A deal between SOCom and eTreppid raises questions, but is hard to track.
By WILLIAM R. LEVESQUE
Published March 9, 2007
Breaking News Video
TAMPA - It all began with an anonymous letter to the St. Petersburg Times in late 2005.
The four-page missive said the leader of U.S. Special Operations Command at MacDill Air Force Base gave preferential treatment to a defense contractor.
This and other allegations from people claiming to work at SOCom were later dismissed by investigators. But that did not end talk about the contractor, eTreppid Technologies of Reno, Nev.
How eTreppid won a no-bid, $30-million contract in 2004 for secret software provides a glimpse into the foggy world of the Pentagon's "black budget," highly classified defense spending that gets little public scrutiny.
To many budget watchers, the story also raised questions about congressional earmarks - items inserted into the federal budget, often to reward lawmakers' supporters.
"It's an atrocious process," said Winslow Wheeler at the Center for Defense Information in Washington, D.C., a nonpartisan think tank on defense issues.
ETreppid was in the news in November when the Wall Street Journal revealed that former Rep. Jim Gibbons, a Nevada Republican who is now the state's governor, accepted gifts from eTreppid's founder, Warren Trepp, and helped the company get government work.
Gibbons denied any "quid pro quo," but questions have persisted about the SOCom contract and others awarded to eTreppid, including deals with the Air Force and Central Intelligence Agency.
"The sad thing with the 'black budget' is that you don't know how the military's budgeting process works," said Craig Holman of Public Citizen, a public interest group in Washington, D.C. "We're operating under total secrecy with some of these things."
Anonymous letter
The news that eTreppid had won the SOCom contract in 2004 was revealed only in vague terms.
The contract, according to the Department of Defense, was for "compression and automatic target recognition software." Additional detail is classified.
The story is further obscured by the reluctance of so many of the players to comment. Gibbons' staff, Trepp and one of Trepp's defense lobbyists, former Largo resident Letitia H. White, did not return calls.
The Times got the anonymous letter in October 2005. It was later received by two Florida congressmen - Rep. C.W. Bill Young and Sen. Bill Nelson - and Pentagon investigators.
The letter said SOCom's commander, Army Gen. Bryan "Doug" Brown, gave eTreppid favored treatment out of line with established procedure. SOCom, which oversees the nation's elite commandos, denied the allegation.
ETreppid, the letter said, had spent $12-million but had not delivered a usable product.
"This is an example of waste and fraud," the letter said. Though the contract was for up to $30-million, SOCom says eTreppid was paid only $9.6-million.
At the time, Nelson said he was suspicious of "rambling anonymous letters." And nearly a year later, Pentagon investigators cleared Brown.
That might have ended the scrutiny over eTreppid but for the front-page article in the Journal.
'Wined and dined'
Trepp "wined and dined" friends and business partners during a weeklong Caribbean cruise in 2005, the Journal reported in November.
Among his guests: longtime friend Jim Gibbons.
Gibbons and his wife flew home from the cruise on a chartered aircraft paid for by Trepp. These gifts were not initially reported by Gibbons, which may have violated federal ethics rules.
Gibbons, a former combat pilot who served on the Intelligence and Armed Services committees, said he thought gifts from friends were exempt.
He also said he helped pay for the trip, though the Journal reported it was not enough to cover its cost.
In an e-mail exchange just before the cruise, the Journal reported, Trepp's wife told her husband, "Please don't forget to bring the money you promised Jim and Dawn," referring to Gibbons and his wife.
The Journal said Trepp quickly responded, "Don't you ever send this kind of message to me! Erase this message from your computer right now!"
Trepp questions the authenticity of the e-mails.
Companies and partnerships tied to Trepp had given nearly $90,000 to Gibbons' gubernatorial campaign, the Journal reported. And court papers filed by a former business partner now locked in a lawsuit with Trepp accused Gibbons of accepting $100,000 in cash and casino chips, which Gibbons denies.
Gibbons acknowledged that he helped open doors for eTreppid.
"My connection was to get people to evaluate the technology," he told the Journal.
Trepp, the Journal reported, said: "If a member of Congress becomes aware of a technology they believe will be beneficial to the country, don't they have a duty to bring it to the attention of the appropriate governmental agencies?"
In a statement to the St. Petersburg Times, SOCom denied that anyone used influence to win the contract and said eTreppid, like many vendors, simply contacted the command about its products. The company no longer does work for SOCom.
SOCom officials said the contract was no-bid because no other company offered a similar product.
ETreppid provided several products as part of its deal (exactly how many is classified). "Only one product worked as advertised," said Lt. Cmdr. Marc Boyd, a SOCom spokesman.
Now the FBI is investigating Gibbons and the eTreppid gifts, the Journal reported.
Oversight questions
The Pentagon's black budget has grown exponentially, doubling since 1995 in inflation-adjusted dollars to more than $30-billion in the current fiscal year.
"It's not debated and discussed like other policy issues," said Steve Kosiak, a researcher with the nonpartisan Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. "The oversight can't be as rigorous as other open programs."
Wheeler, at the Center for Defense Information, said the military rarely rejects the "free money."
"I have no clue whether eTreppid does important stuff well," he said. "And, frankly, neither does Gov. Gibbons because one thing that is studiously avoided (with earmarks) is an objective evaluation from an entity that has no vested interest."
William R. Levesque can be reached at levesque@sptimes.com or (813) 226-3436.
[Last modified March 9, 2007, 05:52:55]
Showing posts with label budget. Show all posts
Showing posts with label budget. Show all posts
Saturday, March 10, 2007
Friday, February 23, 2007
Budget cuts to feed the war machine
WHICH SIDE ARE YOU ON?
Bush’s scorched-earth budget
The cuts to feed the war machine
Bush’s scorched-earth budget
The cuts to feed the war machine
By Sharon Smith | February 23, 2007 | Page 9
BUSH’S BUDGET proposal for FY 2008 is emblematic of the social crisis unfolding inside the U.S. empire, its ramifications still largely ignored in mainstream politics. Coupled with whopping military expenditures and permanent tax cuts for the extraordinarily wealthy, Bush’s budget shreds what little remains of the tattered social safety net for the most downtrodden members of the world’s richest society.
