Author: Spencer Ackerman

When last we checked in on New START, the text of the nuclear deal with the Russians — which has not been released — didn’t impact missile defense, according to senior administration officials, but leading GOP senators still opposed it. That’s not a good sign for a deal that requires at least eight GOP votes in the Senate, as the Republican caucus gambles that it ought to oppose the administration’s agenda wholesale.

Later this morning, I’ll be covering former United Nations ambassador John Bolton as he indicts the administration for allegedly compromising American sovereignty at the Heritage Foundation. Heritage right now is leading its website with a pre-indictment, criticizing New START for pursuing what it calls the “pipe dream” of nuclear disarmament. (That pipe dream was first made a part of U.S. foreign policy by conservative patron saint Ronald Reagan.) The big concern Heritage presents is that the deal won’t be adequately verifiable. But the administration managed to secure 18 annual on-site inspection visits to Russian missile sites and storage facilities in the treaty, while previous accords relied on indirect indications of nuclear and missile activity.

Perhaps the release of the treaty language and the subsequent administration testimony will be able to change some Republican minds. But all the early indicators and pressures on the Republicans point to them denying Obama his treaty victory.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai is in a bad mood because President Obama is too mean to him. His people ran to Some anonymous official ran to The New York Times to say so:

“He has developed a complete theory of American power,” said an Afghan who attended the lunch and who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution. “He believes that America is trying to dominate the region, and that he is the only one who can stand up to them.”

And that’s why Obama set a July 2011 date to begin troop reductions?

Mr. Karzai said that, left alone, he could strike a deal with the Taliban, but that the United States refuses to allow him. The American goal, he said, was to keep the Afghan conflict going, and thereby allow American troops to stay in the country.

And that’s why Amb. Richard Holbrooke, the administration’s special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, supported removing the names of Taliban figures from a United Nations terrorism list, which frees them to travel for peace talks? Or why Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, declares himself agnostic about the political backgrounds of whomever joins the Afghan government in the future? To the point where women’s-rights and human-rights activists fear that reconciliation between Karzai and the Taliban will be a massive, U.S.-supported sellout?

All of Karzai’s criticisms run in one direction: to give himself the maximum freedom of political maneuver, while soon-to-be 140,000 foreign troops and billions of dollars in foreign aid essentially backstop his government. It’s his right as a politician, but to some degree, the volume of Karzai’s complaints about being personally slighted serve as a barometric indicator that the U.S., the U.N. and NATO are broadening their commitment in Afghanistan to be about something more sustainable than a relationship between leaders.

So we knew earlier today that the U.S.-Russia New START nuclear reductions treaty caps deployed warheads at 1,550, a 30 percent reduction from the Bush-Putin “Moscow Treaty” of 2002, and sets a limit of 700 deployed intercontinental and submarine-launched ballistic missiles and heavy bombers. What we didn’t know from today’s press conference is that there’ll be 18 annual on-site inspections — meaning a guy will be observing the destruction of stuff and counting warheads on missiles at missile bases and storage facilities — to ensure compliance.

Unlike under previous accords, there won’t simply be a reliance on data provided by the parties to make sure the deployed missiles, subs, bombers and warheads numbers add up. (Ironically, if the treaty relied entirely on so-called telemetric data — basically, observing this stuff from long distance and by technological inference — that might be bad for U.S. missile-defense plans.) Verification will be a key aspect of getting the treaty through the Senate.

The question that arms controllers are going to have isn’t going to concern New START. It’s going to concern what comes after New START. The lifespan of the treaty is ten years. After ten years, the U.S. and Russia will each possess … up to 1,550 deployed warheads and 700 deployed things with which to deliver them. But last year in Prague — where this treaty will be signed — President Obama outlined an ultimate vision of a nuclear-free world. How to get from here to there?

