Hope is not a plan

In looking at KBR of late, one has the impression that their all-access pass has been revoked. As evidence of their corporate tendency toward unethical or out-and-out fraudulent practices builds up, they more frequently find themselves on the failed end of bids for the kind of large-scale government contracts they used to just be able to assume a win on. Earlier this year, the GAO denied KBR's protest about their failure win a lucrative LOGCAP IV contract, as GAO indicated that KBR didn't have the right to tell the Army how to move its troops around, nor to charge the Army for not taking direction from KBR. So it appropriately goes.

Now the GAO has released another decision denying KBR's protest against yet more failed LOGCAP IV bids. Here's the story this time:

In late 2008, a contracting officer in the Army emailed program folks at KBR with what he thought was an attachment discussing their past performance issues. He realized immediately, however, that he'd instead emailed proprietary bid comparison information discussing KBR and its major competitors. Recognizing the error, he did the appropriate thing and emailed all recipients at KBR telling them to delete that email without opening it, and without reading the attachment. So far, so good. The contracting officer at the Army then asked KBR to provide sworn statements asserting that they had followed his directions and deleted the information without reading it.

The contracts manager at KBR complied, deleting the email without reading it. The program manager at KBR said he'd complied, but actually forwarded the email to his laptop, where he opened it and looked at the attachment (briefly, according to his later report).

The Army at this point asked for a more detailed explanation, since the statements they'd received from KBR were not sworn affidavits as requested, and now they had the issue of the program manager having seen proprietary information and having lied about doing so. KBR replied with affidavits and a cover letter explaining that no one had read the email (note that this contradicts what Army knew at this point).

Wanting to avoid any hint of impropriety or unfair advantage, Army requested that the program manager at KBR be further isolated from the LOGCAP IV bid process. KBR said they thought this was unnecessary, and refused.

Having already been lied to once by the program manager at KBR, and with the company refusing to carry out the required action to limit potential impropriety, the Army at this point disqualified KBR from the two associated LOGCAP IV bids.

KBR naturally freaked out, sending a letter that said, essentially, "Okay, okay, we've isolated the guy" and "Besides, we didn't really get an advantage here..." (Those are my paraphrases, and clearly not quotes).

The Army told KBR tough luck, and KBR protested to GAO. After evaluating the entire situation, GAO backed Army's decision, giving this final word on the matter:

Under the circumstances here, we cannot find unreasonable the contracting officer's request that, in order to preserve the integrity of the procurement system, the KBR program manager be isolated from these competitions. Nor can we find the agency's subsequent determination that KBR be disqualified from these competitions to be unreasonable, in light of KBR's refusal to isolate its program manager from these competitions when requested to do so by the agency. That is, although KBR complains that the agency's disqualification of KBR from these competitions was unduly severe, the record reflects that this action was taken by the agency only after KBR refused the agency's request to isolate the program manager. Given the circumstances, which include KBR's initial refusal to isolate its LOGCAP IV program manager from these open LOGCAP IV task order solicitations, we find the agency's elimination of KBR's proposals from these task order competitions to be reasonable and within the discretion granted to the contracting officer.

The protest is denied.

For much of the last eight years, KBR has been able to freely flaunt regulations and spit in the face of military officers with the expectation that it would be given a pass, and would continue to win contracts. The patient for this misbehavior seems to be running out, and now that KBR is more often being judged on what it does rather than who it knows, it is beginning to bleed just a little bit more with each failed protest that comes with a clear recounting of its business practices.

If you are, perhaps, ever wondering about the generic worth of tax dollars, consider the case of critical infrastructure that is not maintained. A 30-year-old gas line through Moldova blew on Wednesday, cratering the landscape and reducing gas delivery to the Balkans by 40%.

Infrastructure has, in many cases necessarily, been built in a bottlenecked fashion. Losing a bridge annihilates a commute, and losing a power system can leave a giant chunk of land in the dark. Recent history has taught us that even natural infrastructure, such as fisheries, can be destroyed via poor care.

Or, as I often say when asked why I generally approve of taxes, "I like roads."

al Jazeera article

The continued economic collapse and vapid denial of same in Zimbabwe has naturally led to the continuing cholera epidemic there, killing thousands and flooding the South African border with refugees. It also just as naturally leads to a horrible outcome that I must admit I hadn't thought of, even though it makes perfect sense - the prisons are becoming death camps. After all, why would you be feeding prisoners if you're not effectively feeding everyone else?