The Iraq war marks the first major war in the last 100 years fought in the interests of America’s ruling elite without even the pretense of “shared sacrifice.”
During the First World War, the tax rate for top income earners stood at 77 percent; during the Second World War, at 94 percent. Even during Vietnam, the wealthiest taxpayers faced a rate of 70 percent on personal income.
Yet as the bloodletting in Iraq has been proven a war for nothing more than U.S. control over Middle Eastern oil, the corporate class continues to enjoy an income tax rate that has been capped at only 35 percent since 2003--the year the U.S. invaded Iraq.
Bush’s plan to permanently extend these tax cuts, which are set to expire in 2010, would cost an estimated $211 billion in 2012 and $1.6 trillion over the next decade. Added to their profit windfalls and soaring executive salaries, the corporate class has every reason to celebrate.
Bush’s budget makes clear that the growing numbers of economically disadvantaged Americans--already supplying the cannon fodder sent to kill and die in Iraq and Afghanistan--must also continue to shoulder the suffocating financial burden for U.S. imperialism’s 21st century follies.
Bush’s budget proposal brazenly takes aim at veterans themselves, nearly doubling their out-of-pocket fees from $8 to $15 for prescription medications when they return home from a war zone battered and traumatized, and often looking for work.
In this war, only the working class is expected to sacrifice. On January 14, the New York Times interviewed the family of Sgt. Andrew DeBlock, a 41-year-old member of the New Jersey National Guard who recently learned that his stay in Iraq was extended by four months due to Bush’s troop surge.
His wife, Heidi DeBlock, told Times reporters that due to the her husband’s lost income, she “has had to battle her heating-fuel company, which wanted cash up front, and her husband’s cell phone provider, which will not let him out of his contract even though he is off fighting a war.”
Bush’s budget reduces Medicare and Medicaid spending by $102 billion over the next five years. Food stamps would be slashed to the bone, dropping some 300,000 currently eligible recipients. The Commodity Supplemental Food Program, which provides food for more than 450,000 low-income seniors, would be completely eliminated.
Bush also proposes gutting $300 million in funding for the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act and over $3.6 billion from special education programs in public schools. And these are just the highlights.
Bush did, however, manage to find the money to substantially increase funds for sexual abstinence education for 12- to 18-year-olds--rising to $191 million, an increase of $28 million from last year’s budget.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
BECKY OGLE, senior adviser on disability to the Democratic National Committee (DNC), argued of Bush’s proposal: “Last November, the American people went to the polls and demanded a new direction for America. President Bush’s misplaced budget priorities represent more of the same failed leadership that the American people have already rejected. With Congress under Democratic control, we can finally have real leadership that reflects the values and priorities of all Americans.”While voters’ expectations for change are high, Congressional Democrats have thus far shown reluctance to chart anything resembling the “new direction” to which Ogle refers.
Senate Democrats’ inability to win even a non-binding resolution on the Iraq war does not bode well for the upcoming budget battle. Democrats blamed Republicans for maneuvering to block the resolution.
In reality, Republicans called the Democrats’ bluff by insisting that the symbolic resolution be accompanied by a binding vote on continued funding for the war. War funding would have passed with Democratic votes, neutralizing the Democrats’ smoke-and-mirrors efforts to appease their antiwar supporters.
On the domestic front, Democrats have shown no willingness to do more than tinker with the most egregious symptoms of the economic crisis facing the U.S. working-class majority. Roughly 45 percent of American workers now earn $13.25 an hour or less, while 58 percent work for less than $15 an hour. The fastest growing occupations in the U.S. are janitor, hospital orderly and cashier.
During their widely trumpeted first 100 hours, Democrats did spearhead legislation to raise the minimum wage, and pledged to restore cuts from heating subsidies and Head Start programs for the poor.
But raising the minimum wage--which has remained in place at $5.15 an hour for the last decade--to $7.25 does not begin to reverse the race to the bottom in working-class wages, since the typical wage is worth less today than it was in 1972, and real wages have fallen steadily over the last four years of economic “recovery.”
Similarly, Democrats proposed raising Pell Grants for low-income college students from $4,050 (frozen for the last five years) to $4,300. Bush’s own budget proposal surpasses the Democrats,’ raising Pell grants to $4,600 in fiscal year 2008 and to $5,400 by 2012.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
AS THE Times commented on February 5, “While Democrats criticized Mr. Bush for what the House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, called ‘wrong priorities,’ they conceded privately that Mr. Bush was correct in warning that the unchecked growth of entitlement programs would eventually break the federal bank.”Congressional Democrats have yet to confront the elephant in the room: Bush’s massive tax cuts for the wealthy during an imperial war.
Why are they so timid in the face of a seismic shift in popular opinion, winning them a majority in both Houses of Congress in November? The answer is straightforward: the 2008 presidential campaign is already underway, and Democrats plan to continue their centrist path to victory, focusing on would-be Republican voters, secure in the knowledge that the overwhelming majority of progressives will vote Democrat, however little they get in return.
As Mike Davis argued recently in New Left Review, “In practice, this translates not simply into a Democratic reluctance to undertake new spending, but also a refusal to debate the rollback of any of Bush’s $1 trillion in tax cuts for the affluent. ‘Tax and spend, tax and spend, tax and spend’, Senator Kent Conrad (chair of the Budget Committee) told the New York Times, ‘we’re not going there.’”
The Times stated on February 6, “But few Democrats are expected to look for new revenues by calling for an end to Bush's tax cuts, instead of extending them as the president proposed Monday...
“Since 2001, Democratic leaders have made a point of saying the Bush tax cuts are unfairly weighted toward the wealthy and dangerous to American solvency. But the tax cuts expire in 2010, and Democrats acknowledge that they are not ready to move on them now.”
In addition, Democrats are open to negotiations with Bush on future Social Security benefits, “possibly with a curb on some benefits,” the Times added.
