Condi Continues her Contempt for Congress & Oversight

Representative Henry Waxman, Chairman of the House Oversight Committee, on Tuesday leveled charges that Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice has interfered with congressional investigations into corruption by the Iraqi government; as well as the activities of the mercenary security outfit Blackwater USA.

State Department officials have repeatedly told the Oversight Committee that details of corruption in the Iraqi government could not be provided to the committee because the information is treated as a “state secret” and can not be revealed to the public (nor, apparently to our elected representatives).

"You are wrong to interfere with the committee's inquiry," Waxman said in a letter to Rice. "The State Department's position on this matter is ludicrous," added Waxman, a vocal opponent of the Bush administration's Iraq policies.

(Keep Reading)

The State Department did not comment on the letter or Waxman’s comments, but in the past, Rice’s State Department has blown off the requests of the committee, and attempted to dismiss Waxman as “partisan” and inconsequential.

In the case of Blackwater, which was involved in an apparently unprovoked attack on civilians that left at least 11 civilians dead, the company insists that, as they contract their mercenaries to provide security for State Department employees in Iraq, they can not hand over documents and cooperate with Congress without prior approval of the State Department, which will not give it.

"Congress has a constitutional prerogative to examine the impacts that corruption within the Iraqi ministries and the activities of Blackwater may have on the prospects for political reconciliation in Iraq," Waxman wrote to Rice.

Along with the latest letter Waxman wrote to Rice and released to the press, a letter from the State Deparment’s Contracting Officer, Kiazan Moneypenny, to Blackwater, which confirms the obstruction Waxman accuses the State Department of engaging in: "I hereby direct Blackwater to make no disclosure of documents or information ... unless such disclosure has been authorized in writing by the contracting officer." Undeterred by the stonewalling, Waxman has scheduled a hearing on the Blackwater matter for October 2.

Rice has been overtly contemptuous of congressional oversight, ignoring requests to appear before committees, answer questions or even acknowledge that Congress indeed has a legitimate oversight role. With her star waning, and her influence in the White House virtually nil, might she find herself escorted before the committee by the Sergeant of Arms of the House?

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Oh for the good old days of $500 hammers and $600 toilet seats!

Those 1980’s abuses of the American taxpayer seem downright quaint in comparrison. What were they thinking, marking up the price of the goods themselves? The real profit margin is in fraudulent shipping and handling! (Pikers!)

A South Carolina defense contractor pleaded guilty yesterday to bilking the Pentagon out of $20.5 million over nearly 10 years by adding hundreds of thousands of dollars to the cost of shipping spare parts such as metal washers and lamps. The parts were bound for key military installations, including those in Iraq and Afghanistan. In one instance, in 2006, the government paid C&D Distributors $998,798 in transportation costs for shipping two 19-cent washers. Charlene Corley, 47, co-owner of C&D Distributors, used the money to pay for luxury homes, cars, plastic surgery and jewelry, according to court documents.

"It is a troubling case because the fraud took place during a time of war," said Kevin McDonald, the first assistant U.S. attorney for the District of South Carolina. The $20 million "that could have gone to assist our military was diverted and used in a fraudulent manner for excessive personal enjoyment."

C&D billed the Pentagon for materials and shipping separately, and they received payment on 112 of the fraudulent invoices submitted before the scam was uncovered. Among the abuses of your checkbook and mine was a $445,640 shipping invoice for an elbow pipe that cost less than ten dollars, and six machine screws worth a total of $59.94 were shipped at a cost of $403,436.

But there is even more salacious detail…C&D was owned and operated by twin sisters, and one of them committed suicide last fall after being questioned by investigators. The surviving sister is trying to make sure that most of the blame is shifted to her former womb-mate in an effort to reduce her prison time.

"We do not dispute that we participated and benefited in and from the conspiracy," Harris said. "We have, however, always maintained that her sister was the primary actor in this fraud, the primary beneficiary of this fraud, and unfortunately she is not here to today to assist us in distinguishing their roles in the fraud."