South African broadcaster SABC snuck cameras into the jail at Beitbridge, near the South African border, and filmed prisoners being kept under terrible conditions:

Former prisoners and human-rights groups have spoken of the poor conditions in Zimbabwe's prisons but this is the first such footage to be released, which Nare, the SABC producer, hopes will engender assistance.

Some of the prisoners are shown unable to bring food to their mouths and with bones prominent underneath the skin in the footage.

I think Nare is right here; talking about this situation may not have had an impact, but the pictures are undeniable.

al Jazeera article

Secretary of Defense Gates ruffled many feathers today when he proposed a 2010 DoD budget that would see significant restructuring of our military spending away from fetishized glamor projects that benefit specific defense contractors to rational choices that will help support our troops.

Specifically, Gates is proposed curtailing several programs that have seen major cost overruns and which do not address the kind of wars we find ourselves fighting, and is instead proposing expenditures to help make sure we have the appropriate manpower and equipment to actually win our wars. Most notable would be the closing out of the massively overinflated F-22 program, a reduction in missile defense, and the potential scrapping of a fleet of presidential helicopters. Money saved in these areas would instead go to acquiring littoral combat craft for the Navy, acquiring additional drones to provide necessary air support to our ground operations, and bolstering our military numbers by expanding the armed forces.

I've written before about problems in military procurement, as highlighted by the GAO in reports on poor planning and the resulting massive cost overruns. For years, military procurement has been treated as if each specific project were critical, so critical that any amount of cost and time overrun could be accepted. In contrast, Gates appears to be taking the tack that military capability in general is critical, and thus underperforming procurement efforts need to be scrapped in favor of things that we can actually deploy to support our troops.

One would imagine this would be appreciated by nominal conservatives, inasmuch as it's both patriotic and fiscally prudent. If a military project is so over-budget that we end up getting only 25% of the F-22s we projected, and years late at that, then clearly we are not supporting our troops and our national security by funneling more money down an endless hole.

Unfortunately, the response instead has been to put up a patriotic facade in the defense of cash money coming into home districts:

A bipartisan group of senators released a letter during Gates' announcement that urged him "not to allow deep cuts in U.S. missile defense programs that are critically important to protecting our homeland and our allies against the growing threat of ballistic missiles."

The letter was signed by both senators from Alaska -- Republican Lisa Murkowski and Democrat Mark Begich -- among others.

...and...

Georgia Republicans slammed President Obama for Gates' announcement about the phase-out of the F-22 Raptor, which is assembled in Cobb County, Georgia.

Rep. Tom Price, whose district includes the Raptor production facility, called the cut "outrageous" and said Obama's "priorities are deeply flawed." Georgia Sen. Saxby Chambliss said he was "disappointed" in the cuts and accused the administration of being "willing to sacrifice the lives of American military men and women for the sake of domestic programs."

Saxby Chambliss is a lying bastard. He doesn't care about the lives of members of our military. He cares that the bloated F-22 unit price is coming into his state. I'll go with Gates on this one - more soldiers on the ground and more drones in the air mean more dead terrorists and more live American troops. The F-22 is a fine piece of engineering, but it's not keeping our troops alive right now, and only the leverage of people like Chambliss, who value their patch of America more than American soldiers, let it bloat as much as it did.

Gates also announced that he would be shifting jobs away from private contractors to government employees, moving from a DoD workforce that is 39% private to the pre-Bush-administration level of 26%. As the GAO has highlighted, private contractors cost more than government employees. Despite the right-wing religious belief that private industry is always cheaper, the facts show us that this is frequently untrue.

Indeed, it's sickening how much this false belief undervalues the patriotism discount we receive every day from millions of government employees. After all, how much would you need to be paid to risk your life for no good reason? What if you were doing it to protect your country? It's this decision, repeated over and over again throughout the local, state, and federal government positions, that gets us skilled employees for much cheaper than we ever could from the private market.

We'll see how much of Gates' proposed budget makes it through the House and Senate intact. I encourage you to do what I'm doing, and write to your Representative and Senators to let them know that you support the Secretary of Defense in his efforts to make our military strong and effective.

