Hookergate

Put The Rake Down and Back Away Slowly

Spencer Ackerman | December 28, 2007, 5:32PM

Can we stroll down memory lane for a second? Remember when Paul and I offered a grand unified theory of President Bush's warrantless surveillance efforts? Or when I brought you General Petraeus' own methodology for tabulating sectarian killings? How about the time I hung around the Rayburn building when Blackwater's Erik Prince smirked his way through a House oversight hearing? Those times I embarrassed myself playing TV reporter? And, hey, Cookie Krongard -- that was some fun, right?

Well, I'm getting wistful because today's my last day at TPM. As great as working here has been -- more on that after Boyz II Men do their thing -- I'm transferring over to The Washington Independent, a forthcoming online experiment designed to shift the tectonic plates of investigative reporting. We launch on January 28 on washingtonindependent.com, and I hope you'll check it out. (You might find some old friends there, too.) Until then, I'm having some fun with Jonah Goldberg's brilliant book on my personal blog, if you're interested.

Read more »

Iraq Contractors

Who Watches Contractor-Held Property at State Dept? No One!

Spencer Ackerman | December 28, 2007, 4:23PM

Back to our Afghanistan-contractors document for a minute. How could it be that the State Department could effectively lose $28 million worth of cars, guns, radios, computers, generators, and other not-easy-to-lose items? Probably because State doesn't devote people to making sure the stuff is where the contractors say it is, in violation of federal regulations. From the State Department Inspector General:

[Federal Acquisition Regulation] assigns certain responsibilities, such as reviewing contractors' property control systems and approving the type and frequency of physical inventories, to the [contracting officer] or "the representative assigned the responsibility as a property administrator." However, the Department had not appointed a property administrator for these contracts, and Department officials indicated that it was not the Department's practice to do so. ...

As of September 30, 2006, according to the Department, contractors held capitalized government property with a total cost of about $144 million and a net book value of almost $49 million. Although the Department has not appointed property administrators in the past, [the Office of the Inspector General] concluded that contractor-held property has reached such a level that the amount of oversight necessary cannot be met effectively by the Department's existing property administration structure and recommends the following.

The federal government uses many acronyms. Unfortunately, WTF isn't one of them.

The Only Potential-Bhutto-Culprit Rundown That Matters

Spencer Ackerman | December 28, 2007, 1:56PM

... is at Danger Room. Watch Noah Shachtman play the Usual Suspects.

Pervez Musharraf

. . . Or Maybe Lashkar-e-Jhangvi Teamed Up with al-Qaeda on Bhutto Hit

Spencer Ackerman | December 28, 2007, 11:11AM

So you know what they say about early reports. According to the same reporter who received a phone call from al-Qaeda's Afghanistan commander claiming responsibility for the Bhutto slaying, al-Qaeda contracted the hit out to Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, the group I cited in the last post as having minimal links to al-Qaeda.

“This is our first major victory against those [eg, Bhutto and President Pervez Musharraf] who have been siding with infidels [the West] in a fight against al-Qaeda and declared a war against mujahideen,” Mustafa told Asia Times Online by telephone.

He said the death squad consisted of Punjabi associates of the underground anti-Shi’ite militant group Lashkar-i-Jhangvi, operating under al-Qaeda orders.

The assassination of Bhutto was apparently only one of the goals of a large al-Qaeda plot, the existence of which was revealed earlier this month.

It's not clear if that plot had any other successful components. An attack on Nawaz Sharif, Pervez Musharraf's other civilian rival, failed.

U.S. intelligence officials aren't yet vouching for the claim made by the commander, Mustafa Abu Al-Yazid. And it's all murky as to who actually assassinated the ex-premier. But here's a strategy that al-Qaeda or other Islamic extremists might have sought to execute by killing Bhutto.

Numerous assassination attempts on Pervez Musharraf have failed. So, in true asymmetric-war fashion, why not go after the softer target? Killing Bhutto helps destabilize Pakistan. As an ex-U.S. intelligence official told me yesterday, everyone in Pakistan already believes Musharraf had a hand in her death. So Musharraf suffers a crisis of legitimacy matched with a crisis of security. He has to deal with the already-ensuing riots, thereby diverting his security resources away from whatever not-particularly-successful-anyway counterterrorism efforts they're engaged in. That's a terrorist two-fer.

Pervez Musharraf

Pakistan Officially Blames Non-Qaeda Terror Group For Bhutto Slaying

Spencer Ackerman | December 28, 2007, 10:46AM

Investigation suddenly complete! The Pakistani Interior Ministry is blaming Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, a Pakistani terrorist group not really linked to al-Qaeda, for Benazir Bhutto's assassination:

The Pakistani Interior Ministry said Friday the suicide bomber who killed Benazir Bhutto has been identified as belonging to a militant group with links to al Qaeda, Pakistan's GEO TV reported.

