The Reference Desk

Transcript of The Rachel Maddow Show for January 14, 2010

2010-01-15T13:27:00.000-08:00

Guests include Brian Williams, Kerry Sanders, John Irvine, Tracy Kidder, Michelle Wucker, Tom Vilsack, Tony Aiello

Transcript:
RACHEL MADDOW, HOST: Good evening, Keith. Thank you.

We do begin tonight with some signs of growing unrest and anger inside of Haiti, to go with the abject desperation there. Within the last few hours, the “Reuters” news organization did receive a disturbing report from a “Time” magazine photographer on the ground in Haiti. According to the photographer, in some places in Port-au-Prince, in at least two places, survivors of the earthquake have set up roadblocks using corpses to protest the lack of aid actually getting to the people.

It‘s now been about 52 hours since that country was devastated by a massive earthquake, and tonight, search and rescue missions continue. And the Red Cross estimates that between 45,000 and 50,000 people may have lost their lives. Haiti‘s president, Rene Preval, announced today that 7,000 earthquake victims have already been buried.

And tonight, the first American victim of the earthquake has been identified by name. She is 57-year-old Victoria DeLong of California. She‘s a 27-year veteran of the U.S. State Department.

Ms. Delong was stationed at the U.S. embassy in Port-au-Prince. She was apparently killed during the quake when her home collapsed.

The grim reality of the situation on the ground in Haiti is evident in some of the incredible reporting that‘s coming out of there right now.

Today, NBC‘s Tom Llamas made his way into Haiti from the neighboring Dominican Republic. Here‘s what he found when he got there.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TOM LLAMAS, NBC NEWS: Once we got into Haiti, it is truly an unbelievable sight. There are bodies on the streets, children, people are actually using their cars as ambulances to transport people to and from the border or to any hospitals, but the problem is there are no hospitals at this moment. People are living outside churches. It‘s just a really unbelievable and unimaginable sight.

The one thing that stuck out is that people are still being civil in Haiti. People are walking around. There‘s at least 2 million people just walking the streets. They‘re trying to walk out of the country but they‘re acting civil.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MADDOW: According to one report tonight, that civility may be beginning to break down at least in some places.

The main problem at this point is a problem of logistics, getting the tide of rescue and relief aid that has been directed toward Haiti actually to the people who so desperately need it. The chief obstacle right now is most of those supplies are being flown into Haiti from every corner of the globe, flown into an airport that has one runway, has one road in, and one road out.

United States Southern Command has taken control of the airport, but the sheer volume of supplies coming into Haiti has nearly paralyzed that air space.

The other main entryway into Haiti‘s capital is through its port. That option is also presenting problems tonight. This is what the port looked like before the earthquake. Here‘s what it looks like today.

As you can tell from this image the port is non-operational essentially at this point. Three working cranes that have all been destroyed; a main dock that is now partially submerged under water.

But the Haitian government essentially is unable to respond to the needs of its people. It has largely been left to the international community to at least try to help.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BARACK OBAMA, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: After suffering so much for so long, to face this new horror must cause some to look up and ask, “Have we somehow been forsaken?” To the people of Haiti, we say, clearly, and with conviction: you will not be forsaken, you will not be forgotten. In this, your hour of greatest need, America stands with you. The world stands with you.

We know that you are a strong and resilient people. You have endured a history of slavery and struggle of natural disaster and recovery, and through it all, your spirit has been unbroken and your faith unwavering. So, today, you must know that help is arriving. Much, much more help is on the way.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MADDOW: Today some of that help began to arrive. In addition to aid supplies that managed to get in to Port-au-Prince airport, more than 100 U.S. soldiers from Fort Bragg‘s 82nd Airborne Division landed in Haiti. Their mission is to help distribute aid and provide security in what is now an essentially ungoverned capital.

Joining us now from Port-au-Prince, Haiti, is the anchor and managing editor of “NBC Nightly News,” Brian Williams, and NBC News correspondent Kerry Sanders.

Kerry and Brian, thank you both so much for joining us again tonight.

Bring us up to speed.

