Prairie Weather

" ... a former Colombian military official..."??

The Department of Justice has uncovered another of those infamous Bush political appointees who do beeg, beeg favors for friends on the right. 

A former Justice Department grant-making administrator violated federal ethics and procurement rules in awarding hundreds of thousands of dollars in sole source contracts to ideologically favored companies and individuals, the department's inspector general concluded today.

The administrator, J. Robert Flores, was a political appointee during former president George Bush's administration who left his post after the inauguration in January. The department's public integrity section declined to pursue civil or criminal charges against Flores after ethics watchdogs forwarded their findings, investigators said.

Wait!  How come? Shouldn't Flores be prosecuted? 

The report issued this morning culminates a nearly two-year investigation into alleged irregularities with grants awarded by the Justice Department's Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention during the Bush administration.

Flores evidently handed out a job to private contractor with what sounds like an interesting background, having kind of snuck him in through the back door.

Investigators focused in part on the hiring of Hector Rene Fonseca, a former Colombian military official who worked as a contractor to the office between November 2004 and July 2007, when he collected about $281,000 for his work on anti-gang programs.

The Washington Post got that one wrong.  Actually, Hector Rene Fonseca is a Honduran colonel (trained in the US) and former presidential candidate with an interesting history.  Last June, ABC News broadcast a story about him.  The guy got some some pretty nice pay from us taxpayers.

The former Honduran presidential candidate Hector Rene Fonseca was not a US citizen in 2004 when hired and did not meet the residence requirement of living in the US for two out of the previous five years, according to a DOJ staffer familiar with Fonseca's contract.

The staffer said it took Flores a year to jump over all the legal hurdles necessary to hire Fonseca and went so far as to get a waiver from the Assistant Attorney General for Administration at Main Justice. The staffer said the Human Resources Department was concerned that giving access to the DOJ computer system to a non-US citizen and a former Honduran Colonel could be dangerous for security reasons.

Fonseca, whose Honduran military career spanned three decades, was contracted to work on faith-based and gang issues, according to DOJ staff members. The staffer familiar with Fonseca's contract said Flores invented the job and that no one in the office knew that job was needed until the HR Department was told to hire Fonseca. He was paid $450 per day and was expected to work full time, according to the staffer.

I love the fact that this expensive, well-connected Central American political and military figure was hired by our Justice Department to promote "Christian principles", don't you?  Doesn't the phrase "banana republic" come to mind?   What I want to know more about is exactly why the DOJ "declined to pursue" charges against this brat pack.  Dream on.

Whatever works

When it comes to whether or not to use torture, "whatever works" just doesn't cut it, not if one has any respect for our moral code and our laws.  Being put on the defense by those who approve illegal torture isn't pleasant.  But now we're stuck with it:  an embarrassing percentage of Americans thinks torture is okay if... and then they come up with that infamous worst-case scenario. 

Or maybe we're not stuck with it.  In an interview on NPR this morning, military interrogator (as distinct from the disgraced CIA torturers) revealed what many have wanted to know:   just how effective legal interrogation methods are. 

Matthew Alexander is an advocate of a different kind of interrogation — one that builds rapport, like the kind of technique you see on television cop shows. Alexander was a military interrogator in Iraq and doesn't see the need for rough questioning.

"One of my best techniques for building rapport was to bring into the interrogation booth a copy, my copy, of the Koran and to recite a verse out of it or to ask questions about Islam," he said.

It is important to know that Matthew Alexander wasn't just any run-of-the-mill military interrogator. He was in charge of an interrogation team working on one of the most important counterterrorism operations of the war: the hunt for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the man in charge of al-Qaida in Iraq.

So he and his team were let loose in Iraq.  How effective were they?

Alexander and his team arrived in Iraq in March 2006 — well after the abuses at Abu Ghraib forced the military to reform its interrogation process. By the time Alexander's team was on the ground, a military task force had been searching for Zarqawi for three years. But it took Alexander's team just two months of questioning detainees to get one of them to reveal the location of Zarqawi's safe house. Based on that information, the al-Qaida leader was killed in a military operation in June 2006.

"I know on the chase to Zarqawi we had several people during that chase who didn't talk," Alexander says. "But that was OK. We used the opportunities with detainees we couldn't convince to cooperate to become better interrogators. And it was those skills we developed in those interrogations that allowed us to break the detainees who led us to Zarqawi."

Alexander's experience in Iraq is particularly instructive in the context of the current debate over whether harsh interrogation techniques work. That's because Alexander and his team followed international standards for questioning and didn't use any of the rough techniques the CIA adopted. And yet, without waterboarding or stress positions, Alexander says, he not only helped track down al-Qaida's top man in Iraq but also managed to give the military better information. [emphasis added]

