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Candidate-Specific Super PACs Offer End Run For Maxed-Out Donors: Study

2011-10-04T16:49:00Z

WASHINGTON -- Further indicating that candidate-specific super PACs are being used to end-run traditional campaign contribution limits, a new analysis finds that Restore Our Future, the super PAC formed to support former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney's candidacy for president, is being primarily funded by donors who have already maxed out on direct contributions to Romney's campaign.

The analysis confirms a separate analysis conducted by ABC News in August that examined donations to the Romney campaign and Restore Our Future, as well as to President Barack Obama's reelection effort and the Obama-supporting Priorities USA Action super PAC.

As a result of the 2010 Supreme Court Citizens United decision, super PACs can now accept unlimited corporate and personal contributions. They are legally required to be independent of candidate committees, whose contributions are capped.

But the unexpected and meteoric rise of candidate-specific super PACs -- which nevertheless claim to be independent of those candidates' campaigns -- has set watchdogs howling.

A new analysis by Democracy 21, the Campaign Legal Center and the Center for Responsive Politics concludes that 55 of the 75 individuals who donated to Restore Our Future in the second quarter of 2011 also contributed to Romney's presidential campaign committee. Almost all of them had already given $2,500 to the Romney campaign, the maximum amount allowable for an individual donor. These donors then turned around and gave as much as $1 million each to the ostensibly independent super PAC.

The analysis found that double-dipping donors represented almost three-quarters of all Restore Our Future's individual donors.

The analysis also found that nine individuals donated to President Obama's reelection campaign as well as to Priorities USA Action, the super PAC founded by former Obama staffers, in that same time period.

These nine -- out of 24 total donors to the super PAC -- were responsible for $2.6 million in donations to Priorities USA Action -- or 82 percent of the total money the group raised.

"The presidential candidate super PAC exists for one reason: to serve as an arm of the presidential campaign for big-money donors to launder unlimited contributions to support the presidential candidate and thereby evade and eviscerate the contribution limits for a presidential candidate enacted to prevent corruption," Fred Wertheimer, president of Democracy 21 and a longtime champion of campaign finance reform, said in a statement. He called for the Federal Elections Commission to treat campaign and candidate-specific super PACs as "in reality, one entity to which the contribution limits applicable to a single federal candidate should apply."

Paul S. Ryan, FEC Program Director at the Campaign Legal Center, pointed out in his statement that the "revolving door of staff between candidates and the Super PACs supporting them makes clear the close relationships between the two. The Super PACs are simply shadow candidate committees. Million-dollar contributions to the Super PACs pose just as big a threat of corruption as would million-dollar contributions directly to candidates."

The watchdog groups' analysis was based on only an early trickle of data from the super PACs, which report semi-annually in off election years. Several more candidate-specific super PACs, including one supporting Texas Gov. Rick Perry, were formed after the June 2011 reporting deadline.

Candidate-specific super PACs are shattering all sorts of fundraising precedents and records, with the one supporting Perry, for instance, planning on spending $55 million to help him secure the Republican presidential nomination.

Right Under Their Noses: Political Groups Are Flouting IRS Rules To Keep Donors Secret, Reformers Say

2011-09-28T16:10:00Z

Good-government advocates on Wednesday asked the Internal Revenue Service to investigate four groups they say are blatantly flouting the law by claiming tax-exempt status as "social welfare" groups when they are in fact overtly political organizations.

The so-called c4 designation, in addition to exempting organizations from taxes, also allows groups to keep their donors secret -- even while accepting unlimited funds.

The Wednesday letter, sent by Democracy 21 and the Campaign Legal Center, represents the latest of many attempts by reformers to rein in the extraordinary growth of c4 groups, which in the 2010 election cycle began flooding the political landscape with massive amounts of money from people or organizations who for whatever reason didn't want their political involvement to be made public.

The letter called out one liberal group (Priorities USA), two conservative groups (Crossroads GPS and American Action Network) and a pro-third-party group (Americans Elect) for making specious claims -- such as that as long as they only spend 49 percent or less of their total expenditures on explicitly campaign-related activity, they can still qualify as "social welfare" groups.

"Court decisions have established that in order to meet this requirement, section 501(c)(4) organizations cannot engage in more than an insubstantial amount of any non-social welfare activity, such as directly or indirectly participating or intervening in
elections," the letter read.

The same reformers had previously asked the IRS to investigate Crossroads GPS, a group affiliated with Karl Rove.

Democracy 21 president Fred Wertheimer said the four groups were chosen this time around because "we had very significant public information about them." The letter summarized numerous news reports that describe their openly political agendas.

"We can't do everyone, and we think these are prime examples -- on the Democratic, Republican and independent side -- where the tax laws are being misused," Wertheimer said.

"We feel that it's pretty clear that these groups are not social welfare groups. We haven't seen, for example, Karl Rove spending too much time on social welfare activities."

Denial of c4 status would be a crushing blow to the finances of such organizations -- and would likely force them to reorganize under section 527 of the tax code. That section, explicitly for political groups, offers tax exemption -- but requires full disclosure of donors.

The two reform groups also asked the IRS in July to revise its regulations regarding eligibility for 501(c)(4) status.

Jonathan Collegio, spokesman for Crossroads GPS, was dismissive of the letter. "This is the fourth frivolous complaint in twelve months from a highly ideological group that wants to sic the IRS on its opponents," he said in a statement to reporters.