“A great deal depends on the presidential statements in Prague — what they say about what the next steps are,” said Joe Ciricincione, president of the Ploughshares Fund. If they “rest on their laurels” in Prague on April 8, then it won’t be enough. And that’s going to be a moment of great momentum: It’ll build up to a 44-nation conference in Washington next month on nuclear security, which will then build up to a spring summit in New York about strengthening the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. In other words, to other nations, both non-nuclear and nuclear — recall that the U.S. and Russia account for over 90 percent of the world’s nuclear weapons — the gains of New START don’t look as great as the gap between their capabilities and the U.S.’s and Russians’. And on the path to a nuke-free world, that’s a big deal.

Obama has “got to stay with the vision he articulated a year ago,” Cirincione continued, urging the nuclear negotiating teams — exhausted after months of arduous work to cobble together New START — to “enjoy the victory of the moment, get some R&R and come back for another tour of duty.” If Obama shows the rest of the world that he really is committed to lead on nuclear security and disarmament, even beyond New START, “this could be one of the defining moments of his presidency.”

Wikileaks obtained and published (PDF) a CIA “Red Cell” analysis — that’s what the agency presents either to counter received wisdom or to be deliberately provocative — on bolstering support for the Afghanistan war among skeptical European publics. (Hat tip to Jeremy Scahill.) Among the strategies employed: a cynical manipulation of the horror faced by Afghan women under the Taliban:

Afghan women could serve as ideal messengers in humanizing the ISAF role in combating the Taliban because of women’s ability to speak personally and credibly about their experiences under the Taliban, their aspirations for the future, and their fears of a Taliban victory. Outreach initiatives that create media opportunities for Afghan women to share their stories with French, German, and other European women could help to overcome pervasive skepticism among women in Western Europe toward the ISAF mission.

There is a general sense of unease among human rights activists about the future of Afghanistan if there’s a negotiated settlement of the war with Taliban elements, even despite the women’s rights abuses perpetrated by the Karzai government and its allies. It’ll be the subject of what might be a fraught conference at the U.S. Institute of Peace next week. For anyone concerned about human rights, it’s a vexing, haunting question, and one that creates an increased need to listen to the voices of Afghan women as they try to consolidate what gains they have made in post-Taliban Afghanistan.

This analysis, however, outlines a surefire way to cynically discredit those voices precisely when they’re needed most. The easiest recourse to marginalization is to portray someone as a CIA stooge. “Media events that feature testimonials by Afghan women would probably be most effective if broadcast on programs that have large and disproportionately female audiences,” the Red Cell analysis advises. What a disservice that would be to some of the bravest people on the planet, who’ve had to endure so much, to be used as a sales pitch for a war.

So, between health care reform and the New START nuclear reduction treaty with Russia, this is kind of a big week for President Obama. And you know who agrees? Russian President Dmitri Medvedev.

Apparently, when Obama and Medvedev put the finishing touches on the long-negotiated accord over the phone this morning, Medvedev started the call by congratulating Obama on his health care victory. That’s a far cry from saying health care was in any sense a key to unlocking the talks, since all of the substance of this treaty was decided long before Congress finally passed the health care bill.

But the interpersonal relationship between the two presidents apparently was key to getting the most far-reaching nuclear reduction treaty in two decades. Obama and Medvedev had 14 talks about New START and related issues since Obama came into office, and this morning, Medvedev acknowledged the need for the two of them to get down into the weeds on verification mechanisms and what counts as “parity” between land-based missile systems (the bulk of Russia’s nuclear delivery capability) and submarines (the strongest leg of the U.S. nuclear-delivery “triad”) and so forth.

“If you want to get something done right,” Medvedev told Obama in English, apparently having practiced the proverb, “do it yourself.”

Just how many terrorists have American civilian courts convicted? The Justice Department is happy to let you know.

In filings provided to the congressional intelligence and judiciary committees — and now to the press — the Department itemized all the people it’s successfully prosecuted since 9/11. It divides them into two categories: the first is for ”violations of federal statutes that are directly related to international terrorism and that are utilized regularly in international terrorism matters” and the second is for those convicted of a terror-supporting offense, like “fraud, immigration, firearms, drugs, false statements, perjury, and obstruction of justice, as well as general conspiracy charges.” All told, that’s 150 convictions in the first category, and 240 in the second, for a grand total of 390 people convicted on terror-related charges from September 11, 2001 to March 18, 2010.

