Nancy Pelosi, the liberal House speaker, is heckled by liberals

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

By Dana Milbank
Wednesday, June 9, 2010; A02

For 17 months, anger at President Obama and congressional Democrats has been pooling on the left. On Tuesday morning, it spilled onto the floor of an Omni Shoreham ballroom and splashed all over House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

The celebrated San Francisco liberal took the stage to greet what should have been a friendly audience: the annual gathering of progressive activists organized by the Campaign for America's Future.

Instead, Pelosi was eaten by her own.

Just three minutes into her speech -- right after she gave the triumphant news that "Change is here!" -- two men stood up and spread out a large pink banner in front of the podium demanding "Stop Funding Israel Terror."

At that moment, a wheelchair-bound woman named Carrie James began to scream from her table about 30 feet away: "I am not going to a nursing home!" At that cue, about 15 people in the crowd -- who, like James, wore orange T-shirts demanding "Community Choice Act Now" -- unfurled bedsheet banners and struck up a chant: "Our homes, not nursing homes!"

Bodyguards rushed forward and formed a six-person ring around Pelosi and the lectern. Leaders of the conference tried to take the speaker backstage until the disturbance could be quelled, but she brushed them off: "I'm not leaving. I'm not leaving," she said. "You have made your point. I'm going to give my speech over your voices."

And she did, for an excruciating half-hour. The hecklers screamed themselves hoarse, dominating Pelosi's speech through her concluding lines: "I want to say thank you to Campaign for America's Future for your relentlessness, for your dissatisfaction, for your impatience. That's what I see every day in my district."

Political movements tend to unravel gradually, but on Tuesday this one seemed to be imploding in real time. As the "tea party" right has gained strength, Obama's hope-and-change left has faded. The frustration has crystallized at the gathering this week of demoralized activists.

At Monday's opening session, attendance was sparse: 10 empty tables and about 200 empty chairs. "Progressives have grown ever more dissatisfied, and for good reason," Robert Borosage, the conference organizer, said at the start. "Our hopes or illusions were shattered: escalation in Afghanistan, retreat on Guantanamo, no movement on worker rights or comprehensive immigration reform, dithering on 'don't ask, don't tell,' reverses on choice, delay on climate change and new energy."

After a musical break that included the Rolling Stones' "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction," Borosage's co-director, Roger Hickey, took up the complaint. "Larry Summers and Tim Geithner and Rahm Emanuel don't see themselves as part of a movement, and we often see them as part of a problem," he said.

Up next, Darcy Burner of ProgressCongress.org accused Obama of "split the baby" politics and complained that some liberal leaders had sold out for invitations to "White House cocktail parties."

Tuesday brought a denunciation of the Democrats from former Democratic chairman Howard Dean: "It's time for them to behave like Democrats if they want to get reelected. They have forgotten where they came from -- and they haven't been here that long."

In the exhibit hall was a table labeled "Phone Bank for Bill Halter" -- the man trying to unseat Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.) for being insufficiently liberal.

But that was tame compared with the treatment of Pelosi. With her daughter and infant granddaughter watching, the House speaker stammered and struggled to belt out her speech as disability activists shouted her down. Borosage, shaking his head and licking his lips, tried to shoo the wheelchairs away from the podium.

Some audience members tried to shout down the hecklers. "Why are you doing this? You think this is going to help?" pleaded one. Another man asked the demonstrators if they'd "mind shutting up" and flipped his middle finger at them.

This only worsened the disturbance. "Sorry, the stakes are a little high!" James shouted from her wheelchair. Pumping her fists in the air, she chanted: "Hey, hey, ho, ho, nursing homes have got to go!"

Pelosi tried to make a joke. "Listen, I'm used to noise. I talk to the Democratic caucus every single day." A bit of laughter mixed in with shouts of "Our homes! Our homes!"

Pelosi said she supports the hecklers' legislation, a long-languishing proposal to increase access to community services for the disabled, who say it would allow more of them to live at home. But the protest wasn't about reason; it was about rage. Pelosi finally finished her speech to a mixture of cheers and boos. "Everybody calm down," Hickey pleaded. "Let's take a deep breath."

As if to admonish the discontented activists over their treatment of the speaker, the strains of Fatboy Slim's "Praise You" came from the sound system:

We've come a long, long way together

Through the hard times and the good

I have to celebrate you, baby

I have to praise you like I should.

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Obama and BP at Risk Over Oil Spill

Obama examines some of the effects of a spreading crisis Larry Downing/Reuters

As the Gulf spill threatens to sink BP and damage a Presidency, it's time for Obama to rally the U.S. around tough, fair regulation—for the good of capitalism

By Paul M. Barrett

With failure heaped upon failure in the Gulf of Mexico, the environmental disaster now threatens the viability of not only a vast corporation but also a U.S. Presidency. The buck stops with both—one financially, the other politically. Can either recover?

The markets sent ominous signals about BP's (BP) future once it became clear over the Memorial Day Weekend that the top-kill plugging maneuver had not worked. In the Gulf, hurricane season has arrived, bringing with it the prospect of fierce storms chasing rescue ships to shore and spreading the sickening oil slick farther along the southern coast. A long, grim summer seems all but certain.

Its shares sharply depleted, BP, the largest oil and gas producer in the U.S., suddenly seems vulnerable to a breakup or takeover. In Washington, the Obama team appears to be flailing. Trying to assert some form of authority, the President vowed to bring wrongdoers to justice. The promise seemed mostly like a distraction from frustrating reality: In the short term, President Obama can do little, if anything, to stanch the gushing well.

As much as any other challenge—Wall Street, health care, Afghanistan—the oil spill may define Obama as a leader. He either will find a way to rise to this occasion and make some broader use of the crisis in the Gulf, or it will permanently taint him.

Deficient Oversight

This is a moment to think big and creatively. As distant as risky drilling rigs off Louisiana may seem from the New York financial laboratories where wizard bankers synthesized subprime credit derivatives, Obama could explain the important connections: how, after decades of antiregulatory fundamentalism in Washington, the feckless Minerals Management Service became the Securities & Exchange Commission of the oil business.

It is no coincidence that staff members at both agencies watched pornography on government computers when they should have been monitoring their respective beats. Although corruption and incompetence seem to have run deeper at the soon-to-be-dismantled MMS, the zeitgeist of the two places was similar, according to investigations and congressional hearings: Industry was to be trusted, even when government overseers had no more idea what transpired on the trading floor at Lehman Brothers or Bear Stearns than they did on the ocean floor beneath the Gulf of Mexico.

The question is: What will Obama do about it?

One route to political rehabilitation would be to redefine how government interacts with business. The goal he should articulate is protecting capitalism—and the society it's intended to serve—from the tendency of the profit-minded to go to extremes.

Takeover Prospects

Profit-minded investors, meanwhile, have soured on BP. "We are very negative on the prospects for BP, and this situation has a real possibility of breaking the company," London-based investment bank Arbuthnot Securities said in a June 1 research note. That day the British energy giant's shares dropped as much as 17 percent in London, their biggest one-day decline in 18 years. The company's stock flattened on June 2, closing down 34 percent since the Deepwater Horizon exploded Apr. 20. That erased more than $58 billion (40 billion pounds) from BP's value.