Click here to contact your Senators

Click here to contact your Representatives

CNN article

If you're a typical American citizen, you're represented by one president, two senators, and one representative. Hopefully, you know who they are. Even if you do, you may not off the top of your head know how to contact them. Here's how to find out:

Click here to contact your representative

Click here to contact your senators

Click here to contact the president

It may or may not surprise you to know that there are a number of American journalists being held, most likely illegally, by foreign governments at the moment. Here's the rundown:

Roxana Saberi, who has worked for the BBC, NPR, and Fox News has been in detention in Iran for an ever-progressing series of charges that started at "buying alcohol," then transmuted into "working as a journalist without credentials" and is now "spying." Her parents recently traveled from the U.S. to see her (for 20 entire minutes, sadly). As for the spying charges, her lawyer can't comment yet because he hasn't been allowed to see the charges against Ms. Saberi.

More from the BBC on Roxana Saberi

At the same time, Euna Lee and Laura Ling from Current TV were recently detained by the North Korean government, as alluded to in this announcement in North Korean 'news' source KCNA. Ms. Lee and Ms. Ling were picked up near the North Korean border -- exactly where is a huge issue, as the North Korean official statement has them illegally entering the country, but a number of other sources suggest that North Korean soldiers crossed into Chinese territory to grab the two reporters.

More from the BBC on Euna Lee and Laura Ling

If you'd like to express your concern about the detention of American citizens by hostile nations, you can click here to write to your relevant politicians.

Late last year, AIDS profiteer Matthias Rath dropped his spurious libel suit against science columnist Ben Goldacre, who was fortunately backed by not only the ethics but also the money of the Guardian. Following Rath's rightful defeat, Goldacre was free to talk about Rath. Now, Goldacre has been able to publish the full version of his book Bad Science, including the chapter on Rath that the libel suit was meant to quash.

For everyone who missed out on that chapter in the hardcover edition, and for everyone generally who needs to learn about this story of a man willing to kill en masse to line his pockets, this chapter has been made available online under a creative commons license, meaning it can be redistributed and reposted.

So I've done that. Click through to the extended to learn the full, factual, researched story about Rath and his deadly scheme.

As I mentioned before, American journalist Roxana Saberi is being put on trial in Iran, ostensibly for being an American spy. When last we checked in, her lawyer hadn't been allowed to see the specific charges against her; now the (closed) trial has begun, with a verdict expected in a couple weeks.

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has demanded her release.

"That a government expresses an opinion without seeing the indictment is laughable," he said.

Presumably, given that the general charge is spying on our behalf, our government is actually in a position to evaluate the indictment even without seeing the specifics.

Once again, I suggest you contact your political representatives about this issue.

BBC article

Yesterday was "stupid privilege day", e.g. "tax protest day." Rather than write a lot about it myself, let me defer to a coherent writeup on why this is foolish:

There were some protests today all over the US, orchestrated by an outfit called "FreedomWorks." I heard one guy on the radio saying that he objected to paying taxes when he "doesn't get anything for his money."

I guess clean water, food that isn't full of mercury, highways, national defense, buildings that don't fall down, medicare (so you don't have to pay all your parents' medical bills when they have a triple bypass), social security (so your parents don't have to eat dog food) , kids toys that aren't coated in lead paint, breathable air (because we don't put lead in our gasoline anymore), cars that don't kill you (because the inside is all chrome which looks great but stabs you in the face when there's an accident), are worthless. I almost forgot-- storm drains and sewers that don't dump raw sewage into your work parking lot when it rains.

We've already seen the phenomenon of people who move to new communities with a lower tax rate and then complain vociferously when (1) the schools are bad and (2) the fire department can't save them from fire. Consider what your life would be like without roads, clean water, police, clean food, and the Federally subsidized research that made computers and modern medicine possible. If you're fine with giving up all of that, then I'm cool with you wanting to pull back on your taxes. We'll make a little extranational enclave for you where there's none of that wasteful government spending.

I hear there's a nice one near the Gulf of Aden.

This has been an active week vis-a-vis Russia news, with three worthy items.

