction in Iraq to photographs of detainee abuses.
“I think the images of such an action would be as indelible and inflammatory as have been the images of Abu Ghraib,” he said. “This will put our troopers and civilians in greater danger, and it’s somewhat inexplicable to me that fellow citizens would do that.”
….
Just outside ISAF headquarters at the office of the World Philosophical Mathematics Research Center, scholars usually concerned with the pursuit of arcane formulas that attempt to explain and predict world events had turned their attention to more immediate affairs, erecting a banner saying the U.S. government would be blamed for the Quran-burning.
“If this happens, there will not be any protests,” said Ghulam Farouk Hamkar, a researcher at the center. “There will be fire. The U.S. Embassy will be burned. People will attack American soldiers wherever they see them. Everyone will do this, not just insurgents.”
Lets compare the reaction here to the WikiLeaks release:
Q Good afternoon. Robert, there’s a church in Gainesville, Florida, that says it’s going to go ahead and burn copies of the Koran to mark the 9/11 anniversary. Is the White House — is there anything the White House is doing to discourage that or prevent them from going ahead with that?
MR. GIBBS: Well, look, I think the best place to look for the views of this administration would be to look at the — look at what General Petraeus said over the weekend. We know that that type of activity — we know that that type of activity is being transmitted back to places like Afghanistan, when General Petraeus obviously is our lead commander. As he said, it puts our troops in harm’s way. And obviously that — any type of activity like that would be — that
…..
Q And just quickly on the Koran story, have you heard the President comment on that?
MR. GIBBS: I have not. I have not.
I’d say that’s pretty mild. Now lets look back at WikiLeaks:
Q Thanks, Robert. Two questions, a few on WikiLeaks. What was the President’s reaction once he heard about the leaking —
MR. GIBBS: Well, I remember talking to the President sometime last week after discussions with news organizations that these stories were coming. Look, I think our reaction to this type of material, a breach of federal law, is always the same, and that is whenever you have the potential for names and for operations and for programs to be out there in the public domain, that it — besides being against the law — has a potential to be very harmful to those that are in our military, those that are cooperating with our military, and those that are working to keep us safe.
Q Well, I mean, was he personally angered by this? Did he demand answers or an investigation?
MR. GIBBS: Well, there is an ongoing investigation that predated the end of last week into leaks of highly classified secret documents.
…. Q Robert back on WikiLeaks. A couple of times now, you’ve said in the last couple of moments that a lot of this information is not really new, that named U.S. government officials have said some of this same information publicly.
MR. GIBBS: Well, I’m not saying it’s — yes, I said there weren’t any new revelations in the material.
Q So how does it harm national security if we’ve known this already?
MR. GIBBS: Well, because you’ve got — it’s not the content as much as it is their names, their operations, there’s logistics, there are sources — all of that information out in a public way has the potential, Ed, to do harm. If somebody is cooperating with the federal government and their name is listed in an action report, I don’t think it’s a stretch to believe that that could potentially put a group or an individual at great personal risk.
[The President] shall have power, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, to make treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur;
In practice, President signs UN treaties and submits them to Congress for ratification. In some cases, the treaty can be left in limbo if the former happens but not the latter, such as the forty-year lag on the ratification of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. The Rome Statute is an even stranger case because President Clinton signed it in 2000, but chose not to even submit it to the Senate for ratification, stating:
The United States should have the chance to observe and assess the functioning of the court, over time, before choosing to become subject to its jurisdiction. Given these concerns, I will not, and do not recommend that my successor, submit the treaty to the Senate for advice and consent until our fundamental concerns are satisfied.
Concerns about his successor proved unwarranted. Section 9 of the 2002 National Security Strategy (NSS) went a step further:
We will take the actions necessary to ensure that…[“we”] are not impaired by the potential for investigations, inquiry, or prosecution by the International Criminal Court (ICC), whose jurisdiction does not extend to Americans and which we do not accept.
The curious thing about this is that numerous public opinion polls and surveys have shown that Americans support the ICC by wide margins. In particular, a 2008 poll (pdf) by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs found that
There is also bipartisan support for the International Criminal Court (ICC), with 68 percent of Americans saying the United States should participate in the agreement on the ICC that can try individuals for war crimes, genocide, or crimes against humanity if their own country won’t try them.
So while its jurisdiction may not extend to Americans, it’s certainly not accurate to say that Americans wouldn’t accept it if given the choice. Nevertheless, the farcical American Service-Members Protection Act (Hague Invasion Act) was passed in 2002 as well. The Act finds that
Any American prosecuted by the International Criminal Court will, under the Rome Statute, be denied procedural protections to which all Americans are entitled under the Bill of Rights to the United States Constitution, such as the right to trial by jury.
Which brings us to the drone strikes. The drone strikes/assassinations are veryillegal in Pakistan and the Obama administration has formally declared (the Bush administration did so implicitly) that it will use them on whoever they want, including American citizens without “impairing” itself with the whole procedural protection deal that was the rationale for obstructing the ICC.