And there’s more, according to the Justice Department’s filing, since its total “does not include defendants whose convictions remain under seal, nor does it include defendants who have been charged with a terrorism or terrorism-related offense but have not been convicted either at trial or by guilty plea.”

But the military commissions have convicted three people since 9/11, so that’s something.

Greg Sargent scans this all in so I don’t have to. Looks like the Justice Department is trying to fight off any attempt to move Khalid Shaikh Mohammed’s prosecution into a military commission as part of a White House deal with Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.).

On March 16, Shane Harris reported that Harold Koh, the State Department’s legal adviser, asserted that the Obama administration’s drone strikes on al-Qaeda and affiliated targets are legal, and would at some point make a more fulsome public case for why that is. Last night, reports Mark Hosenball, Koh delivered.

Koh told the annual meeting of the American Society of International Law that the administration is guided by the principles of proportionality — no overreaction to an al-Qaeda attack — and distinction, meaning no civilians can be targeted. There’s more:

Koh also responded to critics who have questioned the legality of such attacks under international law. “[S]ome have suggested that the very use of targeting a particular leader of an enemy force in an armed conflict must violate the laws of war. But individuals who are part of such an armed group are belligerent and, therefore, lawful targets under international law….[S]ome have challenged the very use of advanced weapons systems, such as unmanned aerial vehicles, for lethal operations. But the rules that govern targeting do not turn on the type of weapon system involved, and there is no prohibition under the laws of war on the use of technologically advanced weapons systems in armed conflict—such as pilotless aircraft or so-called smart bombs—so long as they are employed in conformity with applicable laws of war.”

I have to go back here to my colleague Dave Weigel’s coverage of the conservative effort last year to keep Koh out of his job because he was allegedly a wild-eyed enemy of American sovereignty. Koh’s chief persecutor was Ed Whelan of the Center for Ethics and Public Policy, who capped tendentious readings of Koh’s writings by contextualizing them in hysterical ways like this:

“What judicial transnationalism is really all about,” wrote Whelan, “is depriving American citizens of their powers of representative government by selectively imposing on them the favored policies of Europe’s leftist elites.”

Perhaps Whelan would like to explain how launching missiles from unmanned aerial vehicles onto targets in Pakistan and Yemen — which kill, by the New America Foundation’s estimate, one civilian for every two combatants — are the favored policy response of effete European elites. The ACLU, meanwhile, has filed a Freedom of Information Act request to get the formal legal arguments prepared by the Obama team justifying the drone strikes.

At a White House briefing on the “New START” treaty on mutual nuclear weapons reductions with the Russians, senior Obama administration officials pressed the case that there ought to be what Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called “broad bipartisan support” for the accord, which requires 67 votes in a deeply partisan Senate for ratification. “National security has always produced large bipartisan majorities and I see no reason why this should be different,” Clinton said.

Robert Gates, who served as defense secretary for George W. Bush and as a national security official for most GOP administrations going back to Gerald Ford, repeatedly and personally vouched that the treaty does not constrain any plans for European missile defense — a Republican priority — adding that it might “hopefully make [the Russians] a partner in a European-wide defense capability” at some point in the future. But between the treaty and the administration’s $5 billion request for maintaining the existing U.S. nuclear stockpile, “I think we addressed the concerns that may have been on the Hill.” Undersecretary of State Ellen Tauscher, who helped negotiate the treaty, added that “this is a strategic offensive weapons treaty,” and discussions with the Russians all focused on that — meaning that missile defense isn’t impacted by its provisions — and the schedule for the phased deployment of the missile shield in Romania is similarly unimpacted.