And he cited as examples of the group's "social welfare" activity its massive ad buys criticizing President Obama's jobs initiatives and government employee unions, supporting Republicans and opposing Democrats in 22 swing House districts, and calling for the repeal of health care legislation.

Crossroads GPS and its Super PAC affiliate, American Crossroads, recently announced a fundraising goal of $240 million to spend on the 2012 presidential election.

Priorities USA was launched by former Obama aides; the American Action network was launched by a prominent and wealthy group of GOP heavyweights.

Americans Elect, the fourth group, is seeking to gain a place on the 2012 ballot in all 50 states for a presidential candidate it intends to nominate through an open, online process. But as the Los Angeles Times noted in July, it "has been able to keep private its financiers, raising questions about what forces are driving the massive undertaking."

The IRS's only response on Wednesday was to state that "Federal law prohibits the IRS from discussing or commenting on any particular taxpayer situation or case."

Wertheimer said he has still not heard anything back from his earlier petitions.

"We feel it is essential for the IRS to get a handle on this. Because to allow groups to abuse the tax laws for political purposes completely undermines the credibility of the laws and of the IRS if it refuses to properly enforce them," he said.

And, he said: "We're going to keep the pressure on until they deal with it. "

But there are reasons to doubt the IRS will act. In August, a lawyer for progressive donors accused the IRS of buckling under political pressure when it shut down an investigation into donor misconduct after six Republican members of the Senate Finance Committee said the agency's investigation was spurious and politically motivated.

Earlier on HuffPost:

The Great Iraqi Giveaway: Billions In Bases, Equipment Being Handed Over

2011-09-26T11:10:00Z

WASHINGTON -- With just over three months until the last U.S. troops are currently due to leave Iraq, the Department of Defense is engaged in a mad dash to give away things that cost U.S. taxpayers billions of dollars to buy and build.

The giveaways include enormous, elaborate military bases and vast amounts of military equipment that will be turned over to the Iraqis, mostly just to save the expense of bringing it home.

"It's all sunk costs," said retired Army Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton, who oversaw the training of Iraqi soldiers from 2003 to 2004. "It's money that we spent and we're not going to recoup."

There were 505 U.S. military bases and outposts in Iraq at the height of operations, said Col. Barry Johnson, a spokesman for U.S. forces in Iraq. Only 39 are still in U.S. hands -- but that includes each of the largest bases, meaning the most significant handovers are yet to come.

Those bases didn't come cheap. Construction costs exceeded $2.4 billion, according to an analysis of Pentagon annual reports by the Congressional Research Service. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers alone was responsible for $1.9 billion in base construction contracts between 2004 and 2010, a spokesman told HuffPost.

Rather than strip those bases clean and ship everything home, Defense Department officials tell The Huffington Post that over 2.4 million pieces of equipment worth a total of at least $250 million -- everything from tanks and trucks to office furniture and latrines -- have been given away to the Iraqi government in the past year, with the pace of transfers expected to increase dramatically in the coming months.

THE U.S. BASES

The most colossal relics of the U.S. invasion of Iraq will be the outsize military bases the Bush administration began erecting not long after the invasion, under the never explicitly stated assumption that Iraq would become the long-term staging area for U.S. forces in the region.

As a recent Congressional Research Service report noted, the Department of Defense "built up a far more extensive infrastructure than anticipated to support troops and equipment in and around Iraq and Afghanistan."

The biggest push came in 2005, with over $1.2 billion in base-building contracts signed in that fiscal year alone, according to CRS.

"How did we come to be wasting that much money?" asked Heather Hurlburt, executive director of the progressive National Security Network. The answer, she said, is that dissenting voices weren't heeded when Bush administration officials were pushing their hugely overambitious agenda.

"The problem that is often cited in the run-up to the war continued afterward," she said. "The political and media elite weren't paying attention."

It wasn't until late in Bush's second term that "cooler heads prevailed," Hurlburt said, and it became apparent that there was no political will in either country for the U.S. to keep permanent bases in Iraq, and therefore no need to spend so much to build them.

But by then, the plans had already been set in motion. As Stars and Stripes reported last year, major construction continued even after November 2008, when then-President George W. Bush and Iraqi officials signed a security agreement calling for all U.S. troops to leave Iraq by the end of 2011.

Most of the $2.4 billion was spent building about a dozen huge outposts that, in addition to containing air strips and massive fortifications also have all the comforts of home. The Al-Asad Airfield in Anbar province, for example, covers 25 square miles -- about the size of Boulder, Colo. -- and is known as "Camp Cupcake" due to its amenities.

The 15-square-mile Joint Base Balad, as Whitney Terrell wrote earlier this year for Slate, is "home to three football-field-sized chow halls, a 25-meter swimming pool, a high dive, a football field, a softball field, two full-service gyms, a squash court, a movie theater, and the U.S. military's largest airfield in Iraq."

Despite the media's elegiac obituaries for these major bases -- like the prematurely named "Camp Victory", with its palace, its lake, and its giant, killer carp -- the fact is that not one major base has yet been evacuated.

And it's not clear just what the Iraqis will do with some of those bases, once they get them.

One U.S. officer whose unit turned over a military outpost in a Baghdad neighborhood to the Iraqi Army in 2009 told the Washington Post that Iraqi soldiers looted it within hours of the U.S. departure. "When we returned to the outpost the next morning, most of the beds had already been taken, wood walls and framing had been pulled and several air-conditioning units had been removed from the walls, leaving gaping holes," the officer told the Post. Weeks later, he added, the power generator the Americans had left behind was barely working.

