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Detainee Policy Gives Obama Credibility Deficit

By Steve Hynd

I don't know about the rest of you, but I strongly feel if Obama is willing to break the universal rule of law as understood by democratic nations to the extent of keeping people in jail after they've been aquitted, after all he said during his campaign and in his first few weeks in office, then there is nothing upon which his word is trustworthy.

Spencer Ackerman yesterday attended a Senate hearing at which the DOD's General Counsel, Jeh Johnson, testified.  As Ackerman highlighted, Johnson actually said that even for those detainees to whom the Obama administration deigns to give a real trial in a real court, the President has the power to continue to imprison them indefinitely even if they are acquitted at their trial.  About this assertion of "presidential post-acquittal detention power" -- an Orwellian term (and a Kafka-esque concept) that should send shivers down the spine of anyone who cares at all about the most basic liberties -- Ackerman wrote, with some understatement, that it "moved the Obama administration into new territory from a civil liberties perspective."  Law professor Jonathan Turley was more blunt:  "The Obama Administration continues its retention and expansion of abusive Bush policies — now clearly Obama policies on indefinite detention." 

...this underscores what has clearly emerged as the core "principle" of Obama justice when it comes to accused Terrorists -- namely, "due process" is pure window dressing with only one goal:   to ensure that anyone the President wants to keep imprisoned will remain in prison.  They'll create various procedures to prettify the process, but the outcome is always the same -- ongoing detention for as long as the President dictates.

You have to assume that anything reasonable coming out of this administration is "pure window dressing", "procedures to prettify the process", which will simply be a cover for maintaining the status quo and increasing the power of the presidency. That applies to healthcare, the economy, the Af/Pak region, energy, global climate change, you name it. You have to, for your own safety, simply because Obama's detainee policy is such a massively criminal break with what Western democracies regard as legal and moral that literally any other crime is possible. That, for many, was exactly the problem with Bush and his administration. Given what they had done on Iraq and Gitmo, it was impossible to trust them to stay within legal boundaries on other matters. And they often didn't.

Murtha to hire Dewey Cheatum & Howe

By Fester:

Rep. Murtha will be hiring the prestigious law firm of Dewey Cheatum & Howe as some of his associates are being very friendly with the Feds investigating an alleged kickback scheme for earnmarks.  Via the Pittsburgh Post Gazette:

Federal prosecutors filed corruption charges yesterday against a onetime defense contractor who has ties to both U.S. Rep. John Murtha and a suburban Johnstown defense contractor currently under criminal investigation.

Richard S. Ianieri, former president and CEO of Coherent Systems International Corp., was accused of accepting $200,000 in kickbacks. He is charged through a criminal information and is expected to plead guilty.

If I understand the legal system well enough, a criminal information is usually what is used for an indictment where there is a pre-arranged plea deal.  Commonly that plea dealer will involve the defendent to start talking and filling in the gaps.  If I was Rep. Murtha, I would be sweating, especially after I have gone on the record with a defense of corruption that is amazingly old-school hack:

The Murtha quote in the Post Gazette is priceless (actually, we can probably get a price for it if we hire PMA...)

"If I'm corrupt, it's because I take care of my district," Mr. Murtha said. "My job as a member of Congress is to make sure that we take care of what we see is necessary. Not the bureaucrats who are unelected over there in whatever White House, whether it's Republican or Democrat. Those bureaucrats would like to control everything. Every president would like to have all the power and not have Congress change anything. But we're closest to the people."

Change names and that statement could come from Rep. Young, (R-AK), or Tom Delay or half a dozen current federal prisoners.

The fine firm of Dewey Cheatum & Howe will make a bloody fortune off of the Murtha defense if things proceed the way I think they will....

The Price of a 'Decent Outcome'

By Fester

Ahh, a decent interval before America can forget and the idiots in charge can continue to be idiots and in charge.

Via IOZ:

Today in 2009 we’re in a lot of ways back to where we were four years ago—able for American forces to start leaving on a high note, confident that they performed their job with skill, and leaving Iraqi leaders with a handshake.

