IN LIBYA AND CAIRO THIS WEEK, THUGS TOOK TO ATTACKING U.S. EMBASSIES BECAUSE THEY COULDN'T LIVE IN THE REAL WORLD.
IN
THE REAL WORLD, YOUR LOVED MIGHT GET CALLED FAT. IN THE REAL WORLD,
YOUR DREAMS MAY BE CRUSHED. IN THE REAL WORLD, YOUR HERO OR GOD MIGHT
GET INSULTED.
THOSE ARE THINGS THOSE OF US LIVING IN THE REAL WORLD GRASP.
DON'T ACCUSE THE A.P. OF EVER LIVING IN THE REAL WORLD:
The search for those behind the provocative, anti-Muslim film implicated
in violent protests in Egypt and Libya led Wednesday to a California
Coptic Christian convicted of financial crimes who acknowledged his role
in managing and providing logistics for the production.
GOOD TO KNOW THAT WHEN 4 U.S. EMBASSY STAFF ARE KILLED IN LIBYA, A.P. LAUNCHES A MANHUNT FOR A FILM DIRECTOR.
AND COULD SOMEONE TEACH A.P. BASIC ENGLISH?
FROM WEBSTERS:
- Show (someone) to be involved in a crime: "police implicated him in more killings".
- Bear
some of the responsibility for (an action or process, esp. a criminal
or harmful one): "he is heavily implicated in the bombing".
PEOPLE
ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR THEIR OWN ACTIONS. THE NORMAL REACTION TO A FILM,
THE ACCEPTED REACTION TO A FILM, IS NOT RIOTING AND MURDER. APPARENTLY
THE A.P. STRUGGLES WITH THE REAL WORLD AS MUCH AS UNEDUCATED
ISOLATIONISTS.
FROM THE TCI WIRE:
It has not been a smooth time for members of the diplomatic corps.
All Iraq News notes
Taha shukr Mahmoud Ismail has died of a heart attack. That's all the
article notes except to say he was born in 1940. I'm told he was born
in 1947 (and that he died Saturday). What follows is the other
information I was told. He had been Iraq's Ambassador to Chile. He
was born in Mosul in 1947, spoke three languages (Arabic, English and
German) earned his degree at the University of Baghdad, first joined the
diplomatic corps in 1975 and previously served as Ambassadors to
Nigeria and Venezuela. Taha shuker Mahmoud Alabass is survived by his
wife and their five children.
Heavily
armed militants assaulted the compound and set fire to our buildings.
American and Libyan security personnel battled the attackers together.
Four Americans were killed. They included Sean Smith, a Foreign Service
information management officer, and our Ambassador to Libya Chris
Stevens. We are still making next of kin notifications for the other two
individuals.
This
is an attack that should shock the conscience of people of all faiths
around the world. We condemn in the strongest terms this senseless act
of violence, and we send our prayers to the families, friends, and
colleagues of those we've lost.
All over
the world, every day, America's diplomats and development experts risk
their lives in the service of our country and our values, because they
believe that the United States must be a force for peace and progress in
the world, that these aspirations are worth striving and sacrificing
for. Alongside our men and women in uniform, they represent the best
traditions of a bold and generous nation.
In
the lobby of this building, the State Department, the names of those
who have fallen in the line of duty are inscribed in marble. Our hearts
break over each one. And now, because of this tragedy, we have new
heroes to honor and more friends to mourn.
Chris
Stevens fell in love with the Middle East as a young Peace Corps
volunteer teaching English in Morocco. He joined the Foreign Service,
learned languages, won friends for America in distant places, and made
other people's hopes his own.
In the early
days of the Libyan revolution, I asked Chris to be our envoy to the
rebel opposition. He arrived on a cargo ship in the port of Benghazi and
began building our relationships with Libya's revolutionaries. He
risked his life to stop a tyrant, then gave his life trying to help
build a better Libya. The world needs more Chris Stevenses. I spoke with
his sister, Ann, this morning, and told her that he will be remembered
as a hero by many nations.