And this, boys and girls, is why we need oversight!

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Re: FISA Let's straighten out a few points of contention

Let’s cut to the chase: There was no compelling reason to "change" or modify any existing FISA laws. That is the LIE they are telling to justify this.

FISA has been amended as technology has changed. If someone invents a new way to communicate wirelessly, FISA can and will be amended and updated to adapt to that new technology, if it is needed.

The “security” angle was a figleaf. This was about removing the oversight, not increasing the ability to conduct surveillance. We have always had, under FISA, the ability to monitor communications for 72 hours without a warrant. We have always had the ability to surveil foreigners without a warrant. And, MOST IMPORTANTLY, if anyone talks to a terrorist, no matter who they are, those communications can be collected without a warrant.

This is irregardless of whether the communications are "routed" through US territory or through a telecommunications switch located in the US. This has nothing to do with the location of switches or anything like that. In fact, read up on how most of the world's telecommunications traffic is routed through a certain switch physically located in Northern Virginia and then perhaps you can explain why a certain intelligence agency and several hundred billion dollars worth of facilities, personnel and technology also happens to be located in that same general area of Northern Virginia.

The intercepted communications of anyone engaged in planning, supporting, financing or backing a terrorist against this country has not nor has it ever required to have any kind of a warrant so long as one of the parties involved is, in fact, a foreigner engaged in that activity. If that person talks to a US person, a FISA warrant most certainly is not required, but the communications are simply reviewed as part of the ongoing process of collecting and disseminating information. (Bet you didn't know that, did you? Because so long as one end of the conversation is a non-US entity, we have always been able to collect that information--something they simply don't want you to know.)

Now, warrantless surveillance can commence even when both parties are US Persons, and continue for 72 hours, until such time as the FISA court can convene and see the evidence. The operation will not be stopped unless ordered to stop by the FISA court. Anyone engaged in collecting on these persons has to ANSWER to a higher authority for their actions--this is called accountability. If an intel agent has legitimate reasons to conduct surveillance, the courts and the oversight personnel will gladly sign off on the work being done.

Please STOP viewing this through the media-and-popular entertainment filter.

There is no dastardly, unimaginative bureaucrat engaged in thwarting the efforts of an intrepid and dazzling young intel agent who just wants to stop the terrorists while the bean counters just want to save money. This is not a "plot line" and there is no correlation between this issue and whatever crap sandwich of a TV show you think you remember.

Oversight is of increasing and desperate importance, given that the US Attorneys in this country are now the political enforcement arm of the Republican Party. Any US Attorney can now indict a US citizen based on what they "discover" as evidence, thanks to the new FISA laws. How would that happen? With no oversight whatsoever, the surveillance capability of the United States of America can be used against any US citizen.

We now know that at least one judge resigned from the FISA court because of abuses of power. We have clear evidence that the FBI has abused the power of National Security Letters. Now we see that other intelligence agencies can combine that with the most technologically advanced surveillance capabilities in existence. They have the complicity of virtually every telecommunications company in this country and now no reason to comply with the wishes of any company that dissents. So if the full weight of the US government can now be wielded against a US citizen--with no oversight, no check on the overreaching power--what reasonable person could conclude that this system will not be abused?

It's not like there is no history of overreach and abuse. FISA was created out of the findings of the Church Committee in the 1970s, which discovered rampant abuse of surveillance abilities by the Executive Branch for political purposes. The abuse of power is not limited to the Republicans or Democrats. Therefore, we need oversight to keep all of them in line. The FISA court, was there to ensure these basic rules were followed and that there was a check on the power of the Executive should they attempt to collect communications outside of these basic rules.

This has a lot more to do with intimidation of political opponents than it does security. As their grip on the rudder of power slips further, they grow increasingly desperate.