A settlement of $42 million over has been reached with the State Department who they’re currently still contracting with, not an actual court. It almost certainly includes provisions about “admitting to no wrongdoing” so this is really just a whitewash. The fines were for “export violations” including:
Illegal weapons exports to Afghanistan.
Making unauthorized proposals to train troops in Sudan.
Providing sniper training for Taiwanese police/paramilitaries.
The first is an actual export violation, the others could be if you count them as “services” but that’s kind of a ridiculous way to treat the situation in Sudan in particular. The story cited anonymous sources and it’s all probably classified so I don’t expect any documents to be released.
Update
On the same day, the NYT has an Op-Ed about how Afghan women will be maimed at a faster rate if foreign contractors are banned.
UNDER orders from President Hamid Karzai, over the next four months Afghanistan will be phasing out almost all foreign private security companies, a move meant to bring the country’s vast security apparatus under tighter government control.
It’s a laudable goal. But it also means that foreign aid workers, government officials and companies will have to rely instead for security on the Afghan National Police and the Afghan National Army — arguably two of the most corrupt and incompetent organizations in the country. Without a more effective replacement for foreign security companies, Mr. Karzai’s order could make the situation in Afghanistan significantly worse.
Who created and trained them in the first place again? Oh, that’s right, foreign contractors! And only a year ago it was about putting an “Afghan face” on the war:
There is a new push to dramatically expand the size of the Afghan Army and police, as the military operations now under way in southern Afghanistan is marked by a conspicuous absence of Afghans in the fight.
….
The Helmand offensive points to the need for more Afghans in the battlefield. There are roughly 4,000 US Marines operating in the Helmand region, but only about 650 Afghan soldiers fighting alongside them. There are also 6,500 British troops in the province.
“I’m not going to sugarcoat it,” said Brig. Gen. Lawrence Nicholson, commander of the Marine Expeditionary Brigade running the operation there, in a briefing with reporters earlier this month. “The fact of the matter is, we don’t have enough Afghan forces, and I’d like more.”
There are in fact a total of 5,000 Afghan soldiers in Helmand, and more are said to be on the way, but officials haven’t explained why they’re not involved in the new offensive. The rest of the Afghan army is posted around the country, with many in the north, where violence is reasonably low.
Putting an “Afghan face” on military operations is more than window dressing.
“Building a larger – yet still professional – ANA [Afghan National Army] will be one of the pillars of a successful counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan,” says Carter Malkasian, an analyst with CNA, a think tank in Washington. “The ANA are cheap, good at gathering information, and respected by the population. The more well-trained, well-advised Afghan soldiers, the better.”
The last US combat troops have left Iraq, seven-and-a-half years after the US-led invasion, and two weeks ahead of President Obama’s 31 August deadline for withdrawal from the country.
The final troops to leave, 4th Stryker Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division, rolled in convoy across the border and into Kuwait this morning, officially ending combat operations which began in March 2003.
The Obama administration had pledged to withdraw troops to 50,000 by 31 August. CNN reported that according to the US military there are now 56,000 US troops in Iraq, meaning another 6,000 must leave if the US president is to meet his own deadline.
….
“By the end of this month, 50,000 troops will be serving in Iraq. As Iraqi security forces take responsibility for securing their country, our troops will move to an advise-and-assist role.
“And, consistent with our agreement with the Iraqi government, all of our troops will be out of Iraq by the end of next year.
KHABARI CROSSING, Kuwait — A line of heavily armored American military vehicles, their headlights twinkling in the pre-dawn desert, lumbered past the barbed wire and metal gates marking the border between Iraq and Kuwait early Thursday and rolled into history.
For the troops of the 4th Stryker Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division, it was a moment of relief fraught with symbolism but lightened by the whoops and cheers of soldiers one step closer to going home. Seven years and five months after the U.S.-led invasion, the last American combat brigade was leaving Iraq, well ahead of President Barack Obama’s Aug. 31 deadline for ending U.S. combat operations there.
The U.S.-Iraq military pact that came into force in 2009 provides the legal basis for U.S. troops to be in Iraq. Under the agreement, all U.S. troops must be out by 2012. But U.S. negotiators say that even as the pact was being negotiated, it was considered likely it would be quietly revised later to allow a longer-term, although much smaller, force to remain.
There are currently 56,000 U.S. troops in Iraq, down from about 140,000 when Obama took office in January 2009.
With opinion polls showing Americans tired of nearly a decade of war in Afghanistan and Iraq, any decision to extend U.S. military involvement in Iraq would be enormously risky for Obama, who is up for re-election in 2012.
….
Iraq’s military commander, Lieutenant-General Babakir Zebari, caused consternation last week when he said his troops would not be ready to protect the country until 2020, and that the United States should keep its forces there until then.
….the State Department is planning to more than double its private security guards, up to as many as 7,000, according to administration officials who disclosed new details of the plan. Defending five fortified compounds across the country, the security contractors would operate radars to warn of enemy rocket attacks, search for roadside bombs, fly reconnaissance drones and even staff quick reaction forces to aid civilians in distress, the officials said.
This isn’t exactly going to fool the Iraqis, so it’s clear who the intended audience is.