Whether the merits of the treaty will be enough to satisfy Republicans who want to deal Obama a bloody nose on a top priority of his agenda remains to be seen. While the press briefing went on, Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, issued a statement that despite “a partisan breakdown in recent years,” the treaty poses an opportunity to “renew the Senate’s bipartisan tradition on arms control and approve ratification of this new treaty in 2010. I know that can happen.”

As a White House press briefing on the New START nuclear-reductions treaty with Russia gets underway, here’s a factsheet the White House sent out about what specifically the deal contains:

The new Treaty will contain limits on U.S. and Russian nuclear forces significantly below the levels established by the START treaty signed in 1991, and the Moscow Treaty signed in 2002. The new START Treaty will specify limits of:

· 1,550 deployed warheads, which is about 30% lower than the upper warhead limit of the Moscow Treaty;

· 800 deployed and non-deployed intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) launchers, submarine launched ballistic missile (SLBM) launchers, and heavy bombers equipped for nuclear weapons; and

· 700 for deployed ICBMs, SLBMs, and heavy bombers equipped for nuclear weapons.

The New START treaty’s verification regime will provide the ability to monitor all aspects of the Treaty. At the same time, the inspections and other verification procedures in this Treaty will be simpler and less costly to implement than the old START treaty. In part, this is possible due to the experience and knowledge gained from 15 years of START implementation.

President Obama said from the White House podium just now: “Today, we have reached agreement on one of my Administration’s top priorities – a pivotal new arms control agreement.” Good luck getting 67 votes in the Senate for anything, though, especially from Republicans on a top Obama priority.

My fascination with NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen is well-documented and not likely to stop anytime soon. As President Obama and Russian President Dmitri Medvedev finalize the most comprehensive mutual nuclear-weapons reduction treaty in 20 years — much more on that later today — Rasmussen tweets a few suggestions for next steps:

Russia has no love lost for either missile defense or NATO, so make of this what you will.

Kalsoom Lakhani over at Changing Up Pakistan takes a look at the conclusion of this week’s ministerial talks.

[A]s expected, a diplomatic “We’re Just Not That Into You” move on the civilian nuclear deal and drone strike technology, but a thumbs up on the substantial topics, i.e. development. That is certainly a plus, depending on how well it’s implemented and allocated.

She points to this Washington Post wrap-up as well for the goods:

Most of the agreements announced after the one-day meeting had been decided earlier, including disbursement of a new $7.5-billion, five-year U.S. aid package for Pakistan’s energy, water, agricultural and education sectors. Long-standing Pakistani complaints about nearly $1 billion in promised but unpaid U.S. reimbursements for Pakistan’s counterinsurgency operations had been largely resolved, with the remaining money to be paid by the end of June. The administration said that it would improve on what Pakistan has described as slow delivery of military hardware and that it would keep trying to facilitate better Pakistani access to U.S. markets and a transit trade arrangement with Afghanistan.

All of which is in keeping with Special Representative Richard Holbrooke’s perspective that Pakistan needs to feel like the U.S. is willing to assist Pakistan as it attends to its national and domestic interests if Washington wants to see more robust counterterrorism results.

Last time, it was the lascivious behavior of ArmorGroup — the private security firm handling the U.S. Embassy in Kabul — that attracted headlines. Those revelations led to disclosures of how contractors knowingly hired guards with poor English skills to save money — something the State Department knew about before renewing the company’s contract. Now it’s Triple Canopy, which guards the gargantuan U.S. Embassy in Iraq.

The Project on Government Oversight, the good-government group that discovered ArmorGroup’s State Department-abetted negligence, has obtained a report from the State Department investigating the department’s management in handling its contract with Triple Canopy for embassy security. POGO was good enough to pass the report on to me. Labor standards are such that Triple Canopy guards often worked ten or eleven consecutive days on average, with some working 39 days in a row without a break.

Here are some highlights of how State’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security, which controls the contract, is managing your money and protecting American diplomats in what remains a warzone.

Embassy Baghdad has not adequately planned for a reduced Department or Department of Defense (DoD) presence in Baghdad, resulting in a projected unnecessary cost of approximately $20 million to the U.S. Government for site security over the next two years. Of this sum, the Department would incur approximately $12 million and DoD would incur more than $8 million in unnecessary costs.