Sean Smith was
an Air Force veteran. He spent 10 years as an information management
officer in the State Department, he was posted at The Hague, and was in
Libya on a brief temporary assignment. He was a husband to his wife
Heather, with whom I spoke this morning. He was a father to two young
children, Samantha and Nathan. They will grow up being proud of the
service their father gave to our country, service that took him from
Pretoria to Baghdad, and finally to Benghazi.
The
mission that drew Chris and Sean and their colleagues to Libya is both
noble and necessary, and we and the people of Libya honor their memory
by carrying it forward. This is not easy. Today, many Americans are
asking – indeed, I asked myself – how could this happen? How could this
happen in a country we helped liberate, in a city we helped save from
destruction? This question reflects just how complicated and, at times,
how confounding the world can be.
But we
must be clear-eyed, even in our grief. This was an attack by a small and
savage group – not the people or Government of Libya. Everywhere Chris
and his team went in Libya, in a country scarred by war and tyranny,
they were hailed as friends and partners. And when the attack came
yesterday, Libyans stood and fought to defend our post. Some were
wounded. Libyans carried Chris' body to the hospital, and they helped
rescue and lead other Americans to safety. And last night, when I spoke
with the President of Libya, he strongly condemned the violence and
pledged every effort to protect our people and pursue those responsible.
The
speech is worth reading or viewing in full. We don't have room because
we also have to cover a Congressional hearing today. One part of it we
do need to emphasize:
Some have
sought to justify this vicious behavior, along with the protest that
took place at our Embassy in Cairo yesterday, as a response to
inflammatory material posted on the internet. America's commitment to
religious tolerance goes back to the very beginning of our nation. But
let me be clear – there is no justification for this, none. Violence
like this is no way to honor religion or faith. And as long as there are
those who would take innocent life in the name of God, the world will
never know a true and lasting peace.
I'm
outraged by the attacks on American diplomatic missions in Libya and
Egypt and by the death of an American consulate worker in Benghazi.
It's
disgraceful that the Obama Administration's first response was not to
condemn attacks on our diplomatic missions, but to sympathize with those
who waged the attacks.
The
attacks were also noted this morning by US House Rep Buck McKeon who is
also the Chair of the House Armed Services Committee. At the start of
this morning's hearing, Chair McKeon observed, "This morning, we're
reminded once more of what a dangerous world we live in and the risk
many Americans take to serve our country abroad. My thoughts and
prayers together with those of the members of the Committee are with the
families of the loved ones of those that we've lost in Libya."
With that noted, McKeon then moved on to the point of the hearing: Is anyone learning?
The short answer is: No, no one is.
The hearing was about the financial costs of war and the oversight needed to ensure that
the
money is spent appropriately and as intended. The Defense Dept has
largely washed its hand of Iraq and the State Dept now is the department
spending billions of US tax dollars on Iraq. This has thrown Congress
which appears unsure of exactly how to examine the work done in Iraq --
instead of a turf war, it's more of a hot potato with no one wanting to
touch it. But the Defense Dept continues to spend huge sums in
Afghanistan and it is thought and hoped that somehow the Iraq War and
the ten years already in Afghanistan at least provided some lessons in
how to improve the financial aspects of warfare. We're talking
contracting, as DoD's Assistant Secretary on Logistics and Material
Readiness Alan F. Estevez made clear in his remarks.
It's
good that there was some clarity somewhere in his remarks. Pacific
Command and the Japanese tsunami? No one is really interested when
you're supposed to be talking about money spent on warfare. In fact,
not only are they not interested but the Committee appeared to
collectively eye roll as they pondered whether or not the tsunami was
brought up because that's the only thing DoD can point to with pride
when it comes to spending?
Estevez and Brig
Gen Craig Crenshaw turned in a joint-written statement. They delivered
individual statements orally to the Committee. Crenshaw stated that
they had addressed past mistakes in their joint-statement. It would be
good if they had done that. The Congressional Research Service's Moshe
Schwartz would testify that experts were stating, "DoD must change the
way it thinks about contracting." But there was nothing that indicated
it had or that it was trying to.