JAKARTA, Indonesia — The United States is lifting a ban of more than a decade on military contact with an elite Indonesian special forces unit implicated in past killings of civilians and other abuses, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates announced Thursday, after meeting here with President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono of Indonesia.
The decision to lift the ban and to take steps toward training the unit, called Kopassus, was reached after intensive internal debate among the Pentagon, the White House and the State Department over whether it had truly left its brutal history behind.
“Training” usually means contractors and this case is no exception as it has already been happening in Indonesia:
Detachment 88 was established after the 2002 Bali bombings carried out by militant network Jemaah Islamiah, which firmly placed Indonesia as a frontline state in the U.S.-led “war on terror.”
But the Western funding of an anti-terrorism unit in the world’s most populous Muslim nation can be sensitive. There have been reports of U.S. intelligence officers in Jakarta helping tap cell phones and reading SMS text messages of Indonesian civilians.
A U.S. embassy spokesman in Jakarta declined to comment, but a U.S. government document showed the unit had received technical support, training and equipment under the State Department’s Anti-Terrorism Assistance (ATA) program since 2003.
Jeremy Scahill has a post on the situation with Iraq
The State Department is asking Congress to approve funds to more than double the number of private security contractors in Iraq with a State Department official testifying in June at a hearing of the Wartime Contracting Commission that the Department wants “between 6,000 and 7,000 security contractors.” The Department also has asked the Pentagon for twenty-four Blackhawk helicopters, fifty Mine-Resistant Ambush-Protected (MRAP) vehicles and other military equipment. “After the departure of U.S. Forces [from Iraq], we will continue to have a critical need for logistical and life support of a magnitude and scale of complexity that is unprecedented in the history of the Department of State,” wrote Patrick Kennedy, under secretary of state for management, in an April letter to the Pentagon. “And to keep our people secure, Diplomatic Security requires certain items of equipment that are only available from the military.”
What is unfolding is the face of President Obama’s scaled-down, rebranded mini-occupation of Iraq. Under the terms of the Status of Forces agreement, all US forces are supposed to be out of Iraq by the end of 2011. Using private forces is a backdoor way of continuing a substantial US presence under the cover of “diplomatic security.” The kind of paramilitary force that Obama and Clinton are trying to build in Iraq is, in large part, a byproduct of the monstrous colonial fortress the United States calls its embassy in Baghdad and other facilities the US will maintain throughout Iraq after the “withdrawal.” The State Department plans to operate five “Enduring Presence Posts” at current US military bases in Basrah, Diyala, Erbil, Kirkuk and Ninewa. The State Department has indicated that more sites may be created in the future, which would increase the demand for private forces. The US embassy in Baghdad is the size of Vatican City, comprised of twenty-one buildings on a 104-acres of land on the Tigris River.
Status of Forces Agreements (SOFAs) are treaties that have been used to keep military bases in countries for decades. When the one with Iraq was signed, a brawl broke out in Parliament:
A session of Iraq’s Parliament collapsed in chaos on Wednesday, as a discussion among lawmakers about a three-year security agreement with the Americans boiled over into shouting and physical confrontation.
The session was dedicated to a second public reading of the agreement, which governs the presence of American troops in Iraq through 2011 and which the Parliament is scheduled to vote on Monday. Even before the session began, legislators were apprehensive.
The Washington Post has added a new feature on the subject named Top Secret America. It has stories as well as interactive features to see where companies and agencies are located, who they contract with, etc. The way this stuff has expanded over the past decade is extremely creepy and almost never really reported on.
A major reason for concern about it is that necessity is not what’s driving its growth:
In the Department of Defense, where more than two-thirds of the intelligence programs reside, only a handful of senior officials – called Super Users – have the ability to even know about all the department’s activities. But as two of the Super Users indicated in interviews, there is simply no way they can keep up with the nation’s most sensitive work.
“I’m not going to live long enough to be briefed on everything” was how one Super User put it. The other recounted that for his initial briefing, he was escorted into a tiny, dark room, seated at a small table and told he couldn’t take notes. Program after program began flashing on a screen, he said, until he yelled ”Stop!” in frustration.
“I wasn’t remembering any of it,” he said.
Underscoring the seriousness of these issues are the conclusions of retired Army Lt. Gen. John R. Vines, who was asked last year to review the method for tracking the Defense Department’s most sensitive programs. Vines, who once commanded 145,000 troops in Iraq and is familiar with complex problems, was stunned by what he discovered.
“I’m not aware of any agency with the authority, responsibility or a process in place to coordinate all these interagency and commercial activities,” he said in an interview. “The complexity of this system defies description.”
The result, he added, is that it’s impossible to tell whether the country is safer because of all this spending and all these activities. “Because it lacks a synchronizing process, it inevitably results in message dissonance, reduced effectiveness and waste,” Vines said. “We consequently can’t effectively assess whether it is making us more safe.”
Another good resource is Spies for Hire, which has some information on the activities of some of the major contractors.
I’ll see if I can find more interesting stuff to post about this now that I have some more substantial background to work from than scattered news stories. For now, I’ll leave you with another recent one: Police Video Shows ProPublica Photographer Detained in Texas (includes video)