Ivor Pether, who helps manage $9.2 billion at Royal London Asset Management, including BP stock, told Bloomberg News: "We're getting into share price territory where analysts speculate about takeover possibilities, because the loss of market value is much greater than the estimated 'worst case' costs." Buyers haven't surfaced yet, he added, "because the near-term uncertainty is so high." BP spokeswoman Sheila Williams declined to comment.

The company's woes grew worse when the Obama Administration announced June 1 that it will investigate potential criminal and civil violations related to the spill. "We will prosecute to the fullest extent of the law," U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said. While Holder didn't get into particulars, troubling facts have already surfaced. The House Energy & Commerce Committee released internal BP e-mail showing that company employees had worried six weeks before the rig explosion that workers were struggling to control the well below. A criminal indictment of BP and other companies involved in the accident—perhaps for infractions of the Clean Water Act or other environmental laws—"is very likely," David M. Uhlmann, a former chief of the Justice Dept.'s environmental crimes section, told Bloomberg. Uhlmann, who now teaches at the University of Michigan Law School, pointed out that after the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska in 1989, ExxonMobil (XOM) pleaded guilty to charges of that variety.

Another potential line of prosecutorial inquiry, and one that could have more severe effects on BP, would focus on whether executives lied in formal statements to the government. Depending on how high up the chain of command the probe went, a cover-up investigation could seal the fate of Chief Executive Tony Hayward and underscore questions about BP remaining independent. The company has said it will cooperate with investigators.

White House in Control?

While the FBI explores the nuances of pollution law, the White House promises daily to stem damage to the Gulf coastline and economy. "I'm confident people are going to look back and say this Administration was on top of what was an unprecedented crisis," Obama has told reporters. That seems increasingly doubtful. However the destructive gusher is stopped, Obama will have been the man in charge when we all realized that the White House isn't "on top of" much of anything when it comes to deep-sea oil.

The federal government that Obama inherited in 2009 had been more or less uninterested in keeping up with business over the course of three decades. "Industry has developed technology the government doesn't understand," says Richard B. Stewart, a professor of environmental law at New York University Law School.

As happened in the wake of the collapse of some of Wall Street's most storied investment banks, we are already beginning to learn that BP's internal communications show a reluctance to address what should have been dire warning signs. BP e-mail obtained by the House Energy Committee reveal that anxiety about the safety and soundness of the BP well was intensifying more than a month before the Apr. 20 blowout. This evidence, while fragmentary and inconclusive, may cast doubt on BP's contention after the explosion that the company was caught entirely by surprise.

A Mar. 10 e-mail from BP executive Scherie Douglas to Frank Patton, an MMS drilling engineer, said the company planned to sever the pipe connecting the well to the rig and then plug the hole. "We are in the midst of a well control situation on MC 252 #001 and we have stuck pipe," Douglas wrote, referring to the subsea area Mississippi Canyon 252. "We are bringing out equipment to begin operations to sever the drillpipe, plugback the well and bypass." BP received verbal approval from an unnamed MMS official at 11 p.m. on Mar. 11 to insert a cement plug at a shallower depth than normally would have been required after the hole caved in on the drilling equipment, the e-mail showed. Asked about these exchanges, a company spokesman said: "We have always said it was a complex accident. We await a full report."

The Myth of Industry Infallibility

As investigators reconstruct events leading up to Apr. 20, Sarah S. Elkind, an historian of politics and the environment at San Diego State University, warns against focusing on minutiae to the exclusion of the big picture. Within the MMS, she says, "The employees followed cues from political appointees during the Bush Administration and earlier Administrations, going back to 1980, and including Democrats as well as Republicans. The message was that government doesn't work, and industry always knows what it's doing. What did we expect the employees to do?"

Industry, of course, doesn't always know what it's doing, NYU's Stewart notes. He headed the Justice Dept.'s environmental division in March 1989, when the Exxon Valdez dumped 250,000 barrels of crude into Alaska's Prince William Sound. For 21 years, until BP, that was the record U.S. oil spill. After the Valdez ran aground, it became clear that the industry lacked the plans or equipment to contain a spill of that magnitude, Stewart says. "Government had delegated most cleanup responsibility to the oil companies, and their response capability was in mothballs."

Congress responded belatedly with legislation in 1990 that required safer supertankers and a mechanism for the U.S. Coast Guard and other agencies to coordinate a cleanup—on the water's surface. That didn't help prepare for a blowout a mile below. Once again, government had deferred to the oil industry, and the giant company in question wasn't ready for a monumental snafu.

Obama has spoken expansively about restoring respect for government service. His occasionally populist rhetoric aside, he has been solicitous of corporate interests, too. Recall the astonishing bailout of General Motors. Just three weeks before the Deepwater Horizon exploded, the President had proposed expanding offshore oil exploration, in part as a bid for Republican votes for stalled energy and climate legislation. At the time, Obama praised advances in drilling technology.

"Where I was wrong," he said on May 27, "was in my belief that the oil companies had their act together when it came to worst-case scenarios." By his own admission, this product of Harvard Law School and liberal South Side Chicago politics was mesmerized, along with everyone else, by the myth of industry omnipotence.

Interior Dept. Lapses

The President also acknowledged that his Interior Secretary, Ken Salazar, who oversees the MMS, hadn't moved quickly enough to root out favoritism and laxity. In 2009, BP was granted a "categorical exclusion" that allowed the Deepwater Horizon to operate without analysis required by the National Environmental Policy Act. Obama said changes had been planned at Interior. "If they were happening fast enough, [BP's safety glitches] might have been caught."

In congressional testimony, Salazar has blamed the environmental lapse on a statutory 30-day deadline on the permitting process. The Administration says it will seek to extend that time limit to 90 days. Salazar exacerbated his department's bumbling image by repeatedly boasting about having a "boot on the neck" of BP. He even suggested that the company would be pushed "out of the way" if it didn't move faster. The tough-guy talk wasn't convincing. The government lacks the necessary engineers, undersea robots, and scientific expertise. This remains BP's show.

The director of the MMS is gone, and the agency has been divided in three, so that its collection of oil royalties won't undermine its policing function. Obama has imposed a six-month moratorium on new permits for deepwater wells. The sale of exploration leases in the Gulf of Mexico and off Virginia has been suspended. A big Arctic energy project will be delayed. The government will require tougher certification of the sort of equipment—the notorious "blowout preventer"—that failed on the Deepwater Horizon.

That's not stopping some Republicans from equating Obama's response to the crisis to President George W. Bush's lack of urgency in reacting to Hurricane Katrina in 2005. The National Republican Senatorial Committee is running a Web video juxtaposing candidate Obama's words about Katrina—"Never again"—with those of liberal commentators castigating him for acting "lackadaisical" about the Gulf crisis and seeming as ineffective as "a Vatican observer."

More measured critics recognize that neither party has covered itself with glory. "The truth of the matter is nobody knows how to fix this damned thing," Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican, told reporters, "and if they know how, they need to step up."

The Case for Better Regulation

Until someone figures out how to fix BP's leak, the idea the President should stress is how to reframe the debate about oil, investment banking, and other technologically sophisticated industries. Obama should argue that we need better government oversight of business, not to harm it, but to nurture it. He could invoke the memory of the New Deal regulatory revolution, which shielded industry and finance from calls for socialism after the Great Depression.