And at the
root of that is the refusal to learn from past mistakes. You can't
learn from them if you can't admit them. The refusal to acknowledge the
past mistakes may be sadder than Estevez desperation for a 'win' that
led to his highlighting Pacific Command's response to Japan's tsunami. A
statement that on its first page of text (the actual first page was a
cover sheet) quickly states, "Without dwelling on the past . . ."?
That's a joint-statement that's not going to be admitting to much of
anything.
So no, in the
joint-written statement, Estevez and Crenshaw do not "acknowledge our
past weakneesses." And this failure to do so -- this repeated failure
-- may go a long way towards explaining why money continues to be wasted
-- why large sums of money continue to be wasted.
Large sums of money?
Schwartz's
testimony also included, "According to DoD data, from Fiscal Year 2008
to Fiscal Year 2011, contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan represented
52% of the total force -- averaging 190,000 contractors to 175,000
uniformed personnel. Over the last five fiscal years, DoD obligations
for contracts performed just in the Iraq and Afghanistan areas of
operation ($132 billion) exceeded total contract obligations of any
other US federal agency.
The Congressional Research Service had three recommendations:
1) Senior leadership must focus on articulating the importance of contract support in a sustained and consistent manner.
2)
The Professional Military Education curriculum must incorporate courses
on operational contract support throughout its various efforts.
3) Training exercises must incorporate contractors playing the role that they would play on the battlefield.
Those
are good suggestions but let's explain why they're needed before we
evaluate them. They're needed because oversight of contractors is not
valued (that's the culture) and what happens is, once in the war zone,
someone gets appointed to do oversight. This person hasn't been trained
in oversight of contractors. These observations were made in this
morning's hearing.
These observations have
been made in repeated Congressional hearings, before the Commission on
Wartime Contracting and elsewhere. They are not new. If you've
attended even one hearing on contracting in war zones, you've heard the
three suggestions in some form already.
This
stuck in the same worn groove aspect was slightly touched on in the
hearing when the Government Accountability Office's Tim DiNapoli noted
that it was June 2010 when the GAO "called for a cultural change -- one
that emphasized an awareness of contractor support throughout the
department. Consistent with this message, in January 2011, the
Secretary of Defense identified the need to institutionalize changes to
bring about such a change."
But nothing
changes. And getting answers is like pulling teeth. For example, grasp
that US House Rep Susan Davis is asking basic questions and watch the
witness run from these basic issues.
US
House Rep Susan Davis: As you've gone through a number of these areas, I
think some of it falls into a category that we might call common
sense. I mean, obviously you need to plan, you need to have data, you
need to have oversight. And yet I guess to someone just listening in on
that, they'd say, "Well yeah." I mean what gets in the way of those
good practices? And I wonder if you could talk more about the different
kinds of contracting then and where that becomes a greater problem
because if it's related to the war fighter and contingency operations, I
would think in many cases that's a difficulty, as I think you've
expressed, of planning. You don't necessarily know what your situation
is going to be until you're in the middle of it. And on the other hand,
if you're talking about operational, it would seem to me that that's --
there's enough standardization in that -- that you shouldn't have to go
back to the drawing board every time. So can you help? What gets in
the way of those different areas that we're not able to, I guess,
accomplish what we really want to do?