The threat of terror is what is being used to scare you into giving them unprecedented access to the tools they need to intimidate their political enemies. They don't give a damn whether a terrorist kills you or not--if they did, would they really be in Iraq, creating more terrorists? Would they allow the northwest region of Pakistan to become the headquarters of al Qaeda? Would they reduce the numbers of first responders and leave the borders open? Would they spend billions to create a department of "Homeland Security" and then botch the job so completely as to allow this department to become the laughingstock of organized society? DHS can stop your Grandma from bringing a bottle of shampoo on an aircraft but it can't stop the people who test the system from showing, time after time, that the screening process misses guns, knives and bomb materials.

That's called "checks and balances" and your government just flushed that concept, along with your Fourth Amendment rights.

FISA has granted tens of thousands of warrants, blocked about 6 of them, and has served as a check on the power of the Executive to intimidate and collect information on its internal political enemies.

They want you to yawn and say, okay, I'll buy it, and they want you to go back to watching boobies on TV and to stop paying attention.

But they've always had the ability to stop terrorists. Always! And what they want you to do is act all scared and concerned and look the other way while they go about intimidating and marginalizing their political enemies.

Wake up. They don't give a shit about you. They care about holding on to power.

This post is a joint effort by guest blogger Pale Rider & regular contributor Blue Girl

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Renzi Death Watch

[Updated below. The death-spiral nears the desert floor...]

It looks like things are about to get much, much worse for Rick Renzi (R-AZ-01). Roll Call is reporting that he has resigned his seats on the Natural Resources and Financial Services committees.

The guy who represents the Grand Canyon is on his way out the door when he resigns his seat on the Natural Resources Committee – and with it his seat on the Subcommittee on National Parks, Forests, and Public Lands.

Just Sayin...

Leave your guesses as to his departure in comments.

UPDATE: Via Think Progress Via War & Piece:

Rep. Renzi may resign.

“Rep. Rick Renzi, R-Ariz., could soon step down in the wake of a federal investigation into his involvement in a federal land swap deal and FBI raids of an insurance agency owned by his wife. His resignation could come as early as Friday or soon after, according to sources familiar with the matter. Top Republicans, including U.S. Sen. Jon Kyl, have been meeting to discuss what they will do if Renzi resigns and his rural congressional seat opens up.”

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The Must-Have Accessory for Spring: Oversight

In a span of fifteen minutes today, a whole slew of subpoenas will be considered for a variety of current and former administration officials, including Condoleeza Rice, Andrew Card and Monica Goodling.

There are so many oversight opportunities to choose from that Speaker Pelosi and Majority Leader Reid have appointed staffers to keep track of what fights are being picked and why. Seriously. They have had to appoint scandal coordinators.

Since Democrats assumed control of Congress in January, they have hired more than 200 investigative staffers for key watchdog committees. They include lawyers, former reporters and congressional staffers who left oversight committees that had all but atrophied during the six years that the GOP controlled Congress and the White House. They have already begun a series of inquiries on subjects ranging from allegations of administration meddling in federal scientists' work on global warming and the General Services Administration's alleged work for Republican campaigns to how disproved claims that Iraq had purchased nuclear material from Niger evolved into a case for war.

Democrats have been emboldened, investigators say, by their House and Senate judiciary committee colleagues' inquiries into the firings of U.S. attorneys. Last week's day-long testimony by Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, some Democrats said, was a reminder of how rare Cabinet-level grillings had become on Capitol Hill. By the end of today, the Senate Judiciary Committee alone is set to authorize subpoenas for 15 people in the inquiry on the prosecutor dismissals.

"Oversight is just as important, if not more important, than legislation," said Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.), chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. The new investigations illustrate just how many questions went unanswered in the six years when Democrats "couldn't hold hearings, we couldn't compel information . . . all we could do was ask for it," he said.

Now, Waxman said, what to tackle next "is something we're always thinking about."

Since the Democrats came to power, nearly 100 research and investigation staffers have been hired to investigate potential violations of congressional rules and federal and state laws. As part of the new culture of accountability that the Democrats campaigned on (and which is our raison d’etre) the Democrats are pushing forward with investigations.

