Continental Divide - Russia Gas Pipeline Heightens East Europe’s Fears - Series - NYTimes.com

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By ANDREW E. KRAMER

MOSCOW — With an ambitious new pipeline planned to run along the bed of the Baltic Sea, the Russian natural gas giant Gazprom is driving a political wedge between Eastern and Western Europe.

While the Russian-German pipeline offers clear energy benefits to Western Europe, Central and Eastern European leaders fear it could lead to a new era of gas-leveraged Russian domination of the former Soviet bloc. With its gas wealth and eyebrow-raising network of personal ties, Russia has divided members of the European Union that have vowed to act collectively to protect their security.

Currently, Russian gas has to be piped through Eastern Europe to reach Western Europe. If Russia shuts off the gas to pressure a neighbor in the east, it is felt in the more powerful, wealthier countries to the west, where it touches off loud protests.

The new Nord Stream pipeline will change that equation. By traveling more than 750 miles underwater, from Vyborg, Russia, to Greifswald, Germany, bypassing the former Soviet and satellite states, it will give Russia a separate supply line to the west.

As a result, many security experts and Eastern European officials say, Russia will be more likely to play pipeline politics with its neighbors.

“Yesterday tanks, today oil,” said Zbigniew Siemiatkowski, a former head of Poland’s security service.

That is not the way the Russians present it. Gazprom, which supplies Europe with 28 percent of its natural gas, says the $10.7 billion project is commercial, not strategic.

Matthias Warnig, Nord Stream’s chief executive and a former East German, said Eastern Europe’s fears were unfounded. “The wall broke down 20 years ago,” he said. Europe needs additional natural gas to compensate for declining output from the North Sea, he said, and Russia is the best place to get it.

European officials have portrayed the project as one that helps unite Europe and enhance its collective energy security. The European Commission and European Parliament endorsed the pipeline as early as 2000 and both reconfirmed their commitments as recently as 2006.

“As far as common energy policy exists, we are part of it on the highest priority level,” said Sebastian Sass, Nord Stream’s main representative to the European Union.

But officials in Central and Eastern Europe fear that while profits from the pipeline, a joint venture between Gazprom and a trio of German and Dutch companies, will flow to Russian suppliers and German utilities, the long trod-upon countries once under the Soviet umbrella will become more vulnerable to energy blackmail.

Such tactics are hardly without precedent. A Swedish Defense Ministry-affiliated research organization has identified 55 politically linked disruptions in the energy supply of Eastern Europe since the breakup of the Soviet Union.

Until now, Russia’s use of natural gas as a foreign policy tool has been limited to short embargoes, at least in part, analysts say, because it is so blunt a club.

Last January, for example, Russia shut down a pipeline that crossed Ukraine, ostensibly over a dispute with Ukraine on pricing and tariff fees.

The shutoff left hundreds of thousands of homes in southeastern Europe without heat and shuttered hundreds of factories for three weeks.

What had been a bilateral dispute spilled across the Continent, angering influential Western governments and costing Russia money.

The new pipeline and a similar project in southern Europe called South Stream, to run under the Black Sea, will insulate Western Europe from such actions and limit the political and financial costs to Russia.

The ability to shut off one pipeline or the other “depending on whim” makes shutoffs to Eastern Europe more likely, said Zbigniew Brzezinski, the national security adviser in the Carter administration. He called the pipelines a grand Russian initiative to “separate Central Europe from Western Europe insofar as dependence on Russian energy is concerned.”

“The Central Europeans, the former coerced members of the Soviet bloc, are the more worried,” he said.

For Eastern Europeans, the pipeline issue evokes deep memories of a darker era of occupation and collaboration, and has become a proxy debate over Russia’s intentions toward the lands it ruled from the end of World War II to the fall of the Berlin Wall.

In an open letter to President Obama last spring, 23 former Central European heads of state and intellectuals, including a former Czech president, Vaclav Havel, and a former Polish president, Lech Walesa, pointed out that after the war in Georgia last year Russia declared a “sphere of privileged interests” that could include their countries.

With the control of gas pipelines, they wrote, “Russia is back as a revisionist power pursuing a 19th-century agenda with 21st-century tactics.”

Radek Sikorski, the Polish foreign minister, has compared the pipeline deal between Russia and Germany to the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact that divided Central Europe into spheres of German and Soviet influence. “Taking the decision first and consulting us later is not our idea of solidarity,” he said.

The din of alarm rising in the East has hardly been heard in the West, however, where Russia has pursued an effective policy of divide and conquer.

“Russia is one of the issues that divides the E.U. the most,” said Angela E. Stent, director of the Center for Eurasian, Russian and East European Studies at Georgetown University in Washington. “Russia and Gazprom go and deal very well with individual countries.”

A web of oil and gas interests in the West, as well as corporations and influential figures with ties to Russia, have greased the process of engagement with Russia.

Perhaps most visibly, a former German chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, has embraced commerce as a means to integrate Russia with Europe. Mr. Schröder was the deal’s “power broker,” says Zeyno Baran, an authority on Eurasian energy at the conservative Hudson Institute in New York. “Without him, it never would have gotten off the ground.”

Mr. Schröder’s government sealed the pipeline deal, including a $1.46 billion German loan guarantee for the project, scant weeks before he lost the 2005 election.

A few weeks later, he took a job as the chairman of Nord Stream. He has said he decided to take the job after leaving office and that he had not known of the loan guarantee.

Mr. Warnig, the project’s chief executive, served as a captain in the foreign intelligence directorate of the East German secret police, the Stasi, in the 1980s. At the time, Vladimir V. Putin, the future Russian president and prime minister, was a K.G.B. agent in Dresden, East Germany.

While his background has fueled speculation of murky cold-war-era ties underlying the project, Mr. Warnig said his spying career was irrelevant to the pipeline debate today.

Other links are more clear-cut. The former prime minister of Finland, Paavo Lipponen, was paid by Nord Stream to help secure permits. Mr. Sass, the Nord Stream liaison in Brussels, was an aide to Mr. Lipponen.

In 2008, Gazprom offered Romano Prodi, then the prime minister of Italy, the chairman’s job at South Stream; Mr. Prodi declined.

Now, with the pipeline looking inevitable, the French have decided to jump on the bandwagon as well, seeking to join the consortium through Gaz de France. Otherwise, they might have to buy gas from a German broker.

The French-German competition, analysts say, illustrates how securing coveted business with Russia has accentuated their rivalry for economic and political preeminence in Europe.

Ultimately, considerations of European unity, like the fears of Eastern Europe, are secondary in the raw struggle over resources by national and corporate interests.

It is a free-market capitalism that post-Communist Russia has cannily exploited, says Pierre Noël, a professor at Cambridge University and a fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations.