BRIAN WILLIAMS, NBC NEWS ANCHOR: Well, first of all, Rachel, a bit of activity here on the airstrip. We have a U.S. C-17. They‘re waiting for at least 100 onboard guests tonight, people who were attached to the U.S. embassy here in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.

This is very common, so many aircraft all day and all night. It‘s already impossible to track them. They come in with pallets of material and if it works correctly, they leave with people onboard.

Before handing it off to Kerry, I‘ll tell you, our on-air team today, all of us fanned out to different locations in Port-au-Prince, and it is—it is almost impossible to describe what we saw. On our part, the most banal and insulting sight of what appeared to be a child‘s body on a plywood gurney wrapped in a blanket on a hot day, dead and abandoned. And if you try to count up and care for all of the bodies that are outside tonight in this city, it is an impossible task.

And it‘s beyond sad and wrenching and tragic and shocking. And you run out of ways to describe it.

Kerry Sanders was out in it and saw an entirely different view.

KERRY SANDERS, NBC NEWS CORRESPONDENT: Brian, there‘s not enough space in the graveyards here for all of the dead. I went to a graveyard today where some folks gathered with their loved ones to say good-bye. They got between two graves that were existing graves, space about that wide, they dug the grave and they placed the bodies of four family members, including a small child in there and began putting the earth back over.

As Brian noted, there are roads that are roads of the dead, body after body after body. It‘s very hot here. We—we‘re sun-burned because it‘s 80-plus degrees here. This is the tropical Caribbean island, and that heat is beginning to take an affect on the bodies that are just left there and people have masks on because there are areas where the stench is beginning to become overwhelming.

And, of course, medical authorities are concerned that people who are exhausted, people who have not been fed properly, people who have not had water, who have their immunities down, are now possibly going to be exposed to diseases that can develop with a body or in this case hundreds and thousands of bodies rotting on the streets.

Because there‘s no government, there is nobody really in charge to say, “Let‘s pick those bodies up,” Brian. Some family members are doing it out of respect for the dead. But others are just too stunned and dazed.

And my greatest fear is we began to see some of the anxiety today turn to anger as people were fighting over water. There are some fresh water supplies available. Prices have doubled. People are getting testy and pushing and screaming. And my fear is that if what is arriving here doesn‘t get to folks in the coming days, and I mean quickly, that anger is going to begin to boil over.

WILLIAMS: Yes, you‘ve taken people with very little and taken it down to nothing—Rachel, as we discussed last night, this won‘t take long to convert itself and that‘s our fear here.

MADDOW: We are amid reports of many people trying to maintain civil behavior, maintain order as best they can, and as you describe it, an essentially ungoverned, destroyed space right now. We are seeing some scenes and hearing those reports as you say of anger boiling over, the frustration boiling over, and some growing disorder.

In terms of the ability to alleviate, that we know that U.S. troops are arriving, we know also that the main task is to get that relief out of the airport and into the streets—what can you tell us about either of those plans?

WILLIAMS: Well, first of all, let‘s start with the airport, the hub. It‘s under U.S. control. Not surrounded by troops but the airstrip, when you call in here to make a landing or a takeoff, you talk to an American air traffic controller. There is no tower.

But second, the streets. Only now here is there starting to be a U.S. military presence. Their stance and their posture is going to be critical. Remember in Katrina, it was General Russell Honore who told them to put their muzzles down. They were here to help. And that is crucial part of this when they get here and start to fan out—I‘m sorry we‘re fighting the jet engines as this cargo plane starts up.

SANDERS: I‘ll throw in there—look, the U.N. has been in here for a long time. And they have armored personnel carriers on the road, but, you know, the military speak would be rules of engagement. Their rules of engagement are to stand back. They are not to mix it up.

If there is violence on the street, they are not to get involved in it. And so, if there is violence on the street, they will come by, but they will not get out of their armored personnel carriers. Yes, they have weapons. Yes, they are armed. But they‘re not going to do that.