One Iraqi entrepreneur indicated to NPR last year that there's a thriving black market in U.S. items. "The Americans turn over every base to the Iraqi army and police -- and they are all thieves," he said.

SO MUCH EQUIPMENT

Much of the U.S.'s most lethal and valuable military equipment is being shipped out of Iraq, in one of the military's biggest logistical efforts in history. Johnson, the spokesman for U.S. forces in Iraq, said that 1.5 million items have been removed in the past 12 months, with about 800,000 to go. "It's an enormous task, but we have no major concerns on our ability to meet the necessary timelines." Johnson wrote in an email to HuffPost.

But whenever a big army moves out, there's always a lot left behind -- what Stephen Biddle, a defense expert at the Council on Foreign Relations likens to an "iron mountain."

The Pentagon can legally transfer four different categories of equipment to the Iraqi government: "excess personal property," such as generators and mattresses, air conditioners and latrines; excess defense articles; sales from stock, including spare parts and ammunition; and non-excess military items deemed particularly useful for the Iraqi security forces.

Various Department of Defense officials provided not entirely consistent data on exactly how much has been given away thus far in each category. But the man in charge, Maj. Gen. Thomas Richardson, the chief logistics officer in Iraq, told reporters last month that U.S. forces had given away equipment with a fair market value of $247 million between Sept. 1, 2010, and August of this year -- on top of items worth $157 million that had been transferred before the withdrawal officially started.

The lion's share of donated items falls into the category of excess, non-military property. Major Kimbia Rey, a spokesperson for the U.S. forces in Iraq, told The Huffington Post this week that more than 2.4 million such items have been transferred to the government of Iraq since last September.

Richardson explained that much of that category consists of what they call "FOB in a box." When the Iraqis take over a Forward Operating Base, he said, they also get the things that go with it, such as containerized housing units, water and fuel tanks, air conditioning units, generators, refrigerators, porta-johns, beds and mattresses, office equipment, fences, dining facilities and so on.

According to Lt. Col Melinda F. Morgan, a Pentagon spokeswoman, some 12,490 excess defense items worth $70.5 million have been turned over to the Iraqis, with 7,000 more, worth about $40 million, to go. That category includes such things as older versions of weapons, vehicles, and body armor.

Finally, U.S. forces have also given the Iraqis 1,251 non-excess military items worth $47.7 million, Morgan said. That category includes such items as up-armored Humvees and 50-caliber machine guns, Richardson said.

All of the dollar figures are for what the military calls "fair market value"; the purchase price of those items could, of course, have been much higher.

And Morgan noted that the "heaviest volume of future property transfers" is expected to occur between September and December of this year, although the "quantity and value" of what is still to come has not yet been determined.

Indeed, a Government Accountability Office report issued earlier this month raised concerns that military officials will suddenly find a lot of equipment they didn't expect -- right at the last minute, just when everybody's leaving.

After one of the largest base transitions to date, the GAO reported, "officials said that they were surprised at the amount of unaccounted-for equipment that was left over at the end of the transition process." Senior military officials told the GAO they were particularly worried that unexpected or abandoned contractor equipment -- including expensive and much-in-demand materiel-handling equipment, like forklifts and pallet trucks -- would suddenly show up "likely at the last minute."

Some equipment has simply piled up in Iraq since combat operations began in 2003 and may not be properly logged, the GAO warned, pointing out, for example, that "units sometimes turn in such equipment without paperwork and have even removed identifying markings such as serial numbers to avoid retribution."

And while leaving the equipment in Iraq, especially if it's worn out or particularly bulky, is much cheaper and more expedient than shipping it home, there's no getting around the enormous expense of purchasing it in the first place -- and that some of it is precisely the kind of equipment that was in such desperately short supply when state National Guards tried to respond to domestic natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina in 2005, or the Greensburg, Kansas, tornado in 2007.

Hurlburt's concern is not so much that the U.S. is giving away the bases and the equipment, but that all these things that so much money was spent on aren't necessarily going to do their new owners much good. "At least, you would like if we were leaving them there, they would be useful to Iraqis," she said.

And it's an awful lot of stuff. "I'm thinking about the size of what was wasted there, and thinking about how what we spent in Iraq was all borrowed," she said. "In a crazy way, what we left in Iraq was our good credit rating."

RELATED: HuffPost's Sept. 16 story, "Massive U.S. Embassy In Iraq Will Expand Further As Soldiers Leave."

* * * * *

Dan Froomkin is senior Washington correspondent for The Huffington Post. You can send him an email, bookmark his page; subscribe to his RSS feed, follow him on Twitter, friend him on Facebook, and/or become a fan and get email alerts when he writes.

Earlier on HuffPost:

The Great Iraqi Giveaway: Billions In Bases, Equipment Being Handed Over

2011-09-26T11:10:00Z

The giveaways include enormous, elaborate military bases and vast amounts of military equipment that will be turned over to the Iraqis, mostly just to save the expense of bringing it home.

"It's all sunk costs," said retired Army Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton, who oversaw the training of Iraqi soldiers from 2003 to 2004. "It's money that we spent and we're not going to recoup."

THE U.S. BASES

The biggest push came in 2005, with over $1.2 billion in base-building contracts signed in that fiscal year alone, according to CRS.