“It is an open, competitive, capitalist economy,” he said. “People build the pipes they want to build.”

Conferees' Report Details Defense Activities - washingtonpost.com

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By Walter Pincus
Tuesday, October 13, 2009

If you want to get a sense of the broad range of Defense Department activities, there's no better reading than the 638-page House-Senate conferee report on the fiscal 2010 defense authorization bill released last week.

You could start with apparel. Each service has its camouflage uniforms, which are different even within services. What to do?

The House wants to standardize uniforms to increase "interoperability" of ground troops and "reduce tactical risk" -- so they don't shoot each other by mistake.

The Senate has different ideas but maybe the same goals. Senators like that camouflage uniforms "uniquely reflect the identity of the individual services" but they also want "interoperability." The Senate also directed that the comptroller general report back on his assessment of combat and camouflage uniforms in use on the battlefield.

The conferees made clear that none of this was to affect Special Forces, who "design and deploy combat uniforms to meet their specific mission requirements." They added, however, that "technological advances and improvements" Special Forces incorporate in their combat uniforms should be shared with the other services when "appropriate and cost effective."

Then there's hardware.

The conferees have some ideas for getting rid of some of that U.S. military equipment sitting in Iraq. They authorized Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, as long as he has the okay of Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, to give as much as $750 million of military equipment now in Iraq or Kuwait to the military or security forces of Iraq or Afghanistan. And being members of Congress, they said Defense should be sure to report any transfer to them 30 days before it occurs.

Then there's the target range, but it's probably not the one that first comes to mind.

The proposed National Cyber Range is the Pentagon's participation through the Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency (DARPA) in the Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative. There is $50 million in next year's budget for it.

It would be a test range whereby both government and nongovernment agencies could try out against experts their cybersecurity systems and, for government agencies, any offensive attack programs. DARPA is to turn it over to a government entity in the next two years, but no partner has been selected.

The conferees said there was "a proliferation of network test beds" across the Defense Department, "creating an environment of excessive duplication and waste." They said they looked forward to the results of the assessment underway by the Pentagon's director of the Test Management Resources Center focused on network testing systems, including the National Cyber Range. And aren't we all?

Duplication and waste are not new descriptions when it comes to many defense programs. They are so entrenched that the Defense Department could be the only government agency to spend $1 billion over 10 years on a computer system that still does not work, and still avoid public criticism from Congress.

And that brings us to DIMHRS, which stands for the Defense Integrated Military Human Resources System. It was originally supposed to create one personnel record for each Army service member over a career and have it available to the soldier, as well as to combatant commanders, personnel and pay managers. The main obstacle to progress has been that DIMHRS was to replace at least 70 Army and Defense Department personnel and finance systems.

Even for the Pentagon, that's a lot. The first target date for operation was 2004. That was missed because there were questions of how much information was provided to the contractor and problems deciding how to replace or modify many of those older systems, according to a Government Accountability Office report. The new date was to be March of this year.

A 2006 Pentagon decision to change the program to make it service-wide was finalized last January, according to the GAO, but testing is underway by the Army and now the Air Force. With a new $70 million in fiscal 2010 defense funding, the gathering of "core" data of DIMHRS was to be continued, but then distributed to the individual services "to oversee, build-out, and deploy," according to the Pentagon budget.

The House-Senate conferees wrote that after investing nearly $1 billion, "the DIMHRS program has not successfully been developed or deployed because of a number of technical and organizational difficulties."

But the conferees decided on a solution: Rather than singling out anyone for blame, the panel said funding could continue but recommended an advisory panel be established to help the effort.

Safety Regained, Al-Rabie Street Again Teems With Life - washingtonpost.com

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By K.I. Ibrahim
Special to The Washington Post
Tuesday, October 13, 2009

More than a year ago, al-Rabie Street, a two-mile swath of office buildings, apartments and homes, was a deserted stretch of Baghdad. Commercial life had stopped. Shops were either shut down or bombed out. Three hospitals catering to the wealthy closed when doctors, nurses and patients simply stopped coming. Their gates were barricaded with metal bars. Restaurants were driven out of business by roaming squads of masked men carrying rifles and ordering everyone, especially women, to comply with strict Islamic dress codes. Jeans were banned -- too Western. Barbers had to close or post signs saying they would do only traditional styles -- no crew cuts, no long hair, no spiky hairdos. One bookshop was burned twice because it sold the government-supported newspaper and magazines with pictures of unveiled women.

Along that urban landscape, there was hardly an intact window. One shop was particularly hard to miss. Inside, tucked behind shattered windows, were chandeliers and light fixtures intact and collecting dust. The shop had given rise to its own rumors. Some said the owner died in a car bomb blast that targeted a soldiers' checkpoint nearby. Others said he just ran for his life, leaving everything behind.

The slow death of al-Rabie Street began with the flare-up of the sectarian civil war in 2006. Within a few months, the majority of the Shiite families living in the Jami'a-Khadraa neighborhood, through which al-Rabie Street runs, were driven out of their homes by armed bands of Sunni extremists linked to a group known as the Islamic State of Iraq. Those who refused to leave were attacked. The men were usually killed, while women were allowed to leave unharmed as long as they left everything behind.

This summer, as the government slowly regained control of neighborhoods in western Baghdad, life started to return to the street. The Sunni insurgency was broken, with the help of a U.S.-backed militia, and Shiite militias went underground. Checkpoints proliferated as people returned to the streets. Sidewalks were rebuilt, new medians were constructed and solar-powered street lights were installed.

Windows were replaced by shining new glass imported from Turkey. A music shop boldly displayed a large poster of Dalli, a curvaceous Iraqi pop star, who has become famous the past two years. On Thursday and Friday nights, the shop loudly plays Iraqi pop music. Through the cacophony, wedding parties careen down the street. Ice cream shops have reopened, and at least one adds to the chorus with its own blaring pop tunes.

Restaurants reopened, and no less than three new ones started, with polished entrances and well-lighted billboards. Some have become more ambitious: one hole in the wall that served roasted chicken has graduated to a broader menu of Iraqi favorites: minced meat kebab, charcoaled mutton ribs and soaked tripe.

At midday, the street is bustling with the latest model cars and shoppers buying everything from doormats to computers. Food stalls and shops selling electric appliances, satellite receivers, household items and furniture dot both sides of the street, while construction on half-finished buildings has resumed.

At night, the street is well lit. Shops have small generators to provide them with power even when the national electric grid comes to a halt.

More often than not, the street feels serenely ordinary.

"Everybody's happy," Abdullah Khider said.

The owner of a shop selling cosmetics and perfumes, Khider sees the revival of al-Rabie Street as a blessing. His story is one of thousands of Iraqis who lived through years of violence only to embark on a new era that feels precarious but hopeful.