-Matthew Yglesias

Or you could say that in 2009 a tactically exhausted and strategically impotent American army is beginning a pullback, leaving behind a million or two (it is a mark, a stain, a dishonor, a horror that we frankly have no idea) extra dead and displaced Iraqis under the rule of a gangster president who looks ever more like his predecessor, whose ouster we sought at the cost of those hundreds of thousands of lives. You could say that the "high note" on which we depart, having made the world safe for British Petroleum, consists of a level of daily terror and violence, both on behalf of the extant state and on behalf of the various insurgencies, hold-outs, rebels, extremists, and others, that would fracture and destroy any internally peaceful western society. The "job" performed so admirably by American forces was the unprovoked invasion and occupation of a foreign nation, and the fact that the American military has subsequently managed to mop much of the blood from the gutters does not obviate or abnegate these facts.....

If anything IOZ has understated the case as the best estimate is several hundred thousand dead and 4.7 million refugees, or roughly one sixth to one fifth of the pre-war population dead or displaced. All that for a decent interval before the resource conflicts start up again....

The tax revolt of 2010 (cont...)

By Fester:

People are in pain right now. Twenty million homeowners are underwater, a systemic debt reduction effort is underway, the employment picture now just sucks instead of horrendously sucking, any productivity and compensation gains are getting eated up by health care premiums and energy prices have bounced back up after an easy first half of the year.

In November 2007, I thought one of the dynamics that we would be seeing in 2009 and 2010 would be a property tax revolt. Property owners in bubblicious areas would see their homes go underwater as values and the regional economy that was built on bubble building deflated, and these property owners would be in pain and in a political position to do something about some of their pain:

People who are stuck with mortgages and houses that they can not sell, refinance or service will be looking for help. They will be looking for refinancing deals, special breaks, holds on foreclosures, delays on credit reporting, and most significantly at the local level, assistance on minimizing the quasi-fixed costs. That means support for more heating and energy assistance, lobbying for lower insurance limits for flooding and hurricanes in disaster prone areas with the hope of either dodging the bullets, or shifting those costs to someone, somewhere else, and most importantly, constant and downwardly revising re-assessments without concurrent increases in millage rates...

Homes are the primary asset for most people, and right now homes are under systemic threat as a symptom of a greater problem. People want to make that pain go away without the costs of fixing the greater problems, and engaging in a local government financial death spiral and micro-local education arbitage seems like a decent short term fix, so we'll see a full scale tax revolt in 2010 or no later than 2012 as the last round of housing bubble junk Option ARM mortgage resets will be hitting in 2010/2011 --- what we are seeing now is just the tip of the iceberg

We have seen refinancing deals, special breaks, and holds on foreclosures as federal policy. These efforts have probably brought marginal relief but they have not addressed the systemic problem of way too much debt and not enough carrying capacity. Local governments are just starting to get slammed as the combination of a decent first half of FY 2009 on revenue collection and short term reserves have made the FY-09 budgets austere but not dramatically shrunked. Those reserves are no longer in place for most states as they face massive budget deficits. Balancing those state budgets will often mean school and local jurisdictions that rely on state funds will see a significant hole in their budget that can either be filled by new taxes or spending cuts.

Local taxing authorities will want to maintain assessed values from the bubble peak years and fight like hell against appeals for lower, closer to market values. Politically it is easier to have a low millage rate on an artificially high base than to have a high millage rate on an accurate base. The New York Times reports on this fight:

Homeowners across the country are challenging their property tax bills in droves as the value of their homes drop, threatening local governments with another big drain on their budgets....

The pain at the state level is trickling down to county and local governments. To compensate, about 10 percent of large counties are raising the tax rates associated with home values to minimize the revenue loss, the county association said....

The revenue losses are coming as homeowners prod towns for new assessments, and as municipalities conduct regular revaluations of their real estate. While declining residential values weigh heaviest on many governments, the value of commercial real estate is also sliding as businesses shut down and move out of storefronts or shopping malls....