"The problem that is often cited in the run-up to the war continued afterward," she said. "The political and media elite weren't paying attention."

And it's not clear just what the Iraqis will do with some of those bases, once they get them.

SO MUCH EQUIPMENT

But whenever a big army moves out, there's always a lot left behind -- what Stephen Biddle, a defense expert at the Council on Foreign Relations likens to an "iron mountain."

All of the dollar figures are for what the military calls "fair market value"; the purchase price of those items could, of course, have been much higher.

RELATED: HuffPost's Sept. 16 story, "Massive U.S. Embassy In Iraq Will Expand Further As Soldiers Leave."

* * * * *

Earlier on HuffPost:

Pentagon Can't Follow Its Own Money, Report Finds

2011-09-23T20:49:57Z

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has been predicting doom should his department be forced to make considerable budget cuts, but a GAO report released Friday points out that the Pentagon can't say for certain where all the money it's getting now is really going.

The Government Accountability Office has been trying to call attention for nearly two decades to the fact that the Department of Defense has been unable to produce auditable financial statements -- in other words, is so big, so complex and so lacking in financial controls that it cannot account for how it spends its funds.

In testimony submitted to the House Armed Services Committee on Friday, senior GAO official Asif A. Khan pulled no punches, concluding that: "Pervasive deficiencies in financial management processes, systems and controls, and the resulting lack of data reliability continue to impair management's ability to assess the resources needed for DOD operations; track and control costs; ensure basic accountability; anticipate future costs; measure performance; maintain funds control; and reduce the risk of loss from fraud, waste and abuse."

President Barack Obama and Congress agreed two months ago to cut about $350 billion in projected growth from the defense budget over the next 10 years. But according to that same agreement, if Congress' joint deficit super committee fails to come up with a popular way to cut $1.3 trillion more from the deficit over the next decade, automatic cuts are scheduled to kick in, including another $500 billion or more from defense spending.

Panetta has described the so-called trigger as a "doomsday mechanism." Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, testified on Thursday that a cutback that large "has a chance of breaking us."

Major defense contractors have warned that such cuts would cause the country to "cede global leadership in a time of increasing threats" -- this despite the fact that the U.S. spends more on defense than the next 17 top-spending countries combined.

Khan, in his testimony, said DOD's inability to assess needed resources, track and control costs, anticipate future costs, measure performance, or reduce the risk of losses results in billions of dollars of waste.

The Commission on Wartime Contracting concluded three weeks ago that contract waste and fraud in Iraq and Afghanistan alone amounted to somewhere between $30 and $60 billion.

The level of cuts that the defense establishment is decrying would actually bring the Pentagon's base budget back to the same level it was in 2007, which was then at a 16-year high in constant dollars. And the cuts would be actually be less than what was recommended by several recent deficit-reduction proposals. The co-chairs of Obama's fiscal commission proposed $100 billion in annual defense cuts; the Bipartisan Policy Center's deficit commission called for $1 trillion in savings through a five-year freeze on defense spending; a bipartisan group of iconoclasts in Congress led by Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) listed cuts totalling nearly $1 trillion over 10 years; and just last week, two grassroots political organizations -- one from the right, one from the left -- found agreement over $429 billion in cuts that could be made by addressing outdated or ineffective military programs.

WATCH Defense Secretary Leon Panetta Discusses Military Budget Cuts

*************************

HUNKER IN THE BUNKER: U.S. Plan For Iraq Is To Fall Back To The Mother Of All Embassies

2011-09-16T19:43:00Z

WASHINGTON -- American combat troops in Iraq may be heading to the exits -- or not -- but the U.S. government's enormously expensive intervention there is hardly coming to an end.

In a telling sign of how dangerous and chaotic Iraq remains more than eight years after President George W. Bush launched the war against Saddam Hussein, U.S. diplomats, military advisers and other officials are planning to fall back to the gargantuan embassy in Baghdad -- a heavily fortified, self-contained compound the size of Vatican City.

The embassy compound is by far the largest the world has ever seen, at one and a half square miles, big enough for 94 football fields. It cost three quarters of a billion dollars to build (coming in about $150 million over budget). Inside its high walls, guard towers and machine-gun emplacements lie not just the embassy itself, but more than 20 other buildings, including residential quarters, a gym and swimming pool, commercial facilities, a power station and a water-treatment plant.

Yet the embassy is turning out to be too small for the swelling retinue of gunmen, gardeners and other workers the State Department considers necessary to provide security and "life support" for the sizable group of diplomats, military advisers and other executive branch officials who will be taking shelter there once the troops withdraw from the country.

The number of personnel under the authority of the U.S. ambassador to Iraq will swell from 8,000 to about 16,000 as the troop presence is drawn down, a State Department official told The Huffington Post. "About 10 percent would be core programmatic staff, 10 percent management and aviation, 30 percent life support contractors -- and 50 percent security," he said.

As part of that increase, the State Department will double its complement of security contractors -- fielding a private army of over 5,000 to guard the embassy and other diplomatic outposts and protect personnel as they travel beyond the fortifications, the official said. Another 3,000 armed guards will protect Office of Security Cooperation personnel, who are responsible for sales and training related to an estimated $13 billion in pending U.S. arms sales, including tanks, squadrons of attack helicopters and 36 F-16s.