He won't win over Tea Partiers who see the New Deal (and the income tax and civil rights laws) as constitutional infringements. But a majority in America may well be receptive to an appeal that Democratic pollster Douglas E. Schoen described this way in a roundtable on the politics of the spill on washingtonpost.com: "We are all in this together—not as corporations or populists, not as Democrats or Republicans, but as Americans working to solve the problem collectively." In a speech in Pittsburgh on the afternoon of June 2, Obama started in this direction, then swerved toward partisanship. The Republican agenda, he said, "basically offers two answers to every problem we face: more tax breaks for the wealthy and fewer rules for corporations."

For the foreseeable future, we need an oil industry. It should be one that worries about tough inspections so it avoids another Deepwater Horizon. For the longer term, as Obama argued in Pittsburgh, we need a comprehensive climate and energy bill that will create incentives to find alternatives to oil retrieved at great expense from the ocean depths or purchased from pernicious foreign sources.

In the same spirit, pending financial reform legislation aims to insulate Wall Street from its worst instincts and make it less of a threat to the rest of us. Bills waiting to be reconciled by the House and Senate would give regulators more authority to monitor complex securities, simple mortgages, and all manner of transactions in between. Financial firms would come under pressure to reduce debt and hold more capital in reserve. If a financial outfit began to fail, regulators would have more tools to disassemble it before a traumatic collapse.

Obama ran for President emphasizing results. Businesspeople like to talk about results, too. After a generation of operating according to a simplistic notion that defined government oversight as essentially poisonous to corporate success, now would be an opportune time to rally the country around an ideal of tough, fair regulation for the good of business and the customers it serves.

Barrett is an assistant managing editor at Bloomberg Businessweek. With reporting by Stanley Reed, Brian Swint, Joe Carroll, Jim Efstathiou Jr., and Justin Blum.

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Obama needs to support Egyptians as well as Mubarak

Image by riacale via Flickr

By Michele Dunne and Robert Kagan
Friday, June 4, 2010; A17

When President Obama called for a "new beginning" in U.S. relations with the Muslim world a year ago, he picked Cairo as the setting for his speech. It was a provocative choice, the capital of a close ally of the United States but also of the three-decades-old autocracy of Hosni Mubarak.

When Obama declared his commitment to "governments that reflect the will of the people" and said that leaders "must maintain your power through consent, not coercion," Egyptians thought they heard a not-so-subtle reference to their aging leader. One enthusiastic Egyptian shouted, "Barack Obama, we love you!" -- the only such interjection during the address.

A year later, Egyptians are scratching their heads about why Obama came to Cairo. In meetings in Cairo this week, Egyptian civil society and political activists across the spectrum voiced their disappointment, asking, "I know they're busy, but can't the Obama administration spare any time at all for what is going on inside Egypt?" and saying resignedly of the president, "He seems like a nice guy, but I guess he's just not going to do anything for us."

The disappointment is understandable. As Egypt heads into controversial parliamentary elections in fall 2010 and a presidential election in 2011, the Obama administration has been tone-deaf, intent on continuing to improve relations with the increasingly brittle and unpopular Mubarak regime. It has cut democracy assistance spending in Egypt by half, agreed to forbid assistance from the U.S. Agency for International Development to groups that lack the government's stamp of approval, and is discussing a future "endowment" that would commit the United States to years of assistance with diminished congressional oversight. When administration officials have privately raised questions about democracy or human rights with the Egyptian government, their carefully calibrated "quiet diplomacy" has been dismissed or ignored. Obama himself politely asked Mubarak during an August 2009 Oval Office meeting to fulfill his 2005 pledge to lift the state of emergency under which Egyptians have been repressed since 1981. Mubarak brushed him off. Last month, Mubarak renewed the state of emergency for another two years, conveniently the period during which parliamentary and presidential elections will occur. The Obama administration called it "regrettable."

Meanwhile, Mubarak is in ill health and may not even make it to the next presidential election. His regime has systematically excluded or discredited new leaders who enjoy any public support, leaving the field of potential successors depressingly impoverished. One would think that under the circumstances both Egyptians and the U.S. government would be working to put in place an open political process so that any new leader could win the support of the people and thus ensure order in this important nation. But the Egyptian government is paralyzed by the aging Mubarak's refusal to look beyond his own rule. And the Obama administration, in pursuit of an illusory stability, stands mute and passive as the predictable train wreck draws nearer.

This administration prides itself on its progressive approach to this post-Cold War world, but it is repeating the mistake that Cold War-era administrations made when they supported right-wing dictatorships -- right up until the point when they were toppled by radical forces.

Obama's Cairo speech had the admirable goal of improving relations with the Muslim world, but the manner in which the administration has pursued this goal has been flawed from the beginning. It has focused almost exclusively on building bridges with leaders and governments. Yet in Egypt, and in Iran, a gulf has opened between the government and the citizenry. Obama has strengthened ties with the aging Mubarak while ignoring the concerns of Egypt's increasingly restive population. "What about us?" one prominent democracy activist asked. "Do we count for anything in this U.S.-Egypt relationship?"

When rebels ousted the corrupt government in Kyrgyzstan in April, they noted angrily that the United States had never stood up for their rights in the face of rigged elections and human rights abuses, placing a clear priority on strategic cooperation with the government. Watch out. If the Obama administration does not figure out how to make clear that it supports the political and human rights of Egyptian citizens, while cooperating with the Egyptian government on diplomatic and security affairs, people will be saying that about the United States in Cairo one of these days -- and maybe sooner than we expect.

There is still time to turn around this failing policy. Vice President Biden visits Egypt next week. There are, as always, numerous crises on the agenda. But if the administration wants to try to head off the next crisis, in Egypt, then Biden should use the opportunity to have a frank talk with Mubarak and other senior officials. In private, he can explain why it is so important, for both Egypt and the United States, that Mubarak take immediate steps to open the political process in this difficult period of transition. In public, Biden needs to make clear that the United States stands for free, fair and competitive elections -- for Egyptians, just as for everyone else.

Given the sorry history of the United States supporting the oppressors rather than the oppressed in that part of the world, such a commitment would be the kind of "new beginning" the Egyptian people seek.

The writers, senior associates at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, are members of the nonpartisan Working Group on Egypt, a consortium of policy experts from Carnegie, the Council on Foreign Relations, Human Rights Watch, the Center for American Progress, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, the Foreign Policy Initiative and Freedom House.

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U.S. 'secret war' expands globally as Special Operations forces take larger role

Image via Wikipedia

By Karen DeYoung and Greg Jaffe
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, June 4, 2010; A01

Beneath its commitment to soft-spoken diplomacy and beyond the combat zones of Afghanistan and Iraq, the Obama administration has significantly expanded a largely secret U.S. war against al-Qaeda and other radical groups, according to senior military and administration officials.

Special Operations forces have grown both in number and budget, and are deployed in 75 countries, compared with about 60 at the beginning of last year. In addition to units that have spent years in the Philippines and Colombia, teams are operating in Yemen and elsewhere in the Middle East, Africa and Central Asia.

Commanders are developing plans for increasing the use of such forces in Somalia, where a Special Operations raid last year killed the alleged head of al-Qaeda in East Africa. Plans exist for preemptive or retaliatory strikes in numerous places around the world, meant to be put into action when a plot has been identified, or after an attack linked to a specific group.

The surge in Special Operations deployments, along with intensified CIA drone attacks in western Pakistan, is the other side of the national security doctrine of global engagement and domestic values President Obama released last week.

Image via Wikipedia

One advantage of using "secret" forces for such missions is that they rarely discuss their operations in public. For a Democratic president such as Obama, who is criticized from either side of the political spectrum for too much or too little aggression, the unacknowledged CIA drone attacks in Pakistan, along with unilateral U.S. raids in Somalia and joint operations in Yemen, provide politically useful tools.