Mr. Kramer, the assessor in Contra Costa County, said homeowners started swamping his office with requests for new assessments in December. As many as 500 people would call in one day. His voice mail message now begins: “If you’re calling to request an informal review of your property value due to the declining real estate market.”

Contra Costa has now reduced the recorded value of more than a third of the 350,000 privately owned properties in the county....

I still think that there is a significant political opening for demagogues who call for tax cuts uber alles as that will seem to alleviate some of the pain for a little while and when people are getting beaten down, a breather and a break is a very attractive promise.

Where's My Monkey Wrench?

By Steve Hynd

A couple of days ago,  Chris Bowers snarkily announced his conversion to being a "conservative Democrat".

After several years of trying to "retake" the Democratic Party and make it more progressive, today I am giving up and becoming a conservative Democrat. Upon careful consideration, the benefits packages are simply too heavily tilted toward the corporate wing of the party. Check it out:

It would be pretty sweet to be able to endorse someone other than a Democrat for President, and then have the Democratic leadership do whatever it takes to keep me in the Party. I mean, if you do this as a progressive, then you are pretty much screwed for life.

...If you are a conservative Democrat, you get frequent meetings with the President and proclamations that he is one of your own. If you are a progressive, you have to stand at the back of the line, and then get threats about never hearing from the White House again if you step out of line.

Further, if you are a conservative Democrat, you can also refuse to pay your Democratic Party Committee dues, and still receive disproportionate expenditures from Democratic Party Committees. That is just a straight up good deal.

...Being a conservative Democrat gets you more money, too. You can proclaim that you are a conservative Democrat, and still have small, progressive, grassroots donors be by far your top contributors. Hard to argue with receiving both enormous big dollar fundraisers held in your honor and huge amounts of money from small progressive donors. So really, who cares if bloggers complain about you. Their readers are still going to fork over huge amounts of money.

If you are a conservative Democrat, you get to hold up, water down, and threaten whatever Democratic legislation you want. And there are no repercussions. In fact...

Being a conservative Democrat also makes you far more likely to receive a major cabinet appointment. Not even counting the Republicans, New Democrats outnumber Progressives in President Obama's cabinet by 7-1.

Finally, if one of those crazy progressives decides to challenge you in a primary campaign, if you are a conservative Democrat you can also count on the endorsements of 95% of your congressional colleagues, the entire party leadership, and virtually every progressive advocacy organization. They will stand by you.

"Bonesparkle" at Scholars & Rogues took up the issue (H/t Kat):

Ultimately, Bowers and other frustrated progressives are right. The Democratic party just isn’t that into them. They’re useful when votes are needed, but are utterly incapable of leveraging that into actual influence...

Playing along isn’t working. So how about rounding up all the members of the Progressive Caucus (and their many allies around the country) and opting out? Leave the Democractic Party. Form a third party of their own (or just join the Greens). All of a sudden the Democratic Party has a numbers problem. All of a sudden they lose majority status, chairmanships, agenda-setting stroke, etc.

...Part of me says “what if it backfires?” But the other part of me looks at the state of the current union, at the looting of the last eight (or, depending on your taste for the long view, 29) years, at the energy way too many Americans have to devote to worrying about what happens if they get sick or injured, at the staggering cost associated with continuing to fuck around with the environment, at the fact that millions and millions and millions of citizens have no hope at all of financial solvency, at the knee-buckling stupidity of a populace that’s been victimized by a brilliantly conceived War on Education, at…. Fuck it. You get the picture.

Off your knees, progressives. The worst that happens is more of the same. At the least do us the favor of dying on your feet.

It's not a new idea. The same ideas play out in the run-up and aftermath to every major election cycle as progressives - perpetual victims - steel themselves to vote for people they're sure are going to screw them, get screwed, then wonder how to stop being screwed. Indeed, back in 2005 I contributed some ideas to the discussion a whole bunch of bloggers were having for a "coalition of the left", an American Solidarity movement which would be a progressive "big tent" outwith the self-imposed political rapings of the Democratic Party. The best round-up of the discussion came from American Samizdat.