A machinist at a military plant south of Baghdad, he found himself jobless when American soldiers drove into the capital city in April 2003. To survive, he set up a stall selling household items. Soon, the violence forced him to close down. He left for Syria, where he stayed until last December. Hearing that security had improved, he returned to Baghdad, arriving on New Year's Eve.

"I wanted to make a new start with the new year," he said.

While in Syria, Khider worked at a cosmetics shop, where he learned the trade. On his return, he opened his own shop selling imported cosmetics. Within a few months, he hired a female assistant, who tends to female customers.

He is dressed in a smart suit and tie and smiling as he looks about his store. He said he has finally found the right job: a nice clean shop selling lipstick, false eyelashes, skin conditioners and other cosmetics.

"Business is good and getting better, as the street comes to life again," he said. "People feel safer. You can see them on the street as late as 10 at night, and they want to look better. So they come here to buy what makes them feel alive again."

In Pakistan, a Deadly Resurgence - washingtonpost.com

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Spate of Attacks Shows Taliban Waging 'a Real Kind of War'

By Karin Brulliard
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, October 13, 2009

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Oct. 12 -- At summer's end, there were hints of optimism in the battle against Pakistan's Islamist insurgents. The military said it had routed the Taliban from the verdant Swat Valley. A CIA missile had killed the Pakistani Taliban's chief -- so shaking the group, U.S. and Pakistani intelligence officials said, that his likely successor was killed in a duel for the top spot. Bombings slowed.

But that successor, Hakimullah Mehsud, is alive, a military spokesman said Monday. And as a spate of mass-casualty attacks during the past week has proven, so is the Taliban.

"They have been able to regroup, and they now feel confident to take on the Pakistani state in the cities," said Hasan-Askari Rizvi, a professor and security analyst in Lahore. "They want to demonstrate that they have the initiative in their hands, rather than Pakistani authorities. So it's a real kind of war."

As if to punctuate that point, the edge of the Swat Valley became the setting Monday for the fourth major attack in eight days. In a Shangla district market, an adolescent strapped with explosives detonated himself near an army convoy, killing 41 people and wounding dozens, military officials said.

The blast came two days after a stunning attack by militants on the armed forces' headquarters in Rawalpindi, which killed 23. A day before that, about 50 people died in a car bombing in Peshawar. Last Monday, a suicide bomber killed five people at an office of the United Nations.

The surge in attacks comes at a delicate time for Pakistan's civilian government, which is struggling to contain a public relations fiasco over conditions placed by Congress on a massive U.S. aid package. The legislation granting the aid exhorts Pakistan to do more to control its armed forces and to fight Islamist extremists -- stipulations that critics, including the military, view as micromanagement by the United States.

In a statement given to the Associated Press on Monday, a Taliban spokesman called the attack on the military headquarters a "first small effort, and a present to the Pakistani and American governments." He said it was vengeance for the killing of the group's leader, Baitullah Mehsud, in August.

As the Taliban has regrouped in recent months, the military became the obvious target, analysts said. The Swat Valley operation buoyed the military's image, and it has been vocal about a planned ground offensive in South Waziristan, a Taliban and al-Qaeda haven along the Afghan border. Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas, a military spokesman, said that "more than 80 percent" of recent attacks in Pakistan have been planned there.

The assault on the military headquarters also was planned there, he said. But he said the fighters who carried it out were from a Taliban-allied sect based in Pakistan's Punjabi heartland.

Punjabi militant groups have long existed, but in the past they were nurtured by intelligence agencies to focus their attacks on Pakistan's archrival, India. Their alliance with the Pashtun-dominated Taliban indicates they are now "up for hire," and represent yet another foe, military analyst Shuja Nawaz said.

"Their involvement means that their break with the military and the [intelligence services] is now complete," said Nawaz, head of the South Asia Center at the Atlantic Council in Washington. "The question is: Will the military have the capacity to take operations against them?"

Previous military offensives in South Waziristan have failed, and the attack on the army headquarters -- which security forces had warned about, Pakistani newspapers reported -- raised doubts about the army's readiness.

But Abbas argued that the assault highlighted the capability of security forces, who prevented militants from venturing far into the compound and rescued 39 of 42 hostages. Military officials were "still judging the situation" in South Waziristan and waiting for the "right time," he said.

The United States has encouraged the offensive into the region, which it views as a hornet's nest of insurgents who focus their violent campaign both within Pakistan and beyond. U.S. officials may think Pakistan is not sufficiently concerned about extremism, one opposition politician said Monday, but the attacks of the past week should leave little doubt that the state knows it is vulnerable.

"If the power of bullets becomes the order in politics, we are all out of business," said Ahsan Iqbal, a spokesman for the Pakistan Muslim League-N. "We only have to make sure we fight this war in the right way, and we don't make it look like an American war. It has to have local ownership."

Special correspondent Haq Nawaz Khan contributed to this report.

Mayo Clinic Criticized for Limiting Medicare Patients - washingtonpost.com

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Critics Say Move Shows That Facility Is Not a Model for Health-Care Reform

By Alec MacGillis
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, October 13, 2009

The renowned Mayo Clinic is no longer accepting some Medicare and Medicaid patients, raising new questions about whether it is too selective to serve as a model for health-care reform.

The White House has repeatedly held up for praise Mayo and other medical centers, many of which are in the Upper Midwest, that perform well in Dartmouth College rankings showing wide disparities in how much hospitals spend on Medicare patients.

The model centers have capitalized on their status to insert into health-care legislation provisions that would result in higher Medicare payments for hospitals that do well on the Dartmouth rankings while punishing those elsewhere -- mostly, big cities and the South -- that spend the most per Medicare patient.

But some skeptics -- health-care analysts as well as politicians and medical officials in states that would be hurt by Mayo's proposals -- argue that low Medicare spending by Mayo and others is driven by the lack of diversity and poverty in their patient population. They say Mayo's low-cost image is belied by the high rates it charges insurers and private payers.

Mayo announced late last week that its flagship facility in Rochester, Minn., will no longer accept Medicaid patients from Nebraska and Montana. The clinic draws patients from across the Midwest and West, but it will now accept Medicaid recipients only from Minnesota and the four states that border it. As it is, 5 percent of Mayo's patients in Rochester are on Medicaid, well below the average for other big teaching hospitals, and below the 29 percent rate at the other hospital in town.

Mayo officials said Monday it would look for other hospitals to take care of the 50 patients from Montana and Nebraska who have come to the hospital at least twice in the past two years. If there are none, the patients might qualify for charity care at Mayo.