The ministry said the attacker was with Lashkar-e-Jhangvi -- a Sunni Muslim militant group that the Pakistani government has blamed for hundreds of killings -- according to the report.

There was no sign the group has claimed responsibility for the attack on the Pakistan opposition leader.

That would seem to support my former U.S. intelligence official's hypothesis. Of course, the idea that the interior ministry has solved the crime already, or that it has no motive to deceive, needs to be put under heavy scrutiny.

Must Read

Today's Must Read

Spencer Ackerman | December 28, 2007, 9:11AM

Who murdered Benazir Bhutto? U.S. authorities don't know. They may never know. And they're not ruling anything in or out.

To recap our debate yesterday, the first-blush assessment from most experts held that al-Qaeda is responsible. Others, including political adversaries of Pervez Musharraf, then suggested Musharraf's government was at least culpable, given the porousness of security Bhutto received in the garrison city of Rawalpindi where she was assassinated. Still others caution that Pakistani Islamic terrorist groups with agendas distinct from al-Qaeda's might be more likely candidates.

That appears to still be the lay of the land. Bhutto's party, the Pakistan People's Party, is demanding an official inquiry, though it's unclear (to me at least) whether Musharraf has agreed to one. But here's one development to watch in the event of a probe. In the Los Angeles Times, Josh Meyer reports that Pakistan hasn't yet replied to U.S. investigators who've offered to help.

Some U.S. intelligence experts and analysts said that there are so many tangled alliances between the extremist groups and Pakistani government agencies that it would be virtually impossible to get to the bottom of who killed Bhutto unless the perpetrators came forward -- with proof. The FBI has offered to send investigators, but Pakistan has not responded, FBI spokesman Richard Kolko said.

Read more »

Pervez Musharraf

Ex-Intel Official: Don't Be So Quick to Blame al-Qaeda, Musharraf for Bhutto Killing

Spencer Ackerman | December 27, 2007, 4:31PM

Here I take my lumps like everyone else. Throughout the day I've either said that the most likely culprit for the Bhutto assassination is "the Pakistani Taliban and al-Qaeda," or I've reported the j'accuse issued by others that Pervez Musharraf is in some way culpable. But what if that's all wrong? According to a former intelligence official with deep experience on Pakistan, there's a third, and perhaps more likely culprit: internally-focused Pakistani Islamist militants without significant links to al-Qaeda.

The ex-intel official doesn't have any ground truth. But, s/he says, the organizations with the most to gain and the least to lose by assassinating Bhutto are the groups "like Lashkar e-Toiba, or the Jaish e-Mohammed." Those groups' ties to al-Qaeda are much, much less than that of the Pakistani Taliban, and their focus is entirely domestic. "There are numerous groups that fit in the militant category whose focus began with Kashmir, but they oppose all U.S.-Pakistani relations and all secular politics," the official says. "They strongly disapprove of the role of Benazir, on every ground, and they have every reason to let Musharraf take the blame. They check every box."

Again, it's pure speculation. But the ex-intel official doesn't believe Musharraf has much to gain by killing Bhutto once the cost of international and domestic outrage are factored in. As to why al-Qaeda wouldn't kill Bhutto, the ex-official wasn't as definitive: "It's very possible al-Qaeda had a hand in it, but I'd look carefully at the domestic component." Ideology wouldn't be what divides al-Qaeda or the Pakistani Taliban from the groups this official considers plausible suspects in the killing: "They all oppose the war on terror and would like to see an Islamist Pakistan, something very much like the Taliban in Afghanistan in Pakistan. There are a huge range of groups that I think are candidates. And no one’s talking about them."

However, an Italian news agency reported receiving a claim of responsibility from al-Qaeda's Afghanistan commander:

A spokesperson for the al-Qaeda terrorist network has claimed responsibility for the death on Thursday of former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto.

“We terminated the most precious American asset which vowed to defeat [the] mujahadeen,” Al-Qaeda’s commander and main spokesperson Mustafa Abu Al-Yazid told Adnkronos International (AKI) in a phone call from an unknown location, speaking in faltering English.

The New York Sun's Eli Lake -- yeah, yeah, it's a right-wing paper, but Lake is a top-shelf reporter -- has more about the evidence tying al-Qaeda to the assassination. But it's worth keeping the ex-intelligence official's perspective in mind when jumping to conclusions about responsibility.

Pervez Musharraf

Who Will Succeed Bhutto?

Spencer Ackerman | December 27, 2007, 1:44PM

Try as Nawaz Sharif might to carry the banner of Benazir Bhutto, he might not be the optimal anti-Musharraf candidate. For one thing, even if Musharraf holds a promised election, Sharif isn't eligible to run, thanks to a ruling of the Musharraf-controlled Electoral Commission. For another, there's another secular, democratic politician waiting in the wings who might resonate with this year's middle-class rejection of Musharraf.

