16 January 2009

Conceptual Conflicts

As would-be Attorney General Eric Holder testified that he considers terrorists to be “combatants” in the “war on terror” and Sen. Lindsay Graham describes Khalid Sheikh Mohammed as a “warrior” rather than a “criminal,” British foreign secretary  David Miliband critcizes the phrase “war on terror.”

Holder agreed with Graham in his hypothetical that a person who funded al Qaeda, located in the Philippines, and turned over to the US would be a combatant captured on the “battlefield” in the Philippines. Astoundingly Graham went on to argue that detaining such persons indefinitely would require some judicial review. But if Holder and Graham agree that any person who conspires with or aids al Qaeda is a combatant in a war, not a criminal violating US or international laws, then they agree with the Bush administration. Why grant judicial review to enemy combatants, whether they be prisoners of war or not?

Combatants in a war can be held until the war is ended; they can be punished during the war for war crimes and incarcerated well after the war for violating the laws of wars. If Holder agrees with Graham, then closing Guantanamo is stupid. The US could hold enemy combatants in any US facility, in the US or not. They would not be entitled to civilian court access.

The reason Bush administration detention policies against al Qaeda and its supporters are controversial is that the administration is applying US criminal law standards to identify and punish suspected terrorists and their collaborators, but applying military law standards to justify the conditions and the duration of the detentions. The US has moved opportunistically between claims that it is fighting a global war, which restricts what crimes a combatant can be charged with but allows the US to use force more freely, and that it is suppressing a criminal group, which expands the crimes its conspirators can be charged with but limits the scope and length of detentions.

Consider Graham’s hypothetical: someone who lives in the Philippines and funds al Qaeda. Such a person has not violated the laws of war. There is no war crime of funding a combatant. That person’s action does not make wherever he goes a moving “battlefield.” But Graham and Holder say it is. To see the error of their position remember that during the Cold War, the US  provided funds to insurgencies across the globe. These actions were not and are not considered war crimes. The wars were unconventional wars fought by combatants whose belligerence was considered illegal by the governments fighting them.  The insurgents frequently violated the laws of wars. In these respects, the contra rebels were similar to al Qaeda. But it would have been outrageous if, for example, Nicaragua were to have declared US government personnel or  private US citizen who provided funds to the contras in the 1980s as “illegal enemy combatants.”

Al Qaeda and its off-shoots have political goals, and they use force to achieve them. But the US and most other states regard al Qaeda as a criminal organization, not a party to an armed conflict. The reason to do this is that we can arrest and punish al Qaeda conspirators, plotters, funders, or abetters as criminals. If we treat al Qaeda as a party to an armed conflict, then US citizens who aid it can be charged with treason, but foreigners would only be punishable if they comitted crimes under the laws of war. For example, being trained by al Qaeda would not be a crime under the laws of war if a person took no other actions. Only under US criminal law is being trained by a terrorist organization considered to be “material support.” Providing funds to combatants is not a crime under the laws of armed conflict. But under US criminal law, funding an international terrorist organizations is.

Treating al Qaeda as a criminal group rather than as a participant in a war with US does not mean the US military can play no role. Al Qaeda does threaten US national security, and when its actions occur outside US legal jurisdiction, be that in Pakistan, Afghanistan, or elsewhere, the US has the right to defend itself.

Leave a Comment

Filed under security

Tags: , , ,

5 December 2008

That’s Classified! Put it in a footnote.

The Senate Select Intelligence Committee report on the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy’s intelligence activities, issued this June, contains this lovely example of redaction follies.

Take this sentence:
redact

The cleric’s name appears to be redacted. But if you look at the footnote:
redact2

We now learn it is Maliki. We still don’t know who he is, but apparently neither does the government.

I guess using footnotes is a form of concealment.

Leave a Comment

Filed under security, stupid

Tags: , , ,

3 December 2008

Contracting Reform

Democracy Arsenal has a post up that, in part, defends the role of contracting in the federal government. While contracting out work can be useful, too often, contracting is presumed to be cost-effective rather than shown to be cost-effective. And poor contracting can be deadly, as the NYT story on soldiers electrocuted and shocked from faulty wiring shows. Under the Bush administration, contracting reached a fevered pitch in the Iraq war, with many roles previously performed by US forces transferred to private firms.

For roles that the government infrequently performs and lacks in-house expertise, contracting is an excellent idea. For example, painting a remote government office is better contracted out to a local company instead of having transporting government painters to the site and housing them to paint the office. In short, the wisdom of contracting varies from case to case.