Separately, the Mayo branch in Arizona -- the third leg of the Mayo stool, with the Rochester clinic and one in Florida -- put out word a few days ago that under a two-year pilot program, it would no longer accept Medicare for patients seeking primary care at its Glendale facility. That facility, with 3,000 regular Medicare patients, will continue to see them for advanced care -- Mayo's specialty -- but those seeking primary care will need to pay an annual $250 fee, plus fees of $175 to $400 per visit.

Mayo officials said Monday that the two moves were "business decisions" that had grown out of longstanding concerns about what it sees as underpayment by Medicare and Medicaid. The officials said they were not meant to influence the national reform debate, in which Mayo has also been advocating against the creation of a government-run insurance option. But they said the moves were indicative of the need for the Medicare payment reforms it has been pushing in Washington.

"These decisions aren't based on timing with what's going on with the legislation," said Mayo spokeswoman Shelly Plutowski. "It simply is the reality of the health-care business, and how are we going to be able to continue our mission when these payments are so far below what it costs to provide the care."

Skeptics see the moves differently. As it is, they say, Mayo has been drawing a rarefied clientele by charging a premium to Medicare patients coming to Rochester from outside Minnesota. This month's moves, they say, will result in a yet more affluent clientele, and given that Medicare costs correlate with poverty, Mayo's spending data will look only better compared with others.

"If your institutions are located in the Bronx or South Central L.A. or other parts of the country with dense poverty, it's hard to compare those patients . . . with places like Mayo," said Atul Grover of the Association of American Medical Colleges. "It's not like they can just stop seeing Medicaid patients, because they live right in their area, and are not coming from hundreds of miles away. They're located right in areas with dense poverty."

Mayo spokeswoman Jane Jacobs rejected this, saying that poverty rates can explain only a fraction of the Medicare spending disparities. "To use your patient demographics as an excuse for not getting better is outrageous," she said.

The skeptics also question Mayo's argument that it needs to cut back on Medicare and Medicaid patients because those payments are so far below its costs. While Mayo is adept at limiting unnecessary procedures, they note, the costs of the procedures it does provide are high. By extracting such high rates from insurers and private payers, it can pay for top talent and facilities, thus raising its budget and its per-procedure costs.

By contrast, a recent report by the commission that advises Congress on Medicare found that hospitals relying most on Medicare and Medicaid, without a big private-payer base, report per-procedure costs in line with Medicare rates -- suggesting that those hospitals can make do with Medicare payment levels.

Clinton Says No to Another Presidential Bid - washingtonpost.com

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By Anne E. Kornblut
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, October 13, 2009

A year and a half after the end of her historic presidential campaign, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Monday for the first time that she will not run for the job again, firmly setting aside a question that has followed her for most of the past decade.

She has dismissed the notion of a future presidential bid before, and even her most hopeful supporters have long conceded that a 2016 Clinton campaign would be unlikely.

But until this week, there always seemed to be a way to interpret her response as a "maybe." That was not the case in her interview with NBC's Ann Curry, who asked whether she had any regrets about not winning the presidency -- or any interest in seeking it again.

"Will you ever run for president again? Yes or no?" Curry asked.

"No," Clinton said.

"No?" Curry asked.

"No. No," Clinton replied. "I mean, this is a great job. It is a 24/7 job. And I'm looking forward to retirement at some point."

Clinton will turn 65 in October 2012, putting her at the older end of the range of typical White House seekers. Yet she remains the most viable female potential candidate in either party, after winning 18 million votes, raising more than $220 million and becoming the first woman in history to win a primary.

It is unlikely that any Democrat would challenge President Obama in 2012, when he is all but certain to run for reelection. If he were to win another term, it is unclear who would succeed him as the leader of the Democratic Party in 2016: Vice President Biden will turn 74 that year, making him older than Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) was during his presidential campaign in 2008 -- and leading to speculation that Clinton, or perhaps another woman, could emerge as a more viable candidate.

It remains to be seen whether Clinton's flat denial is enough to permanently put to rest questions about her future. Other political figures have ruled out a campaign only to reverse themselves, as Obama did after declaring in 2006 that he would not run for president in 2008.

In the interview, Curry asked Clinton if she ever wished she were president so she could make big decisions for herself. "I have to tell you, it never crosses my mind," Clinton said, adding that she is "part of the team that makes the decisions."

She also called "absurd" what Curry described as a concern by some "that you have been marginalized, that you -- that the highest-ranking woman in the United States [is] having to fight against being marginalized."

"I think there is such a -- you know, maybe there is some misunderstanding which needs to be clarified. I believe in delegating power. You know, I'm not one of these people who feels like I have to have my face in the, you know, front of the newspaper or on the TV every moment of the day," Clinton said. "I would be irresponsible and negligent were I to say, 'Oh, no, everything must come to me.' Now, maybe that is a woman's thing. Maybe I'm totally secure and feel absolutely no need to go running around in order for people to see what I'm doing. It's just the way I am. My goal is to be a very positive force to implement the kind of changes that the president and I believe are in the best interest of our country. But that doesn't mean that it all has to be me, me, me all the time. I like lifting people up."

Under Obama, Regulatory Agencies Step Up Enforcement - washingtonpost.com

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Consumer, Workplace Agencies More Active

By Lyndsey Layton
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, October 13, 2009

The Obama administration is taking on Cheerios. And popular cold remedies and swimming pool drains and rhinestones on children's clothing.

With much of Washington focused on efforts to revamp the health-care system and address climate change, a handful of Obama appointees have been quietly exercising their power over the trappings of daily life. They are awakening a vast regulatory apparatus with authority over nearly every U.S. workplace, 15,000 consumer products, and most items found in kitchen pantries and medicine cabinets.

Top appointees at the Food and Drug Administration, for example, have cracked down on dietary supplements with "steroid-like" substances that for years had been sold in gyms and health-food stores. In a move designed as much for symbolism as effect, the new chairman of the Consumer Product Safety Commission dispatched all 100 agency inspectors across the country last month to enforce a law that requires special drains on swimming pools to prevent children from entrapment. The agency shut down more than 200 pools.

The new regulators display a passion for rules and a belief that government must protect the public from dangers lurking at home and on the job -- one more way the new White House is reworking the relationship between government and business.

"In the Bush administration, the problem was that the political folks were hostile to the mission," said Michael A. Livermore, executive director of the Institute for the Study of Regulation at New York University Law School. "We've already seen the new direction of this White House play out in other regulatory aspects -- the Environmental Protection Agency and financial regulation. With the consumer protection agencies, you're going to see a lot more stuff happening because they fit Obama's broad vision for government."

The regulators still face significant hurdles if they want to dramatically expand government's reach. Most proposed regulations have to be vetted by a central White House office headed by another new appointee, Cass R. Sunstein, whose embrace of cost-benefit analyses may mean he will discourage expensive new rules. Some efforts to expand regulation are sure to face legal challenges from industry. And the private sector is likely to assert that new regulations would be an additional burden in a weak economy.