Aitzaz Ahsan was the chief counsel for former Supreme Court Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry, whose ouster by Musharraf on dubious charges of personal corruption proved to be the final straw for much of middle-class Pakistan. According to Pakistan expert Barnett Rubin, Ahsan has a good shot at inheriting the reins of the Pakistan People’s Party. A longtime PPP member, respected barrister and democracy advocate, Ahsan's representation of Chaudhry landed him a stint in prison when Musharraf declared emergency rule on November 3. Ahsan, not surprisingly, disagreed with the more conciliatory stance toward Musharraf that brought Bhutto back from exile earlier this year, according to Rubin.

Ahsan has an international profile as well. An old enemy of 80s-vintage dictator Zia ul-Haq, he gained global esteem for his willingness to go to jail for the sake of democracy. After his November detention, 33 U.S. Senators wrote to Musharraf demanding his release. Still, Ahsan's profile is much higher in Pakistan than it is in the United States. But shortly before Christmas, he penned this New York Times op-ed:

Last Thursday morning, I was released to celebrate the Id holidays. But that evening, driving to Islamabad to say prayers at Faisal Mosque, my family and I were surrounded at a rest stop by policemen with guns cocked and I was dragged off and thrown into the back of a police van. After a long and harrowing drive along back roads, I was returned home and to house arrest.

Every day, thousands of lawyers and members of the civil society striving for a liberal and tolerant society in Pakistan demonstrate on the streets. They are bludgeoned by the regime’s brutal police and paramilitary units. Yet they come out again the next day.

People in the United States wonder why extremist militants in Pakistan are winning. What they should ask is why does President Musharraf have so little respect for civil society — and why does he essentially have the backing of American officials?

With Ahsan a potential successor to Bhutto, those questions have a renewed salience. As does his implicit challenge to Washington to support Pakistani democracy:

How long can the leaders of the lawyers’ movement be detained? They will all be out one day. And they will neither be silent nor still.

They will recount the brutal treatment meted out to them for seeking the establishment of a tolerant, democratic, liberal and plural political system in Pakistan. They will state how the writ of habeas corpus was denied to them by the arbitrary and unconstitutional firing of Supreme and High Court justices. They will spell out precisely how one man set aside a Constitution under the pretext of an “emergency,” arrested the judges, packed the judiciary, “amended” the Constitution by a personal decree and then “restored” it to the acclaim of London and Washington.

Correction: Due to an error on my part, this post initially attributed to Husain Haqqani comments that should have been attributed to Barnett Rubin. Haqqani did not make any prognostication to me about Ahsan. I misread my own notes when writing this post, and I apologize for the mistake.

Pervez Musharraf

Nawaz Sharif Also Blames Musharraf for Bhutto Killing

Spencer Ackerman | December 27, 2007, 12:26PM

It's not just Bhutto adviser Husain Haqqani. Nawaz Sharif, now Pervez Musharraf's chief political enemy in the wake of Bhutto's assassination, also blamed the dictator for his onetime rival's death. The Hindustan Times:

"Pervez Musharraf is responsible and accountable for what happened today," Sharif told a private news channel in an interview.

"I hold his policies responsible for landing this country into the terrible mess," a shaken Sharif said.

"Nobody has confidence in Musharraf. Everybody wants him to step down and hold the inquiry (into Benazir's death)," he said.

Sharif appears to have wasted little time taking up Bhutto's mantle and consolidating the non-Islamist opposition to Musharraf:

Sharif told Bhutto's supporters that he would fight "your war from now on", and that he shared the grief of "the entire nation".

Sharif was speaking outside the hospital where Bhutto died. "I assure you that I will fight your war from now," Sharif said.

Pervez Musharraf

State Dept Pakistan Chief: Ask Me Later About Bhutto

Spencer Ackerman | December 27, 2007, 11:32AM

There's no statement as yet on Bhutto's assassination from Richard Boucher. That's notable, considering Boucher is the assistant secretary of state for South Asia. A spokeswoman for Boucher referred me to the general State press office before saying that she was telling reporters to watch for a statement from President Bush.

As the assassination of Benazir Bhutto throws U.S.-Pakistani relations into turmoil, it's worth pointing out how the staffing of the U.S.'s Pakistan team indicates that Pakistan isn't exactly a priority for the Bush administration. Boucher is a career foreign service officer, but he has no prior South Asia experience, and his highest-profile portfolios were his two turns as departmental spokesman. The current U.S. ambassador, Anne W. Patterson, used to run State's anti-narcotics efforts -- a none-too-subtle signal that combatting Afghan heroin exportation gets more attention from the administration than figuring out what to do with a nuclear-armed dictatorship that's home to Osama bin Laden and a rising tide of Islamic extremism. Patterson, too, doesn't have experience in the region. The previous, well-regarded ambassador to Pakistan? He's a little busy right now somewhere else.

Matthew Yglesias recently noted how we've got the C-Listers on Pakistan, and suggested Dick Cheney was exploiting the dearth of expertise to control our Pakistan policies. All of which, it should be noted in fairness, are looking super-awesome right now.