First, current Russian president (and suspected Putin puppet) Dmitry Medvedev made minor waves by giving his first presidential interview to the Novaya Gazeta, an opposition newspaper that has had a number of its reporters murdered out from under them, notably including Anna Politkovskaya, who reported on Russian abuses in Chechnya. Novaya Gazeta is tracking the murder trial here, including the many unanswered questions associated with Ms. Politkovskaya's treatment by the Russian government in the years preceding her murder.

More on the interview here and here and, if you can read Russian, the actual interview is, of course, at Novaya Gazeta itself.

On a related note, the Russian government announced that it is officially ending "counter-terrorism operations" in the much-bombarded republic of Chechnya. This is seen as largely a symbolic change at this point, as Chechen separatists have been kept mostly under wraps since 2004. That said, one might wonder if perhaps they'll be more active as security relaxes. More on that here and here.

Finally, the Russian government has protested as a "provocation" planned joint military exercises between NATO and Georgian troops. The official NATO word is that no heavy equipment will be involved, and this is basically training to cooperate on a UN-style policing exercise. The Russian statement counters that even if the exercise was planned before the Ossetian war, it's not reasonable to have a military exercise so soon after a conflict. I might request that NATO not commit to joint exercises with Georgia until the stupid people have left their executive positions in the Georgian government, but I'm not hopeful about that. More on that here and here.

Just ahead of a routine bout of crazy, President Ahmadinejad of Iran called for measures to be taken to ensure the rights of recently convicted Iranian-American journalist Roxana Saberi:

"Please take the necessary measures to ensure that the process of examining the charges against the aforementioned individuals are being carried out carefully and fairness, justice and regulations are observed," he wrote in the letter to prosecutors.

Given the rapid upscaling and risible nature of the charges levied against Ms. Saberi, some on the outside are taking this as a sign that she's the fulcrum of a power struggle within Iran. The concern is that the case has been overtaken by hardliners within Iran who are attempting to alienate the United States during the beginning of a time of rapprochement between the two nations.

Following this call, Ayatollah Shahrudi, the head of the Iranian judiciary, called for a "quick and fair" appeal for Ms. Saberi. We can hope that this is a code for the reorientation of this misguided trial such that the bogus charges against Ms. Saberi can be reversed. We can't assume that's the case, however, and it's hard to say what anything we see from outside Iran means until Ms. Saberi and her parents are allowed to leave.

BBC article

Some people need to have their noses broken.

In response to the release of Bush-era memos that reveal that we did torture captives (which we knew) a lot (which we didn't necessarily know), various people have suggested that this fundamentally weakens our position as a nation.

In contrast, I'd suggest that torturing people in direct violation of our own morals and ethics (and probably the eight amendment to the U.S. Constitution in the Bill of Rights) has severely undermined our position in this ongoing conflict with violent extremists. It is, after all, hard to successfully promote the U.S. as a leader in morals and democracy when we're willing to toss that and lie about doing so.

What brings me back to the title of this post is Peggy Noonan's solution to the whole problem of torture - ignore it.

"It's hard for me to look at a great nation issuing these documents and sending them out to the world and thinking, oh, much good will come of that."

"Some things in life need to be mysterious. Sometimes you need to just keep walking."

Do we suppose Ms. Noonan would appreciate the mysteries of life if someone kidnapped her and tortured her repeatedly? I'm going to guess no. Just as I'm going to guess that Noonan, like many other people who blithely call for the torture of others have shied or even run away from personal violence all their lives.

Or, in simpler terms, if someone broke her nose, she'd be panicking and calling the cops, her lawyer, and anyone else she could to help her out. She certainly wouldn't want to just "keep walking."

One of our collaborators from Mexico was unable to travel for a meeting today as he has a cough, and thus is banned from flying out of the country.

There are now about 150 deaths attributed to the current wave of flu in Mexico. Cases have also been identified in Spain, Scotland, and, naturally, the United States. So far, there have been no deaths in the United States. The World Health Organization is rating this flu at an alert level of 3, which means they don't think it is readily transmitted between humans. You can read more from the WHO about this influenza outbreak here. WHO is not yet recommending restrictions on trade or travel; the U.S. government has suggested that nonessential travel to and from Mexico be avoided for now.

al Jazeera article
BBC article

I just added al Arabiya to my RSS reader and was immediately rewarded with a story that is a ridiculous confluence of ideology, trademark violation, and agricultural trade.