And I don‘t even know whether the rules of engagement have been set for the U.S. military when they come here. When the military came here, when this country was falling apart, and Bill Clinton sent in the Marines, the rules of engagement were: do not get involved. It‘s a good decision probably because you don‘t want people turning on the military, but by the same token, they don‘t bring the law and order. They bring the supplies which hopefully calm people down.

MADDOW: Brian and Kerry, people have survived a long time inside collapsed buildings in other disasters. But at 52 hours and counting now, there‘s worry that the window of opportunity to save people who are buried is closing.

Are these elite search and rescue teams from all over the globe—are they actually getting out into the streets to do their work?

SANDERS: I know that the folks from Miami Metro-Dade are here. I know the folks from Fairfax County, Virginia, are here. I know that the Chinese sent in a team with a fair amount of experience from their own earthquakes there.

I have not personally seen them out removing any rubble. I did go to some collapse locations today and just the residents who had been removing the rubble and the rocks, looking for those who might still be alive, they‘ve given up. And they don‘t have the expertise, but they‘ve given up.

I‘ve seen—I‘ve seen the dogs that are here to sniff, but I personally have not seen anybody out there doing the digging.

WILLIAMS: There is a French team here, Rachel, and they‘ve been here at the airport all day. They don‘t have their marching orders yet.

But I have to say, we saw L.A. County outside in one of the neighborhoods today. When they arrived today, it was just an unbelievable experience. About a half dozen of the firefighters I had last seen in the fight for Mount Wilson, the station fire in California, wearing the boots that I burned that day, and here they are in another corner of the world, but they‘re also among the best in the world, and I think they are now deployed tonight.

MADDOW: Brian, when I hear you say that the French team was at the airport waiting for marching orders, what I‘m wondering is who those marching orders would come from. The president‘s spokesman today had pains to say that the Haitian government is still in charge of the nation of Haiti. The U.N. is expressing their desire and their intention to be coordinating efforts.

When you‘re there, who does it seem like is in charge?

WILLIAMS: Well, you know what? You see the blue helmets. You see the armored personnel carriers Kerry was talking about, and you see U.N. blue vests and people with clip boards. You see the USAID officials when it‘s an American search and rescue team.

There are overarching organizational bodies, but there is really no secretary of the interior here. There is—there‘s no infrastructure, a white board, a command post, a communication structure. Making a cell phone call, taking down someone‘s number, sending an e-mail—a lot of it is for naught.

SANDERS: Project Medishare, it‘s based out of South Florida, doctors and nurses who have been coming to this country for quite sometime. When they landed here today, I just in chatting with them and said, “It seems to me, the most logical thing for you to do with the expertise that you have is take your supplies, go to one of these parks where people are, and begin treating them right there. There are people in triage right in those locations.”

They told me it doesn‘t work that way. “We will fly in. We will go to a location that we have set up that has security, that has protection. We will work on the people that we can work on there.”

And then they will come back to the airport. They‘ll fly back to Miami, and then they‘ll come back again tomorrow, and it will go like that.

It might seem that it makes sense to go straight there as I thought, but when you hear them explain from their experiences, that doesn‘t make sense. By the same token, you can‘t just take a truck here, load it up with water, and drive out the street and say, “Hey, I‘ve got water,” because the next thing you know, you‘re going to have 1,000 people surrounding the truck fighting, and the last thing they want to do is create a situation that leads to violence.

So, it‘s a very delicate situation. But they all recognize they‘re under pressure. It has to be done soon.

WILLIAMS: Sixty more seconds, Rachel, if you will. There is an air crew on this C-17 that were—the engine noise we‘re fighting. They came in tonight from Jersey. They are—there is sweat dripping off.

MADDOW: And as you can tell, we‘ve just lost the signal from Brian Williams and Kerry Sanders. They‘re joining us live from the airport, Port-au-Prince. We‘ll bring them back up for Brian‘s closing thoughts if we can, but I have a feeling that we cannot. Obviously, the technical challenges of bringing people on live from this disaster zone are incredible.