Pervez Musharraf

Bush: Bhutto Assassination 'Cowardly'

Spencer Ackerman | December 27, 2007, 11:22AM

Live from Crawford, Texas:

President Bush demanded Thursday that those responsible for the killing of former Prime Minister Benazir be brought to justice.

"The United States strongly condemns this cowardly act by murderous extremists who are trying to undermine Pakistan's democracy," he said. "Those who committed this crime must be brought to justice."

The president was speaking to reporters at a hangar adjacent to his Crawford ranch in central Texas.

Bush expressed his deepest condolences to Bhutto's family and to the families of others slain in the attack and to all the people of Pakistan.

"We stand with the people of Pakistan in their struggle against the forces of terror and extremism. We urge them to honor Benazir Bhutto's memory by continuing with the democratic process for which she so bravely gave her life," he said.

Bush looked tense in delivering a statement that lasted about a minute and he took no questions.

President Bush is making a televised statement as I type, and we'll have that for you as well.

Update: Here's that statement.

Pervez Musharraf

Bhutto Adviser: Musharraf Is To Blame

Spencer Ackerman | December 27, 2007, 10:32AM

A longtime adviser and close friend of assassinated Pakistani ex-prime minister Benazir Bhutto places blame for Bhutto's death squarely on the shoulders of U.S.-supported dictator Pervez Musharraf.

After an October attack on Bhutto's life in Karachi, the ex-prime minister warned "certain individuals in the security establishment [about the threat] and nothing was done," says Husain Haqqani, a confidante of Bhutto's for decades. "There is only one possibility: the security establishment and Musharraf are complicit, either by negligence or design. That is the most important thing. She's not the first political leader killed, since Musharraf took power, by the security forces."

Haqqani notes that Bhutto died of a gunshot wound to the neck. "It's like a hit, not a regular suicide bombing," he says. "It's quite clear that someone who considers himself Pakistan's Godfather has a very different attitude toward human life than you and I do."

As for what comes next: Haqqani doubts that Musharraf will go forward with scheduled elections. "The greatest likelihood is that this was aimed not just aimed at Benazir Bhutto but at weakening Pakistan's push for democracy," he says. "But the U.S. has to think long and hard. Musharraf's position is untenable in Pakistan. More and more people are going to blame him for bringing Pakistan to this point, intentionally or unintentionally. It's very clear that terrorism has increased in Pakistan. It's quite clear that poverty has increased in Pakistan. ... anti-Americanism might come in, as people say, 'You know what, why should we support this [pro-U.S.] regime that has not delivered anything to us?'"

Growing emotional, Haqqani says people should know that "Benazir Bhutto was a very warm person. She was a very strong and courageous person, a very forgiving person. To have gone what she went through -- her father assassinated by one military dictator [General Zia ul-Haq], her two brothers assassinated, no one in the elite fully loyal to her... The whole Pakistani security establishment thinks Pakistan should be governed as a national-security state. She resisted that completely, and that doesn't get seen enough. She questioned their right to govern."

Pervez Musharraf

Today's Must Read

Spencer Ackerman | December 27, 2007, 9:22AM

Benazir Bhutto, former prime minister of Pakistan and linchpin of a post-Musharraf U.S. strategy in the turbulent South Asian country, was assassinated today in Rawalpindi.

"She has been martyred," said party official Rehman Malik.

Bhutto, 54, died in hospital in Rawalpindi. Ary-One Television said she had been shot in the head.

Police said a suicide bomber fired shots at Bhutto as she was leaving the rally venue in a park before blowing himself up.

"The man first fired at Bhutto's vehicle. She ducked and then he blew himself up," said police officer Mohammad Shahid.

Police said 16 people had been killed in the blast.

Earlier, party officials said Bhutto was safe.

The most likely culprit is the Pakistani Taliban and al-Qaeda. But it's not exactly an event met with tears by the Pakistani military, which thoroughly controls the government and the economy. After the summer's turbulence with Islamic radicals and Pervez Musharraf's subsequent declaration of martial law -- designed to crack down not on Islamist militants but the remnants of Pakistan's democratic opposition -- the U.S. prevailed upon Musharraf to ally with Bhutto in the interest of broadening Musharraf's base of support. But the event that would consummate the alliance, next month's election, represented a threat to continued military rule. "The military didn't really want civilian politicians in power," says New York University's Barnett Rubin, a South Asia expert. "They wanted to use them to legitimate indirect [military] rule, and they were going to do it by rigging the election."

U.S. strategy didn't exactly find that so offensive. "The idea was to consolidate the alliance of the so-called moderate forces in the Pakistani military through this election that the military was going to rig but we were going to certify anyway," Rubin observes. That is, as long as Bhutto was in the picture -- since the U.S. had reduced the democratic opposition to the figure of Benazir Bhutto, although her corruption as PM was manifest. Without Bhutto, it is unclear what the U.S. will do.