Not all contracting is cost-effective. A CBO study (cited by Michael A. Cohen above) allegedly shows that the cost of hiring Blackwater to field 189 full-time equivalent (FTE) “protective security specialists” would be roughly equal to the cost of having the US Army do it. CBO reached this conclusion because the Army  currently maintains 1.2 times the number of deployed troops at home bases, and would like to have 2 times the amount at home. If only the deployed force is counted, Blackwater charged $98.5 million for 189 FTE specialists, while the US Army could provide them for $55.4 million. Now the Army has a 1:1.2 ratio of deployed to home-base soldiers, and the total costs are $88.2 million, a $10.3 million savings over Blackwater. Only if the US has the 2:1 ratio would the Blackwater contract be 10.5% cheaper. And if the US needed say, another 189 specialists in an emergency, they are on-hand, with another 189 to spare.  Blackwater would require another $98.5 million to provide 189 more.

For CBO, the savings comes during “peacetime.” If the US no longer needed the 189 specialists, it would not renew the Blackwater contract and save $98.5 million. The soldiers would remain until their enlistment period was up. OK. But if the US needed 189 specialists elsewhere, the Army would have them if they were soldiers. Otherwise, they would need to renew the Blackwater contract. In which case, no savings.

The real problem with contracting is that the process is very opaque. Information, like the cost of services and rates, is frequently redacted (see for example, the BearingPoints contract at the Center for Public Integrity. The total cost is provided, but the base cost and the BearingPoint fee is blacked-out). Only when audits are done and their is a controversy do we get better information, even then the devil is in the deatils.

Take the controversy over KBR charges for purchasing and delivering fuel to Iraq. The 2003 story was that KBR was overbilling. In 2006, an outside audit found the charges were in fact reasonable. But the real question is whether the US could have provided the service more cheaply. According to the actual audit, KBR paid a Kuwaiti company rougly $25,000 per month per fuel truck to transport fuel to Iraq (that fee covered the risk that that the truck would be destroyed; the rental fee dropped to $20,000 in 2004). The company, Altanmia, reported a loss of 233 trucks at a cost of $15 million. That comes to $64,378 per truck. Let’s say the US directly bought trucks in Kuwait for $70,000 each, paid each driver $100,000 per year, and paid $50,000 per year to maintain and run each truck. The US would still have saved money versus KBR’s rental agreement! If the US resold the trucks later, it would have saved even more.

Indeed, the US’s Defense Energy Support Center (DESC) took over the KBR operation after 11 months. The problem was not that KBR was bilking the US, but that the US did not have the capacity to perform the fuel transport role at that time. Why not? Was it poor planning on the US part, or was US capacity low because the government was supposed to turn to contractors?

Leave a Comment

Filed under security

Tags: , , ,

18 November 2008

Not Even Wrong

Peter D. Salins argues that data from the SUNY system shows that SATs are superior predictors of college graduation rates than grade-point averages. Alas, the study, as described, is fatally flawed.

I’ll be clear. We can measure whether SATs or GPAs better predict better college performance if we were to compare high school GPA and SAT scores for students who took identical classes (by identical I mean the same class and same professor). To my knowledge, no one has taken on his onerous task. Even this would fail to answer the question: would a student whose SAT score was too low but had as high a GPA as an accepted student whose SAT score was higher do as well in college? We cannot answer this question unless we were to accept such students and see how they do.

Back to Salins. An NYT op-ed is not the ideal place to present this data but I could not Google a better presentation. There was none at his SUNY or Manhattan Institute webpages. First, he compares average or mean counts rather than median ones. If several really bright students went to a more selective SUNY school, it could raise the mean but do nothing for the median (the number in the middle). Second, our dependent variable, the percentage of students that graduated in six years, is not the best measure of performance. Selective schools expect that most of their students will graduate; we are trying to measure how well they do in college, particularly their first-year GPA.

Using just graduation rates also leaves us wondering about other relevant data. How was financial aid allocated at these schools? Were student with higher SAT scores at the selective schools given more or less aid than students at the less-selective schools? (If a student at the less selective school had to go part-time because he had to work while the student at the more selective school could go full-time, this will effect graduation rates.) How many courses  were offered? (Since schools often require a certain number and distribution of courses to graduate, we must control for the availability of these courses across colleges.)

Leave a Comment

Filed under Domestic Affairs, Social Policy

Tags: , , ,

16 November 2008

Crisis, Systems, and Hindsight

I am struck by the number of bloggers that consider the current financial crisis and resulting recession to be the result of a failure of market economics. Market economics worked; the workings are ugly. If you believe in equilibrium analysis, you believe that when there are wide swings, you expect wide swings back. (If you’re trying to make money off them, the key is to get the timing right.)

