Miscellaneous Policy Snapshots

In a prior blog on campaign finance reform, I made reference to an ad being run in New Mexico by the American Future Fund, contending that President Obama has appointed a listed 27 Wall Street movers and shakers to high-level government positions. I have deleted the reference because FactCheck.org of the Annenberg Public Policy Center has found that more than half of those cases are either flat wrong or greatly exaggerated. The "most laughable" examples are: Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner as having worked on Wall Street; two men appointed by former president Bush who left shortly after Obama took office; two men who never worked in the administration; and two men who worked on Wall Street only after leaving their administration job.

Pakistan
Dexter Filkins' article in the September 12, 2011 issue of The New Yorker, points up the challenge faced by the Obama administration in countering the influence of Pakistan's military and intelligence service (the I.S.I.). The Pakistani army is the world's eighth largest and takes up a quarter of the country's budget. Since the late 1970s, the military and the I.S.I. have trained and directed thousands of militants to fight in Indian Kashmir. I.S.I agent Fida Muhammad estimated that the I.S.I. evacuated as many as 1,500 militants from Tora Bora and other camps. Those evacuated included Arabs, Pakistanis, Uzbeks and Chechens.

Pakistan's military faces a major problem of Islamization.

In September 2011, the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, directly accused the I.S.I. of being directly involved in the attack on the U.S.Embassy in Kabul.

Bush-Era Memo Details Arguments for Rendition Power
The March 13 memo by Jay S. Bybee, then assistant attorney general in the Justice Department's office of general counsel, said the president has an unfettered right to transfer prisoners captured in the Global War on Terror to governments around the world without regard for whether they would be tortured there.

The March memo went further. It said that prisoners held outside the United States were not protected by U.S. law nor against a separate international treaty banning torture. It also said that an 1998 law making it U.S. policy not to hand over prisoners to a country where they may be tortured was invalid because it unconstitutionally interferes with presidential powers.

The memo said: "To fully shield our personnel from criminal liability, it is important that the United States not enter into an agreement with a foreign country for the purpose of having the individual tortured. So long as the United States does not intend for a detainee to be tortured post-transfer, however, no criminal liability will attach to a transfer, even if the foreign country receiving the detainee does torture him."

Then CIA Director Leon Panetta, an appointee of President Barack Obama, said the United States would continue to engage in extraordinary rendition but would use it rarely and would be more selective about the countries to which prisoners would be sent.

Shortly after Barack Obama took the oath of office, the Washington Post reported that Obama had formally ended the Global War on Terror but he retained the right to use renditions; also, the detainees in Bagram air base in Afghanistan and the thousands being held in Iraq wouldn't get the case-by-case review accorded to counterparts being held in Cuba. Non-military agencies, such as the CIA, were told that after a six-month review they might get "additional or different guidance on interrogations."

An article titled "GWOT's End?" in the January 27, 2009 issue of Foreign Affairs in Focus, expressed skepticism about an end to the Global War on Terrorism: "But so far the new president still treats terrorism as a war to be won rather than an endemic problem to be dealt with, patiently and largely by law enforcement agencies. We're still at war in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and for the time being, in Iraq. We're still selling arms to Indonesia, Israel and Colombia as part of an overall counterterrorism approach. The Pentagon's new Africa Command (AFRICOM) still looks at counterterorism through a military lens."