Bhutto's assassination presents an opportunity for Musharraf. "It's very possible Musharraf will declare [another] state of emergency and postpone the elections," Rubin continues. "That will confirm in many people's minds the idea that the military is behind" the assassination. For it's part, the U.S. will likely "be scrambling to say the election either needs to be held as planned or postponed rather than canceled, but Musharraf is in a position to preempt that."

As a result, Rubin says, U.S. strategy is "in tatters."

A spokeswoman for Richard Boucher, the assistant secretary of state for South Asia, said the senior State Department official will have to get back to TPM.

Iraq Contractors

Contractors in Afghanistan Didn't Have to Prove Purchases Actually Occurred

Spencer Ackerman | December 26, 2007, 4:50PM

More outrageous tales from the State Department car dealership: it turns out that contractor DynCorp didn't have to even prove that it in fact purchased dozens of SUVs for which it charged the government. Try to follow the money on this one.

[O]ne Civilian Police task order [on which DynCorp is the contractor] included a requirement for 68 armored Ford Excursions at a fixed price of $113,064. The [State] Department was billed for 68 "armored vehicles" at a unit cost of $123,327. The property list contained 61 Ford Excursions, of which some were described as armored, others uparmored, and others had no notation of armoring. The costs shown on the property list for these 61 Ford Excursions ranged from $43,990 to $150,000 with nine at $122,190, seven with higher costs, and the remaining 45 with costs of $77,000 and below. Thus, OIG could not conclude that the 68 "armored vehicles" in the vouchers were the 68 armored Ford Excursions specified in the task order.

Let's just assume for a minute that they are. To do the math: 68 Excursions at the State Department contract's fixed unit price works out to $7,688,352. But 68 Excursions at the price DynCorp billed the department is $8,386,236. So that's an overcharge of almost $698,000. Nice.

But what the report's saying is that it has no way of knowing if DynCorp really spent the $8,386,236. It's not easy to work out the numbers given the vague way the report describes the expenses cited on the 61 Excursions DynCorp documented. But nine Excursions at $122,190 is $1,099,710. Add another 45 at $77,000 (the maximum cited here), and that's $3,465,000. Take a conservative estimate of the remaining seven with "higher costs" than the $122,190 -- let's say $122,200, a mere $10 more. That's $855,400. Add it all up and you get in the ballpark of $5,420,110.

And that means the State Department's lax bookkeeping requirements allowed DynCorp to, potentially, pocket around (by my calculation) $2,996,126. Whether that in fact happened is unclear by definition. But what's crystal clear is that State's shoddy accounting is practically an invitation to abuse. Why not just have the State Department open its petty cash drawers and save the inspector-general's office the trouble?

Iraq Contractors

Wanna Buy a Car? Charge It To The State Department

Spencer Ackerman | December 26, 2007, 3:39PM

For a moment, leave aside the question of missing property. The September 2007 State Department inspector general report provides a blueprint for how lax department rules let contractors in Afghanistan shoehorn all manner of purchases into their conctract costs -- regardless of whether the contract required those specific purchases. As they say on the streets, DynCorp, essentially, got to charge it to the game.

Take one example. On one of DynCorp's task orders for the Civilian Police training contract, the company bought $1.1 million worth of trucks, unspecified in its contract, and charged it to the government. And that was just the start.

Under one of the Civilian Police task orders, the vouchers included charges for 20 Ford F-250s, with a cost of $1.1 million, that were acquired before the modification authorizing their purchase was issued; 18 vehicles consisting of Ford Excursions, John Deere Gators, and Yamaha motorcycles, with a cost of $384,590, that were not specified in the task order; and an additional unknown quantity of John Deere Gators and Ford Excursions, with a cost of $1.4 million, that were not specified in the ask order.

That worked for DynCorp so well on the police contract, the company ran the same game on its ordnance-removal contract:

Although weapons and weapon accessories were not among the property specified for purchase under the WRAP contract, the vouchers included charges of $30,000.

The inspector general concedes that contractors might legitimately need to buy new property during the course of the contract. But the department's requirements -- apparently still in place -- don't allow outside observers enough visibility to determine what's a legitimate expense and what isn't. (Or, in the IG's words, "the Department should assess whether additional property items are needed to meet program requirements, approve new acquisitions before they are made, and modify the contract accordingly.") The absence of such protections is practically an invitation for a contractor to walk into a Ford dealership and hand over Condoleezza Rice's credit card -- which, incidentally, you pay for.

Iraq Contractors

Internal State Dep't Review Finds Dep't in Afghanistan Can't Account for $28 Million in Contractor-Used Cars, Guns, Radios

Spencer Ackerman | December 26, 2007, 3:03PM

A September 2007 State Department report, obtained by TPMmuckraker, found that contractors DynCorp and Blackwater can't account for $28.4 million in U.S. government-issued property in Afghanistan, including armored cars, guns and radios.