“Bipartisanship” is the watchword of the new Democratic majority in Congress. But this is not a new strategy. Democrats have been eager bipartisans for the last 30 years--enabling Reagan’s tax cuts, Clinton’s gutting of “welfare as we know it” and all of George W. Bush’s legislation, including the Patriot Act, the wars on Iraq and Afghanistan and, yes, Bush’s tax cuts.
The neoliberal Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) remains firmly in control of the Democratic Party, personified by their presidential frontrunner, Sen. Hillary Clinton. The word “poverty” never passes her lips.
During a recently staged “conversation with Iowans,” Clinton asked what health insurance system her audience preferred. “Overwhelmingly, the audience favored moving toward a Medicare-like system for all Americans,” the Washington Post reported.
Yet Clinton remained noncommittal about any forthcoming policy pledge for the nation’s 47 million uninsured. She told her Iowa audience, “I’m not ready to be specific until I hear from people.”
Expect no major progress from Democratic Party powerbrokers until the angry electorate that swept them into power in November begins to hold them accountable for their actions--and inactions.
Wednesday, February 7, 2007
Bombs away over Baghdad
By withholding figures on the expenditure of various kinds of munitions in air strikes, the Pentagon conceals information on the size, scope and damage involved in its air operations in Iraq. In the coming months, however, as the US "surge" in Baghdad bites, the true nature of the air war - and the devastation it causes - will emerge.
---
---
Tomgram: Nick Turse, America's Secret Air War in Iraq
Just last week, in a typical air strike of the Iraq War, two missiles were fired at targets somewhere in the city of Ramadi, capital of al-Anbar province in the heartland of the Sunni insurgency, in the course of a battle with American forces stationed there. According to newspaper accounts, "18 insurgents" were killed.
Air power has, since World War II, been the American way of war. The invasion of Iraq began, after all, with a dominating show of air power that was meant to "shock and awe" -– that is, cow -- not just Saddam Hussein's regime, but the whole "axis of evil" and other countries the Bush administration had in its mental gun sights. Among the largest of America's "permanent" megabases in Iraq is Balad Air Base with the sorts of daily air-traffic pile-ups that you would normally see over Chicago's O'Hare Airport. And yet, as Tomdispatch.com has written numerous times over these last years, reporters in Iraq almost determinedly refuse to look up or report on the regular, if intermittent, application of American air power especially to heavily populated neighborhoods in Iraq's cities.
Now, the Bush "surge" is officially beginning. Little about it is strikingly new or untried -- except possibly the unspoken urge to ratchet up the use of air power in Iraq, the only thing a Pentagon with desperately overstretched ground forces really has to throw into the escalation breach (as in recent months it has drastically escalated the use of air power in Afghanistan). Pepe Escobar, the superb globe-trotting correspondent for Asia Times, has recently warned that the new Bush administration "plan" signals "the dire prospect... of a devastating air war over Baghdad" in which "Iraqification-cum-surge" will prove "a disaster mostly for every Baghdadi caught in the crossfire."
Just last week, Julian E. Barnes of the Los Angeles Times reported that the U.S. Air Force has the Iraqi itch and is getting ready to scratch it. Air Force commanders are preparing for a "heightened role in the volatile region." They are, he reported, already "gearing up for just such a role in Iraq as part of Bush's planned troop increase" -- an expansion of air power that "could include aggressive new tactics designed to deter Iranian assistance to Iraqi militants… [and] more forceful patrols by Air Force and Navy fighter planes along the Iran-Iraq border to counter the smuggling of bomb supplies from Iran."
Until now, U.S. air power in Iraq has been a non-story -- if you weren't an Iraqi. In the coming months, however, it may force its way onto the front pages of our papers and onto the nightly TV news -- but not if the Pentagon has anything to say about it. Doing some journalistic sleuthing, Nick Turse has discovered just how secretive the Pentagon has been about offering any significant information on the size, scope, and damage involved in its air operations over Iraq. The story of this secret American air war is now told for the first time -- and at this website. Tom
Bombs over Baghdad
The Pentagon's Secret Air War in Iraq
By Nick TurseA secret air war is being waged in Iraq -- often in and around that country's population centers -- about which we can find out little. The U.S. military keeps information on the munitions expended in its air efforts under tight wraps, refusing to offer details on the scale of use and so minimizing the importance of air power in Iraq. But expert opinion holds that the forms of aerial assault being employed in that country, though hardly covered in our media, may account for most of the U.S. and coalition-attributed Iraqi civilian deaths there since the 2003 invasion.
While some aspects of the air war remain a total mystery, Air Force officials do acknowledge that U.S. military and coalition aircraft dropped at least 111,000 pounds of bombs on targets in Iraq in 2006. This figure, 177 bombs in all, does not include guided missiles and unguided rockets fired, or cannon rounds expended; nor, according to a U.S. Central Command Air Forces (CENTAF) spokesman, does it take into account the munitions used by some Marine Corps and other coalition aircraft or any of the Army's helicopter gunships. Moreover, it does not include munitions used by the armed helicopters of the many private security contractors flying their own missions in Iraq.
Air War, Iraq: 2006
In statistics provided to Tomdispatch, CENTAF reported a total of 10,519 "close air support missions" in Iraq in 2006, during which its aircraft dropped 177 bombs and fired 52 "Hellfire/Maverick missiles." These air strikes presumably included numerous highly publicized missions ranging from the January air strike outside the town of Baiji that reportedly "killed a family of 12," including at least three women and three young children, to the December attack on an insurgent safehouse in the Garma area, near Fallujah, that reportedly killed "two women and a child" in addition to five guerillas. Then there were the even less well remembered events, such as those on July 28th when, according to official reports, an Air Force Predator unmanned aerial vehicle destroyed an "anti-Iraqi forces" vehicle with Hellfire missiles, while Air Force F-16 Fighting Falcons "expended a GBU-12, destroying an anti-Iraqi forces location," both in the vicinity of the city of Ramadi.