Moshe
Schwartz There are a number of issues that you raised and I think it's
an excellent question. One of the challenges that has occured in
Afghanistan is that there's a frequent rotation among personnel --
uniform personnel as well as contractors, as well as civilian personnel
-- and so often someone who gets to theater who has never engaged in a
counter-insurgency operation -- which Afghanistan has the policy now
being pursued there -- it takes them a learning curve and they say, "Oh,
I get it. I see what's going on. And now I'm three months from going
home." And then someone else comes in who may not have had that
learning curve. That definitely has an impact of the ability for
continuity in some of these common sense issues. For example,
contracting in war time is fundamentally different than contracting in
peace time so someone who has done contracting for years and years here
to build a road is thinking: Cost, schedule, performance. When they
get to Afghanistan, perhaps cost, schedule and performance and perhaps,
"Wait, stealing the goods. We can't take them to court. What effect is
this having on the local village?" And when they start getting up to
speed, as I mentioned, they start rotating back. That's one problem. A
second problem is sometimes you hae personnel who, because of the
rotation policy, don't have the experience in that area. When I was in
Afghanistan last summer, a former helo pilot was working on contracting
strategy. He had never done that before. Incredibly talented
individual but it took him also some time to get up to speed. So I
think that is one factor that makes a difference. I think the other
factor sometimes is simply exposure to the magnitude of what one might
be dealing with. For example --
US
House Rep Susan Davis: I guess, so where -- Are there, because you
talk about gaps in data and in that collection process, how do you
mitigate these issues which are, again, they're obvious. There's a
certain level of uncertainty that you can't necessarily plan for. How
do -- What's the best way of getting around that, if that's the issue.
The other thing, and I just wanted to see if you had some thoughts on or
a sesne of what is the cost of unpreparedness and the lack of
planning? Has anybody tried to quantify that? And particularly to the
extent that we obviously need to do better planning and there is a cost
to that as well. So where is that balance and what do we think that
is? I mean is that 10% of the budget? Is that 3% of the budget? So
the first one, how do you get around those issues that you mentioned
that are obviously difficult to plan for?
Moshe Schwartz: Let me address just the data. Would you like me to respond to that one?
US House Rep Susan Davis: Yeah.
Moshe
Schwartz: So there a couple of strategies that have been suggested
that could assist. One is that what's happened often in Afghanistan is
that you have somebody collecting data but they don't know how to get it
into the system because, for example, the Sidney System, the system
that is being used in Afghanistan, they're not familiar with it. The
user interface hasn't been done in a way so that someone who isn't
experienced in programming is necessarly capable of using effectively.
In that area, training and education can make a substantial difference
as well as [. . .]
And on and on he
yammered. Want numbers? Don't ask the witnesses because despite the
fact that they should have an answer to these questions, should arrive
for the hearing with answers to these questions, they never provide
them. Davis went over her time in the excerpt above. When Schwartz was
finally done yammering, she would quickly ask if -- by hand in the air
-- could anyone indicate that they had a rough idea of the cost that was
being talked about? No one could.
Another point to note, we said DoD does less. DoD is not gone from Iraq. And this was briefly noted in the hearing.
US
House Rep Mike Coffman: I think my first question would be how many
contractors -- or is anybody aware of how many contractors we have in
Iraq today
Alan Estevez: Iraq today, end of third-quarter number is about 7,300. DoD contractors.
US House Rep Mike Coffman: 7,300. And what kind of missions are they performing at this time?
Alan Estevez: They're still doing some base support, delivery of food and fuel, some private security, some security missions.
Those are not State Dept contractors, those are DoD contractors.
Let's
not Estevez's title again: Assistant Secretary of Defense Logistics and
Material Readiness. He is qualified to answer that question. He did
answer that question.
Quickly, if US House
Rep Dennis Kucinich wanted to contribute anything before he leaves
Congress (he lost his primary and has no election to run in), he could
chair or co-chair a hearing on what we learn from the Iraq War that
deals with realities and not just dollars and cents. US House Rep Lynne
Woolsey, who decided not to seek re-election, would make a good chair
for such a hearing.
Recommended: "
Iraq
snapshot"
"
6 dead, 13 wounded so far
today"
"
Iraq's persecuted LGBT
community"
"
The teachers
strike"
"
NBC disrespects 9-11 twice
today"
"
The
issues"
"
full service: hollywood and
prostitution"
"
West Nile"
"
Paul Simon's
Graceland"
"
Hepburn, Tracy, Burr, prostitutes
and more"
"
What does it
mean?"
"
Another death at
Guantanamo"
"
Who's the grown up in the
room?"
"
Groveling 101"
"
THIS JUST IN! LEAD FROM
WEAKNESS!"