Then, as now, the biggest real-world barrier to a divorce of progressives and Beltway Democrats is the way in which the big two parties have the electoral process sewn up at the earliest stages, making it nigh-on impossible for a new third party to get on the ballot in enough places to mount a truly national campaign. The biggest emotional barrier is the perennial notion that "this time it will be different" - the Dems playing Lucy with the football, as Fester likes to describe it. For the 2006 cycle, the football was Iraq. For 2008, it was Barack Obama himself and his promises even convinced cynical me to back off from urging that divorce. But Obama has become more and more a Tony Blair figure - he said a lot of stuff to get elected but on healthcare, the economy, social safety nets, interventionist foreign policy, state secrecy, torture and the Imperial presidency he's turned out not to mean a whole lot of those words.

No more excuses. "Off your knees, progressives. The worst that happens is more of the same. At the least do us the favor of dying on your feet."

Solidarinosc!

Time for a Blogger's Ethics Panel

By Fester:

Time for a blogger ethics panel as there is no invinsible wall between editorial and business functions at this and many other blogs. The Newshoggers recently received a paid advertisment from the ACLU that advocates Twittering Against Torture. Once BlogAds takes their cut, we may be able to afford a pint of good Kentucky whiskey to split amongst everyone. The ACLU advertised on the 'Hog because they consider the writers and by implications our audience to be a receptive audience to their message that torture is an inherent bad and should not be condoned. Our opinions as writers made us notable and potentially valuable to an advertiser. Time for an ethics panel...

If this Politico Report is to believed, the Washington Post really needs a Bloggers' Ethics Panel:

For $25,000 to $250,000, The Washington Post is offering lobbyists and association executives off-the-record, nonconfrontational access to "those powerful few" — Obama administration officials, members of Congress, and the paper’s own reporters and editors....

 

"Underwriting Opportunity: An evening with the right people can alter the debate," says the one-page flier. "Underwrite and participate in this intimate and exclusive Washington Post Salon, an off-the-record dinner and discussion at the home of CEO and Publisher Katharine Weymouth. ... Bring your organization’s CEO or executive director literally to the table. Interact with key Obama administration and congressional leaders …

 

“Spirited? Yes. Confrontational? No. The relaxed setting in the home of Katharine Weymouth assures it. What is guaranteed is a collegial evening, with Obama administration officials, Congress members, business leaders, advocacy leaders and other select minds typically on the guest list of 20 or less. …

 

“Offered at $25,000 per sponsor, per Salon. Maximum of two sponsors per Salon. Underwriters’ CEO or Executive Director participates in the discussion....

 

Hosts and Discussion Leaders ... Health-care reporting and editorial staff members of The Washington Post ..

Of course we know it is the job of the national print media to star-fuck.  Why would that raise any ethical concerns at all.  And why would this raise any credibility concerns when it is so difficult to get decent steaks with an appetizer, desert and a pair of drinks for two for less than $20,000, they barely are making any money on this at all.  There is nothing suspicious here.  Nothing at all besides the complete confirmation of the malleability of the Washington Post’s editorial stances for deep pockets. 

But there is no need for an ethics panel as Tom in Comments at Balloon Juice wins quote of the week on this story with this line:

So we have now come to the point where a health care lobbyist is more ethical than the Washington Post.

Wow!

Congress has few philospher kings

By Fester:

I like to live in the real world. It is messy, it is confusing, it often produces non-optimal outcomes (depending on the relevant constraints) but it is tangible. I can also live in a normative world where everything is neat, clean, organized and optimized towards the relevant constraints. However that world seldom exists. I often look for satisficing improvements instead of optimal solutions because the improvements are achievable.

I don't understand the critique of Waxman-Markley that Andrew Samwick and others are advancing in that it is a satisficaing improvement but non-optimal on several grounds:

Much as you may like the idea, this is another 1300 pages of complexity and loopholes. Buried in there, I'll wager, are more than enough ways for large organizations (the ones who hire lobbyists) to get all the exemption and evasion they'll need. Consider the alternative of a carbon tax calibrated to achieve the same emission reductions, and applied to all sectors including vehicle fuel consumption. I'm no expert on translating ideas into pages of a bill, but that can't be much. And given that it allows us to do away with the CAFE standards, I figure we've done a great service of dramatically simplifying the whole regulatory process for carbon emissions.