The current crisis occurred because of systemic properties. The outlines of the problem were clear in Warren Buffet’s 2002 annual report (issued in March 2003). It is famous for the line describing derivatives as “financial weapons of mass destruction.” But Buffet’s reasoning is often ignored:

Derivatives also create a daisy-chain risk that is akin to the risk run by insurers or reinsurers that lay off much of their business with others. In both cases, huge receivables from many counterparties tend to build up over time… A participant may see himself as prudent, believing his large credit exposures to be diversified and therefore not dangerous. Under certain circumstances, though, an exogenous event that causes the receivable from Company A to go bad will also affect those from Companies B through Z. History teaches us that a crisis often causes problems to correlate in a manner undreamed of in more tranquil times…

Charlie and I believe, however, that the macro picture is dangerous and getting more so. Large amounts of risk, particularly credit risk, have become concentrated in the hands of relatively few derivatives dealers, who in addition trade extensively with one other. The troubles of one could quickly infect the others. On top of that, these dealers are owed huge amounts by non-dealer counterparties. Some of these counterparties, as I’ve mentioned, are linked in ways that could cause them to contemporaneously run into a problem because of a single event (such as the implosion of the telecom industry or the precipitous decline in the value of merchant power projects). Linkage, when it suddenly surfaces, can trigger serious systemic problems.

In social science language, the financial system for credit derivatives was complexly interactive and tightly coupled. It was accident prone. (Don’t take my word for it; see Perrow 1984/1999, p.385) Put differently, unless there was a way to making the couplings loose or simplify the interactions, the crisis was not preventable in the normal understanding of the term.

Leave a Comment

Filed under Domestic Affairs

Tags: , , ,

16 November 2008

Change You’ll Have to Work Hard For

Democracy Arsenal has several posts criticizing claims that Obama is not likely to change US foreign policy in any bold directions, at least not in his first 100 days as president. The truth is that he will find it hard to make bold change.

Closing Guantanamo

This sounds easy, but there are problems if the country of detainees’ nationality will not accept them or they will be tortured there. Then they would have to be brought into the US and either left in US-based detention centers until a repatriation country can be found or put on trial in the US. If the former, they will remain in indefinite detention. In short, the location of their detention will have changed but not the fact of uncertain detention.

Changing Course in Afghanistan

Will US allies contribute more forces and with fewer restrictions for combat in Afghanistan? This is not likely until the US makes greater contributions. The issue for US allies is that they are not going to have their forces substitute for US forces tied down in Iraq, unless they are countries that backed the Iraq war. Moreover, they are unlikely to make substantial new contributions unless they have a greater role in the command of the multi-national strategy in Iraq and other US operations in Afghanistan. Since the air war against Serbia, the US has chafed at coalition-based operational controls. But France is not going to raise its contributions in Afghanistan if it has no say over what US special forces are doing in the French sector. Right now, US special operations forces operate outside the multi-national structure.

Rebuilding Alliances

The Iraq invasion strained alliances with countries that opposed the war, but it is not clear what the US can do to repair relations. It cannot undo the Iraq war. Indeed, should conditions in Iraq worsen substantially, the US will be left with a serious problem: can it wash its hands of the crisis as the fault of a prior president, or will the US be expected to make amends by assuming the lions share of any response, whatever the terms?

Consulting with allies is easy in principle and difficult in practice. For example, dealing with Iran’s nuclear program in cooperation with US allies will require the US to adopt policies that meet their concerns. If Russia or China opposes tougher sanctions, the US will have a hard time convincing some EU states, like Germany and Italy, that harsh mini-lateral sanctions are necessary.  It is not that US and its allies interests diverge in fundamental ways. Rather, the problem has been arguments over how much say each party should have in decisions. If the US is bearing the balance of the burden, it expects to have the balance of the decision-making power. US allies do not always see it this way. When military matters are involved,  once allies’ forces are on the ground, their pilots in the air, or their sailors in troubled waters, they often want to have a veto over some items. Striking a fair balance is hard because figuring out what is fair is hard.

Restoring America’s Reputation

This has always been a problematic area. If the Bush administration really harmed America’s reputation because foreign publics did not like Bush’s policies, then a change in policies is needed. If they did not like Bush’s style or personality, than indeed Obama’s presidency will herald a major change. But if the former is the case, then Obama will face the burden of trying to pull the US public along a number of lines that it was not willing to go before the Bush administration took office. Remember, the Clinton administration never submitted the Kyoto Protocols to the Senate and that while Clinton signed the ICC statute, he recommended against Senate ratification until US conditions were met.

