More Honesty and Integrity from the Bush Admin

The St. Petersburg Times (Florida) is reporting that the Special Operations Command at MacDill Air Force Base falsly inflated their budget proposals to help hide $20 million the Pentagon wanted to ahve available, but didn't want Congress to know about.

The plan, according to defense officials and documents obtained by the Times, called for Special Operations to pad its proposed budget by $20-million so the money could be used later by the Pentagon for some other purpose. The Pentagon initially wanted Special Operations to hide $40-million. The Special Operations Command, which oversees the nation's secret commando units, refused.

It is unclear what the Pentagon intended to do with the $20-million, or what became of the money. Young surmised that the money could have been used as a contingency fund, available to Rumsfeld to use at his discretion. While $20-million is relatively modest in a Pentagon budget of almost $400-billion, Young said, if all the armed services are doing it the amount could grow significantly.

This is more than just an idle accusation, apparently, there are e-mail messages that back up the allegation.

The agreement between the Pentagon officials in Washington and Special Operations officials in Tampa is spelled out in an e-mail distributed by SoCom comptroller Elaine Kingston to colleagues on Feb. 11, 2002.

In the e-mail, Kingston wrote that she received a call from someone in the Pentagon comptroller's office. The caller, who is not identified in the e-mail, asked if the Special Operations Command could "park" $40-million of research and development money in its proposed budget for the 2003 fiscal year, which ends Tuesday.

"They needed an answer in 5 minutes," Kingston wrote. "The agency they had it parked with had a problem and couldn't do it."

Kingston wrote that "there was no way for us to park $40M." She wrote that she and Deborah Kiser, SoCom's investment appropriations budget chief, found six programs where they could add $20-million.

The programs listed in the e-mail include improvements to missile warning systems on Special Operations aircraft, infrared equipment on helicopters and radar systems. The $20-million was distributed in amounts as small as $2-million and as large as $5-million.

In her e-mail, Kingston coached colleagues on how to account for the additional money and avoid attracting attention to it in congressional briefings.

"I just wanted to follow up with an e-mail to ensure that the staffer briefing slides for these programs DO include these funds and that the briefer not highlight or discuss them during the staffer briefings," she wrote.

So, basically, the Pentagon wanted more money, but it didn't want to tell Congress what it wanted or why, so they asked MacDill Air Force Base's Special Operations Command to artificially inflate their budget request so that they would get $20 million more than they actually needed, and SOC would keep it on hand to give back to the Pentagon at their request.

It's unclear at this point how common of a practice it is for the Pentagon to "park" money at bases, or if any other bases were involved (though my personal guess would be that there may well be at least one more since the Pentagon wanted to part $40 million and MacDill SOC could only accomodate $20 million of that), but even if this is an isolated incidence, there's something fundamentally wrong about the Pentagon wanting to keep money hidden from Congress and an Air Force Base going along with it.

Link via Atrios

Sensitivity 101

Maybe it's just me, but this comment by Paul Wolfowitz, made while trying to answer a question "about whether the administration plans to withdraw troops right before the 2004 presidential election," seems to be more than just a bit insensitive.

"These are national security decisions; they have to be made on that basis," he said. Wolfowitz said that doesn't mean that "we're not trying to, in fact, get more Iraqis on the front lines, get them dying for their country so fewer Americans have to."

Now, I don't want to see any more Americans die over Iraq - I think I've made that pretty clear. But then again, I want to see fewer people dying over Iraq in general, not just change the race of those who are.

Of course, the idiocy of Wolfowitz' statement - beyond the sheer insensitivity of it - is that the Iraqis who are doing the killing don't necessarily want to kill other Iraqis, though they will kill them if they're working with us. No, they want to kill Americans because we invaded their country and they want us gone. Americans keep dying because they're still there.

Of course, right now, it might not be feasible to remove our troops - there's still a lot of rebuilding that has to be done, and the situation there is rather chaotic. That I recognize that doesn't mean I like it, but we have to remember that this is our war. The Iraqi people didn't ask us for help - our leaders took it upon themselves to decide that for our safety Saddam had to go. We didn't do this for he Iraqis - regardless of how the administration tries to spin it - we did it for ourselves. And now we have one of our erstwhile leaders saying that more of the Iraqis who have decided to help us in our quest need to be the ones to die.

Wouldn't it be better to have as our goal less killing overall?