Economically, a clean carbon tax and a clean cap and trade bill will do the same thing. They will both internalize the currently externalize cost of carbon dioxide emissions. There are two big differences. The first is that a a carbon tax is a price certain option while the cap and trade system is a quantity certain feature.  Secondly, cap and trade is economically more efficient as it allows for market discovery of prices of a scarce good instead of hoping that Congress can hit the right number at any given time for optimal economic efficiency for a given amount of emissions.  

 

His argument is that a carbon tax would be neater and less messy.  Lobbyists would not be able to claw out special interest exemptions and transfers and the legislation would be only several pages long.  He is arguing a straw man here in my opinion.  A properly designed cap and trade system could also be written in a fairly short and concise manner as well.

 

He is bitching and moaning about basic political incentives here.  A complex bill with exemptions, curlicues and who knows what else in it for concentrated interests is far more profitable to the relevant players than a simple, clean sheet proposal with no exemptions.  Dr. Samwick is implicitly arguing that a carbon tax would be less susceptible to this type of manipulation than a cap and trade regime.  I have severe doubts about that.  We have plenty of evidence that tax bills, even comparatively simple tax bills that are mere modifications of existing tax laws can and will be massively abused with exemptions, exceptions, partially refundable credits, donut hole deductions and anything else that concentrated interests can muster to improve their interests against the counterfactual of a clean bill.  The classic example is the agricultural bill where there are significant subsidies for sugar, mohair, honey and other products because there is a strong lobby for those interests while the public purpose of food security, public health and reasonably low prices for a wide selection of goods is often ignored. 

 

I have yet to see a good political reason why the concessions that the Democrats on the Agricultural Committee wanted and received to weaken the bill and make the bill more complex for cap and trade would not also be granted in a carbon tax system.  I think it is very reasonable to assume that Agricultural Committee Democrats would want land use carbon emissions to be exempted from the carbon tax or at least counted under a friendly system.  Those are the concessions that they basically got in cap and trade, and those would be the concessions they would have wanted from a carbon tax regime.  Otherwise they most likely and there would be nothing. 

 

Now if Dr. Samwick wants to argue that doing nothing now is a superior option as the costs of action and inaction escalate the pressure to pass a much cleaner bill that is more to his liking at some uncertain point in the future, that is a defensible argument.  However that is not the argument he is making.  He is whining that Congress is acting like politicians engaged in politics with attendant incentives instead of philosopher king technocrats who will agree with his preferred solutions.  Me, I’m happy for an improvement with the hope that institutional inertia will lead to a good process and outcome over time. 

 

 

Lucy's Football

By Fester:

Ian Welsh has the outline of the Senate Finance Committee’s health insurance plan. The shorter version of the short version is that it sucks. Here is the short version of the plan:

1) Lower the medicaid coverage rate from 150% to 100% of the Federal poverty line, 133% for kids and pregnant women (once you have the baby, too bad for you)

2) Subsidies stop at 300% of the poverty line (was 400%)

3) No Public Option mentioned

4) Insurance exchanges at the State level

5) Must buy insurance unless it costs more than 15% of your income

6) A fine if you don’t buy insurance unless you’re below the Federal poverty line

For the most part, as Walker discusses, this is actually identical to or slightly worse than the plan put forward by America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP). Yes, worse than the insurance industry’s plan. Remarkable. Baucus is really earning his campaign donations these days…. Without a public option, the insurance companies will have no check on their prices, let alone pressure to actually reduce them. Because people will be forced to buy bad insurance, they’ll hate the plan, and because “reform” has been passed, we’ll have to wait another 10 or 12 years for another shot....

Tim at Balloon Juice is very curious why Obama is not actively selling a strong public option proposal.