Leave a Comment

Filed under 2008 Elections, security

Tags: , , ,

13 November 2008

“I’m just a caveman, but I know…”

Yesterday’s Supreme Court decision raises the recurring issue of how courts (and other civic institutions) should consider claims rooted in alleged expertise, or expert judgments. The SC has frequently argued that judges should not substitute the judgment of government officials in certain areas (usually secrecy, military and foreign policy) for their own judgments. A government assertion of harm or gain in these areas should be accepted as fact.

The danger in this doctrine is that it permits the government, usually the executive, to lie, dissemble, or mislead. Consider claims that revealing certain classified information will harm national security. This might be true. But the veracity of that assertion should be explicable. That is, an official making that claim ought to be able to explain to a judge how and why a specific revelation will produce a harm, and the judge can decide whether that conclusion is reasonable.

“Oh, no!” counter the supporters of the current system. The judiciary must defer to the executive in its claims to expertise in these areas. But the executive has not established is expertise; it has asserted it.  The expertise is not based on accumulated knowledge, thought and experience. It is an attribute of holding public office. Today, Barack Obama is a senator. In 68 days he will be president, and in a host of cases, the courts will defer to his judgment about matters of secrecy, military and foreign policy. Surely, he will not accrue enormous new expertise for those judgments in 68 days. They will be conferred to him by his office. He will listen to arguments and reasons and decide what choices to make. There is no reason that the courts cannot do the same. Or the Congress. Or the citizens.

Self-government is predicated upon the ability of citizens and officials to discern good arguments, evaluate reasons, and draw correct inferences. It is not based on the blind acceptance of judgments based on self-asserted claims to expertise.

Leave a Comment

Filed under Domestic Affairs, Social Policy, security

Tags: , , , ,

10 November 2008

Two Key Obama Appointments

Beyond the chief of staff, the two key appointments for Sen. Obama’s presidency will be his national security advisor and his secretary of health and human services. On the international front,  President Obama will have to deal with two ground wars and repairing US alliances and relationships. On the domestic front, healthcare will be key on the agenda.

To end the war in Iraq and re-think the war in Afghanistan, the president will need good advice on policy options. The National Security Council staff — the national security advisor and his deputies, directors, and other aides — will be key. The actual Council consists of the president, vice-president, and secretaries of state and defense and any other secretaries or directors that the president wishes to attend. The director of national intelligence and the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff server as advisors to the council.

Most presidents since Eisenhower have had problems devising effective NSC staff arrangements. If the NSC staff works well, it ensures that the president and other NSC members are presented with clear options, make a choice, explain it to the dept. heads, and implement it.

Many presdients since Eisenhower have had trouble differentiating and fulfilling these roles. Eisenhower had a Planning Board that sent topics up to the NSC for decision and an Operations Control Board that monitored the implementation of decisions. Recent NCS staffs have a deputies’ committe (deputy secretaries)  that reports to a principals’ committee (cabinet secretaries without the president) and reserves final decisions for the president at the formal NSC level. Decison are monitored by working groups, with mixed results, because the groups are usually chaired by an under-secretary or assistant secretary rather than by an NSC staff official, whose focus would be ensuring that the presdient’s decision was carried out.

Two persons mentioned as NSC advisor are Gregory Craig, a DC litigator, and James Steinberg, a policy school dean. Both are lawyers by training, but Steinberg would be the superior choice since he served as deputy NSC under Clinton. Craig never served on the NSC before. This is primarily an organizational job. People with strong policy convictions tend to do poorly at advising the president. The best NSC advisors have been retired generals — Robert Cutler and Brent Scowcroft.

If Obama is smart, he will have the secretary of health and human services spearhead the healthcare reform drive. Clinton side-tracked his HHS secretary, having the White House attempt to lead healthcare reform. Obama shows signs that he will appoint a political heavy-weight to the job, such as Howard Dean.

Leave a Comment

Filed under 2008 Elections

Tags: , , , ,

9 November 2008

Will Obama Be an Imperial President?

Jonathan Mahler asks whether Sen. Obama will relinquish some of the powers that President Bush has usurped over the past eight years. I hope that he does but I doubt that he will.