The latter weapon, Guided Bomb Unit-12, a laser-guided bomb with a 500-pound general purpose warhead, was the most frequently used bomb in Iraq in 2006, according CENTAF statistics provided to Tomdispatch. In addition to the ninety-five GBU-12s "expended," sixty-seven satellite-guided, 500-pound GBU-38s and fifteen 2,000-pound GBU-31/32 munitions were also dropped on Iraqi targets last year, according to official Air Force figures.
One weapon conspicuously left out of this total is rockets -- such as the 2.75-inch Hydra-70 rocket which can be outfitted with various warheads and is fired from fixed-wing aircraft and most helicopters. The number of rockets fired is withheld from the press so as, according to a CENTAF spokesman, not to "skew the tally and present an inaccurate picture of the air campaign." The number of rockets fired may be quite significant as, according to a 2005 press release issued by Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), who helped secure a $900 million Hydra contract from the Army for General Dynamics, "the widely used Hydra-70 rocket… has seen extensive use in Afghanistan and Iraq… [and] has become the world's most widely used helicopter-launched weapon system." Early last year, Sandra I. Erwin of National Defense Magazine noted that the U.S. military was looking to the Hydra to serve as a low-cost weapon for Iraq's urban areas. "The Army already buys and stockpiles thousands of the 2.75-inch Hydra rockets, and is seeking to equip as many as 73,000 with the laser kits, under a program called 'advanced precision kill weapon system,' or APKWS. The Navy would purchase 8,000 for Marine Corps helicopters," she wrote.
The number of cannon rounds fired -- some models of the AC-130 gunship, for instance, have a Gatling gun that can fire up to 1,800 rounds in a single minute-- is also a closely guarded secret. The official reason given is that "special forces often use aircraft such as the AC-130" and since "their missions and operations are classified, so therefore these figures are not released."
Repeated inquiries concerning another reporter's statistics on cannon rounds fired by CENTAF aircraft prompted the same official to emphatically state in an email: "WE DO NOT REPORT CANNON ROUNDS." His superior officer, Lt. Col. Johnn Kennedy, the Deputy Director of CENTAF Public Affairs, followed up, noting:
Glad to see you appreciate the tremendous efforts [my subordinate] has already expended on you. Trust me, it's probably much more significant than the relentless pursuit of the number of cannon rounds.But the number of cannon rounds and rockets fired by U.S. aircraft is not an insignificant matter, according to Les Roberts, formerly an epidemiologist for the World Health Organization in Rwanda during that country's civil war and an expert on the human costs of the war in Iraq. According to Roberts, who was last in Iraq in 2004 (where, he says, he personally witnessed "the shredding of entire blocks" in Baghdad's Sadr City by aerial cannon fire), "rocket and cannon fire could account for most coalition-attributed civilian deaths." He adds, "I find it disturbing that they will not release this [figure], but even more disturbing that they have not released such information to Congressmen who have requested it."
Non-CENTAF military officials were equally tight-lipped about such munitions -- at least with me. A Public Affairs officer from U.S. Central Command told me that the Command didn't track such information. When I questioned a coalition spokesman in Baghdad about the number of rockets and cannon rounds fired by Army and Marine Corps helicopters in Iraq in 2006, I was told, "We cannot comment on your inquiry due to operational security."
I then pointed out that just last month, in National Defense Magazine, Col. Robert A. Fitzgerald, the Marine Corps' head of aviation plans and policy, was quoted as saying that, in 2006, "Marine rotary-wing aircraft flew more than 60,000 combat flight hours, and fixed-wing platforms completed 31,000. They dropped 80 tons of bombs and fired 80 missiles, 3,532 rockets and more than 2 million rounds of smaller ammunition."
When asked if this admission had endangered operational security, the spokesman responded, "I cannot comment on the policies or release authority of a Marine colonel."
While the Marine Corps' statistics presumably include totals of munitions used in Afghanistan, where American air power has played a large role in the fighting, they do remind us that the minimal figures given out by CENTAF don't give an accurate picture of the air war in Iraq. These particular totals are, according CENTAF, "separate from the data provided" to Tomdispatch on Iraqi bomb and missile expenditure in 2006.
"Relentless Pursuit"
Since the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, the American air war in Iraq, often targeting urban areas, has been given remarkably short shrift in the media. In 2004, Tom Engelhardt, writing at Tomdispatch, called attention to this glaring absence. Seymour Hersh's seminal piece of reportage, "Up in the Air," published in the New Yorker in late 2005, ushered in some mainstream attention to the subject. Articles by Dahr Jamail, an independent journalist who covered the American occupation and war in Iraq, before and after the Hersh piece, are among the smattering of pieces that have offered glimpses of the air campaign and its impact. To date, however, the mainstream media has not, to use the words of Lt. Col. Kennedy, engaged in a "relentless pursuit of the number of cannon rounds" fired or any other aspect of the air war or its consequences for the people of Iraq.
While we will undoubtedly never know the full extent of the human costs of the U.S. air campaign, just a few dogged reporters assigned to the air-power beat might, at the very least, have offered some sense of this one-sided air war. Since this has not been the case, we must rely on the best available evidence. One valuable source is a national cross-sectional cluster sample survey of mortality in Iraq since the 2003 invasion. Carried out by epidemiologists at Johns Hopkins University's Bloomberg School of Public Health and Iraqi physicians organized through Mustansiriya University in Baghdad, it estimated 655,000 "excess Iraqi deaths as a consequence of the war." The study, published in the British medical journal, The Lancet, in October 2006, found that from March 2003 to June 2006, 13% of violent deaths in Iraq were caused by coalition air strikes. If the 655,000 figure, including over 601,000 violent deaths, is anywhere close to accurate -- and the study offered a possible range of civilian deaths that ran from 392,979 to 942,636 -- this would equal approximately 78,133 Iraqis killed by bombs, missiles, rockets, or cannon rounds from coalition aircraft between March 2003 when the invasion of Iraq began and last June when the study concluded.
There are indications that the U.S. air war has taken an especially grievous toll on Iraqi children. According to statistics provided to Tomdispatch by The Lancet study's authors, 50% of all violent deaths of Iraqi children under 15 years of age, between March 2003 and June 2006, were due to coalition air strikes.