Obama, one senior military official said, has allowed "things that the previous administration did not."

'More access'

Special Operations commanders have also become a far more regular presence at the White House than they were under George W. Bush's administration, when most briefings on potential future operations were run through the Pentagon chain of command and were conducted by the defense secretary or the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

"We have a lot more access," a second military official said. "They are talking publicly much less but they are acting more. They are willing to get aggressive much more quickly."

The White House, he said, is "asking for ideas and plans . . . calling us in and saying, 'Tell me what you can do. Tell me how you do these things.' "

The Special Operations capabilities requested by the White House go beyond unilateral strikes and include the training of local counterterrorism forces and joint operations with them. In Yemen, for example, "we are doing all three," the official said. Officials who spoke about the increased operations were not authorized to discuss them on the record.

The clearest public description of the secret-war aspects of the doctrine came from White House counterterrorism director John O. Brennan. He said last week that the United States "will not merely respond after the fact" of a terrorist attack but will "take the fight to al-Qaeda and its extremist affiliates whether they plot and train in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and beyond."

That rhetoric is not much different than Bush's pledge to "take the battle to the enemy . . . and confront the worst threats before they emerge." The elite Special Operations units, drawn from all four branches of the armed forces, became a frontline counterterrorism weapon for the United States after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

But Obama has made such forces a far more integrated part of his global security strategy. He has asked for a 5.7 percent increase in the Special Operations budget for fiscal 2011, for a total of $6.3 billion, plus an additional $3.5 billion in 2010 contingency funding.

Bush-era clashes between the Defense and State departments over Special Operations deployments have all but ceased. Former defense secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld saw them as an independent force, approving in some countries Special Operations intelligence-gathering missions that were so secret that the U.S. ambassador was not told they were underway. But the close relationship between Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is said to have smoothed out the process.

"In some places, we are quite obvious in our presence," Adm. Eric T. Olson, head of the Special Operations Command, said in a speech. "In some places, in deference to host-country sensitivities, we are lower in profile. In every place, Special Operations forces activities are coordinated with the U.S. ambassador and are under the operational control of the four-star regional commander."

Chains of command

Gen. David H. Petraeus at the Central Command and others were ordered by the Joint Staff under Bush to develop plans to use Special Operations forces for intelligence collection and other counterterrorism efforts, and were given the authority to issue direct orders to them. But those orders were formalized only last year, including in a CENTCOM directive outlining operations throughout South Asia, the Horn of Africa and the Middle East.

The order, whose existence was first reported by the New York Times, includes intelligence collection in Iran, although it is unclear whether Special Operations forces are active there.

The Tampa-based Special Operations Command is not entirely happy with its subordination to regional commanders and, in Afghanistan and Iraq, to theater commanders. Special Operations troops within Afghanistan had their own chain of command until early this year, when they were brought under the unified direction of the overall U.S. and NATO commander there, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, and his operational deputy, Lt. Gen. David M. Rodriguez.

"Everybody working in CENTCOM works for Dave Petraeus," a military official said. "Our issue is that we believe our theater forces should be under a Special Operations theater commander, instead of . . . Rodriguez, who is a conventional [forces] guy who doesn't know how to do what we do."

Special Operations troops train for years in foreign cultures and language, and consider themselves a breed apart from what they call "general purpose forces." Special Operations troops sometimes bridle at ambassadorial authority to "control who comes in and out of their country," the official said. Operations have also been hindered in Pakistan -- where Special Operations trainers hope to nearly triple their current deployment to 300 -- by that government's delay in issuing the visas.

Although pleased with their expanded numbers and funding, Special Operations commanders would like to devote more of their force to global missions outside war zones. Of about 13,000 Special Operations forces deployed overseas, about 9,000 are evenly divided between Iraq and Afghanistan.

"Eighty percent of our investment is now in resolving current conflicts, not in building capabilities with partners to avoid future ones," one official said.

Questions remain

The force has also chafed at the cumbersome process under which the president or his designee, usually Gates, must authorize its use of lethal force outside war zones. Although the CIA has the authority to designate targets and launch lethal missiles in Pakistan's western tribal areas, attacks such as last year's in Somalia and Yemen require civilian approval.

The United Nations, in a report this week, questioned the administration's authority under international law to conduct such raids, particularly when they kill innocent civilians. One possible legal justification -- the permission of the country in question -- is complicated in places such as Pakistan and Yemen, where the governments privately agree but do not publicly acknowledge approving the attacks.

Former Bush officials, still smarting from accusations that their administration overextended the president's authority to conduct lethal activities around the world at will, have asked similar questions. "While they seem to be expanding their operations both in terms of extraterritoriality and aggressiveness, they are contracting the legal authority upon which those expanding actions are based," said John B. Bellinger III, a senior legal adviser in both of Bush's administrations.

The Obama administration has rejected the constitutional executive authority claimed by Bush and has based its lethal operations on the authority Congress gave the president in 2001 to use "all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons" he determines "planned, authorized, committed, or aided" the Sept. 11 attacks.

Many of those currently being targeted, Bellinger said, "particularly in places outside Afghanistan," had nothing to do with the 2001 attacks.

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Obama administration moves to distance itself from BP on oil spill response

Image via Wikipedia

By Joel Achenbach and Jerry Markon
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, June 1, 2010; A01

Struggling to convey command of the worsening Gulf of Mexico oil spill, the Obama administration is taking steps to distance itself from BP and is dispatching Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. to the Gulf Coast to meet with federal and state prosecutors. The Holder trip could signal that the environmental calamity might become the subject of a criminal investigation.

Holder has said Justice Department lawyers are examining whether there was any "malfeasance" related to the leaking oil well, and investigators, who have already been on the coast for a month, have sent letters to BP instructing the company to preserve internal records related to the spill. But federal officials indicated that Holder's trip, which will include a news conference in New Orleans on Tuesday afternoon, will focus on enforcement of environmental laws and holding BP accountable.

The opening of a criminal investigation or civil action against BP, if either were to happen, would create the unusual situation of the federal government weighing charges against a company that it is simultaneously depending on for the most critical elements of the response to the record oil spill.

"We're cooperating fully with all inquiries, and we're doing everything we need to do and more in terms of preserving records," BP spokesman Andrew Gowers said Monday.

The relationship between the federal government and the oil company has been an awkward collaboration all along -- "We have them by the neck," Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said of BP in congressional testimony last week -- but it reached a turning point Monday when the administration said it no longer wants to share a podium with BP at the daily briefing in Louisiana. Instead, the national incident commander, Coast Guard Adm. Thad W. Allen, will give a solo briefing wherever he happens to be.

The public relations shake-up comes in a tense period, with the Gulf Coast rattled by news that last week's attempted "top kill" of the well didn't work. A government forecast shows the oil slick potentially striking the popular tourist beaches of Mississippi and Alabama later this week. The official arrival of hurricane season Tuesday has incited a new rash of dire scenarios. With bad news washing up everywhere, the administration has been desperate to convince the public that the government, and not the oil company, is fully in charge of the crisis and mounting a robust response.

The administration and BP have disagreed over whether the company's next maneuver would cause a temporary increase in the flow of oil into the gulf. In the coming days, BP plans to saw off the top of the leaking riser pipe where it emerges from the blowout preventer that sits on the well. BP will then lower a containment dome, or cap, onto the riser in an attempt to capture the leaking oil.