Under the Status of Forces Agreement negotiated between Iraq and former President Bush in 2008 -- and, at least thus far, still in effect -- all U.S. troops are supposed to leave the country by the end of this year.

As of now, there are about 45,000 U.S. troops still in Iraq. Obama administration officials had been hoping the Iraqi government would allow at least 10,000 to remain past the end-of-the-year deadline. Earlier this month, however, they floated the idea of keeping only 3,000. But given the unpredictable nature of the fractured Iraqi leadership, nothing is certain.

As the Department of Defense pulls out and its spending drops, the State Department is expecting its costs to skyrocket. State asked Congress for $2.7 billion for its Iraqi operations in fiscal year 2011, and got $2.1 billion. It wants $6.2 billion for next year. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee estimates that State's plans will cost $25 to $30 billion over the next five years.

Patrick Kennedy, undersecretary of state for management, told the Commission on Wartime Contracting in June that State intends to pay $3 billion in the next five years on its major private security contracts alone.

While $6 billion a year might not seem like much compared to the estimated $806 billion in direct appropriations spent on the Iraq war and reconstruction thus far, that is still an enormous amount of money. Consider, for instance, that the State Department's total operating budget this year is about $14 billion.

Money isn't the only resource being drained by Iraq. The toll on the diplomatic corps is substantial.

In addition to staffing the embassy in Baghdad, the department intends to have more than 1,000 people on staff at each of its two consulates, making them far larger than all but the most important U.S. embassies around the world. Given the de facto partitioning of Iraq, one consulate, in Erbil, will essentially be an embassy to the Kurds; the other, in Basra, an embassy to the Shia -- and to the country's biggest oil fields.

Steve Kashkett, then the head of the American Foreign Service Association, complained at Hillary Clinton's very first town hall meeting as secretary of State that the cost of creating the largest diplomatic mission in U.S. history "has been to take people away from all of our other diplomatic missions around the world, which have been left understaffed and with staffing gaps." A Government Accountability Office report in 2009 concluded that filling the numerous positions in Iraq and Afghanistan meant that "key positions at other hardship posts remain vacant or are filled by officers who may lack the necessary experience to effectively perform their duties, potentially compromising State’s ability to advance U.S. international interests."

IS IT WORTH IT?

U.S. Ambassador to Iraq James Jeffrey testified on Capitol Hill in February that the State Department's plan is absolutely necessary to achieve key goals when it comes to diplomacy, economics, energy, security and rule of law. "To not finish the job now creates substantial risks of what some people call a Charlie Wilson's war moment in Iraq, with both the resurgence of al Qaeda and the empowering of other problematic regional players," he said.

Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), who fought the expansion of the embassy in the first place, told The Huffington Post he's been hearing similar arguments for eight years now -- and thinks Iraq isn't worth all this trouble.

"I don't know why that has to be one of our highest priorities," he said. "I think we've reached the point in Iraq where whatever we're spending money on, we're throwing good money after bad."

"I've been to that embassy," Leahy continued, "and I understand security concerns and all. But this is a small country. They can't even get their act together. A lot of people there see us as occupiers and wish we'd leave."

For Leahy, the continued spending spree in Iraq is also part of a larger complaint.

"We're told by a lot of the Republican party that we can't even get disaster relief unless we take it out of some other program in the United States, maybe education or health care or something like that," he said. "I think it's about time that we started thinking more about money for Americans, more than we do for Iraq or Afghanistan. It's upside down."

Leahy stopped short of definitively calling for a smaller State Department footprint in Iraq. "I'm not exactly sure what I'd do, other than to say I wish we'd never built it to begin with," he said.

But Peter Van Buren, a blogger and career Foreign Service employee who spent 2009 and 2010 leading two Provincial Reconstruction Teams in Iraq, told HuffPost it's time to retrench.

"I think what's important in this day and age -- particularly with the budget crisis in the United States and the need to convey a message to the Middle East that the United States seeks a relationship that isn't martial -- is to right-size the embassy in Iraq," he said. "That respects the fact that budgets are tight and sends the signal to the Middle East that we're not there as an occupying power."

Van Buren's book, "We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People" is set to be released in two weeks. In his experience, he said, the size and nature of the U.S. embassy compound is a major problem.

"By building a palace -- a fortress -- in the middle of their country, we're sending a message," he said. That message is: "We're still here and we're still running the show."

The U.S. needs to have an embassy in Baghdad to do what embassies normally do, Christopher A. Preble, vice president for defense and foreign policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, told HuffPost. But, he added, "Having an embassy as large as the one that we have suggests that the United States Government is intending something much more than that."

The need for extensive security is certainly real. In his most recent quarterly report in July, Stuart W. Bowen, the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR) wrote that "Iraq remains an extraordinarily dangerous place to work. It is less safe, in my judgment, than 12 months ago."

But in Van Buren's view, the size of the embassy is overkill. "It's a fortress designed to keep both people and reality out," he said.

University of Michigan professor and Middle East blogger Juan Cole said the U.S. embassy in Iraq is "emblematic of the entire way of thinking of this enterprise: From the beginning, the Iraq war was hubris."

A COMPOUND PROBLEM

Construction of the embassy began in 2005, and was troubled from the start. An October 2009 review from the State Department's inspector general recommended that of the $470 million in no-bid construction contracts the U.S. signed with the First Kuwaiti construction company, the department should ask for $132 million back, because of construction deficiencies, inadequate quality control and other problems. There were even allegations that the construction company engaged in human trafficking as it assembled its large, third-country national workforce.