Remember that everything the U.S. is supposed to be doing in Iraq is predicated on the 2011 troop withdrawal. I’ve heard from former administration officials that the embassy is lax in its political mission in Baghdad. Apparently that attitude has some spillover effect.

This will be familiar:

DS does not ensure that [Triple Canopy] personnel have required English language proficiency.

The report further finds that DS did not carry out the random language checks they were supposed to have carried out. True story: when I visited the embassy in 2007, the Triple Canopy guards were very nice people from (if I recall correctly) El Salvador, who made up for their lack of English with warm attitudes. I saw one guard actually reading a Teach-Yourself-English handbook on post in the Green Zone. Clearly DS’s negligence with ArmorGroup’s English-challenged guards is hardly an isolated case.

This might be my favorite:

The contracting officer’s representative in Baghdad does not verify either the guards’ attendance at their posts or the accuracy of personnel rosters (muster sheets) before they are submitted, to ensure contractor charges for labor are accurate. In addition, DS does not ensure that personnel have required English language proficiency.

DS lacks standards for maintaining training records. As a result, Triple Canopy’s training records are incomplete and in disparate locations making it difficult for the Bureau to verify whether all personnel have received required training.

And yet the IG’s overall conclusion is “The Bureau of Diplomatic Security (DS) generally manages the Triple Canopy contract well.” The last State Department Inspector General to take such a sunny interpretation of contract security in spite of the accumulated evidence resigned in disgrace.

POGO executive director Danielle Brian comments in a prepared statement, “How could State not have learned their lesson after the public flogging they got for their handling of the Kabul contract?…This report again raises an important point about whether State can properly manage Embassy security contracts in a war zone.”

Lt. Choi may not be so satisfied with Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ decision to relax “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” enforcement, but it’s being greeted warmly by sponsors of legislation in the Senate to repeal the ban on open gay military service. “I am confident that Secretary Gates and our military leadership would not have taken these initial measures to halt the discharge of many gay Americans if they did not enhance the readiness of our Armed Forces,” said the bill’s principle sponsor, Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), in a prepared statement.

In the same statement, Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) said the policy was now “somewhat more humane” but urged Gates to go further and simply “suspend discharges based solely on sexual orientation” until a Pentagon-ordered study of how to repeal the ban is complete. Sen. Roland Burris (D-Ill.) was more sanguine in the statement, calling Gates’ move “a major shift in thinking, and tangible progress toward the elimination of this discriminatory policy.” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) added that the group “won’t rest until ‘Don’t Ask Don’t Tell’ is repealed.”

In the House, a man who wants to join them, Rep. Joe Sestak (D-Pa.) — a Senate hopeful and retired three-star admiral — said in a separate statement that while he was encouraged by Gates’ revisions,

“it is my firm conviction that these new procedures do not go far enough.  If unfortunately we are to spend a year studying the impact of repeal, our military and troops cannot be left in limbo throughout this process. President Obama should sign an executive order — relying on the same ’stop-loss’ authority used to extend tours of duty — to halt all dismissals under this policy.”

Lt. Dan Choi — the West Point graduate, Iraq veteran, Arabic linguist and arguably most forceful advocate for repealing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” — had a simple question for Defense Secretary Robert Gates after Gates’ announcement of changes to the implementation of the ban on open gay military service. “Why would anybody believe this is, in any way, restoring the humanity of the service?” Choi asked during a phone interview just now.

For Choi, the issue comes down to integrity. “What’s inhumane about ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ is the fact that soldiers have to lie,” he said. “It’s the only federal policy that enforces shame, particularly because these are soldiers willing to risk their lives to protect America.” The measure of the Obama administration’s seriousness to repeal, Choi argued, is its unwillingness to place a provision repealing it in the Defense Authorization Bill and daring senators to filibuster the Pentagon’s funding vehicle.