Watching Democrats try to fix health care I see a photo negative of the Bush years. Here is an issue with obvious urgency. Setting aside our shameful infant mortality rate, uninsured rate and other statistics, medical bills are by far the leading cause of personal bankruptcies. Insurer misconducy wrecks lives every day in every city in America. The right options are obvious and relatively few in number. Huge majorities support doing the right thing.

Even self-interest is similarly one sided. Remember how much Republicans invested in realigning the destroying Social Security? Imagine if they had an issue that would realign the country in their favor and instead of huge majorities violently hating it, most Americans strongly supported what they wanted to do. Republican strategists would give two of their first three kids for a shot at an issue with this much going for it....

I hear that Obama supports the public option. That would mean more if it felt even a little more urgent than his idea that we should have a college football playoff series.

Belaboring the obvious, people who care about what they’re doing normally enter negotiations with some firm goal in mind. Most would agree that it is moronic to make negotiating itself the point.

Many others, including Steve have noted that if a major and effective health financing reform bill passed with either a pathway to de facto single payer for baseline care or at least a strong public option, major fundraising avenues will be closed off to some of the current veto points in the Senate and the House. I think that is part of the problem with the Democrats.

However, I would like to get a little more cynical for a moment. What if healthcare reform is to Democrats what abortion and anti-feminism is to Republicans in that both are seem by significant portions of their respective bases as high salience issues that are best served by never fully addressing? Gotta keep the activists in line and ready to donate and phone bank for two more incremental steps in the 'right' direction instead of attempting to systemically change the constraints of power and the political process.

Tim is right that an effective public plan option would be a system changer that would effectively tilt the political playing field to Democrats for at least a generation or two in much the same way that Social Security and Medicare are high salience, high effectiveness boundary conditions for Democrats to lean on. However the Democrats who would benefit from these changes are not neccessarily the Democrats who are currently in power or more importantly, currently occupying critical blocking positions. So reform that can shave off several points of GDP on health expenditures, improve coverage and re-align US politics is not a winning solution for the key set of stakeholders; instead their winning solution is to do just enough to avoid overwhelming political costs and pressure.

The Best Democracy Money Can Buy

Commentary By Ron Beasley

So how is it that 76% of the citizens of the US support a public health plan but it may not have the votes in congress?  It's simple really.  When we vote we elect people who take their orders from a few wealthy oligarchs who set policy and make the decisions. The people with the most money can but the most lawmakers.  Jim Hightower explains:

Pockets of Influence in Washington

What do shoplifters and members of Congress have in common? Tailor-made clothing.

Like a shoplifter's long coat, the suits of many lawmakers come with an astonishing array of inside pockets that hold surprising volumes of loot. We already know about various conduits that politicians have crafted to funnel cash into their election campaigns, but USA Today recently reported that our congressional stalwarts have also created a series of less-obvious pockets for stashing special-interest influence money.

[....]

Take the "foundation pocket." Rep. Joe Barton, a Texas Republican, has sewn one of these into his suit. His Barton Family Foundation has become a handy place for favor-seeking corporate interests to stash cash and earn Joe's gratitude. For example, Exelon, the giant nuclear-powered electric company, has deposited $75,000 in the foundation - money it could not legally give directly to Barton's campaign fund. Did I mention that Joe is the top Republican on the house energy committee and that he often carries legislative water for the nuclear industry?

Still, Barton sees no ethical lapse in such smelly transactions, cleverly claiming, "The money doesn't go to me." Too clever by half. The Exelon donation came only because the congressman personally wrote to the CEO to solicit it, the check is made out to a foundation bearing the congressman's very own name, and he controls the dispersal of the funds. Indeed, thanks to his corporate donors, Barton's foundation is able to give highly publicized grants to nonprofit groups in his district, thus scoring major political points for Joe.

Then there's the "institute pocket" stitched into the garments of a bipartisan collection of lawmakers.

One is Ted Kennedy, the Democratic icon who is presently setting up an Institute for the United States Senate in Boston. It will be named for - guess who? - him. Amgen, the huge drug corporation, was so moved by the civic nature of the institute that it ponied up $5 million to help fund it.