The Lancet study used well-established survey methods, which have been proven in conflict zones from Kosovo to the Congo, and interviewers actually inspected death certificates from 92% of the households surveyed where they were requested (which they did 87% of the time). The Iraq Body Count Project, a group of researchers based in the United Kingdom who maintain a public database of Iraqi civilian deaths resulting from the war, carefully restricts itself to the sparser media reports of civilian fatalities that come out of Iraq. While a much lower number (currently the range of media-reported deaths stands at: 55,441-61,133) than the The Lancet's findings, an analysis of their carefully limited data also offers a glimpse of the human costs of the air war.
Statistics provided to Tomdispatch by the Iraq Body Count Project show that since the U.S. invasion in 2003, coalition air strikes have, according to media sources alone -- which as we know have covered the air war poorly -- caused between 15,593-17,067 Iraqi civilian casualties, including 3,625-4,093 deaths. Last year, media reports listed between 169-200 Iraqis killed and 111-112 injured in twenty-eight separate coalition air strikes, according to the IBC project.
These numbers also appear to be on the rise. In an email message to Tomdispatch last month, John Sloboda, the co-founder and spokesperson for the IBC Project, notes that the "vast majority [of lethal air strikes] have been in the last half of the year."
When asked about the modest air power casualty figures provided by the Iraq Body Count Project and whether CENTAF accepts them, Lt. Col. Kennedy dodged the question, telling Tomdispatch, "We do not track such numbers and so cannot comment on the Project's efforts or validity." He had a similar answer when it came to The Lancet study's findings.
Asked about the assertion that the second half of 2006 was much deadlier for Iraqis due to U.S. air strikes and the possible reasons for this, Kennedy waxed eloquent, "War, by its very nature has ebbs and flows, and we constantly review the application of airpower to best support the forces on the ground in theater. We view this as simply part of our contract to the warfighters. As we do not discuss operational aspects of missions, I'll decline further comment."
Kennedy went on to say that the U.S. makes "every effort" to "minimize collateral damage regardless of whether the enemy is on open ground or within the confines of a city." Just days ago, in the Los Angeles Times, Lt. Gen. Carrol H. "Howie" Chandler, the Air Force's Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations, Plans and Requirements, expanded on this line of thought, noting, "I wouldn't automatically write off air power in an urban environment for fear of collateral damage… We have the capability with precision targeting and the new weapons to operate in an urban environment."
Sarah Sewall, who served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense from 1993 to 1996 and is now Director for the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard, agrees that air power has a role to play in urban operations, and may even mitigate civilian harm in certain instances. She warns, however, "I have a lot of skepticism about the applicability of air power for all types of problems and particularly for the types of problems that we see commonly, on a day to day basis, in Iraq today." As she told Tomdispatch, "The problem comes when you think it is the functional equivalent of ground forces."
The Pace Quickens
In 2005, CENTAF reported using 404 bombs and missiles in Iraq. In 2006, an apparent lull (whether in lethal attacks or just in their reporting) in the first half of the year seems to have given way to a rise in deadly attacks during the second half. Only days into 2007, the U.S. military had already conducted air strikes in three nations -- Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia. And in Iraq, the air war may be increasing in pace and ferocity. For example, on January 9th, the U.S. unleashed its air power on Baghdad's Haifa Street, a "mostly Sunni Arab enclave of residential buildings and shops." According to the Washington Post, "F-15 fighter jets strafed rooftops with cannons, while the Apache[ helicopter]s fired Hellfire missiles." Elsewhere in Iraq that day, according to Air Force reports, F-16s strafed targets near Bayji with cannon fire, while others dropped GBU-38s on targets near Turki Village; and F-15Es provided "close-air support" to troops near Basrah.
That same evening, back in the U.S., a broadcast of Fox News Channel's "Special Report with Brit Hume" offered a brief glimpse of the air war in a story by reporter David Macdougall who was, said Hume, "embedded with the Air Force in a location we cannot identify, where not only fighter jets, but bombers roared into the air headed for other targets in Iraq." Macdougall reported that the B-1B Lancer, the long-range bomber that carries the largest payload of weapons in the Air Force was, for the first time in over a year, again being employed in combat in Iraq.
"These B-1 bombers were central to the raid. We're told they flew a ten-hour mission, and by the looks of their empty bomb bays, these planes dropped thousands of pounds of munitions. They bombed 25 targets deep inside Iraq," he said. At one of these sites, he reported, Army troops sent in after the air strike reportedly found a "command and control center, insurgent hospital, and a closet-sized room covered in blood." We may never know if that "room covered in blood" was a torture center, part of the hospital, or if it became "covered" in the same manner that caused the 280 Iraqi civilian casualties from air strikes reported in the media, and the many more that undoubtedly went unreported and ignored, last year. This is yet another facet of the air war that will remain a mystery.
The Secret Air War
While reporting on the air war has often been barely evident, except as the odd paragraph in daily round-up battle pieces from Iraq (which rely mainly on military handouts or press briefings), the gaps in our knowledge about the air war have been facilitated by the U.S. military's failure to be honest and forthcoming with both data and doctrine. In this respect, the military has been the media's enabler.
Given CENTAF's knowledge that, no matter how "smart" their munitions or how precise their targeting, noncombatants, especially in urban neighborhoods, are sure to die in air strikes, I had a question for Lt. Col. Kennedy: Could he explain how CENTAF decided what was an acceptable level of civilian caualties it was willing to sacrifice for military aims? His answer: "Not in a sufficient manner that you would be happy with."
Kennedy's response echoed a running theme in his replies to my questions. At one point in our exchanges, he actually suggested that an article on the air war in Iraq was not "a viable story" and told me not to contact him again until I was under contract to produce an article that met his standards. He later claimed that his viability comment was due to my "apparent freelance status" and the fact I had not provided "a copy of any contract, nor contacts with a publisher."
"When you provide such information I'll be happy to entertain your questions," he wrote. After providing proof that I was, indeed, a journalist, he deigned to answer me again, concluding, "This is the last email I will respond to from you."