“What will pave the way for full repeal is a recognition and cognizance on the part of the administration,” Choi said, “that the fundamental reason to get rid of ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ is that it sacrifices, violates and compromises the integrity of all soldiers, not just gay soldiers.”

Choi was arrested after leading a protest to the gates of the White House last week to pressure President Obama to live up to his pledge of ending “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” this year. At a Human Rights Campaign dinner last fall, Obama encouraged equal-rights activists to “continue to pressure leaders — including me,” and Choi said he took Obama’s words “as an order.”

In an extremely short statement released today, Osama bin Laden warned the U.S. against putting Khalid Shaikh Mohammed to death. “The day America makes that decision will be the day it has issued a death sentence for any one of you that is taken captive,” bin Laden said in a message broadcast on Al Jazeera.

Because before, we all figured Americans taken captive by al-Qaeda or its affiliates would be shown tender mercy.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates (Matthieu Rondel/Maxppp/ZUMA Press)

In a major victory for opponents of the military’s ban on open homosexual service, Defense Secretary Robert Gates significantly revised how the Pentagon will implement the so-called “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” law, effectively making it difficult to remove a soldier, sailor, airman or marine who does not out himself or herself as gay.

Image by: Matt Mahurin

Gates said the changes, endorsed by Joint Chiefs of Staff and vetted by the Pentagon’s top lawyer, would add “a greater measure of common sense and common decency” for service members negatively impacted by the law. The Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, an advocacy organization for gay and lesbian service members, considered Gates’ changes a “major step toward the end of the law,” according to spokesman Kevin Nix.

Starting today, only a general officer in an accused service member’s chain of command can discharge someone for a violation of the ban, and only an officer with the rank of commander or lieutenant colonel or higher can conduct a fact-finding inquiry to recommend a discharge. The standards of evidence provided to those inquiries will become far less burdensome on the accused, with what Gates called “special scrutiny on third parties who may be motivated to harm the service member.” Entire categories of evidence will no longer be admissible, including testimony from clergy members, physicians, abuse counselors, security-clearance review personnel and mental-health personnel — a move that also significantly improves troops’ quality of life.

“A good friend of mine just left the Navy as a Navy doctor,” said Christopher Anders, a lobbyist for the American Civil Liberties Union, which opposes “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” Anders said that while his friend never turned in service members for violating the ban, the gay ban “was an obstacle to medical care,” as some personnel opted not to pursue certain medical care out of fear that treatment might be used against them in a “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” hearing.

Seated beside Adm. Mike Mullen, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who forcefully endorsed repealing the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” law, Gates said at a press conference this morning that the new procedural changes apply to all ongoing investigations related to the ban on open gay military service. Gates clarified that he would not endorse any changes to the law until he sees the results of a review led by Pentagon general counsel Jeh Johnson and Army Gen. Carter Ham due by the end of the year. But Gates also clarified that the Johnson/Ham review “is about how you implement” a repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” and “not about ’should we do it.’”

While recent polls show repealing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” is broadly popular among both civilians and Iraq and Afghanistan military veterans, there has been some opposition to the looming repeal from senior levels of the military. The commandant of the Marine Corps, Gen. James Conway, favored keeping the gay ban in testimony last month. Army Lt. Gen. Benjamin Mixon wrote a letter to “Stars & Stripes” earlier this month urging advocates of the gay ban to “write your elected officials and chain of command and express your views.”

That letter earned Mixon a rebuke from both Gates and Mullen this morning. “That letter was not an appropriate letter,” Gates said. Mullen reminded Mixon that “as a three-star leader in command, he has great influence,” and “all of us in uniform are obliged to follow the leadership of the president,” who urged an end to the gay servicemember ban in his State of the Union address in January.

Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) introduced a bill earlier this month to repeal the ban. A statement from Lieberman and his co-sponsors reacting to Gates’ changes in implementing the ban is expected later today.