White House official Carol M. Browner said Sunday that after the pipe is cut, about 20 percent more oil would probably escape before the new cap is in place. BP officials said that they think that is unlikely and that there might be no significant change in the flow.

"We've been increasingly frustrated with BP on matters of transparency," an administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity said Monday. "We're not going to stand there while BP says there's not going to be any increase in flow rate when they cut the riser."

Said Gowers: "We've been very clear about the likelihood of increased flow, and we'll leave it at that."

The seat-of-the-pants nature of BP's effort to deal with the spill was driven home Monday night by the announcement of a new element of the latest containment strategy, this one using hoses deployed in the failed top kill maneuver to channel oil to a free-standing pipe and then onto surface ships. BP said the technique, which might not be ready until early July, would capture more oil and gas. Another change to the pipe near the surface would allow greater flexibility of operations during a hurricane.

Hovering over such squabbles is the bigger question of whose hands are on the wheel of response to the crisis, which began with the April 20 explosion and fire on the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig that killed 11 people.

President Obama and his lieutenants have insisted that the government has full authority. Before BP attempted the top kill, for example, the federal government issued a statement saying it had given approval for the maneuver. Allen, the incident commander, has said that while BP is the "responsible" party, the federal government is "accountable" for the response and that there's no meaningful way for the government to assume greater authority.

But the daily news briefings have not always bolstered the government's stature as the commanding authority in the crisis. The briefings have been held at the Unified Area Command headquarters in a Shell Oil training facility in the town of Robert, La. The two principal briefers have been Coast Guard Rear Adm. Mary Landry and BP's chief operating officer, Doug Suttles.

Landry tended to give relatively upbeat remarks on the progress of the response and the dedication of those involved. "BP has brought a very, very good team," she said early in the crisis. She rarely delivered bad news. Saturday, after Suttles announced the crushing news that the top-kill effort had failed, Landry said she was disappointed, but she added, "We also want to assure you we've had a very, very aggressive response posture."

Suttles typically delivered the most detailed, urgent news of the day involving the efforts to plug the leak. Reporters directed most of their questions to him.

Now Landry has been rotated back to her position as 8th District commander "in order to focus solely on coordinated federal hurricane response planning and preparation efforts in the Gulf of Mexico," a government spokesman said. The new on-scene coordinator at the command center is Rear Adm. James A. Watson. White House officials said Monday that no one was unhappy with Landry, only with the arrangement in which the government and BP shared a microphone.

Staff writers Robert Barnes, Steven Mufson and Michael D. Shear contributed to this report.

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Most Guantanamo detainees low-level fighters, task force report says

Image via Wikipedia

By Peter Finn
Saturday, May 29, 2010; A03

About 10 percent of the 240 detainees held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, when President Obama took office were "leaders, operatives and facilitators involved in plots against the United States," but the majority were low-level fighters, according to a previously undisclosed government report. About 5 percent of the detainees could not be categorized at all.

The final report by the Guantanamo Review Task Force recommends that 126 of the detainees be transferred either to their homes or to a third country; that 36 be prosecuted in either federal court or a military commission; and that 48 be held indefinitely under the laws of war. A group of 30 Yemenis was approved for release if security conditions in their home country improve.

The report was completed in January but sent to select committees on Capitol Hill just this week. The administration sat on the report in the wake of the attempted bombing of a Detroit-bound airliner on Christmas Day because there was little public or congressional appetite for further discussion of its plan to close the military detention center.

The figures are in line with previous estimates, but the report, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Post, could have important political implications. There is deepening bipartisan congressional opposition to the closure of Guantanamo, and the administration is attempting to show that it has conducted a rigorous review process and been attentive to security risks.

It remains unclear whether the administration can gain enough support on Capitol Hill to move forward with its plan to buy a state prison in Illinois to replace Guantanamo, where 181 detainees remain. Key House and Senate committees introduced language this month into defense bills that would bar funding for any such facility in the United States.

According to the task force report, more than 60 career professionals -- including intelligence analysts, law enforcement agents and prosecutors -- compiled files on each detainee. The files included capture information, interview reports, record searches by the CIA, FBI and National Security Agency, and Guantanamo Bay files on behavior, disciplinary infractions and mental health.

Before the review, there was no single repository of information for each detainee. The task force determined that there "were more than a thousand pieces of potentially relevant physical evidence (including electronic media) seized during raids in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks that had not yet been systematically catalogued."

Apart from the 10 percent implicated in plots against the United States, a group of about 20 percent of detainees had significant roles with al-Qaeda or associated groups. Fewer than 10 percent were Taliban leaders or members of groups opposed to the U.S.-led coalition in Afghanistan.

The task force's recommendations were reviewed and largely approved by senior officials from six agencies, including the departments of Defense and Homeland Security. If there was disagreement among senior officials, cases went to agency heads.

"These weren't all easy calls," said a government official involved in the process who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "But in the end, these were unanimous decisions among all six agencies."

The decision to hold 48 detainees without trial remains the most controversial part of the review process for key parts of Obama's constituency, including human rights activists. The task force said prosecution was not feasible for some detainees because the focus at the time of their capture was the "gathering of intelligence," not evidence. But these detainees still posed "a high level of threat."

The report says that obstacles to prosecution "typically did not stem from concerns over protecting sensitive sources or methods from disclosure, or concerns that evidence against the detainee was tainted."

The report says those recommended for indefinite detention had significant roles in al-Qaeda or the Taliban and advanced training or expertise. It notes that "some detainees designated for detention have, while at Guantanamo, expressly stated or otherwise exhibited an intent to reengage in extremist activity upon release."

For a handful of detainees cleared for transfer, there was scant evidence of any involvement with terrorist groups, the report says. Most were low-level fighters affiliated with al-Qaeda or other groups in Afghanistan.

"It is important to emphasize that a decision to approve a detainee for transfer does not reflect a decision that a detainee poses no threat or no risk of recidivism," the report says. "The review participants nonetheless considered those detainees appropriate candidates for transfer from a threat perspective, in light of their limited skills, minor organizational roles, or other factors."

Of the of 779 detainees held at Guantanamo since it opened in January 2002, about 70 percent, or 530, were released by the Bush administration. It had cleared 59 more for release by the time Obama took office.

Since January 2009, the Obama administration has resettled 33 detainees in third countries, repatriated 24 and sent two to Italy for prosecution. Of the remaining detainees cleared for release, 28 are Yemeni, 17 are candidates for repatriation and 22, including five Uighurs from China, have been approved for resettlement in third countries.

In a letter this month, seven Republicans on the House Appropriations Committee asked James L. Jones, the president's national security adviser, to recommend to Obama "an immediate prohibition on the transfer of any detainee out of Guantanamo Bay, and a halt to any action related to the closure of the facility."

Jones replied to the letter this week, saying that "Guantanamo has compromised our standing in the world, undermined our core values, and diminished our moral authority." He said that the Pentagon spends $150 million a year for detention operations at Guantanamo and that costs at a possible facility in Thomson, Ill., would be $70 million to $80 million.

Staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.

• Final report by Guantanamo Review Task Force
• Status of Guantanamo Bay detainees

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Obama struggling to show he's in control of oil spill

Image by tsevis via Flickr

By Karen Tumulty
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, May 28, 2010; A01

A defensive President Obama sought Thursday to quell doubts about his handling of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, insisting that his administration has been "in charge" from the moment it began and bristling that critics who accuse it of being sluggish to react "don't know the facts."