Some cost overruns were not the contractor's fault, however; they were a function of the naivete of the original embassy designers, who both expected diplomats to move to Baghdad with their families and that they would be able to shop at neighborhood grocery stores and eat at neighborhood restaurants. Instead, the designs had to be redrawn for a rocket- and mortar-proof cafeteria where compound residents could eat all their meals. A building intended for use as an international school was converted into offices.

And despite the compound's large size, a report in May from the State Department inspector general warned that there soon won't be enough beds to go around. State Department officials, the report said, are trying to get new leases on nearby properties currently being used by the military -- but are also considering "creative ways" to accommodate more personnel, including "hot bunking," having people share beds and sleep in shifts.

For security reasons, photography on the compound is banned except in a few rare circumstances (see the NBC video below). Its location is hardly a secret, though, and architectural designs for the compound have leaked out, but publicly available satellite imagery is either dated or blurred out.

Van Buren, who now has an administrative job at the State Department in Washington, recalled how shockingly out of place the embassy compound felt whenever he came in from his tours outside the fortified international zone.

"We lived in austere conditions, characterized by heat and dust," he said. But once past the compound's various security gates, "You feel like you've just stepped onto a fairly well funded American community college campus," he said. "It is one of the most surreal experiences that's available without pharmaceuticals."

The compound even had outdoor water-misters to keep people cool. "The people I was working with at the Provincial Reconstruction Teams were desperate for clean water -- and here we were spraying it in the air so that people could sit outside in the summer," he said.

"From the outside, all you see of course are walls," Van Buren added.

"It's a fortress," said Leahy. "I can't imagine how inviting that is to Iraqis."

But no matter how impregnable the embassy compound now seems, it may, in the long run, be doomed. "How long can this enormous fortress on foreign soil stand without at some point offending and angering the population?" asked retired Army Col. Douglas MacGregor, now a military analyst.

"These are supposed to be monuments to our determination and resolve to stay," he said. But, as with the British edifices built in India, he said, "at some point it's inevitable. At some point in the future, this little fortress America comes under siege."

WATCH rare video NBC shot from inside the U.S. embassy compound in 2009:

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Beyond Left And Right: Groups Offer $1 Trillion In Deficit Reduction

2011-09-15T16:32:00Z

WASHINGTON -- Two grassroots political organizations -- one from the right, one from the left -- are offering Capitol Hill an entirely different way of looking at deficit reduction.

Rather than seeing it in partisan terms, or simply as a zero-sum choice between raising taxes and slashing social programs, the two groups on Thursday released a list of $1 trillion in proposed cuts targeting wasteful spending, ineffective programs and massive giveaways to special interests.

The two organizations -- the public-interest group U.S. PIRG and the anti-tax National Taxpayers Union -- have agreed on more than 50 specific recommendations for the congressional super committee on deficit reduction. Taking those recommendations would get the committee 80 percent of the way to its target of reducing the federal deficit by $1.3 trillion over the next 10 years.

Given the two groups' constituencies, raising taxes and breaking social contracts were both off the table. Instead, they found agreement on what they describe as $215 billion in savings from ending wasteful subsidies, $429 billion from addressing outdated or ineffective military programs, $232 billion from improving program execution and government operations and $132 billion from reforms to entitlement programs.

Among the big-ticket items on their hit list are massive subsidies to agriculture, a program that underwrites international marketing for major U.S. corporations, high payments to certain classes of Medicare providers and weapons programs such as the F-35 joint strike fighters.

"What we're trying to demonstrate is that there is fair amount of policy agreement between left and right," said Andrew Moylan, NTU's vice president for public affairs.

So why were these groups able to find common ground in a way that politicians in Washington have not?

"We don't have to get elected. I think that's really the big difference here," Moylan said. "There are a lot of folks who are much more worried about their election prospects than they are about fixing the federal budget. It's sort of the age-old story in Washington, that politics tend to complicate the policy."

The joint report gores some of Capitol Hill's most active and well-financed oxen, including military contractors, agribusiness, oil and gas companies, pharmaceutical conglomerates and other multinational companies.

"Most of this stuff goes after the heart of what's been lobbied for over the last 30 years," said Gary Kalman, U.S. PIRG's federal legislative office director. For members of Congress, "these are the guys who fill their coffers."

"It's a classic case of concentrated benefits and diffused costs," said Moylan. "The folks who benefit from this are going to fight to the death." Although corporate tax breaks were off limits for NTU, subsidies, overpayments and wasteful contracts were fair game. "Any time we try to tackle some of these wasteful projects, we have these intense lobbying campaigns that crop up all around them," Moylan said.

Kalman said that the Supreme Court decisions that struck down historical limits on campaign spending will only increase the pressure on those seeking reelection to be responsive to corporate, rather than public, interests.

"We are about to see companies, corporations, industries, special interests, pile money into elections like I think we've not seen before," he said. And with the electorate as angry as it is over Congressional dysfunction, he said, "if you are in an incumbent, you have to be nervous no matter which side of the aisle you're on."

Budget cuts that look like low-hanging fruit from outside Washington seem "exactly the opposite" to members of Congress seeking reelection, Kalman said. "This is the hardest stuff to cut," he said. "It's way easier to cut Medicaid than it is to cut agricultural subsidies."