While Anders hailed Gates’ changes, he noted that the defense secretary did not exercise all his authority to relieve some of the onerous provisions of the ban. Gates did not endorse a recent ruling of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals that said the military must prove servicemember discharges under “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” are vital to unit cohesion or combat readiness. Nor did Gates reverse a policy that cuts troops’ separation pay in half if the cause of their discharge from the military is a violation of the gay ban. Gates also clarified at his press conference that the changes are not retroactive, and so service members who were kicked out of the military for violating the ban will not be able to appeal their cases under the new rules.

Still, Anders said, Gates’ changes “are really important steps forward, obviously.”

Nix said that the Servicemembers Legal Defense Fund’s attorneys are reviewing the changes to determine what they mean for their clients, but that they dealt a serious blow to the ban.

“At the end of the day, what happened today is an important signal to Congress that repeal needs to happen this year,” Nix said. “What the secretary’s recommendations should tell Congress is this thing is on its way to an end, and Congress’s responsibility is to get rid of the law once and for all.”

As TWI reported yesterday, Defense Secretary Robert Gates is changing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” enforcement significantly, even before Congress passes any changes to the law. Gates said it was time to add “a greater measure of common sense and common decency” to the process of investigating servicemembers for their sexual orientation.

Process-wise, Gates said that from now on, only an officer of lieutenant colonel or commander rank or higher is permitted to conduct a fact-finding inquiry, and only a general officer in the accused’s chain of command can discharge a servicemember for violating the ban on openly gay service. As we reported, the standards of evidence to be brought in such inquiries are now significantly raised: Nothing a servicemember tells a clergymember, shrink, official conducting a security-clearance investigation or medical professional is admissible. All information given by third parties must now be given under oath.”We will revise what constitutes a reliable person, upon whose word an inquiry could be initiated, with special scrutiny on third parties who may be motivated to harm the service member,” Gates said.

The new rules now apply to “every case currently open,” Gates added.

More soon.

Asked by Yochi Dreazen of The Wall Street Journal at a press conference this morning to address Gen. David Petraeus’ recent testimony that the Israel-Palestinian conflict’s persistence “foments anti-American sentiment,” Defense Secretary Robert Gates said that he didn’t know if it had a “direct” influence on U.S. security, but “the lack of progress toward Middle East peace clearly is an issue that is exploited by our adversaries in the region, and is a source of, certainly, political challenges.” There’s “no question,” Gates said, that the “absence of Middle East peace” impacts U.S. interests in the region.

Seeming like he was dissatisfied over the level of discourse on the issue, Gates added that “the U.S. has considered peace in the Middle East to be a national security interest for decades.”

Petraeus has tried to lower tempers over the suddenly controversial remarks, most recently yesterday in response to a question by Phil Klein of The American Spectator. That hasn’t, so far, stopped the Anti-Defamation League’s Abraham Foxman from attacking the general. So set your stopwatch to figure out how long it’ll take Foxman to go after Gates.

After months of negotiations, the U.S. and Russia have agreed on a wide-ranging series of mutual reductions in their massive nuclear arsenals. Arms control advocates are over the moon, as they contend that a deal to reduce the two major nuclear powers’ stockpiles will reinvigorate the rules of the arms-control world, leading to stiffer penalties for violators. The Washington Post reports details of the deal:

Each side will reduce its most dangerous nuclear weapons — those deployed for long-range missions — from a ceiling of 2,200 to between 1,500 and 1,675. And the two militaries will make relatively small cuts in the number of jets and land- or submarine-based missiles that carry nuclear warheads and bombs.

That’s the substance of the deal known as New START. But it requires Senate ratification, which in turn requires a grueling 67 Senate votes. So the political calculation is roughly this: having lost on health care, will Senate Republicans really give the Obama administration another victory on, of all things, nuclear arms control, a principle they largely don’t accept? In an election year?

Josh Rogin recently reported that Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.), the Republican dean of arms control, said he was “hopeful that it will be signed and that there will be time assigned on the floor for debate and a vote this year.” But Lugar’s Foreign Relations Committee counterpart, chairman John Kerry (D-Mass.), told Rogin he has “no idea” if the votes are there. Presuming partisan polarization, Lugar is either the 59th or the 60th vote, depending on Joe Lieberman’s (I-Conn.) mood. Who are the other seven or eight?