'You want me to put a sign on it in fifty languages, 'I am a troop carrier, not a tank. Please don't shoot me?' '

Newsweek is reporting that the Army's new Stryker troop carriers have a rather serious problem: The German subcontrator that General Dynamics used to make ceramic tiles (which are supposed to protect the lightweight steel and aluminum skin of the Stryker) didn't always make them according to specs, resulting in some batches of tiles that fail to protect either the vehicle or - more importantly - the troops inside.

The bad tiles are weak enough that they leave the Stryker vulnerable to attacks from RPGs or machine gun fire - both of which are frequently used by Iraqis attacking the US forces.

Worse still: the Army has known it might have a problem since February, but has kept quiet about it. An Army memo sent yesterday to the head of the Stryker program, and obtained by NEWSWEEK, reports: "Evidently this issue was first raised in February 2003. Am unsure how this issue escaped public scrutiny for six months." Not even Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was told, NEWSWEEK has learned. “Understand that ARSTAF [Army Staff] have been told to treat this issue as if it were ‘classified’,” says the memo, which is addressed to Lt. Gen. John Riggs, the head of the Stryker program.

The Stryker has been "advertised as the first fruit of the Army’s plan to transform itself into a lighter, go-anywhere-fast force," but the program has been controversial from the start.

Many of the Army’s most senior officers privately consider the Stryker far too large—it’s as big as a school bus—and far too vulnerable either in open combat or in the confined spaces of urban warfare. (Even with its ceramic cladding, certain spots on the Stryker remain unprotected against an accurately aimed RPG or even rifle fire.)

The Army's contract with General Dynamics is for 2100 vehicles of which more than 600 have been delivered. A study of the database related to the making of the vehicles shows that “'[a]ll Strykers in combat brigades and at test sites—more than 600 vehicles—are equipped with some [potentially faulty] armor panels' and will need retesting, says the memo to Riggs."

The only sure remedy will be to replace all of the bad tiles, but in the meantime, "the emergency fix that the Army has decided for the Strykers bound for Iraq is to glue a sheet of ultrahard steel behind each faulty tile." The downside to this remedy is that the Strykers - which are supposed to be lightweight and fast - will be made that much heavier by the added steel plates.

I'm not exactly sure why, but for some reason, the use of a foreign subcontractor strikes me as a less-than-wise move, though I'm sure it's SOP in the defense industry.

What's even more troublesome, though, is that a subcontractor - regardless of where they're located - would decide to disregard the specifications of the equipment that they're making and change the forumula/recipe apparently on their own initiative, and without regard for the effect it has on the safety and useability of the final product.

It never ceases to amaze me how frequently we hear about problems with equipment that our men and women - who are already risking their lives for this country - are depending on to protect them. Defense contractor scandals are pretty mush standard operating procedure for Washington, but why anyone accepts the status quo is beyond me.

Shouldn't that be wanting no more dead NOW?

Chicago Tribune | U.S. failures in Iraq set stage for deeper trouble

Perhaps the only hope lies in the story going around town that President Bush has told the Pentagon he wants "no more American dead" after next March. By then, the electoral campaign will be well under way, and perhaps zealotry will give way to reality--or at least to a change in administration.

Read the rest of the article as well, as it points out just how badly - and how stupidly - we're going about this.

Possible Saudi link to 9/11 probed

This just popped up in my e-mail as "Breaking News"...  When more info is available, I'll probably be writing about it.  In the meantime, this alert came from MSNBC and Newsweek, so you may want to check there for more info:'

The FBI is investigating whether the Saudi government -- using the bank account of the wife of a senior Saudi diplomat -- sent tens of thousands of dollars to two Saudi students in the United States who provided assistance to two of the September 11 hijackers, law enforcement sources told Newsweek.

From the sketchy information here, if there is a link, it's somewhat tangental, but finding any connection between the Saudi government and the September 11th attacks could create some radical changes in what we do from here.  The Saudi government has long been treated as a good friend of America, and it's known that the Bush family has several strong ties to the Royal family there.  At the same time, the majority of the hijackers were from Saudi Arabia, and there have been questions raised about the Saudi government's support of some of the more militant forms of Islam.

If this story pans out, it should be one worth watching - and it'll be interesting to see if there are attempts made to supress the story at all, especially if it touches on the ties between the Saudi government and the Bush family.

UPDATE: Newsweek has posted an article here on this story.