Kalman said he is hopeful that the super committee will take a different perspective. "There's going to be a spotlight focused on these guys," he said. "They're going to feel a lot of pressure to be the adults in the room."

And to that end, the joint report offers something else in addition to ideas -- something possibly even more useful. "These are grassroots organizations with hundreds of thousands of members," Kalman said. "And therefore you have political cover from across the political spectrum."

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Beyond Left And Right: Groups Offer $1 Trillion In Deficit Reduction

2011-09-15T16:32:00Z

WASHINGTON -- Two grassroots political organizations -- one from the right, one from the left -- are offering Capitol Hill an entirely different way of looking at deficit reduction.

"What we're trying to demonstrate is that there is fair amount of policy agreement between left and right," said Andrew Moylan, NTU's vice president for public affairs.

So why were these groups able to find common ground in a way that politicians in Washington have not?

*************************

Military Spending Costs Jobs, Doesn't Create Them, Anti-War Group Says

2011-09-12T20:45:00Z

The nation's biggest military contractors are descending on Capitol Hill this week to lobby against potential defense spending cuts they warn would produce "devastating job losses". But military spending is one of the least efficient ways the government can create jobs, according to a campaign the antiwar group Brave New Foundation launched on Monday.

By the group’s reckoning, "when you compare it to other ways of spending the money, every $1 billion spent for military purposes costs us, at minimum, 3,222 jobs." The group uses as a basis for its calculations a 2009 study by the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

"In assessing the impact of military spending on job opportunities in the U.S. economy, the relevant measure is how many jobs it creates per dollar of spending relative to various alternative spending targets," the report's co-author, economics professor Robert Pollin, said in a statement on Monday.

"By this standard, military spending does very poorly. It creates about 12,000 jobs per $1 billion in spending, compared with 17,000 for the green economy, 20,000 for health care and 29,000 for education. This means that when we spend $1 billion on the military rather than green investments, health care or education we are forfeiting between 5,000 and 17,000 jobs. Creating more job opportunities in this country therefore means moving money out of the military and into socially beneficial domestic spending.”

And keep in mind that when it comes to military spending, $1 billion is almost a rounding error. The Commission on Wartime Contracting concluded just last week that as much as $60 billion in taxpayer money has been lost to waste and fraud in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past decade.

A spokesman for the Aerospace Industries Association (AIA), the umbrella group coordinating this week's lobbying blitz, said he had no comment on the antiwar group's job figures. But he said his own group will be releasing some jobs data they have compiled at a press briefing on Wednesday.

The defense budget has already taken a $350 billion hit over the next decade -- relative to projected future growth -- as part of the debt ceiling agreement.

But if the 12-member supercommittee doesn't come up with a more palatable way to reduce the deficit by $1.5 trillion over 10 years, about $500 million more will automatically be cut from defense -- unless, of course, Congress votes to change the rules again.

The committee could also decide to make more reductions to military spending, although one member, Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) last week said he would quit the committee in protest if it came to that.

The potential for cuts that could actually reduce spending, rather than just tame its growth, has led big defense contractors to join forces in a messaging and advocacy blitz under the slogan "Second to None".

But even the most drastic defense budget cuts being considered wouldn't come anywhere close to dislodging the U.S. from its top spot in global defense spending.

This week is National Aerospace Week, and the industry has many Capitol Hill events planned. At one, Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) will be presented with the group's Aerospace Wings of Liberty Award. Murray is also a co-chair of the congressional supercommittee.

The group also has a luncheon with Murray on Wednesday, and will have an exhibit up in the Rayburn House Office Building on Thursday.

Military Spending Costs Jobs, Doesn't Create Them, Anti-War Group Says

2011-09-12T20:45:00Z

The defense budget has already taken a $350 billion hit over the next decade -- relative to projected future growth -- as part of the debt ceiling agreement.

The committee could also decide to make more reductions to military spending, although one member, Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) last week said he would quit the committee in protest if it came to that.

But even the most drastic defense budget cuts being considered wouldn't come anywhere close to dislodging the U.S. from its top spot in global defense spending.

The group also has a luncheon with Murray on Wednesday, and will have an exhibit up in the Rayburn House Office Building on Thursday.

9/11 Attacks Led To Half-Trillion-Dollar Homeland Security Spending Binge

2011-09-09T19:30:00Z

WASHINGTON -- In July, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security quietly scuttled a multi-billion dollar program to install high-tech radiation detectors at the nation's ports. A top priority of the Bush administration, the advanced spectroscopic portal (ASP) devices that the Raytheon Company was being paid to build weren't just way behind schedule and enormously over budget -- they didn't actually appear to work. The failed project cost taxpayers well over $230 million.

DHS had already pulled the plug on its SBInet program -- an effort to build a "virtual fence" of sensors, cameras and radar along the nation's border -- in January, after paying more than $1.1 billion. The Government Accountability Office, among others, had concluded that poor management and an over-reliance on the prime contractor, Boeing, had caused staggering delays and cost overruns while producing inadequate results.

And earlier in July, DHS had scrapped its unfinished and dysfunctional Risk Assessment Management Program, a computer application intended to help officials distribute their small army of private security guards between federal buildings, based on the chances of those buildings becoming terror targets. DHS had already shelled out $35 million over three years for a project that contractor Booz Allen had promised to complete in one year for $21 million. With the program axed, some eight years after DHS was founded, the department still isn't able to do something as basic as assess which federal buildings are more vulnerable to attack than others.