"Panic" (to quote the somewhat wry coverage from al Arabiya) erupted in Iranian markets after people realized that traders were selling oranges labeled with an Israeli brand. A first-blush glance suggested they'd made their way to Iran from Israel via China, but a deeper look, including some checking in Israel, suggests that the oranges may well have been grown somewhere else and then had fake labels slapped on them, effectively counterfeiting a prestigious Israeli brand. This reasonably plausible suggestion has not stopped the relevant Iranian authorities from issuing default rabidity in response to this finding:

In an interview with Mehr, the head of the fruit and vegetable distribution organization in Tehran called the incident worrying and said the "violators" should be dealt with.

He added that his organization will follow the issue closely and will not allow those who want to make a profit ignore “religious and revolutionary learning.”

al Arabiya article

The default message of the recent discussion of piracy adjacent to Somalia is that Somalia as a whole is in disarray. Certainly, it's true that the recognized national Somali government is nominal, having no influence in Mogadishu and no ability to police the land or maritime borders of the country. This, in turn, has facilitated the current piracy epidemic in the Gulf of Aden.

In that light, this BBC article about a militia from Puntland going after pirates sounds like a story of just a grassroots effort from annoyed locals, but for a cryptic mention of "local authorities" to whom captured pirates must be passed over.

So who are the "local authorities" here?

It turns out that the Puntland region has a fairly coherent - one might almost say nation-like - government. Established as an independent body from the national Somali government in 1998, the government of Puntland maintains a web site, has a parliament, and is building an international airport in Bosasso with the work being done by an Italian contractor. They even have a working election process, with the current president, Dr. Abdirahman Farole, having won the presidency via an election in early 2008.

In fact, if you recall the 2007 American shelling of Islamist positions in Puntland, you may not have known at the time (I certainly didn't) that the Islamists in question had already been engaged in combat by the local Puntland government, who weren't pleased to have them there either.

The UN has suggested in the past that the Puntland government shares some responsibility for the piracy issues in the Gulf. I suspect that it's more an issue of resources. It's logical for the government of Puntland to support local efforts to prevent victimization of fishing vessels coming out of Puntland. However, faced with the option of putting resources into protecting first-world cargo traffic or supporting airport construction and protecting their fisheries, it's not shocking that they decided to take care of their own first. So, in a sense, that's support by inaction, but in another sense, we don't ask that North Carolina police the behavior of its citizens when they go to the beaches of Miami. If Miami happened to be a failed state, the issue would be theirs.

The government of Puntland is not currently making a bid for full formal independence from Somalia as a whole, although they did want a place in UN-led talks that broke down last year. These talks framed the question of Somali national rule as a duality between the marginalized yet internationally recognized Somali government and the Islamic groups that held sway in Mogadishu, completely sidestepping any possible interaction with the reasonably functional governing body of the Puntland region.

It's curious that we don't offer more assistance to working governments in a region where we're concerned about state failure. Clearly, if we're bent on the policy decision of unrestricted support for the nominal Somali government, they can nix any support for Puntland merely by saying, "No," but it's problematic that in media discussions of issues concerning Somalia that we don't acknowledge that parts of the country may be working significantly better than the country as a whole. Garowe is no more Mogadishu than Los Angeles is Detroit.

An interesting precedent concerning seized land came from the European Court of Justice this week, following a series of judgment and appeals dealing with the sale of seized property in North Cyprus.

A Greek Cypriot, one Meletis Apostolides, sued a couple from the United Kingdom for the return of his land in North Cyprus, land that Apostolides was forced to vacate when North Cyprus fell under de facto Turkish Cypriot rule during the 1974 partition of the island. Following an initial judgment in his favor from a court in Nicosia (where Apostolides won by default, as the couple in question did not show up to fight his claim), a challenge was made against the claim on several bases, including the idea that the court who issued the original ruling (a Republic of Cyprus court in the south) had no jurisdiction, and that the claims were fundamentally unenforceable.

