Cleaning up the Pentagon

One of the key decisions Obama will have to make (d.v.) involves dealing with a bloated, corrupt, and top-heavy military.  The New York Times and the Washington Post both have lead stories this morning about deep corruption at the Pentagon.  Once again the stories will come as no big surprise to those who have suspected the worst and should make supporters of the military establishment very uncomfortable.

James Risen writes in the New York Times that "the Army official who managed the Pentagon’s largest contract in Iraq says he was ousted from his job when he refused to approve paying more than $1 billion in questionable charges to KBR, the Houston-based company that has provided food, housing and other services to American troops."

The official, Charles M. Smith, was the senior civilian overseeing the multibillion-dollar contract with KBR during the first two years of the war. Speaking out for the first time, Mr. Smith said that he was forced from his job in 2004 after informing KBR officials that the Army would impose escalating financial penalties if they failed to improve their chaotic Iraqi operations.

Army auditors had determined that KBR lacked credible data or records for more than $1 billion in spending, so Mr. Smith refused to sign off on the payments to the company. “They had a gigantic amount of costs they couldn’t justify,” he said in an interview. “Ultimately, the money that was going to KBR was money being taken away from the troops, and I wasn’t going to do that.”

But he was suddenly replaced, he said, and his successors — after taking the unusual step of hiring an outside contractor to consider KBR’s claims — approved most of the payments he had tried to block.

Move on, move on -- nothing new to see there.  But, at the very least, we are finally getting enough hard information to fuel serious changes at the Department of Defense.   Henry Waxman blames it all on the Bush administration and he's not wrong.  He just needs to adjust his lens.  After all, the Cold War made the Pentagon a happy playground for capitalism.

The Washington Post story takes us back to Abu Ghraib.  Again, we're getting news about torture that we already know.  Now it's official.  They tortured; they broke the law;  and they lied.  In a report which is due out today, Senate investigators find that the decision to use torture -- "harsh interrogation techniques" in Bush idiom -- came from the top.

The sources said that memos and other evidence obtained during the inquiry show that officials in the office of then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld started to research the use of waterboarding, stress positions, sensory deprivation and other practices in July 2002, months before memos from commanders at the detention facility in Cuba requested permission to use those measures on suspected terrorists.

The reported evidence -- some of which is expected to be made public at a Senate hearing today -- also shows that military lawyers raised strong concerns about the legality of the practices as early as November 2002, a month before Rumsfeld approved them. The findings contradict previous accounts by top Bush administration appointees, setting the stage for new clashes between the White House and Congress over the origins of interrogation methods that many lawmakers regard as torture and possibly illegal.

"Some have suggested that detainee abuses committed by U.S. personnel at Abu Ghraib in Iraq and at Guantanamo were the result of a 'few bad apples' acting on their own. It would be a lot easier to accept if that were true," Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, wrote in a statement for delivery at a committee hearing this morning. "Senior officials in the United States government sought out information on aggressive techniques, twisted the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees."

Pentagon legal counsel, William Haynes, testified in an earlier investigation that there was a kind of moral struggle going on over the use of these techniques. 

Not!

...Memos and e-mails obtained by investigators reveal that in July 2002, Haynes and other Pentagon officials were soliciting ideas for harsh interrogations from military experts in survival training, according to two congressional officials familiar with the committee's investigation. By late July, a list was compiled that included many of the techniques that would later be formally approved for use at Guantanamo Bay, including stress positions, sleep deprivation and the hooding of detainees during questioning. The techniques were later used at the Abu Ghraib detention facility in Iraq.

Nearly all the ideas were derived from U.S. military programs known as Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape, or SERE, the congressional officials said. In training, some military pilots and Special Forces troops are subjected to harsh treatment to simulate conditions they might face if captured by enemy troops. One of the techniques suggested was waterboarding, a form of simulated drowning that was used by CIA interrogators but was never approved for use by the military.

In his prepared statement, Levin said the evidence collected in the committee's 18-month investigation highlights a "particularly disturbing part of the story: how the techniques -- used to teach American soldiers to resist abusive interrogations by enemies that refuse to follow the Geneva Conventions -- were turned on their head and sanctioned by senior leaders for their use offensively against detainees."

The Senate committee's investigation began in January 2007 and involved Republican and Democratic staff members. The final report is expected by the end of the year.

And it will show just how far up the ladder of command these decisions went.  Cheney.

Haynes and other senior administration officials also visited Guantanamo Bay in September 2002 to "talk about techniques," said one congressional official. Also on the trip was David S. Addington, chief of staff to Vice President Cheney. ...

... A group of 56 Congressional Democrats last week asked the Justice Department to appoint a special counsel to investigate whether any Bush administration officials may have broken laws in approving the use of harsh interrogation techniques for suspected terrorists.