But at times during a 63-minute news conference in the East Room of the White House, the president seemed to undercut his own argument. He enumerated a litany of fumbles and lapses: that the government lacks resources and "superior technology" to respond to the disaster; that he personally had assumed oil companies "had their act together when it came to worst-case scenarios"; that his administration "fell short" with its acceptance of BP's inaccurate estimate of the size of the gusher; that reforms of the corruption-plagued government agency that oversees offshore drilling "weren't happening fast enough."

At one point, Obama said he did not know whether Elizabeth Birnbaum -- the director of the Minerals Management Service he blamed for allowing the oil industry to overrule environmental and safety concerns -- had resigned or been fired hours before.

The news conference marked a sharp departure in tone from the first days after an oil rig explosion caused the spill, when the White House seemed determined to fix the blame and keep the public outrage directed at the oil company involved. "In case you were wondering who's responsible, I take responsibility," Obama said Thursday. "It is my job to make sure that everything is done to shut this down."

This is the familiar Obama: resolute and in charge. But six weeks after the spill began, those words seemed to highlight the difficulty he has had in convincing the country that he is on top of the situation. As oil continues to foul the gulf, the conflicting signals coming from the president and his team have imperiled his reputation for competence and coolness in the face of crisis.

Only three weeks before the explosion, Obama had proposed opening up 167 million acres to offshore oil exploration, as a means of finding more oil and more votes on Capitol Hill for comprehensive energy and climate legislation. In defending that plan, he had cited advances in drilling technology that he said made it significantly safer than it had been in the past.

White House aides say that as oil continued to spew from the floor of the gulf, the president -- who described himself as "angry and frustrated" -- privately expressed dismay about the faulty assurances he received from the oil industry that exploration was safe. "For so long, we didn't have accidents in the gulf, and we took the oil and gas industry maybe a little too much at their word," said one official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Obama announced new steps that he said would help "ensure that a catastrophe like this never happens again." Deep and far-reaching reform will come, he promised, after a commission he is appointing finishes a six-month investigation of the causes of the April 20 explosion of BP's Deepwater Horizon rig and measures that might have prevented it.

In the early weeks after the rig sank, polls showed the public saw a clear villain -- BP -- and approved of the administration's approach to the situation, which emphasized ensuring that the oil company would bear the cost of stopping the spill, cleaning it up and repairing the damage. Some in the White House were so confident of their ability to stay ahead of the crisis that they welcomed comparisons with George W. Bush's bungling of the response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

But the latest surveys show that public confidence in Washington's handling of the spill has dropped sharply. And there has also been a fraying of what had begun as a relatively smooth working relationship among the government, BP, and state and local officials in the region. "The president has not been as visible as he should have been on this," Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) told Politico, "and he's going to pay a political price for it, unfortunately."

Gulf Coast residents are furious; images of the oil's sheen on the water have given way to ones of black beaches and dead animals.

On cable news broadcasts of Obama's news conference, he had to share the screen with a live shot of that painfully familiar underwater pipe spitting out brown gunk.

Even as the president laid greater claim to the handling of the disaster, he distanced himself from Interior Secretary Ken Salazar's frequent boast that the administration has a "boot on the neck" of BP.

"I think Ken Salazar would probably be the first one to admit that he has been frustrated, angry and occasionally emotional about this issue, like a lot of people have," Obama said. He added: "I would say that we don't need to use language like that."

Indeed, Obama seemed most sensitive to suggestions -- made with increasing frequency by such critics as Democratic strategist James Carville -- that the oil company is calling the shots.

BP is the "responsible party," with access to resources, technology and expertise that the government lacks, Obama said. But all its actions, he insisted, are done "under our supervision, and any major decision that they make has to be done under the approval of Thad Allen, the national incident coordinator."

Although he acknowledged that the government's performance before and since the spill began has been far from perfect, Obama insisted that it should not be faulted for lack of effort. "This has been our highest priority since this crisis occurred," he said, and later added, "We are relying on every resource and every idea, every expert and every bit of technology, to work to stop it."

Obama spoke of the toll the crisis has taken on him, an unusual turn for a president who is sometimes faulted for being too intellectual and aloof.

"This is what I wake up to in the morning, and this is what I go to bed at night thinking about," he said. He cannot escape questions about the spill, even at home. As he was shaving Thursday morning, he said, 11-year-old daughter, Malia, peeked in and asked, "Did you plug the hole yet, Daddy?"

Staff writers Anne E. Kornblut and Scott Wilson contributed to this report.

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Compassion, prejudice and American Muslims

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

By Walied Shater
Saturday, May 15, 2010; A15

I woke up early on Sept. 12, 2001, to get ready for work. I put on my best suit, my only custom-made shirt, my most expensive Nordstrom tie. I shined my shoes. I was tense and nervous and did not know what to expect from my co-workers. I had, by chance, been off duty the day before, the day of the horrific attacks on the United States, and of course by late evening on Sept. 11, the names of the suspected hijackers began to come out. All were Arabic or Muslim names like mine.

Since January 2000, I had been assigned to the most important division in the U.S. Secret Service: the Presidential Protective Division, commonly known as PPD. I held a top-secret clearance, reported to the White House daily, and traveled routinely on Air Force One or Marine One with the president. I loved the experience. I had never felt discriminated against at work or socially, except for a few "terrorist" jokes. I was a welcomed and trusted member of the division.

Sept. 12 was different, though. Nineteen men had killed close to 3,000 Americans the day before in the name of my religion.

As I entered the White House, I prepared myself mentally for the verbal barrage to come. I had grown up a tough kid in Brooklyn and had been raised a proud American Muslim.

As I walked to the office for agents on the president's detail, I was intercepted by a supervisor named Ron. When he asked to speak with me, I said I had to put my equipment bag in the office and would come right back. I was trying to buy time to get ready for what might come. As I approached Ron, a tall and strong man in his early 50s, I thought, "Here it comes, stay cool."

Image via Wikipedia

Ron put his hand on my right shoulder and said: "Walied, I am glad you are here with us today." My defenses crumbled, and my eyes welled up at this simple act of compassion. I said thanks and excused myself.

Ron stood up as a preemptive strike to anyone who might have said something to me that day. He told me I belonged. He embodied what was great about America. As the day went on I felt ashamed of the fears I had felt earlier.

When I concluded my five-year assignment on the PPD in 2005, managers told me I had led more presidential security advance teams than any other agent since 2000. My wife and I were proud of my work and proud for a nation in which an American Muslim can achieve anything. That is America.

Today, though, American Muslims feel under siege. Too many feel the American dream is not for them. For a few, radicalization is the next step. Anti-Muslim rhetoric has reached epic proportions in broader U.S. society -- largely tolerated, rarely condemned. While "terrorism experts" cite frequent travel to Muslim countries or Internet videos as primers for radicalization, the core primer, which is largely unremarked upon, is the siege mentality surrounding American Muslims.

Many factors contribute to this mentality, including rhetoric from fringe hate groups, the demonization of Muslims by Hollywood and repeated questions of loyalty by (conservative)

commentators. Nothing is more debilitating to the psyche of American Muslims than to have those in positions of authority remain silent after such

comments or, worse, contribute to the hostility.