Kennedy was just one of a number of U.S. military officials who thwarted attempts to uncover the barest outline of the real extent and nature of the American air war and its toll on Iraqis. Aside from the Air Force's daily release of airpower summaries of dubious worth, the military's efforts have kept almost all substantive aspects of the air war essentially a secret from Americans at home.
During the Vietnam War, the United States conducted a clandestine air war in Cambodia, lied about it to the press, and hid it from the American public. In Iraq, the military has, these last years, engaged in a different kind of secretive air campaign, but their methods of keeping it a mystery appear to have certain similarities. A few years ago, at a meeting at a Carnegie Endowment for International Peace event, Les Roberts, a co-author of The Lancet study and now on faculty at Columbia University's Program on Forced Migration and Health, recalls a Pentagon spokesman's declaration that, aside from some sites in Najaf and al-Anbar province, the military had refrained from any attacks on mosques in Iraq. Roberts said that the spokesman's rhetoric differed markedly from the facts on the ground, recalling that "just weeks before I had seen helicopter gunships destroy a beautiful Mosque about an hour south of Baghdad."
When I asked Lt. Col. Kennedy why CENTAF did not track figures on civilian casualties of the air war, he laid the blame on higher headquarters, namely the Office of the Secretary of Defense: "Go ask OSD as we do not set policy here," he wrote.
"I think that it's a red herring," Sewall, the former Pentagon official, told Tomdispatch. "They spend a tremendous amount of energy using computer models to predict where the glass shards are going to go, and then they don't actually care about whether or not that effort to control the direction of the glass shards results in killing fewer people, because they've never bothered to find out whether it, in fact, succeeded in killing fewer people." As she pointed out in a telephone interview, it is "a rather absurd position."
"If they wanted to, they could certainly, as a matter of their own internal procedures, do it," Sewall said of tracking civilian casualties. "I think it's inexcusable that they don't do a better job."
Nick Turse is the associate editor and research director of Tomdispatch.com. He has written for the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Nation, the Village Voice, and regularly for Tomdispatch.
Copyright 2007 Nick Turse
Cost of troop buildup not in budget
2008 SPENDING PROPOSAL: MILITARY, HEALTHCARE
click to enlarge
But Defense officials could not provide assurances Monday that the troop level would fall back again by next year, and acknowledged they may be forced to return to Congress for more money to pay for the extra forces if sectarian conflict continues to rage.
In unveiling the Defense Department's budget request, Tina Jonas, the Pentagon budget director, told reporters that Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates provided instructions to treat the troop increase as "a near-term initiative" that would not need to be accounted for in the 2008 budget. But Jonas acknowledged those assumptions could change.
"I think we know that it will be wrong," Jonas said of the war-cost estimate.
"Obviously, things will change and we'll have to adjust at that point."
President Bush announced last month that he would send 21,500 additional U.S. troops to Iraq to help stem violence, a move that was widely criticized in Congress and met with disapproval by the American public.
The issue of how long the troop level will remain higher is highly sensitive within the Pentagon as well, with apparent disagreements over its size and duration occurring even between the outgoing and incoming commanders in Iraq.
$725 billion for defense
The $142-billion war budget submitted Monday was part of a complicated defense spending package that surpassed $725 billion. It also included $481 billion for non-war defense spending in 2008 and a $93-billion supplemental request for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan through the remainder of 2007.
Added to $70 billion approved last year for 2007 war spending, the extra $93 billion requested by Bush would bring this year's war spending total to $163 billion.
Congressional Democrats charged that, even without money for the additional troops, the war funding request is so high that it shows that the White House has no intention of reducing the U.S. presence in Iraq before next year's presidential election.
"The new funding requests for the war in Iraq submitted today give the American people no hope that President Bush has plans to reduce our military involvement in Iraq for the foreseeable future — in fact, just the opposite," said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco).
The 2008 budget — which covers the fiscal year, October 2007 through September 2008 — includes projections that show war spending dropping to $50 billion in 2009.
Bush hastened to say that that projection did not foretell a reduction in the U.S. presence, and administration officials said the 2009 figure was seen as a "placeholder" to be adjusted in the future.
The Pentagon said Bush's decision to increase troops in Iraq would cost $5.6 billion through the end of 2007, a figure that officials said would cover the buildup for at least eight months. That was well below a Congressional Budget Office estimate issued last week that argued the cost could spiral to $27 billion for a yearlong buildup because of the number of support personnel needed to deploy an additional 21,500 combat troops.
Long-term plans
Even without the additional funding for the escalation in 2008, however, there were signs of the administration's commitment to a long-term presence in Iraq in their budget proposals, including hundreds of millions of dollars for military bases in both Iraq and Afghanistan.
The 2007 portion of the budget includes a $318-million request for construction in Iraq, most of which will fund projects on two of the military's huge bases within the country: Al Asad Air Base in western Anbar province and Balad Air Base north of Baghdad.
It also asks for $650 million for military construction in Afghanistan, nearly half of it for projects at Bagram Air Base, the sprawling facility north of Kabul that serves as the military's prime operations center in the country.
In testimony shortly after becoming Defense secretary, Gates told the House Armed Services Committee that the U.S. did not want permanent bases in Iraq. But both Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill remain skeptical. Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Oakland) reintroduced legislation last month that would prevent the U.S. from establishing permanent bases in Iraq, a bill that has in the past garnered bipartisan support.
Despite the prospect of continued high troop levels in Iraq, the budget also assumes the Iraqi security forces will begin to take over more responsibilities by next year.
U.S. funding for the Iraqi security forces would rise 83% in 2007, to $5.5 billion, under the new proposals. But the funding would drop to $2 billion in 2008. By that time, according to budget documents, the Pentagon assumes the government of Iraq "will have taken on primary financial responsibility for sustaining the Iraqi security forces."
Afghan forces would get an even larger influx of funding in the proposed budget: $7.4 billion for the Afghan army and police, nearly triple last year's amount. However, funding for security forces is due to drop to $2.7 billion by 2008.