A wholly-owned subsidiary of Goldman Sachs

It is also startling to see how quickly Obama’s senatorship has been woven into the web of institutionalized influence-trading that afflicts official Washington. He quickly established a political machine funded and run by a standard Beltway group of lobbyists, P.R. consultants, and hangers-on. For the staff post of policy director he hired Karen Kornbluh, a senior aide to Robert Rubin when the latter, as head of the Treasury Department under Bill Clinton, was a chief advocate for NAFTA and other free-trade policies that decimated the nation’s manufacturing sector (and the organized labor wing of the Democratic Party). Obama’s top contributors are corporate law and lobbying firms (Kirkland & Ellis and Skadden, Arps, where four attorneys are fund-raisers for Obama as well as donors), Wall Street financial houses (Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase), and big Chicago interests (Henry Crown and Company, an investment firm that has stakes in industries ranging from telecommunications to defense). Obama immediately established a “leadership PAC,” a vehicle through which a member of Congress can contribute to other politicians’ campaigns—and one that political reform groups generally view as a slush fund through which congressional leaders can evade campaign-finance rules while raising their own political profiles.  ...Ken Silverstein, "Barack Obama, Inc.", in Harpers, 11/06

_____________________

Sen. Dick Durbin, on a local Chicago radio station this week, blurted out an obvious truth about Congress that, despite being blindingly obvious, is rarely spoken:  "And the banks -- hard to believe in a time when we're facing a banking crisis that many of the banks created -- are still the most powerful lobby on Capitol Hill. And they frankly own the place."  The blunt acknowledgment that the same banks that caused the financial crisis "own" the U.S. Congress -- according to one of that institution's most powerful members -- demonstrates just how extreme this institutional corruption is.

...The ownership of the federal government by banks and other large corporations is effectuated in literally countless ways, none more effective than the endless and increasingly sleazy overlap between government and corporate officials.  Here is just one random item this week announcing a couple of standard personnel moves:

Former Barney Frank staffer now top Goldman Sachs lobbyist

Goldman Sachs' new top lobbyist was recently the top staffer to Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., on the House Financial Services Committee chaired by Frank. 

... That Congress is fully owned and controlled by a tiny sliver of narrow, oligarchical, deeply corrupted interests is simultaneously so obvious yet so demonized (only Unserious Shrill Fringe radicals, such as the IMF's former chief economist, use that sort of language) that even Durbin's explicit admission will be largely ignored.  Even that extreme of a confession (Durbin elaborated on it with Ed Schultz last night) hardly causes a ripple. ...Glenn Greenwald, in Salon, 4/30/09

Here we go again

Racism still slinks around the media, leaving a slimy trail. 

On his 100th day in office, Barack Obama enjoys high job approval ratings, no matter what poll you consult. But if a new survey by the New York Times is accurate, the president and some of his policies are significantly less popular with white Americans than with black Americans, and his sky-high ratings among African-Americans make some of his positions appear a bit more popular overall that they actually are.

That gem comes from the National Review by way of Steve Benen, who takes it apart.  I guess he doesn't agree with Byron York that poll numbers are meaningful only when whites are given more weight.  There's a thought:  maybe an African-American should be reduced to 3/5^ths of a person like, you know, they used to be.

Inside the Obama administration

Maybe this will turn out to be more of a reading than a writing day -- beginning with this view inside the White House's efforts to turn the economy around.  Then there some new dope on Jane Harman (h/t War and Piece).

More.  Phillipe Sands. and Scott Shane (NYT) are interviewed today on Fresh Air.  The Sands interview took place early this morning, right after Garzon confirmed he will oversee the inquiry into the actions of Bybee, Rice, Gonzales, et al. when they authorized illegal torture.  The Shane interview covers what he found out about how much the CIA knew, etc. etc.  Both interviews contain shocking material, the Shane interview perhaps slightly more for its intimation of how much the CIA officials did not know.  Or perhaps better:  how much they avoided knowing.  It looks as though the legal actions in Spain and the UK (for starters) may put sufficient pressure on the Obama administration that it will have to give into an investigation and prosecution.

Arlen Specter's agenda

First, I intend to introduce legislation that will mandate Supreme Court review of lower court decisions in suits brought by the ACLU and others that challenge the constitutionality of the warrantless wiretapping program authorized by President Bush after September 11. While the Supreme Court generally exercises discretion on whether it will review a case, there are precedents for Congress to direct Supreme Court review on constitutional issues—including the statutes forbidding flag burning and requiring Congress to abide by federal employment laws—and I will follow those.

Second, I will reintroduce legislation to keep the courts open to suits filed against several major telephone companies that allegedly facilitated the Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping program. Although Congress granted immunity to the telephone companies in July 2008, this issue may yet be successfully revisited since the courts have not yet ruled on the legality of the immunity provision. My legislation would substitute the government as defendant in place of the telephone companies. This would allow the cases to go forward, with the government footing the bill for any damages awarded.

Further, I will reintroduce my legislation from 2006 and 2007 (the "Presidential Signing Statements Act") to prohibit courts from relying on, or deferring to, presidential signing statements when determining the meaning of any Act of Congress. These statements, sometimes issued when the president signs a bill into law, have too often been used to undermine congressional intent. Earlier versions of my legislation went nowhere because of the obvious impossibility of obtaining two-thirds majorities in each house to override an expected veto by President Bush. Nevertheless, in the new Congress, my legislation has a better chance of mustering a majority vote and being signed into law by President Obama. ... New York Review of Books, 5/14/09   [emphasis added]