As Mahler acknowledges, President Clinton never reversed the accumulation of presidential war powers. As Congressional Research Service expert Louis Fisher has dilligently recorded, Clinton repeatedly used force without seeking Congressional authorization (Bush at least sought, however reluctantly, Congressional approval for the invasion of Iraq, and was granted it for the invasion of Afghanistan). While many Cold War-era records were released, and the total intelligence budget was disclosed for two years, Clinton (and Congress) did little to diminish executive secrecy. Remember, the Cold War was over when Clinton took office; if there was a time to reduce the presumed powers of the presidency, it was then.

What would a democratic presidency look like? For starters, the record of secret abuses, like CIA and military torture and  FISA violations, needs to be disclosed. The aim should not be prosecution, but an inquiry into the truth of what happened. Those testifying should be given legal immunity for doing so. Another would be a review and appropriate rescinding of Justice legal opinions. New ones need to be issued that delimit executive authority, where appropriate. Last, if President Obama were to genuienly consult with the Senate on treaty matters and with the House on others, it would vastly improve legislative-executive relations. One step toward this would be convening weekly meetings with the Democratic Congressional leaders, as President Eisenhower did, preceded by staff work on detailed agendas.

Leave a Comment

Filed under 2008 Elections

Tags: ,

9 November 2008

Presidents, President-Elects & Protocol

Update: Reporters at pre-inaugural news conferences addressed then Gov. Bush as “Mr. President-Elect” after Sen. Breaux did it. I cannot find any transcripts of the 1993 Bush-Clinton transition period.

Some bloggers have made hash of Sen. Obama’s appearance before a lectern emblazoned with “Office of the President-Elect.” This is the name that past presidents-elect have used for their transition offices, which can be funded by the US government after the general election. According to the Presidential Transitions Act of 1963:

(c) The terms ‘President-elect’ and ‘Vice-President-elect’ as used in this Act shall mean such persons as are the apparent successful candidates for the office of President and Vice President, respectively, as ascertained by the Administrator following the general elections held to determine the electors of President and Vice President in accordance with title 3, United States Code, sections 1 and 2.

But, of course, Sen. Obama is not really the president-elect. That would not occur until 15 Dec., when the electors meet to elect him and Sen. Biden. And there is no real office (as the position held by an officer of the US government) as the president-elect or vice-president elect. Rather, it is a status.

Some organizations do have official positions of “president-elect.” But these are organizations that elect the succeeding officer usually a year or more in advance of his or her becoming president. For example, the American Political Science Association has a president-elect who serves as a council member during the full term of the president, and then becomes president after the seated president’s term ends. This ensures smooth transitions.

But persons who are elected to be president of the United States are presidents-elect de facto. The only reference to the president elect in the US Constitution is the 20th amendment, enacted in 1933. It shortened the lame-duck period between the election and the president-elect assuming office; it merely provides that the vice-president elect becomes president if the president elect dies before his inauguration.

Sen. Obama’s transition team can call the transition office “the office of the president elect” but there is no official position as such. There is no officer of government titled “the president elect of the United States”. For example, Sen. Obama has not taken an oath of office, nor will he until inauguration day.

Reporters were addressing Sen. Obama as “Mr. President Elect.” This is wrong. The etiquette for addressing officials in person is often mis-understood. Some had taken to addressing the attorney general and the postmaster general as “General XXXX.” This is nonsense. The attorney general is an attorney covering matteris in general, not a general of attorneys. As OED puts it:

The designation began in England, where this officer was at first merely the king’s attorney (see above 6), called from the reign of Edward IV, ‘the king’s general attorney,’ to distinguish him from those appointed to act on special occasions, or in particular courts.

Former US presidents are commonly addressed as “Mr. President.” They should not be. As the 1889 edition of the the Hand-book of Official and Social Etiquette and Public Ceremonials at Washington makes clear (p.24), only the seated president should be addressed that way. Retired presidents should be referred to as  “Ex-President” as in “Ex-President Clinton.” As the Hand-Book makes clear (p.16), this applies to all titles of office. After a governor’s, judge’s, or senator’s term ends, it is back to whatever title they had prior to holding their office, with the exception of being able to keep the honorific “Honorable.” As in “the Honorable Mr. XXXX,” which is used in letter salutations or invitations.

The earliest usage I can find of the address “Mr. President Elect” is in newspaper columns from 1968 written in the form of open letters. When President Truman wrote to President Elect Eisenhower, he addressed him as “Gen. Eisenhower.” When President Reagan held his first post-election news conference, the reporters addressed him as “Governor” and Vice-President Bush was addressed as “Mr. Vice-President” not “Mr. President Elect” after he defeated Gov. Dukakis.

Leave a Comment

Filed under 2008 Elections

Tags: , , , , ,

Newer Entries

Older Entries