The Pentagon also for the first time detailed the cost of increasing the size of the Army and Marine Corps over the next five years, saying the additional 92,000 soldiers and Marines would add $117.6 billion through 2013. That includes $5.3 billion to be spent this year and an additional $18.6 billion for 2008.
peter.spiegel@latimes.com
Times staff writer Julian E. Barnes contributed to this report.
Monday, February 5, 2007
Bush sends Congress $2.90T spending plan
By MARTIN CRUTSINGER, AP Economics Writer 1 hour, 13 minutes ago
President Bush sent a $2.90 trillion spending plan to a Democratic-controlled Congress on Monday, proposing a big increase in military spending, including billions more to fight the war in Iraq, while squeezing the rest of government to meet his goal of eliminating the deficit in five years.
Bush's spending plan would make his first-term tax cuts permanent, at a cost of $1.6 trillion over 10 years. He is seeking $78 billion in savings in the government's big health care programs — Medicare and Medicaid — over the next five years.
Release of the budget in four massive volumes kicks off months of debate in which Democrats, now in control of both the House and Senate for the first time in Bush's presidency, made clear that they have significantly different views on spending and taxes.
"The president's budget is filled with debt and deception, disconnected from reality and continues to move America in the wrong direction," said Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (news, bio, voting record), D-N.D.
The president insisted that he had made the right choices to keep the nation secure from terrorist threats and the economy growing.
"My formula for a balanced budget reflects the priorities of our country at this moment in its history: protecting the homeland and fighting terrorism, keeping the economy strong with low taxes and keeping spending under control while making federal programs more effective," Bush said.
Just as Iraq has come to dominate Bush's presidency, military spending was a major element in the president's new spending request. Bush was seeking a Pentagon budget of $624.6 billion for 2008, more than one-fifth of the total budget, up from $600.3 billion in 2007. For the first time, the Pentagon figures include what Bush wants to spend to fight the Iraq war, money that in past years was put in supplemental appropriations rather than the regular budget.
Bush projected a deficit in the current year of $244 billion, just slightly lower than last year's $248 billion imbalance. For 2008, the budget year that begins next Oct. 1, Bush sees another slight decline in the deficit to $239 billion with further steady improvement over the next three years until the budget records a surplus of $61 billion in 2012, three years after Bush has left office.
Democrats, however, challenged those projections, contending that Bush only achieves a surplus by leaving out the billions of dollars Congress is expected to spend to keep the alternative minimum tax from ensnaring millions of middle-class taxpayers. His budget includes an AMT fix only for 2008.
Bush projects government spending in 2008 of $2.90 trillion, a 4.9 percent increase from the $2.78 trillion in outlays the administration is projecting for this year. However, the administration notes that the 2007 total is only an estimate, given that Congress is still working to complete a massive omnibus spending bill to cover most agencies for the rest of this fiscal year.
To help achieve what would be the government's first surplus since 2001, Bush is proposing $95.9 billion in savings in mandatory spending, the part of the budget that includes the big benefit programs of Social Security and health care.
Medicare, which provides health insurance for 43 million older and disabled Americans, would see the bulk of those savings — reductions of $66 billion over five years. That would come about primarily by slowing the growth of payments to health care providers.
Additional savings would be achieved by charging higher income Medicare beneficiaries bigger monthly premiums.
While Bush said something had to be done to get control of spiraling health care costs, Congress refused to go along last year with Bush's effort for smaller reductions in Medicare.
Bush would seek to eliminate or sharply reduce 141 government programs for a five-year savings of $12 billion. But many of those reductions he has proposed in past budgets — only to see them rejected by Congress.
Bush once listed overhauling Social Security as the No. 1 domestic priority of his second term. But his effort two years ago to accomplish this goal by diverting some Social Security taxes into private investment accounts went nowhere in Congress. He included the private accounts again in this year's budget. But to minimize the impact, he only showed the program taking effect in 2012, when the private accounts would cost $29.3 billion.
The president's budget also includes an initiative to expand health care coverage to the uninsured through a complex proposal that would give every family a $15,000 tax deduction for purchasing health coverage but would make current employee-supplied health coverage taxable for certain taxpayers.
Bush is also proposing to increase the maximum Pell grant, which goes to low-income students, from the current $4,050 to $4,600. Democrats are pushing for even larger increases.
Bush's energy proposals would expand use of ethanol and other renewable fuels with a goal of cutting gasoline use by 20 percent over the next decade.
Saturday, February 3, 2007
DoD to request record $622.6 billion for 2008
DoD to request $622.6 billion for 2008
Posted : Friday Feb 2, 2007 20:31:47 EST
The Pentagon is expected to send Congress a $622.6 billion defense budget for 2008. The sum includes $141.7 billion to continue fighting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The numbers were confirmed by a Pentagon official Feb. 2.
The spending plan, to be delivered to lawmakers Feb. 5, is $6.2 billion more than the $616.4 billion the Pentagon is spending this year. But there are greater differences in the budget than those numbers alone suggest.
Basic “peacetime” spending for 2008 is set at $481.4 billion, up from about $440 billion approved for 2007. Peacetime spending is how much it costs each year to keep the U.S. military going — pay and train troops, buy and maintain weapons, conduct exercises and deployments. War costs are extra.
And there’s a substantial drop in war costs. The Pentagon wants $163.4 billion to fight the wars during 2007. The 2008 request is $21.7 billion less.
At about the same time the 2008 request goes to Capitol Hill, the Pentagon is expected to ask for $93.4 billion more in emergency war funding for 2007. That is slightly less than the $99.7 billion called for in a December draft of the supplemental.
The budget figures, closely held by the Pentagon, were first reported by Bloomberg news service.
With war costs included, defense spending in 2008 would be higher than it has been since World War II, said Steven Kosiak, director of budget studies at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA).
If the requested total is not cut by Congress, the 2008 budget will mark 10 years of robust growth in military spending. The current run-up began in 1999, when the budget was $276.2 billion.
There is a growing sense in Congress, now controlled by the Democrats, that defense spending cannot continue its decade-long ascent.