American Muslims notice when, as happened last week, the Naval Criminal Investigative Service stopped using an anti-Muslim film "Obsession: Radical Islam's Obsession with the West" to train agents. But American Muslims also notice when a Florida Republican candidate for Congress, Dan Fanelli, runs television ads in which he points to a white man and asks, "Does this look like a terrorist?" and then turns to an Arab-looking man and asks, "Or this?"

Or when Congress invites the preacher Franklin Graham to speak at the National Day of Prayer event on Capitol Hill despite Graham's infamous remarks about Islam as a "very evil and wicked religion."

U.S. leaders need to do much more to help bring American Muslims into the mainstream. The president and others should follow the example set by former secretary of state Colin Powell when he endorsed then-candidate Barack Obama on "Meet the Press." Reacting to assertions that Obama was Muslim, Powell asked, "Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? Is there something wrong with some 7-year-old Muslim American kid believing that he or she could be president?"

Not just American Muslims but all Americans need to see and hear examples of people like my former supervisor and Colin Powell.

The writer served as a special agent with the U.S. Secret Service from 1995 to 2007.

View all comments that have been posted about this article.

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Fueling the Afghan War

Image by kahunapulej via Flickr

Aram Roston | April 21, 2010

Research support for this article was provided by the Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute.

In Napoleon Bonaparte's day an army may have marched on its belly, as the French emperor famously quipped, but the modern-day American military campaign in Afghanistan needs not just food but also fuel. Diesel for the MRAPs and Humvees, aviation fuel for the planes and helicopters--that's the fodder for the military surge under way in Afghanistan. Fuel is precious there--they call it liquid gold--and the effort to keep it flowing has created an array of bizarre monopolies, strange alliances and allegations of corruption entangling the US government.

This is the story of two interlinked and secretive offshore companies run by a former Army intelligence officer. The firms run a specialized monopoly of massive proportions. Their niche: supplying aviation fuel for US military operations in Afghanistan--enough to fill two Olympic-size swimming pools each and every day of the year.

The companies' names are Red Star Enterprises and Mina Corp. In Afghanistan, Red Star Enterprises has a sole source contract worth more than $1 billion, won without competition, to deliver fuel to Bagram Air Base, that central hub of the war effort. The Nation has obtained an unusual "memorandum of agreement [1]" between Red Star and the US military authorities, giving the firm exclusive ownership of a fuel pipeline that feeds directly into the base.

Similarly, in nearby Kyrgyzstan, a staging ground for the Afghan war, Mina has another sole source contract, awarded without any announcement, to provide fuel to a huge and controversial base. The contract has been at the center of corruption and kickback allegations, and the companies have been accused of enriching the families of two successive heads of state, both of whom presided over kleptocratic and repressive regimes--an arrangement that fostered great resentment in the country. Violence exploded on the streets in early April, leaving eighty protesters dead, and President Kurmanbek Bakiyev was forced to flee. The new, provisional government sees Red Star and Mina in a very specific light. The chief of staff, Edil Baisalov, tells The Nation that the firms have served as "an indirect way for the Pentagon to bribe the ruling families of Kyrgyzstan." (These allegations are the subject of a Congressional hearing tomorrow, convened by the House Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs.)

Baisalov's charge is a serious one but not new, nor as outlandish as it may seem, although the companies deny it. The eight-year saga of high-stakes contracts and secretive deals raises serious questions about how the Afghan campaign has been run, not only by the Bush administration but also under President Barack Obama. Sole source contracts have continued under the current administration, and if the Kyrgyz authorities are correct, the Pentagon contractors are still doing what they did under Bush. After all, the thirst for oil and fuel can only grow as President Obama's Afghan surge ramps up.

The man in charge of Red Star's and Mina's operations is a good-natured retired Army lieutenant colonel named Chuck Squires, now 56 years old. A lanky and broad-shouldered fellow with a good sense of humor, he has a graduate degree in Russian studies from Harvard. Before 9/11, he was the defense attaché at the US Embassy in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. Back then, when he was still in the military, the Republic of Kyrgyzstan was just another impoverished and mountainous ex-Soviet republic, with a per capita income a little higher than that of Cambodia. It was just one pawn in the Great Game between Russia and the United States, and it was not easily accessible, bordered by Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan on the south, west and north, respectively, and by China on the east. Nor was it strategically important, although its huge inland lake did serve as a testing site for advanced Russian torpedoes.

Squires, who did not respond to requests for comment for this article, had left Bishkek by September 11, 2001. One source says he was gone from the military by then too, but his experience there would serve him well in the private sector in the future.

That is because shortly after 9/11, Kyrgyzstan agreed to host a US air base. At the time, Kyrgyzstan's president was Askar Akayev, who presented himself as an innovative reformer and economist. The United States did not pay much for the base rights, although this was a source of controversy within the country and a matter of concern for the State Department. At the time, Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon was holding sway over Colin Powell's State Department. The Defense Department insisted it was in charge of all negotiations, and the State Department's input wasn't wanted. "You stay out of it" is how a former State Department official remembers the Pentagon's tone.

The Manas base, dubbed the Ganci base, after a firefighter killed on 9/11, was like the FedEx hub through which the US military flies material and people to Afghanistan from around the world. The base hosts tankers and other planes, and operates as a transfer facility for troops.

Red Star Enterprises and Mina Corp. soon appeared on the scene like mysterious strangers. They had a rather ethereal, offshore quality and some intriguing connections. For example, Red Star had the same London address and phone number as Iraq Today, a purportedly independent and short-lived newspaper launched in the wake of the invasion of Iraq. The paper had been set up by a former journalist who worked with Mina Corp.--which, of course, was connected to Red Star.

Over the years neither Red Star nor Mina seems to have even bothered to put up a website. They both have offices in London, but they are both incorporated on the island of Gibraltar, a British territory off Spain with impenetrable secrecy laws for corporations. Various private investigators have been unable to determine who really owns them.

Though Red Star had no apparent track record, it was hired by the Pentagon to supply the base's massive fuel needs. Red Star's director of operations: the now retired Lieutenant Colonel Squires. Squires returned to Bishkek as a civilian, coordinating Red Star's contract work. The Pentagon's Defense Energy Support Center hired Red Star to supply its fuel. It was a huge contract, totaling $240 million over three years.

Even if the Kyrgyz government wasn't getting paid much for the base, the Akayev family was reaping tens of millions. It was heavily involved in business at the airport, running the two companies that operated as Red Star's subcontractors. One of them was run by Akayev's son, and the other by his son-in-law, and from 2002 to 2005 Red Star, operating on its US government contract, paid the firms about $120 million.

It may have just been business, but the way Kyrgyz investigators later saw it, Red Star, the prime contractor, was the cut out for funneling funds to the Akayev family.

It was all cozy until violence hit the streets of Bishkek in 2005, foreshadowing what was to come five years later. The "Tulip Revolution" forced Akayev to flee and abdicate, and then the secrets of the Akayev regime began to tumble out, in scandal after scandal. The new government, headed by President Kurmanbek Bakiyev, even asked the US government for help investigating the former regime. The FBI's Eurasian Unit churned out an extraordinary report that laid bare a "vast amount of potential criminal activities associated with the Akaev Organization." The president and his family were accused of "siphoning off at least $1 billion from the Kyrgyz state budget." It was as if the Kyrgyz government had been some kind of criminal enterprise within which the United States ran a military base.