The report, prepared by the State Department inspector-general's office, hits the department for its lack of "adequate internal control over the government property held by contractors." It calls the property lists provided by State officials managing the contract in Afghanistan "incomplete and, therefore, unreliable." The $28.4 million worth of missing or poorly-documented property represents 21 percent of the government property held by DynCorp and Blackwater.

In some cases, the property has disappeared into a bureaucratic morass, thanks to State's improper bookkeeping. But in other cases, the property appears to be simply gone. For instance, the report finds:

OIG [the Office of the Inspector General] found all of the selected WPPS [Worldwide Personnel Protective Service] items on the property list but was unable to locate some of the items (see Table 3), including vehicles, a weapon, generators, computers, radios, and phones, on the Civilian Police and WRAP [Weapons Removal and Abatement Program] lists.

DynCorp holds the Civilian Police and WRAP contracts. The WPPS contract is held by Blackwater, and the report doesn't accuse Blackwater of mishandling government property. But it does say that Blackwater didn't include the cost of 91 percent of items on its property list reviewed by the inspector general. As a result, inspectors were unable to verify that the money cited by Blackwater for the purchase of "any of its vehicles and much of its communications equipment" was properly spent.

It wouldn't be the first time inspectors hit the department for inadequate bookkeeping. In October, Stuart Bowen, the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, chided State for its inability to account for $1.2 billion it had awarded to DynCorp in Iraq.

TPMmuckraker obtained the September 2007 report thanks to a Freedom of Information Act request. We'll have it for you in our Documents Collection shortly. And we'll be presenting you with more from the report throughout the week.

Dick Cheney

Ex-Archives Security Chief: Cheney Self-Exemption 'Remarkable'

Spencer Ackerman | December 26, 2007, 11:45AM

With all the scandals to choose from in 2007, it's hard to pick a favorite. But here's one that qualifies: remember when Dick Cheney tried to evade oversight of his procedures for handling classified material by claiming that the vice presidency is outside the executive branch? And remember when the head of the classification-security office for the National Archives, a fellow named J. William Leonard, arched an eyebrow? And how that just made the vice president's men attempt to abolish Leonard's job?

Leonard certainly does. And now that he's retiring, he recounted the whole sorry story to Newsweek's Mike Isikoff.

So how did matters escalate? The challenge arose last year when the Chicago Tribune was looking at [ISOO's annual report] and saw the asterisk [reporting that it contained no information from OVP] and decided to follow up. And that's when the spokesperson from the OVP made public this idea that because they have both legislative and executive functions, that requirement doesn't apply to them.…They were saying the basic rules didn't apply to them. I thought that was a rather remarkable position. So I wrote my letter to the Attorney General [asking for a ruling that Cheney's office had to comply.] Then it was shortly after that there were [email] recommendations [from OVP to a National Security Council task force] to change the executive order that would effectively abolish [my] office.

Who wrote the emails?
It was David Addington.

No explanation was offered?
No. It was strike this, strike that. Anyplace you saw the words, "the director of ISOO" or "ISOO" it was struck.

What was your reaction?
I was disappointed that rather than engage on the substance of an issue, some people would resort to that…

Must Read

Today's Must Read

Spencer Ackerman | December 26, 2007, 9:05AM

The Ramones once implored us not to fight on Christmas. But the Turkish general staff doesn't like the Ramones. Nor, to understate matters, does it like the Kurdish terror group known as the PKK. With the approval of the U.S. to violate Iraqi airspace, Turkish warplanes and invasion forces have killed an estimated 150 Kurds in the last week-plus, according to the Turkish military. The New York Times:

Turkey’s assertions came as Kurdish and American officials said that Turkish jets crossed into Iraqi airspace again on Tuesday, in what American officials said was the fourth such flight over the border in two weeks.

Turkish officials did not comment on claims that it flew into Iraq on Tuesday, but confirmed that it had carried out an air and ground operation early Tuesday on its side of the border in southeastern Turkey. An army statement said five rebels were killed, including two women, part of a rebel group preparing an attack.

None of these raids could have occurred without the support of the United States, which controls Iraqi airspace. At the risk of inducing strategic vertigo, here are the stakes. Turkey is a crucial NATO ally, and the major launching point for all U.S. air cargo into Iraq. It fought a war against the PKK in the 1990s, since it thinks that the strength of the PKK bolsters the desire for independence in Turkey's heavily-Kurdish southeast. Plus it says to George W. Bush that the PKK are terrorists -- rather truthfully -- the U.S. is fighting its own war on terrorists, it's all one fight, etc. So we're helping them. And how!

Rear Adm. Greg Smith, director of communications for the American-led forces in Iraq, said Turkey had notified American officials in advance of the latest raid, as is customary, telling them it was a reconnaissance flight, not a strike mission.

“They tell us where they are going and what their mission is,” he said. “The first three missions were all identified as strike missions. They said their intentions were to go and drop ordnance and they told us that at the time.”