“Half the discretionary budget goes into defense. We can’t keep adding to the top line,” said an aide to a senior House Armed Services Committee member. “We’re going to have to start making some choices.”
It’s not getting easier.
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) reported Feb. 1 that the Pentagon’s estimate of $5 billion to send 21,500 more troops to Iraq may be understated by a factor of two or almost three. Sending support troops along with the combat troops is expected to push the cost to $9 billion to $13 billion, the CBO said.
To accommodate that, Congress will have to consider “cutting back, delaying or deferring new weapons to ensure that the people on the ground over there have the equipment they need,” the aide said.
The defense budget is not expected to call for eliminating — or even seriously trimming — any of the military’s major weapon programs. But lawmakers might as they weight war costs and their desire to bolster spending on domestic programs.
Potential Targets
The most vulnerable program is probably the Army’s Future Combat Systems (FCS), defense analysts agree.
FCS calls for building 18 separate systems — manned and unmanned ground and air vehicles — that are linked to one another through an electronic communications network.
Soldiers in the vehicles and on the ground would be fed volumes of information about where the enemy is on the battlefield.
But many of the systems exist at this point only in concept. And FCS, estimated in 2003 to cost $92 billion, ballooned to $161 billion last year.
Moreover, the Iraq war may be casting doubt on the FCS concept, said Winslow Wheeler, director of the Straus Military Reform Project.
Sensors and the network were supposed to give U.S. troops such a precise picture of the battlefield that U.S. troops could kill or avoid enemy forces. Old fashioned equipment such as heavy tanks would be unnecessary.
But it hasn’t worked out that way in Iraq, where U.S. technology has been largely unable to detect and defeat “improvised explosive devices” cobbled together by insurgents, Wheeler said.
“FCS will be messed around with,” Wheeler predicted, but possibly not until after 2008.
The Joint Strike Fighter is another program likely to face cuts, although it may survive unscathed in 2008. The multiservice, multicountry plane is a budget-cutter’s target because that’s where the money is. At $276 billion, it is the most expensive weapon program ever.
The JSF will almost certainly be “scaled back significantly” over the next six years, Wheeler said.
Supplemental Scrutiny?
For short-term cuts, look to the 2007 emergency supplemental. Under rules set by Gordon England, deputy defense secretary, last fall, the services were permitted to include requests in the supplemental for spending not directly related to the two wars.
Thus the $93.4 billion request is expected to include money for such items as Joint Strike Fighters, research-and-development projects and Army modularization.
House and Senate Appropriations Committee members have promised intense scrutiny of the emergency supplemental request.
“They’re going to scrub the hell out of it and all kinds of things are going to fall out,” the House aide said.
Cost-consciousness in Congress may trigger a new a new era of rivalry among the three U.S. services for money, manpower and modernization.
For several decades there has been an unspoken truce among the services that has prevented any service from trying to gain budget share at the expense of another, said Kosiak. Now that truce may be in jeopardy.
For example, Congress seems sympathetic to an Army and Marine Corps request for 92,000 extra troops, and that makes the Navy and Air Force “very, very nervous,” said Robert Work, director of strategic studies at CSBA.
In recent years, the Air Force and Navy have been cutting troops to make more money available for new weapons. Now they fear the money they save from troop cuts may be diverted to add troops to the Army and Marine Corps.
Troop increases are expected to cost about $8 billon in 2008 and $58 billion over the next six years, according to Cindy Williams, a principal research scientist in the Security Studies Program at MIT.
Williams contends that even the massive new budget the U.S. military has prepared will fall some $30 billion short of paying for all of the weapons, additional troops and operations it has planned.
It is an “unrealistic budget” because big as it is, it does not cover the cost of all the Pentagon is planning to do, said Williams, who is a former assistant director of the CBO’s National Security Division.
By Sean D. Naylor - Staff writerWednesday, January 31, 2007
Bush's budget math doesn't add up
Dave Zweifel
Politicians like to manipulate numbers when it comes to justifying their positions on taxes and spending, but our president definitely needs to be crowned the champion manipulator just by virtue of his State of the Union speech last week. Regardless of what one thought of his Iraq strategy or even his convoluted health care plan, the worst was his pronouncement that his policies will produce a balanced budget by the year 2012.
Indeed, the budget deficit today is about half of what had been predicted last year, but first let's put things in perspective. Our country is still running more than $200 billion in the red every year when just six years ago it was showing a surplus. Our national debt has now ballooned to $8.7 trillion, about 55 percent higher than it was when George Bush took office.
The Congressional Budget Office agrees that the budget could be balanced by 2012, but that assumes that Congress will let President Bush's tax cuts expire in 2010 along with many of the corporate tax breaks enacted by the Republican Congresses of the past 12 years. It also assumes that nothing will be done with the increasingly unpopular alternative minimum tax which was once aimed at millionaires but now catches many in the middle class.
And guess who is fighting against allowing the tax cuts to expire? The same guy, of course, who contends we're on course toward a balanced budget. Is that an incredible game or what?
According to a piece in the New York Times that ran a few days after the speech, an official in the budget office said that if the tax cuts are extended, the cost to the U.S. treasury would be $1.4 trillion over the next 10 years. The impact on the deficit in the year 2017 alone would be more than $400 billion.
South Carolina Democratic Rep. John Spratt, chairman of the House Budget Committee, told the newspaper that it is far too early to cheer any of the budget news. Rather, he added, it's a "bleak reminder of how much current policy will need to be changed to return the budget to a fiscally responsible course."
Further, none of Bush's rosy predictions consider increased spending for the war in Iraq. The logistical support for those 21,500 new soldiers isn't going to be free.
It wasn't hard to predict, though, that the president's talk was going to be a little hard to figure. At the very beginning he called on the now Democratic-controlled Congress to do away with the expensive practice of attaching "earmarks" to spending bills to send billions of dollars of extra money to pet projects back home, often without even identifying the member of Congress who proposed the earmark.
Funny, he never asked Congress to stop that practice in the days when his own party controlled both Houses and could have easily done something about it. Perhaps that's because the Republicans perfected the idea.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)