U.S. soldiers train Afghan police in Herat. (EPA/ZUMApress.com)

An obscure Army contracting office with ties to the private security firm Blackwater has formally lost control of a lucrative contract to train Afghan police, the Pentagon and U.S. military officials in Afghanistan confirmed to TWI.

Image by: Matt Mahurin

The office, known as the Counter-Narcoterrorism Technology Program Office or CNTPO, came under criticism from the Government Accountability Office earlier this month for having only a marginal relationship to the training of Afghan police. CNTPO has responsibility for the military’s counternarcotics efforts, not the training of foreign military forces, and only received control over the contract after the U.S. military last year moved to take it away from the State Department and sought to rapidly award the contract to one of the five companies with which it does business — one of which is Blackwater.

That bureaucratic shift prompted a protest from State’s contractor, DynCorp, which stood to lose millions from the switch and argued that a counternarcotics office was an improper choice to award a contract for police training services. On March 15, the Government Accountability Office agreed, formally saying that the military’s solicitations were “outside the scope of [CNTPO’s] existing contracts” according to a top GAO procurement official, Ralph O. White. But GAO also did not formally say that CNTPO had to be stripped of its contract authority, creating confusion over the future of the contract.

According to several officials, the U.S./NATO military command in Afghanistan responsible for training Afghan security forces, known as NTM-A or CSTC-A, have decided keeping CNTPO involved would invite the same complaints that prompted GAO to scotch a contract worth up to $1 billion. “NTM-A/CSTC-A has seen the GAO ruling, is reviewing it and evaluating how to proceed in a manner that most effectively meets legal requirements and advances the key goal of helping to train an effective Afghan National Police Force,” said Lt. Col. Mark Wright, a Pentagon spokesman.

Reached in Kabul for comment, Lt. Col. David Hylton, a spokesman for NTM-A/CSTC-A, confirmed that “we’re reevaluating how to proceed.” Hylton added that every aspect of the contract was up for discussion within the command, and he guessed that no decisions would be made about even how to move forward with the bidding process until mid-April at the earliest.

The contract first garnered attention last month, when CNTPO’s connection to Blackwater appeared in a late-February Politico story. The same day the story ran, the Senate Armed Services Committee released a report accusing Blackwater employees of improperly taking hundreds of rifles and pistols for personal use out of a U.S. military weapons depot in Afghanistan intended to supply those very same Afghan policemen.

Scott Amey, the general counsel for the Project on Government Oversight, observed that the military “tried to fit a square peg into a round hole” by giving a counter-narcoterrorism office awarding duties for a police training contract. “The best case scenario now is that this [contract] will operate through an open process that will allow anyone to come to the table,” Amey said.

CNTPO initially got the contract because its existing relationships with the five security contractors meant that it could rapidly award a bid for a mission identified by the military as vital to the U.S. war effort, a process that entailed restricting the eligible pool of bidders. “If the government has an immediate need, it could conduct a limited competition with vendors with proven capabilities” to meet the contract requirements, Amey said.

Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, has identified that need as immediate. “There’s a shortage of trainers,” McChrystal said at a press briefing on March 17. “And we have been very unequivocal in our statement of that, both to Washington, D.C., and of course, more appropriately, to NATO.”

DynCorp’s old contract with the State Department expires in August. Hylton said NTM-A/CSTC-A had not yet made a decision on whether to seek a temporary extension of DynCorp’s contract. Col. John Ferrari, a senior officer in the training command’s programs directorate, was in charge of the decision-making process for the revised contract.

A spokesman for DynCorp, Jason Rossbach, said that the company — which the Iraq inspector general has criticized, along with the State Department, for negligent book-keeping over the police-training contract — awaited the outcome of NTM-A/CSTC-A’s contract restructuring. “We’re interested in bidding, whatever the government decides to do,” Rossbach said.