“On this occasion they told us it was a reconnaissance mission,” he continued. However, he confirmed that while the Americans monitor all such Turkish flights, they would not necessarily know if, having crossed the border, the Turkish pilots changed their mission from reconnaissance to bombing.

Read more »

Iraq Corruption

Blackwater's 2004 Iraq Contract with State: A 'Pyramid' Scheme

Spencer Ackerman | December 24, 2007, 2:17PM

More goodies from our Blackwater FOIA: the security company employed such creative accounting methods that it charged the State Department from the profit it made off its 2004-edition Iraq contract.

A January 2005 audit performed for State's inspector general discovered several of Blackwater's accounting irregularities. But how the company accounted for its profit is perhaps the most impressive. Blackwater hid its profits within its "dedicated overhead" -- that is, the expenses it incurred in the cost of fulfilling its contractual obligations. Here's what happened:

This results not only in a duplication of profit, but also a pyramiding of profit because, in effect, Blackwater is applying profit to profit. As a result, we have questioned the proposed amount in total.

That might not be a traditional pyramid scheme per se, but conceivably, it could have yielded an infinite regression -- Blackwater makes money, charges State for it, makes more money, and so forth. So did it work like that?

I don't know! And why don't I know? Because, in its release of the 2005 report, State blacked out every section that detailed exactly how Blackwater's bookkeeping ripped off the taxpayer. For instance, here's what it says about the profit-pyramiding effort.

Note 6 -- Profit [redacted] Profit is a matter under the purview of the contracting officer.

It's worth remembering that classification procedures exist to protect national security. They don't exist to protect giant corporations that fleece the public. Someone should tell the State Department.

CIA Tapes

CIA Wraps Up Probe of Its Own Inspector-General

Spencer Ackerman | December 24, 2007, 12:14PM

It was one of the high points of recent CIA history, and that's saying a lot: CIA Director Mike Hayden ordered an investigation of CIA Inspector General John Helgerson. On top of ordering a scathing review of the CIA's pre-9/11 counterterrorism performance, Helgerson -- legally tasked with being an independent internal watchdog -- stuck his nose into the agency's detentions, interrogations and renditions programs, angering many inside the agency. Hayden struck back.

Now the probe is over, the Los Angeles Times' Greg Miller reported yesterday, and the IG's relationship to the agency has changed in some nebulous fashion. The CIA isn't releasing what's changed, exactly, but Miller reports that agency officials -- including, presumably, those under investigation -- now have "a greater ability to defend their actions and present their views."

The investigation was criticized on Capitol Hill and by former agency officials as an attack on the independence of the inspector general.

The senior intelligence official disagreed with that characterization: "We have no interest in trampling upon the independence of the I.G. It's not our interest, not our goal." ...

"This has always been a straightforward management review," said CIA spokesman Mark Mansfield. "The aim has been to make the office even more efficient and effective as well as making its procedures more transparent and understandable to employees."

And what a coincidence! The changes come just in time for Helgerson's joint probe with the Justice Department into the 2005 destruction of the CIA's interrogation videotapes!

Iraq Contractors

A Special Christmas Message from Blackwater

Spencer Ackerman | December 24, 2007, 11:46AM

Every Monday, Blackwater emails a newsletter to its supporters and potential clients called the Blackwater Tactical Weekly. Often it's a compendium of conservative-media pieces about how everything's awesome in Iraq, accompanied by a few quick company notes. But today's Christmas Eve. And during this season of reflection, the company would be remiss if Blackwater didn't place itself in its proper spiritual context.

Some excerpts:

GIVING... is something with which all Peace Keepers are very familiar... Giving time in ways that most do not understand... Giving up pleasures and presence of family to patrol streets, conflicts and battlefields... Giving up comforts that most take for granted... Giving companionship to a fellow Peace Keeper because you are together in the same endeavor at home and on foreign fields... Giving support to those in need of assistance... Giving life and limb, risking injury or death, so that the people they love and care for may continue to live in peace and safety in their world.

Of course, T.X. Hammes and other actual defense experts don't believe Blackwater and the U.S. military "are together in the same endeavor." Rather, Blackwater's wilding out makes things worse for the U.S. military in Iraq. But in Moyock, NC, nothing says Christmas like cynical exploitation of the troops!

These are the Peace Keepers... These are my Parish...

We are in a season of good wishes and good cheer for most of us. Peace Keepers have to be just as vigilant this season as in any other season. Evil and tragedy do not take the day or the season off... but indeed they are ever present... and must be resisted at all times.

[snip]

Peace Keepers you have loved me without even knowing that I existed... You have loved to the highest degree of which the human being is capable... You have laid your life and being on the line of defense between good and evil and you do all that you can to stop evil where you are... and rush to the scene when you are not already there...

What Iraqi schoolchild doesn't recite the yuletide hymn, "Blackwater loves me/ This I know/ For the Blackwater Tactical Weekly tells me so"?

I am part of you by the call to service and by my response... and I know of no other more honorable place to be this day than here among you in spirit, even if I cannot be with each of you in presence.