"The argument is going to be that this is going to hurt jobs and be bad for the economy," Livermore said. "That has resonance on the Hill and within the public. . . . That's the one big challenge."

Already, some have complained that the new political leaders are overzealous.

"It's 'shoot first and ask who we shot later,' " said Gary L. Yingling, a lawyer and pharmacist who worked for a decade in the FDA general counsel's office and now represents companies regulated by the agency. "My concern is whether they've dotted their i's, crossed the t's, understand the statutory regulations and understand what the agency did yesterday. That's a real concern."

Still, waves of recalls of dangerous foods and consumer products have created pressure for stronger federal oversight. The new administration focused first on the FDA, which oversees a quarter of the U.S. economy and during George W. Bush's presidency had been faulted by consumer advocates and members of Congress for not blocking contaminated foods and drugs and faulty medical devices.

In their first few months on the job, FDA Commissioner Margaret A. Hamburg and deputy Joshua M. Sharfstein -- both with backgrounds running public health agencies -- notified General Mills that it was violating the law with its two-year-old marketing campaign that said Cheerios can lower cholesterol by 4 percent. The FDA said the company was essentially making a drug claim, which would require clinical studies and agency approval before a product is put on the market. The food giant has removed that claim from its Web site and a spokeswoman said it is in discussions with the FDA.

While the FDA began looking into Cheerios before Obama's election, several lawyers who represent food and drugmakers said they think the agency under Bush would never have taken action against General Mills.

In June, Sharfstein defied pistachio producers and told the nation to stop eating the nuts out of concern over potential salmonella contamination, even though no illnesses had been reported and just one company was involved.

That same month, the FDA warned consumers to stop using popular cold medicines, Zicam Cold Remedy nasal gel and Zicam Cold Remedy swab products, citing evidence that some consumers could lose their sense of smell. The agency had known about the problem for years but had not addressed it.

"Companies must have a realistic expectation that if they are crossing the line, they will be caught, and that if they fail to act . . . we will," Hamburg told a gathering of lawyers representing food and drugmakers in August.

For industry, the costs of stronger enforcement are significant. Matrixx Initiatives, which makes Zicam, lost about $33 million as a result of the FDA's crackdown, executives told analysts.

At the Consumer Product Safety Commission, which regulates items as varied as aquariums and wheelbarrows, the new chairman, Inez Moore Tenenbaum, said her top priority is to implement a complex new law that includes the strongest consumer protections in a generation. Among other things, the law significantly lowers the amount of lead in children's products. Trade groups that make crystal and glass rhinestones and beads for children's fashions sought an exemption; Tenenbaum and the commission have turned them down. "We are enforcing the law; that's what we do," she said.

She also directed her agency to draft a mandatory safety standard for a new off-road recreational vehicle that has a tendency to tip over and has been linked to 59 deaths. Under Tenenbaum's predecessor, the agency prompted manufacturers to offer free repairs that were supposed to improve safety. But Tenenbaum has gone further -- pushing for a mandatory standard that would force the company to redesign the vehicle. The five-member commission has to approve a mandatory standard; the last time it took similar action was 2001.

Tenenbaum's determination to enforce the law is a reversal from her predecessor, said CPSC Commissioner Nancy A. Nord, a former lobbyist for Eastman Kodak who argued against many aspects of that law.

At the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, acting head Jordan Barab has already rankled the business community by reviving a hot-button issue -- rules to protect workers from repetitive-strain injuries. The injuries affect laborers from computer keyboard operators to poultry processors and cause about 60 percent of workplace injuries, according to OSHA studies.

The business community has long argued that ergonomics standards are not based on sound science and will require the costly redesign of millions of workplaces. Furthermore, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and others say that repetitive strain injuries are specific to workplaces and broad government standards won't work as well as voluntary programs adopted by individual businesses.

Barab led the last attempt to enact ergonomics standards while at OSHA during the Clinton administration, when the GOP-controlled Congress and Bush repealed the rules two months after they took effect.

Awaiting Senate approval is Obama's nominee for OSHA director, David Michaels, an Energy Department assistant secretary under President Bill Clinton, who could further ruffle feathers. He has become a recent target of conservative bloggers, who say he is hostile to certain industries. Michaels has called for a more aggressive OSHA, saying that illnesses and death have resulted from the agency not issuing workplace safety rules. He also has argued that tobacco, chemical and other industries have exploited scientific uncertainty to slow or kill federal regulation, even when aware their products pose health risks. Public health organizations have applauded his selection.

Barab is unapologetic about an aggressive approach. "The law says that employers are responsible for workplace safety and health," he said in June. "And there's a new sheriff in town to enforce the law."

Number of U.S. Troops in Afghanistan Overlooks Thousands of Support Troops - washingtonpost.com

Image by Cecilia... via Flickr

By Ann Scott Tyson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, October 13, 2009

President Obama announced in March that he would be sending 21,000 additional troops to Afghanistan. But in an unannounced move, the White House has also authorized -- and the Pentagon is deploying -- at least 13,000 troops beyond that number, according to defense officials.

The additional troops are primarily support forces, including engineers, medical personnel, intelligence experts and military police. Their deployment has received little mention by officials at the Pentagon and the White House, who have spoken more publicly about the combat troops who have been sent to Afghanistan.

The deployment of the support troops to Afghanistan brings the total increase approved by Obama to 34,000. The buildup has raised the number of U.S. troops deployed to the war zones of Iraq and Afghanistan above the peak during the Iraq "surge" that President George W. Bush ordered, officials said.

The deployment does not change the maximum number of service members expected to soon be in Afghanistan: 68,000, more than double the number there when Bush left office. Still, it suggests that a significant number of support troops, in addition to combat forces, would be needed to meet commanders' demands. It also underscores the growing strain on U.S. ground troops, raising practical questions about how the Army and Marine Corps would meet a request from Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan.

Defense experts said the military usually requires that thousands of support troops deploy for each combat brigade of about 4,000. That, in turn, exacerbates the strain on the force, in part because support troops are some of the most heavily demanded in the military and are still needed in large numbers in Iraq.

"There are admittedly some challenges over the next 10 to 12 months as we are downsizing in Iraq, and therefore any schedule for increasing in Afghanistan might have to be more gradual," said Michael E. O'Hanlon, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

Pentagon and White House officials have not publicized significant deployments of support troops. For example, when Bush announced the Iraq surge, he spoke only of 20,000 combat troops and did not mention the approximately 8,000 support troops that would accompany them. When Gen. David H. Petraeus announced that the surge would end, he spoke only of the withdrawal of the combat units because he needed to retain many of the support troops in Iraq.

On Afghanistan, White House and Pentagon spokesmen differed over exactly what the president has approved.