The Court of Justice has ruled that the Act of Accession that accepted the Republic of Cyprus (the southern part of the island) suspends application of EU law in the north of the island...but that this suspension does not apply to Mr. Apostolides, as he made his claim in a court on the south of the island, where the law applies. Or, to put it another way, it's not the location of the object of the claim that matters, but the location of the claimant. The Court has also ruled that having some or all of a claim be effectively unenforceable does not mean that the claim itself is not valid. Thus, while the authorities of the Republic of Cyprus can't make it to the location of his property to actually evict the UK citizens occupying it, the judgment that they should be evicted is valid. This is important, since there apparently are financial penalties that Mr. Apostolides sued for as well, and these are enforceable via the mechanisms of the European Community.

There are other components to this ruling, but the upshot is that if if you are a member of the EU, you can effectively sue another member of the EU for damages even if you can't act on the property involved. We might wonder how many other cases this would apply to, and whether other courts might look to this example in deciding rulings concerning seized land and its later resale.

Which, as you might imagine, has many applications worldwide.

You can find the summary of the judgment on this page at the moment; it's Number 39 on April 28, 2009.

al Jazeera article

(This is a reposting, with permission, of an article written by attorney Timothy Y. Fong. I thought it was worth disseminating.)

I'm tired of hacks talking about laws regarding torture. I watched an interview that John Stewart did with Cliff May about torture. May is the head of a neo-con group, the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. May insisted that any Geneva Convention rules against torture were irrelevant because the Geneva Convention does not apply (in his view) to captured high level Al Qaeda operatives. Once he said that he brushed off international law restrictions against torture. This was disingenuous. It was disingenuous because even if the Geneva Conventions do not apply to high level Al Qaeda operatives, the Convention Against Torture [CAT] certainly does.

The CAT is a treaty that bars torture of anyone. The US actually ratified the CAT during the administration of the notoriously liberal President Ronald Reagan. Article 2, Section 1 specifically bars torture:

Each State Party shall take effective legislative, administrative, judicial or other measures to prevent acts of torture in any territory under its jurisdiction.

The CAT does not allow any exceptions for exigent circumstances.

Now, some sharp commentators will doubtlessly point out that in many cases treaties are ratified by the US Government, but do not have force of law within the United States without implementing legislation. That is true-- and the US has implemented the CAT through 18 U.S.C. § 2340. Federal law bars torture by any American, regardless of location. Individuals who torture can be punished by death. Conspiracy to commit torture that results in death can result in a life sentence. Torture that does not result in death can result in a fine and/or a 20 year prison term.

So what does this mean? When May claims that the Geneva Conventions do not apply to captured high level terrorists, he may be speaking correctly. However he is misleading people because it makes it seem as if there are no international treaty obligations against torture. There are, and they are embodied by the CAT. Furthermore, federal law forbids torture by any American of any person for any reason.

There are only two reasons that May does not discuss the fact that the CAT and federal law forbid torture. There are two possible reasons-- incompetence or an intent to deceive. If he is speaking in public about torture and our obligations, then it is difficult to believe that he has not, during his preparations and research, run across the Convention Against Torture. For example, a basic human rights cram text, International Human Rights in a Nutshell. This is available online for $27.44 and at any law school library. Presumably the President of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies has access to a law library, or has friends who do. Failing that, one would think that his expense account would cover ordering a book that costs less than $30.00. I could understand if overnight shipping might break his expense account and be considered a needless extravagance, but surely he could afford the book if shipped via super saver shipping. Now perhaps the neo-con movement has fallen on such hard times that May cannot afford to buy the book via Amazon. Then perhaps he could have availed himself of a Google search. A quick search for [torture human rights laws] on Google brought up, as the fourth link the HREA website, which discusses, as the fourth paragraph the convention against torture. Maybe the neocon movement is having such a hard time that they can't even afford an internet connection. If so, I can almost feel bad for them.

What seems a lot more likely is that May is intentionally obfuscating the fact that international law does bar torture. That is intellectually dishonest and undermines his case. It is dishonest because the statement can be argued to be true, i.e. some people believe that the Geneva Conventions won't apply to high level Al Qaeda prisoners. It implies that there is no international obligation barring the US from torturing a high level Al Qaeda prisoner. However, as shown above, the CAT does strictly bar torture. Thus, if May knows about the CAT (and if he is in any way competent, then he must know about it) then he is willfully deceiving Americans about our international obligations.

He is either incompetent or a liar. Either way he is a hack.

So the next time someone who watches too much TV snidely tells you that "well the Geneva Conventions don't apply to terrorists," just tell him that the Convention Against Torture certainly does.