It's true: there's no more honorable place to be than Moyock. Everyone at, say, COB Speicher surely agrees.

Pervez Musharraf

Unaccountable Musharraf Aid Spent Unaccountably

Spencer Ackerman | December 24, 2007, 10:59AM

Stop the presses! When the U.S. gave Pervez Musharraf a dumptruck full of cash after 9/11 -- $10.58 billion and counting, mostly in untraceable cash transfers -- it didn't exactly care how he spent it, as long as he was sufficiently bought off as a U.S. ally for the war on terror. Lo and behold: Musharraf spent his cash how he pleased, and not on U.S. "priorities" for Pakistan!

A case in point: now that al-Qaeda's senior leadership has reconstituted itself in Pakistan's Northwest Frontier Province, U.S. officials fret that Musharraf didn't use his free money to build up a promised counterterrorist force for the FATA.

In interviews in Islamabad and Washington, Bush administration and military officials said they believed that much of the American money was not making its way to frontline Pakistani units. Money has been diverted to help finance weapons systems designed to counter India, not Al Qaeda or the Taliban, the officials said, adding that the United States has paid tens of millions of dollars in inflated Pakistani reimbursement claims for fuel, ammunition and other costs.

“I personally believe there is exaggeration and inflation,” said a senior American military official who has reviewed the program, referring to Pakistani requests for reimbursement. “Then, I point back to the United States and say we didn’t have to give them money this way.”

Pakistani officials say they are incensed at what they see as American ingratitude for Pakistani counterterrorism efforts that have left about 1,000 Pakistani soldiers and police officers dead. They deny that any overcharging has occurred.

There's a lot of back and forth between U.S. and Pakistani officials in the piece about whether the U.S. delivered all the military equipment it promised, which the Pakistanis cite as the reason for their FATA intransigence. But look: if the U.S. truly cared about Pakistan spending the money fastidiously, it wouldn't be paying Musharraf in untraceable cash transfers. Rather, the U.S. needs to buy off Musharraf so he'll let us dip our toes into the volatile FATA and occasionally kill some terrorists, and so his security services will share intelligence with us and snag us some al-Qaeda members hiding up in Rawalpindi or Karachi or Peshawar or wherever. And buying him off means buying him off. Corruption and diversion of money is part of the bargain -- a cost of doing business.

It's one thing for U.S. officials to ask what exactly it is they're purchasing for over $10 billion. But it's quite another the U.S. to turn around and complain that the cash we've given Musharraf doesn't come with strings.

(Via Yglesias, who, sources indicate, blogs on Christmas Eve day in a charcoal-gray Hugo Boss business suit.)

Must Read

Today's Must Read

Spencer Ackerman | December 24, 2007, 8:57AM

For two years, military officials, defense experts, lawyers and Iraqi officials tried to warn the U.S. against relying so heavily on unaccountable private security contractors in Iraq. Until Blackwater's fateful September shooting at Nisour Square, the U.S. answer was always the same: meh. One reason the Pentagon didn't care: one of its chief advisers on security contractors was on the contractors' payroll.

Steve Fainaru of The Washington Post -- who's dogged Blackwater ever since the shooting -- delivers a taxonomy of unheeded warnings. The pattern is fairly simple, and rather Blackwater-specific. (The Blackwater brand has become a generic signifier for security contractors in Iraq -- the Q-Tip or Kleenex of contract security.) Blackwater's guards shoot someone. People complain. They warn that impunity for security contractors jeopardizes the U.S. mission. U.S. officials do nothing. Nothing changes. More Iraqis get shot. Repeat. T.X. Hammes, a top-shelf counterinsurgency expert and ex-adviser to the Iraqi army training mission, told Fainaru, "I still think, from a pure counterinsurgency standpoint, armed contractors are an inherently bad idea, because you cannot control the quality, you cannot control the action on the ground, but you're held responsible for everything they do."

So why did it take widespread Iraqi outrage over the Nisour Square debacle for anything to change? One reason, Fainaru reports, is a man named Lawrence W. Peter. The Pentagon allowed the security contractors to regulate and police themselves. Peter, a Pentagon consultant, helped keep it that way. Only while he delivered that advice, he worked for a security contractors' lobby.

U.S. officials often turned to the Private Security Company Association of Iraq, a trade group funded by the security companies. Lawrence T. Peter, a retired Navy intelligence officer, served as the association's director while also working as a consultant to the Pentagon's Defense Reconstruction Support Office, which administers contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Whitman, the Pentagon spokesman, said Peter earned "a few thousand dollars a year" as a consultant.

The association operated out of an office inside the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Logistics Directorate in the Green Zone. Jack Holly, a retired Marine colonel who heads corps logistics in Iraq, said that Peter and the association play "a critical role to help the private security community improve and regulate itself," adding, "They tried to fill a void that had been left by the U.S. government's failure to recognize the problem."

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