Obama announced in a March 27 speech that he was approving 21,000 troops, and a White House spokesman said that the president did not approve any other increases before or after. Asked for more details on the troop authorizations, spokesman Tommy Vietor said the Pentagon was better suited to provide such "technical information."

Defense officials, however, acknowledge that the request for 21,000 troops has led to the authorization of more forces.

"The 21,000 are only combat forces, and when the combat forces go in, there are a certain amount of additional forces that are required," said Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, who signs the deployment orders, had military officials identify last spring the entire scope of the increase and agreed that he would consult with Obama again if the Pentagon sought to go above that, Whitman said.

"Obama authorized the whole thing. The only thing you saw announced in a press release was the 21,000," said another defense official familiar with the troop-approval process.

McChrystal's request, which the administration is considering, would be in addition to the troops Obama has approved. The request reportedly includes different options for adding troops for combat, training and support, with one option totaling about 40,000. The ability of the Army and Marine Corps to meet the request would depend on the type and number of troops McChrystal asked for, and when he wants them. A significant troop increase in Afghanistan early next year -- similar to the 2007 increase in Iraq -- would be difficult to sustain given the current size of the Army and Marine Corps and ongoing troop demands in Iraq, officials said.

The Army has 17 brigades deployed worldwide, including 11 in Iraq and five in Afghanistan, according to Pentagon data. The Marine Corps has one expeditionary brigade in Afghanistan. As of early this month, 65,000 U.S. troops were in Afghanistan and about 124,000 were in Iraq. At the height of the increase in Iraq, in late 2007 and early 2008, about 160,000 U.S. troops were in Iraq and 26,000 were in Afghanistan.

Senior Army officials have made it clear that they want to avoid further wearying the force by imposing longer war zone tours or shortening time at home -- as happened during the Iraq troop increase when the Army extended one-year deployments to 15 months.

"I would hope we don't get there," Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the Army chief of staff, told reporters last week before meeting with Obama to provide his advice. Still, Casey said he could not promise that Army units would not face extended tours.

"Once you come off a 15-month [rotation requirement], you don't want to go right back on it," said Lt. Gen. James D. Thurman, the Army's operations chief.

Army officials said that for planning purposes they are looking at various options for meeting the request for forces, including those that both maintain and break the Army's "red lines" requiring no more than 12 months deployed and no less than 12 months at home.

To give soldiers more time at home, the goal would be to deploy first those units that have been home the longest.

Other factors would affect the Army's ability to meet McChrystal's request. One variable involves the types of forces used, which differ between Afghanistan and Iraq.

So far, the Army has tried to deploy mostly light and airborne infantry to Afghanistan because of the country's rural, mountainous terrain and the nature of the insurgency there. To maintain continuity, the Army seeks to keep deploying such units because of their experience in Afghanistan. In July, the Army deployed the first Stryker brigade to Afghanistan, to provide greater mobility and firepower to the force, and more may be sent.

A significant troop increase, however, could require the Army to send mechanized and armored brigades to Afghanistan, although they would have to deploy with lighter vehicles.

Recent growth in U.S. ground forces, ordered by Gates in 2007, has helped make the troop buildup in Afghanistan possible by permanently expanding the Army and Marine Corps. This summer, Gates ordered another temporary increase of 22,000 soldiers to fill out gaps in Army units created by the growing number of wounded and other "non-deployable" troops.

Gates last month ordered to Afghanistan up to 3,000 support troops, and he could seek approval to send more to meet urgent needs. "I'm prepared to ask for the flexibility to send more enablers if we need to before the president makes a decision on -- on whether or not to send significant additional combat troops," he said, using the term "enablers" to refer to support troops as opposed to combat units.

Casey and other senior Army officials said the Army will keep pursuing its goal of giving active-duty soldiers two years at home between year-long deployments by 2011.

"An increase in dwell time is the single most important thing we can do to relieve stress on the force," said Gen. Peter W. Chiarelli, the Army's vice chief of staff, using the military term for at-home rest.

Making the Most of Customers' Online Reviews - WSJ.com

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Companies are learning to make the most out of customers' online reviews of their products

By GEOFFREY A. FOWLER

Online, everyone has an opinion. For e-commerce businesses, the hard part is making the most of them.

Amazon.com Inc. began posting customer ratings and reviews of its products online in 1995, with an anonymous five-star write-up of Dr. Seuss's "The Butter Battle Book." Since then, most online businesses have found that allowing customers to post reviews—including negative ones—can boost sales and help merchants quickly identify problems with their products.

Now, makers of review software are adding features that allow businesses to get more out of consumers' input online. They have found ways to boost the number of reviews on a site and lend them more credibility, so shoppers are more likely to feel comfortable making purchases. And merchants can now reap the benefits of input from consumers before a sale is made, by posting questions from people thinking about buying a product and the answers, including comments from other consumers.

Building Trust

The review software developed in-house by Drugstore.com Inc. relied on customers to motivate themselves to submit reviews of the products they bought. But after outsourcing its reviews in June of 2008 to San Francisco-based Power Reviews Inc., Drugstore.com launched a system that automatically emails customers about three weeks after they've made a purchase, encouraging them to post a review.

Getting those email requests "makes you feel important and also increased our brand's connection to you," says David Lonczak, chief marketing officer of Drugstore.com, which is based in Bellevue, Wash.

After launching the program, Drugstore.com witnessed a more than 300% increase in new reviews, lending a lot more credibility to its products—especially those with a large number of positive reviews.

There was also a side benefit. Customers who responded to the emails could be confirmed as buyers of those products—unlike some people who post reviews on products they haven't actually purchased. These "verified buyers" are given a badge next to their reviews, adding authenticity to what they report.

"Three or four years ago, you were just happy if you found a review on something. But now you wonder if I can trust the reviews that I am reading to make a decision," says Andy Chen, Power Reviews' chief executive.

Feeling Connected

Skepticism about whether the reviewer actually bought the product isn't the only reason a shopper might not give a review much weight in deciding on a purchase. Sites like baby-products retailer Diapers.com are increasingly deciding that customers are more likely to trust a review from someone they feel connected to in some way.

In the market for baby products, "the most important recommender is going to be people who are in a very similar situation to yourself," says Josh Himwich, director of e-commerce solutions at Diapers.com, which is based in Montclair, N.J. "It is the closest thing you can get to a recommendation from a sister or friend."

Sometimes a review will include personal information about the author that might establish a connection with a shopper. But that's not true of many reviews, and even when such information is included it isn't prominently displayed.

So two years ago Diapers.com started using a feature offered by Power Reviews that helps shoppers distinguish one reviewer from another. Now when customers contribute a review, they have to check one or more boxes to identify themselves in terms such as "first-time parent" or "grandparent." Reviews show up on Diapers.com categorized under those headings.