Please be assured, however, that Kennedy's prominent role in the current legislative fight to rein in drug company gouging had nothing whatsoever to do with the corporation's decision to donate so generously. As an Amgen spokeswoman explained, the $5 million merely reflects the drug maker's interest in helping "young people to become engaged in public service and public policy." 

That's why even though the political party in charge may change things don't change that much.  Without serious campaign reform the oligarchs will continue to rule and a government buy the people and for the people will remain a memory and a dream.

UPDATE

Ali Frick at Think Progress points out that the corporate media is in the attack mode:

Major Media Headlines Pretend That Latest Polls Show Obama’s Policies Are Unpopular

Today, two new national polls were released, one by the New York Times and CBS, the other by the Wall Street Journal and NBC. News headlines quickly settled on a theme: The polls showed that President Obama’s policies were suddenly unpopular:

“Sticker Shock — Obama still popular; his policies, not so much” [ABC's The Note]

“Polls find rising concern with Obama on key issues” [Reuters]

“Polls Show Declining Support For Obama Decisions” [U.S. News & World Report's Political Bulletin]

“Obama’s popularity: Problems testing it” [Chicago Tribune's The Swamp]

“Is ‘Smooth Sailing’ Over for Obama?” [Washington Post]

The headlines have little to no relation to the actual data in the polls, both of which found broad approval for Obama’s foreign policy and economic agendas.

Stupidity of Secrecy

By Fester:
Recently General McChystal in his confirmation hearings before taking command in Afghanistan noted that the most important metric for US and allied forces would be the number of civilians protected from harm in Afghanistan. This is a bit of a turn from the Twitter body counts of 'success' that the US PAOs are putting out. But this statement by McChrystal is aligned with current US population-centric COIN doctrine. The people are the center of operational gravity and their allegiance or at least tolerance of the counter-insurgent and passive intolerance of the insurgent is the key.

The strategic goal of US COIN doctrine is to build up the capacity and legitimacy of the host nation government by the provision of public goods and services, most notably security and economic development. The key is the legitimacy of the government must be accepted. And that means the government and its allies (in this case, the US government and military) must be seen as worthy of trust even, or especially when the truth is less than flattering. When the truth is less than flattering but it is told without pressure or coercian to cover it up, the government has engaged in a costly but credible signal that it is trying its best to be transparent and non-arbitary.

 Steve highlighted the internal debate amongst the DOD to bury the report on a set of airstrikes that allegedly killed numerous civilians after the US did not follow the rules of engagement. The argument is that attempts at transparency will only inflame the Afghani civilian population. This illustrates high level friction and confusion within the US decision loop.

When I read that, I wanted to stab myself in the eye with a dull spoon for the stupid burns. The civilian grapevine works very well in any society, and even better in one where there are few credible sources of information. The relevant actors already know about either this airstrike that killed civilians or other airstrikes that killed civilians. Releasing a report that accepts responsibility will not suddenly release new information into the wild. If anything, it could slowly, especially if it is a part of a corrective action cycle where after action reports are made public in cases of large scale civilian deaths so that procedures could be improved, nip some of the credibility killing conspiracy theories in the bud.

Tim F. has often noted the basic reason why transparency works well:

People do a more competent job under the threat of transparency and adversarial oversight. Take that away and you eliminate the disincentive for slack, graft and letting mistakes of every magnitude slide uncorrected. To the degree that whistleblowers are actively protected, shitty managers and government programs that fail for whatever reason can be exposed and corrected. Strict ethics rules enforced by zealous and independent oversight keep away the stink that almost always goes along with political power. If these things disappear it hardly matters who is in charge; shitty management will follow like water flows downhill. Tax money will disappear down unaccountable holes, important programs will stop working. National security will be less secure.

Secrecy does not help anyone on any measure. It delegitimatizes the United States military and by extension the Afghan government. It kills more civilians. It creates a juicier rumor mill where the casual assumption of credibility runs against US interests. It directly contradicts US COIN doctrine. It is mind-numbingly stupid and counter-productive.