After the revolt, people thought things might be different. The new government seemed to bring a fresh sense of integrity for a short while, before it began to stack its own skeletons in the closet. Despite his claims to be a reformer, Bakiyev appeared to go about replicating the patterns of his predecessor in a deliberate manner. "He really didn't think twice. They inherited this," says one consultant who dealt with Bakiyev shortly after the revolution. "We really in great detail uncovered the scheme. And I think the moment they figured out how it worked, they went and did it."

Peter Zalmayev of the Eurasia Democracy Initiative puts it this way: "Bakiyev came in under the premise he would clean [the government] up and make it more transparent. But he replaced the structure they had with Akayev and his son with his own family." Word quickly spread that Bakiyev's youngest son, Maksim, was in business too. The insiders said he was taking over "Manas International"--through frontmen.

Meanwhile, Bakiyev's associates were making powerful US connections. For example, one of his allies set up a bank called AsiaUniversalBank (AUB) in Bishkek. On its board were two august former US senators: former US Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole, currently associated with the lobbying firm Alston & Bird, and J. Bennett Johnston, the longtime Louisiana senator, who has his own firm. Dole was paid several hundred thousand dollars for his role, which included one trip to Bishkek and a few board meetings in Washington.

Meanwhile, what mattered to the United States was the base at Manas. There, the airfield was still lined with squadrons of KC-135 Stratotankers, which needed constant filling for their missions over the skies of Afghanistan.

Red Star kept up its work, supplying fuel.

But Red Star was also busy elsewhere at the same time. Chuck Squires and Red Star were now focused not just on Kyrgyzstan but directly on Afghanistan. To do business with the US military in Afghanistan usually means operating at Bagram Air Base, the sprawling compound--a virtual military city--about an hour north of Kabul.

Col. Jonathan Ives was then the base commander at Bagram. Red Star, he says, was synonymous with aviation fuel, trucking it down from Uzbekistan along an old and treacherous route through the mountains from Mazar-i-Sharif to Kabul, passing at one point through the Salang Pass, a 1.5-mile tunnel through a mountain. Ives says Red Star trucked in more than 250,000 gallons of the precious stuff each day--a staggering amount. Each tanker truck can carry a maximum of 9,000 gallons, so Red Star would have had convoys of about thirty tractor-trailers per day.

In October 2007 Red Star scored a remarkable coup. Squires signed a deal with Ives that allowed Red Star to build and own a pipeline that ran from the base for all that fuel. Ives says that Red Star had purchased land near Bagram Air Base. "It was farmland, so they purchased the land and the rights." In the memorandum of agreement between Red Star and the military, obtained by The Nation, Red Star promises it "will install, at no cost to the United States Government (USG), a petroleum pipeline for transfer of TS-1 jet fuel." Significantly, the agreement says, "Red Star will retain ownership of the pipeline."

It is intriguing that the firm signed such a document rather than an ordinary contract. "It is very unusual--very unusual," said professor Charles Tiefer, an expert on contract law at the University of Baltimore School of Law who sits on the US government's eight-member Commission on Wartime Contracting. I asked him who would regulate such an agreement. "Nobody," he answered. "There is no regulation of it because it's not supposed to happen, because it is trying to create a loophole where there is none in the Competition in Contracting Act."

Whatever the legal basis for the contract, not only the fuel pipeline but the land underneath it was owned by Red Star. Indeed, trucks would be able to gain access to the pipeline only through Red Star property. Red Star, in other words, controlled all access to the pipeline that would bring fuel to the thirsty US air base. It was as if the company offered to build a door to a US base and then controlled anything that went through the door. "I think it is pretty clever, if you want to say that," says Ives. "It is shrewd business," he added, a bit ruefully. He says he thought the pipeline was a good idea because it limited fuel trucks' access to the base and made things safe. He didn't realize, he says, that the pipeline Red Star built would give it a monopoly.

But that's what it did. Within four months of that memorandum of agreement, the United States announced it planned to offer a sole source contract to Red Star for 194 million gallons of fuel over two years. There were some complaints by a potential competitor, but it had no access to the pipeline. That summer, in August 2008, Red Star was awarded the contract for $720 million. It had locked in the monopoly.

On March 4, 2009, barely six weeks in office, Barack Obama pledged to crack down on government procurement waste and fraud, and "to dramatically reform the way we do business on contracts across the entire government." Standing next to Senator John McCain, his adversary in the election but an advocate of contract reform as well, he said, "We need more competition for contracts and more oversight as they are carried out." That day he sent out a memo asking all federal agencies to work on a way to end sole source contracts.

But when it came to Red Star and Mina, things stayed very much the same. On July 29, about five months after the president's speech, the Defense Department did not bother issuing a solicitation or requesting bids for the fuel contract. Instead, it quietly issued a new, $243 million contract to Mina to keep selling fuel to the base at Manas. The government used an unusual clause in the federal rules to justify this: the "national security" exemption. Under that provision, "Full and open competition need not be provided for when the disclosure of the agency's needs would compromise the national security."

"It went from competitive to sole source," says lawyer Ronald Uscher, who represents a competitor to Red Star and Mina called IOTC. In 2007 Mina had actually won the contract through a process that ostensibly included competitive bidding--though it beat out IOTC, whose bid had been almost 3 percent lower. Using the Freedom of Information Act, Uscher tried to obtain information about Mina's bid, but the Defense Department refused to tell him how Mina and Red Star gauged their price changes. Normally these are based on worldwide fuel prices, but not in Kyrgyzstan. Here it would be kept a secret. "There is nothing secretive about the price of jet fuel in 99.9 percent of the world," says Uscher, "except at Manas Air Base in Kyrgyzstan, apparently!" Then, in 2009, Uscher complains, "You have a sole source secret contract to supply fuel to Manas awarded to Mina with no other competitors having oversight and no citizens having oversight."

Why the secrecy? And what was the national security requirement that dictated avoiding competition? Did Mina's source for fuel have anything to do with it?

Officials in Kyrgyzstan's provisional government say it straight out: Mina Corp., the affiliate of Red Star, was paying funds to Maksim Bakiyev, the president's son. The new government's chief of staff Baisalov says that in order to keep the air base secure and supplied with fuel, the United States essentially "bribed the Kyrgyz ruling family. First it was Akayev and then it was Bakiyev. On one hand, the White House and the US State Department, they announce these noble goals, democracy, good government, and on the other hand, the military comes in and overrides everyone else." The Defense Logistics Agency, which oversees the Defense Energy Support Center, wouldn't comment specifically on that, even to deny it. "We can't speak to that," said DLA spokesman Dennis Gauci. "You'll have to speak to Mina Corp."

A representative of Mina, who asked not to be named, denied any wrongdoing. "There was no consideration given to the ownership interests of any supplier." If Maksim Bakiyev did have any ownership interest, he said, Mina didn't know about it. The company, he told me, was reaching out to the interim Kyrgyz government to try to explain it to them. (Mina emphasizes it does vital work "by providing mission-critical fuel supplies to the troops and civilians that are carrying out the mission in Afghanistan.")

With the collapse of the Bakiyev regime, a whole web of money and power has been exposed. That bank, AUB, on whose board sat ex-Senators Dole and Johnston? Its accounts have been frozen, and the new government says it was laundering money.

The provisional government in Kyrgyzstan says it will leave the base open for now. And the United States, with the Afghan surge under way, needs that base now more than ever. But the Kyrgyz government is making a new demand: it is launching a criminal investigation of the Bakiyev regime and its profits--and it wants the US government to help.

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