The site plans to expand on that service next year by allowing users to search through the jumble of reviews on any given product based on those identifying categories—choosing to see, for example, only reviews written by the parents of twins. Mr. Himwich expects that feature to give his site a leg up on others that only sort reviews based on ratings or on comments that have been voted the most useful.

In the coming weeks, Bazaarvoice, a software firm based in Austin, Texas, will expand a system that takes the idea of drawing connections among shoppers a step further, by linking reviewers' write-ups with their Facebook profiles. That will make it easy for reviewers to share write-ups with their friends, and for other shoppers to see a lot more information about who has left a review. "Everybody knows you will trust somebody you know more than somebody you don't," says Bazaarvoice Chief Executive Brett Hurt.

Any Questions?

Another service from Bazaarvoice is helping merchants mine input from consumers who are still considering a purchase. The Whitney Automotive Group, which runs auto-parts supply site JCWhitney.com, watched sales jump after it hired Bazaarvoice to add customer reviews to its site three years ago. But the comments alone couldn't help with another problem: shoppers inadvertently buying the wrong product.

So two years ago, the company asked Bazaarvoice to add the capability for shoppers to pose questions about products before they buy, instead of just leaving comments after the fact. The service allows customers to "let us know what information isn't out there," says Tom West, JC Whitney's chief executive.

It also sparks discussions among shoppers about the company's products. Normally, online shoppers ask questions about products by sending an email to the store, or phoning a call center. The answers a shopper is given only benefit that one person—other shoppers don't get to listen in. Now, when a JC Whitney customer posts a question on the site, other customers or JC Whitney employees or suppliers can post answers that all shoppers can see. The software keeps track of which questions have and haven't been answered, and directs new questions to employees who are experts on the subject.

The feature hasn't increased sales much, says Mr. West, but it did cause the company's product return rate to drop 23% in the first year after the system was put in place, compared with the previous year, for those products that had received a critical mass of queries.

"It turns out that if it was a question for one person, it was a question for even more," says Mr. West. "While we may lose a sale, we also prevent a return."

Bazaarvoice has been extending the service to suppliers who want to answer the questions asked about their products on retailers' sites. For example, Samsung Electronics uses the service to answer questions on BestBuy.com and other sites about its television sets, signing its answers "Mr. Samsung."

The End of the Email Era - WSJ.com

Image by eszter via Flickr

By JESSICA E. VASCELLARO

Email has had a good run as king of communications. But its reign is over.

In its place, a new generation of services is starting to take hold—services like Twitter and Facebook and countless others vying for a piece of the new world. And just as email did more than a decade ago, this shift promises to profoundly rewrite the way we communicate—in ways we can only begin to imagine.

We all still use email, of course. But email was better suited to the way we used to use the Internet—logging off and on, checking our messages in bursts. Now, we are always connected, whether we are sitting at a desk or on a mobile phone. The always-on connection, in turn, has created a host of new ways to communicate that are much faster than email, and more fun.

Why wait for a response to an email when you get a quicker answer over instant messaging? Thanks to Facebook, some questions can be answered without asking them. You don't need to ask a friend whether she has left work, if she has updated her public "status" on the site telling the world so. Email, stuck in the era of attachments, seems boring compared to services like Google Wave, currently in test phase, which allows users to share photos by dragging and dropping them from a desktop into a Wave, and to enter comments in near real time.

Little wonder that while email continues to grow, other types of communication services are growing far faster. In August 2009, 276.9 million people used email across the U.S., several European countries, Australia and Brazil, according to Nielsen Co., up 21% from 229.2 million in August 2008. But the number of users on social-networking and other community sites jumped 31% to 301.5 million people.

"The whole idea of this email service isn't really quite as significant anymore when you can have many, many different types of messages and files and when you have this all on the same type of networks," says Alex Bochannek, curator at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif.

So, how will these new tools change the way we communicate? Let's start with the most obvious: They make our interactions that much faster.

Into the River

Years ago, we were frustrated if it took a few days for a letter to arrive. A couple of years ago, we'd complain about a half-hour delay in getting an email. Today, we gripe about it taking an extra few seconds for a text message to go through. In a few months, we may be complaining that our cellphones aren't automatically able to send messages to friends within a certain distance, letting them know we're nearby. (A number of services already do this.)

These new services also make communicating more frequent and informal—more like a blog comment or a throwaway aside, rather than a crafted email sent to one person. No need to spend time writing a long email to your half-dozen closest friends about how your vacation went. Now those friends, if they're interested, can watch it unfold in real time online. Instead of sending a few emails a week to a handful of friends, you can send dozens of messages a day to hundreds of people who know you, or just barely do.

Consider Twitter. The service allows users to send 140-character messages to people who have subscribed to see them, called followers. So instead of sending an email to friends announcing that you just got a new job, you can just tweet it for all the people who have chosen to "follow" you to see. You can create links to particular users in messages by entering @ followed by their user name or send private "direct messages" through the system by typing d and the user name.

Facebook is part of the trend, too. Users post status updates that show up in their friends' "streams." They can also post links to content and comment on it. No in-box required.

Dozens of other companies, from AOL and Yahoo Inc. to start-ups like Yammer Inc., are building products based on the same theme.

David Liu, an executive at AOL, calls it replacing the in-box with "a river that continues to flow as you dip into it."

But the speed and ease of communication cut both ways. While making communication more frequent, they can also make it less personal and intimate. Communicating is becoming so easy that the recipient knows how little time and thought was required of the sender. Yes, your half-dozen closest friends can read your vacation updates. But so can your 500 other "friends." And if you know all these people are reading your updates, you might say a lot less than you would otherwise.

Too Much Information

Another obvious downside to the constant stream: It's a constant stream.

That can make it harder to determine the importance of various messages. When people can more easily fire off all sorts of messages—from updates about their breakfast to questions about the evening's plans—being able to figure out which messages are truly important, or even which warrant a response, can be difficult. Information overload can lead some people to tune out messages altogether.

Such noise makes us even more dependent on technology to help us communicate. Without software to help filter and organize based on factors we deem relevant, we'd drown in the deluge.

Enter filtering. In email land, consumers can often get by with a few folders, if that. But in the land of the stream, some sort of more sophisticated filtering is a must.

On Facebook, you can choose to see updates only from certain people you add to certain lists. Twitter users have adopted the trend of "tagging" their tweets by topic. So people tweeting about a company may follow their tweet with the # symbol and the company name. A number of software programs filter Tweets by these tags, making it easier to follow a topic.

The combination of more public messages and tagging has cool search and discovery implications. In the old days, people shared photos over email. Now, they post them to Flickr and tag them with their location. That means users can, with little effort, search for an area, down to a street corner, and see photos of the place.