These are just a few of the most recent -- and in these cases, now staunched -- examples of how DHS has hemorrhaged money since its creation in 2003.

According to an estimate by Ohio State University political scientist John Mueller and Australian engineer Mark Stewart, the cumulative increase in U.S. domestic homeland security spending since the 9/11 terror attacks totals about $580 billion.

Critics of the department say its poor track record when it comes to the distribution of its considerable funds is directly related to how the department was formed: in a panic, out of a need for a grand political gesture -- and without a clear mission.

As Virginia Tech public policy professor Patrick Roberts wrote in the Review of Policy Research in 2005, the creation of DHS was "an example of the triumph of symbolic and distributive policies over more straightforward attempts to address the real problems of homeland security."

When it was formed, DHS absorbed 22 disparate agencies, cramming them into a single, 230,000-person mega-bureaucracy. Without a clear overall strategy, the grant money DHS was responsible for allocating went out to states regardless of their needs. Huge defense contractors took advantage of the easy funding to pitch untested products.

"It opened a floodgate of money for private industry to sell scanners and other devices," said Charles Perrow, a Yale sociology professor who has called the creation of DHS "The Disaster After 9/11."

"A lot of money was kind of thrown at the problem," said John Gannon, a former deputy director of the CIA who was part of the White House team that launched the department and who now leads BAE Systems' cybersecurity division.

Gannon blames what he called the "unfocused, unstrategic allocation of funds" on Congress, which he said failed to set a strategy for the department, then provided inadequate oversight. But the department also lacked the personnel to hold its contractors accountable.

"You certainly had an insufficient and an inexperienced contracting team," said former DHS Inspector General Clark Kent Ervin. "And you certainly had rapacious contractors."

In 2006, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee identified 32 DHS contracts "collectively worth $34.3 billion that have been plagued by waste, abuse, or mismanagement" during the first five years after 9/11. In 2008, the House Committee on Homeland Security listed $15 billion in failed contracts since the department's founding.

Stories of smaller-scale DHS excesses have become the stuff of legend. One is the famous terror target list used to allocate DHS grant money. It listed 77,069 sites under possible threat, including the Old MacDonald’s Petting Zoo in Woodville, Ala., the Amish Country Popcorn factory in Berne, Ind., and the Mule Day Parade in Columbia, Tenn.

The Los Angeles Times reported just last week that DHS grant money is still buying such things as state-of-the-art dive gear, cattle nose leads and electric prods for rural Nebraska counties and a nine-ton BearCat armored tactical assault vehicle for suburban Glendale, Calif.

"[T]he reality is that DHS is a colossal and inefficient boondoggle," Joan Johnson-Freese and Tom Nichols, both professors at the Naval War College, wrote this week for AOL Defense:

DHS was a panic reaction, a precipitous act by a Bush administration determined to show it was 'doing something' about terrorism. The horses had already escaped, but the Bush administration went ahead anyway and bought more land, constructed extra barns, equipped them with state-of-the-art doors, and then hired thousands of conscientious civil servants to slam them shut over and over again, for the rest of eternity.

DHS officials insist that the department is a proven success -- and is getting better all the time.

"Over the last year, year and a half, in particular, I think you've really begun to see the department begin to gel, in terms of working in a coordinated manner," said John Cohen, principal deputy counterterrorism coordinator at DHS.

"There are capabilities that now exist across this country that have made this country safer from potential attacks that would not exist without a department of homeland security," he said.

As for contracting, DHS officials said that Obama appointees have worked hard to improve the department's acquisition oversight. And Ervin, the former inspector general, among others, gives Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano credit for canceling some projects.

"It's important to acknowledge when you're throwing money down a rathole," Ervin said.

DHS could allocate its counterterrorism dollars more effectively by focusing on the areas of greatest risk -- regardless of the political consequences or the desires of powerful lobbyists.

But a 2010 study by the National Academy of Sciences found DHS had paid "little effective attention" to "features of the risk problem that are fundamental."

"Risk analysis capabilities with regard to areas beyond natural disasters ... are not yet adequate for supporting DHS decision-making," the study concluded.

Mueller, the OSU professor, thinks that's a serious problem. "You're dealing with human lives, and if you're spending money on foolish ways to save lives, and there are known ways to save lives and you're not spending money on that, then that's really irresponsible," he said.

Cohen, the DHS official, disputed the notion that the department doesn't pay enough attention to risk analysis.

"From my perspective, we leverage assessments of risk in everything we do," he said. "We are constantly evaluating risk and we do it through multiple entities."

Perrow, the Yale sociology professor, traces DHS's problems back to the department's inception. He argues what was needed after 9/11 in terms of domestic counterterrorism efforts was coordination, not centralization. Relevant federal agencies needed to share information and have clear goals; simply shoving them all together into one agency actually made things worse.

But politicians in Washington "never bought this," he said, because "they like to be in control."

"If you have a lot of money involved, you tend not to decentralize," he said. "You tend to keep control at the top." DHS may be too big to manage effectively, Perrow said, but that doesn't mean that its founders consider it a failure.

"If you have that control and hierarchy, then you can channel funding in the most politically productive manner," he said.

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Dan Froomkin is senior Washington correspondent for the Huffington Post. You can send him an e-mail, bookmark his page; subscribe to his RSS feed, follow him on Twitter, friend him on Facebook, and/or become a fan and get e-mail alerts when he writes.