The subpoenas are about to fly. I do believe the events of this week are going to be a hell of a lot of fun to watch.

[Cross-posted from Blue Girl, Red State]

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Representative Waxman is out of patience

Representative Waxman’s patience is at an end. Condoleeza Rice has blown him off and ignored his respectful requests that she appear before the Oversight Committee he chairs and answer questions about the false claims of a Niger-Iraq connection that was used as justification for a pre-emptive war against Iraq.

Now that Condoleeza Rice has officially blown off the Oversight Committee (Rep. Waxman sent a letter last month, in which he requested she appear on April 17^th) the full Oversight Committee will convene on Wednesday, 25 April to consider compelling testimony with subpoenas.

If subpoenaed, will Ms. Rice ignore that, too? Will it go that far? (I would pay to see it.) . Ignore a subpoena and the Capitol Police can arrest you and deliver you to the committee.

Next week is going to be very interesting indeed.

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GAO: Unsecured Munitions Responsible for Half of U.S. Casualties in Iraq

A Government Accountability Office report was released yesterday, concurrent with testimony given in front of the National Security subcommittee of the House Oversight Committee.

The testimony of Davi M. D'Agostino, Director of Defense Capabilities and Management at GAO was really a damning indictment of the mismanagement of the entire war by the Bush administration and the Department of Defense under their control, including the Joint Chiefs.

You might recall the incident at al Qa Qaa, where 380 tons of conventional weaponry and explosives went missing? That was only a drop in the bucket. Conventional munitions caches were scattered all over the country, and the failure of the DoD to properly secure these ammo dumps has been directly responsible for fully one half of the deaths and injuries sustained by U.S. Service personnel serving in Iraq.

In our report, we concluded that a fundamental gap existed between the OIF war plan assumptions and the experiences of U.S. and coalition forces in Iraq, contributing to insufficient troops being on the ground to prevent widespread looting of conventional munitions storage sites and resulting in looted munitions being a continuing asymmetric threat to U.S. and coalition forces. The human, strategic, and financial costs of this failure to provide sufficient troops have been high, with IEDs made with looted munitions causing about half of all U.S. combat fatalities and casualties in Iraq and killing hundreds of Iraqis and contributing to increasing instability, challenging U.S. strategic goals in Iraq. Further, DOD does not appear to have conducted a theaterwide survey and assessed the risk associated with unsecured conventional munitions storage sites to U.S. (P. 12 of .pdf)

Read the entire report. Put simply: Absolutely every thing has been done absolutely wrong. Everything. From the very first faulty and outlandishly foolish assumptions of a cakewalk and a capitulated Iraqi military providing security and post-war Iraq would not be a U.S. concern and resistance would be minimal (the whole “greeted as liberators” thing). All the way to fecklessly failing to secure munitions that have subsequently killed 1600 Americans and severely injured 10-15,000 more.

Am I supposed to just shrug and say "so what?" here? Because I can't do that.

Congress is right to take control away. They can not point to a single thing they have done right, there is no reason to trust them now, and it’s time to start taking reasoned and reasonable steps to end the war and bring our troops home.

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House Judiciary Committee to Look at Signing Statements

Well, it looks like the House Judicary Committee is also going to have a hearing this week. On wednesday 01/31/2007 at 10:15 AM the committee has scheduled a hearing in Room 2141 Rayburn House Office Building of the full committee to examine "Presidential Signing Statements under the Bush Administration: A Threat to Checks and Balances and the Rule of Law?" Finally, the House Committee is doing something interesting.

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Time for a Reprise of the Truman Committee

In 1940, as World War II gripped the globe and United States involvement in the conflict became more and more likely, the United States appropriated $10 Billion in defense contracts in preparation for that eventuality.