Tagging also is creating the potential for new social movements. Instead of trying to organize people over email, protesters can tweet their messages, tag them with the topic and have them discovered by others interested in the cause. Iranians used that technique to galvanize public opinion during their election protests earlier this year. It was a powerful example of what can happen when messages get unleashed.

Who Are You?

Perhaps the biggest change that these email successors bring is more of a public profile for users. In the email world, you are your name followed by a "dot-com." That's it. In the new messaging world, you have a higher profile, packed with data you want to share and possibly some you don't.

Such a public profile has its pluses and minuses. It can draw the people communicating closer, allowing them to exchange not only text but also all sorts of personal information, even facial cues. You know a lot about the person you are talking to, even before you've ever exchanged a single word.

Take, for example, Facebook. Message someone over the site and, depending on your privacy settings, he may be a click away from your photos and your entire profile, including news articles you have shared and pictures of that party you were at last night. The extra details can help you cut to the chase. If you see that I am in London, you don't need to ask me where I am. They can also make communication feel more personal, restoring some of the intimacy that social-network sites—and email, for that matter—have stripped away. If I have posted to the world that I am in a bad mood, you might try to cheer me up, or at least think twice about bothering me.

Email is trying to compete by helping users roll in more signals about themselves. Yahoo and Google Inc. have launched new profile services that connect to mail accounts. That means just by clicking on a contact, one can see whatever information she has chosen to share through her profile, from her hobbies to her high school.

But a dump of personal data can also turn off the people you are trying to communicate with. If I really just want to know what time the meeting is, I may not care that you have updated your status message to point people to photos of your kids.

Having your identity pegged to communication creates more data to manage and some blurry lines. What's fine for one sort of recipient to know about you may not be acceptable for another. While our growing digital footprints have made it easier for anyone to find personal information about anyone online if they go search for it, new communications tools are marrying that trail of information with the message, making it easier than ever for the recipient to uncover more details.

A Question of Time

Meanwhile, one more big question remains: Will the new services save time, or eat up even more of it?

Many of the companies pitching the services insist they will free up people.

Jeff Teper, vice president of Microsoft Corp.'s SharePoint division, which makes software that businesses use to collaborate, says in the past, employees received an email every time the status changed on a project they were working on, which led to hundreds of unnecessary emails a day. Now, thanks to SharePoint and other software that allows companies to direct those updates to flow through centralized sites that employees can check when they need to, those unnecessary emails are out of users' in-boxes.

"People were very dependent on email. They overused it," he says. "Now, people can use the right tool for the right task."

Perhaps. But there's another way to think about all this. You can argue that because we have more ways to send more messages, we spend more time doing it. That may make us more productive, but it may not. We get lured into wasting time, telling our bosses we are looking into something, instead of just doing it, for example. And we will no doubt waste time communicating stuff that isn't meaningful, maybe at the expense of more meaningful communication. Such as, say, talking to somebody in person.

White House Bid to Close Gitmo Hampered by Snags in Congress - WSJ.com

Image by stormbear via Flickr

By EVAN PEREZ

WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama's order to close the Guantanamo Bay prison by January faces snags in Congress that some of the president's supporters say result from a lack of White House muscle.

The Obama administration won a measure of support last week when House and Senate negotiators agreed on a joint Homeland Security appropriations bill that allows Guantanamo prisoners to be transferred to the U.S. for prosecution if the administration provides a plan for handling each detainee case.

However, just days before, in the full House, lawmakers overwhelmingly passed nonbinding resolutions barring the transfer of prisoners, even for trial.

Both the House and Senate must now sort out what to do when the Homeland Security appropriations legislation reaches the floor.

Republicans assailed the Homeland Security legislation because the language allowing some prisoner transfers emerged during last-minute conference negotiations instead of during earlier committee hearings. Republicans are calling for stronger prohibitions on moving Guantanamo prisoners to the U.S. and hope to use the votes in the full Senate and House to highlight what they describe as dangerous Democratic policies.

Rep. Jerry Lewis (R., Calif.), the ranking Republican on the House Appropriations Committee, said Democrats in the Homeland Security bill "defied the will of Congress and the American people and have voted to allow terrorist detainees to be brought onto American soil at taxpayer expense."

Supporters of closing Guantanamo quickly are criticizing the White House, saying the administration has a scattershot approach toward corralling Democrats in Congress. "There hasn't been a visible effort to make the case," said Tom Malinowski, Washington advocacy director for Human Rights Watch. He said the White House effort has lacked a "point person" for the issue on Capitol Hill and the president himself hasn't spoken out.

"There's nothing outside groups can do to meet the cynical criticism in Congress, to buck up the president's supporters if he's not seen talking about these issues himself," Mr. Malinowski said.

Administration officials acknowledge they will likely not meet the president's January deadline to close the prison, where 221 detainees remain after Friday's announced transfer of prisoners to Belgium and Kuwait. Even if some are allowed to come to the U.S. to face trial, the Obama administration still has no clear route for dealing with those it says must be held indefinitely without trial.

Administration officials play down criticism about their Guantanamo management. They cite the Homeland Security appropriations bill as a sign that the administration's fortunes on Guantanamo are turning around.

The administration last week also won House passage of legislation that makes changes Mr. Obama sought to military commissions, a Bush-era creation that the Obama administration wants to use in modified form to try some detainees. Just because the administration's lobbying isn't visible doesn't mean it isn't happening and gaining traction, White House officials said.

A White House aide, citing the Homeland Security bill, said: "Allowing transfers for trial is a positive development that will allow us to bring many of the detainees at Guantanamo Bay to swift and certain justice. President Obama, President Bush, and Sen. McCain all publicly committed to closing Guantanamo and prosecuting detainees when possible because it is in our national security interest, and we will continue our dialogue with Congress to ensure those goals are achieved."

Mr. Obama's Jan. 22 executive order calling for closure of Guantanamo within a year was part of the new president's symbolic sweeping away of the Bush administration's terrorism policies, which helped win him international support.

But moving beyond the symbolism has proved difficult for the president and top officials.

The closure was initially managed by White House Counsel Greg Craig but is now under the direction of the National Security Council, following missteps.

Attorney General Eric Holder, at a briefing with reporters last Tuesday, a day before the deal was worked out on the Homeland Security appropriations bill, expressed frustration that lawmakers keep citing security concerns about housing Guantanamo detainees in federal prisons.

"The restrictions that we've had to deal with on the Hill give me great concern," he said. "We have to get up on the Hill -- maybe people like myself have to get up there and speak to those members who have concerns." Pressed by reporters on whether he personally would make the administration's case to Congress, Mr. Holder said, "I'm sure that at some point I will."

Write to Evan Perez at evan.perez@wsj.com