Early in 1941, reports of malfeasance and abuses by the contractors reached Missouri Senator Harry S Truman, and the news did not sit well with WW I Infantry Captain “Give ‘em Hell Harry.” In typical Truman fashion, he set out to seek the truth, not by summoning “experts” but by embarking on a 10,000 mile tour of military installations. On this fact-finding tour, he discovered that the companies that received the contracts were clustered in the east, with a mere handful divvying up most of the largesse. He also discovered that they were receiving a fixed-profit, regardless of performance.

He returned to the Senate convinced that the defense efforts of the United States were being undermined by waste and corruption, and he proposed the notion of a special Senate committee that would investigate the National Defense Program.

President Roosevelt was convinced to let Truman head up the committee, being sympathetic to the President and his administration. The President was assured that the committee would not be too much trouble, as it would only be allotted $15,000 to investigate billions in defense contracts.

The Truman Committee was created by unanimous Senate decree on 01 March 1941. Over the next three years, with Senator Truman at the helm, the committee held hundreds of hearings, traveled thousands of miles to conduct field inspections, and saved millions of dollars in cost over-runs. Senator Truman was not shy about threatening executives with prison time as he whacked greedy corporate snouts out of the public trough. It was through his chairmanship of the Truman Committee that Harry S Truman shed his image as a bagman for the Pendergast political/criminal machine that ran Kansas City and Missouri politics for decades, and set his course for the White House. (For those who are unfamiliar with Big Tom Pendergast…He out-Tammanied Tammany Hall.)

Now we face the need for another Truman Committee to investigate contractor abuses once more.

On Wednesday, 17 January, the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Readiness heard testimony from Thomas F. Gimble, the acting Inspector General (IG) for the Pentagon, and Katherine V. Schinasi, the Managing Director of Acquisitions and Resource management for the Government Accountability Office (GAO). (Links to opening statements are in .pdf format.) Full transcripts are not yet available, but the opening statements of these two career civil servants are disturbing enough.

Mr. Gimble, the IG for the Pentagon testified that the problems he uncovered were widespread and pervasive, and they ranged from rushing purchases to use funds that were about to expire without doing the appropriate market research and cost analysis; to DoD personnel without security clearances authorizing contracts for classified work. Office space was leased for the Counterintelligence Field Activity by using a service contract instead of following required procedures through GSA. Using service contracts constitutes an “end run” around regulation and if not curtailed, will effectively eliminate oversight.

Both statements linked are full of outrages that should have every last one of us on the phone to our Senators, demanding the appointment of a present-day Truman Committee to rein in the abuses by contractors and the government employees who facilitate their malfeasance.

If it were up to me, that committee would be co-chaired by Chuck Hagel of Nebraska and Tom Harkin of Iowa; and Claire McCaskill, fresh from a successful tour as Missouri’s State Auditor, would have a seat on that committee too. Only appropriate, since she now occupies Harry Truman’s senate seat.

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Overview of House Armed Services Committee Organizational Meeting

The House Armed Services Committee came to order yesterday with Chairman Ike Skelton presiding. The organizational meeting is the proverbial first step of the journey. It is in the organizational meeting in which Members ratify the Committee rules and the oversight plan for the 110^th Congress. The Committee rules include the legislative jurisdictions for Subcommittees during the 110^th Congress. Establishing a Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations was immediatly undertaken, restoring a panel that was eliminated in the Republican Revolution of the 103rd congress in 1995.

“As our agenda moves forward, we will restore the House Armed Services Committee’s historic commitment to robust oversight of the Pentagon and of the Administration’s military policies. Other priorities include, but are not limited to: taking care of the troops and their families; rebuilding military readiness, particularly for the Army and the Marine Corps; a comprehensive examination of our current policy in Iraq and identifying options for the future; refocusing attention on the war in Afghanistan; and placing greater emphasis on preventing nuclear proliferation,” said Skelton.

I, for one, am glad to have the grown-ups back in charge. I'll be back later, once the minutes of the hearing with SecDef Gates are posted...

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