Brian doing a significant part of his newscast for “NBC Nightly News” tonight with a satellite phone to his ear because that was the way that they could get audio out of the country. Our NBC News team there, Brian Williams, the anchor and managing editor of “NBC Nightly News” and Kerry Sanders, NBC News correspondent, have been there along with Al Roker and Ann Curry from the “Today Show” and we‘ve been all the better for having their—access to their reporting here in MSNBC.

The need for medical care in Haiti is, of course, dire tonight. Partners in Health is an organization that‘s been providing medical care—advanced medical care in Haiti for 25 years.

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Tracy Kidder works with and wrote the definitive book about that organization. It was a bestseller. It‘s called “Mountains Beyond Mountains.” Tracy Kidder joins us next to talk about the current crisis and how medical care can be provided well in Haiti.

Later, the Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack joins us with an update from the Obama administration about America‘s response.

Stay with us. We will be right back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

MADDOW: An update on the status of medical care in Haiti. Some of the heroic things being done and some of the amazing technology being use today do it—coming up next.

Stay with us.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

MADDOW: Even as aid agencies and foreign governments are working to rush badly needed medical supplies and personnel to Haiti, much of the help has not gotten to the people who need it. Medical care in Port-au-Prince is in crisis right now.

ITN reporter John Irvine filed this report from the capital today. Warning: this includes some disturbing images, but also some on-the-ground reporting. We are otherwise not seeing about the on-the-ground consequences of the bottleneck in getting aid into the streets of Port-au-Prince.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

JOHN IRVINE, ITN REPORTER (voice-over): This is a hospital

overflowing with patients desperate for treatment it can‘t provide. The

casualty unit stretches from the corridors inside to the car park out front

where patients have to endure the daytime heat as well as their crush injuries. So basic are the facilities here that many won‘t get to walk away.

The few doctors and nurses we saw are overwhelmed and under-resourced. No help has arrived and such is the mortality rate, there are bodies all over the place.

The drip sustaining this man has run dry. His family tried to comfort him as his life ebbs away.

(on camera): To me, it‘s ironic that Haiti is within a relative stone‘s throw of other Caribbean islands that are among the great playgrounds of the western world, and yet, the situation here is about as bad as you can get. If you want to know what the expression they desperately need help looks like, look no further than here.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

MADDOW: The medical need in Haiti right now is obviously acute. We talked on this show last night with Sophie Delaunay of Doctors Without Borders—that organization‘s multiple existing facilities in Port-au-Prince were so badly damaged in the earthquake that the facilities themselves are no longer functional. Doctors Without Borders had hundreds of staff operating in Haiti even before the quake. Thus far, they‘ve been administering post-earthquake medical care primarily from tents.

As of today, Doctors Without Borders says it has treated more than 1,500 patients, but as Ms. Delaunay told us on the show last night, they believe that at least 500 people they‘ve been in contact with already are in need of immediate major surgery, something that cannot really be done safely from the tents they‘ve been operating out of.

The next step for Doctors Without Borders is to bring in something I did not even know existed before now. They‘re bringing in an inflatable hospital. Not kidding. They‘re expecting an inflatable hospital to arrive in Haiti by tomorrow.

We googled “inflatable hospital” today. This is part of what we found. It turns out that, first, the military and then Doctors Without Borders have been using inflatable hospital facilities for years.

Here‘s one.

We‘ve also got footage that Doctors Without Borders used in Pakistan after that—the earthquake in that country in 2005.

As the name suggests, it is inflatable but it‘s substantially more than a tent or a bouncy castle. Its modular rooms can be sterilized and even decontaminated. It includes portable operating theaters, beds, rolling trays, respirators, everything medical teams on the ground need to perform surgery.

Here‘s a graphic that was published by “The Plain Dealer” in Cleveland that it shows how these things work.

Each inflatable hospital is about 1,000 square feet when it gets blown up. But it gets stored and transported—get this—in a bundle about the size of a desk. It‘s then spread out and inflated with a pump. Its support beams are made of very thick fabric. They apparently feel as solid as concrete when they are inflated.

Doctors Without Borders has one of those things—one of those inflatable hospitals headed to Haiti right now. We believe it‘s due to arrive by tomorrow.

Another remarkable medical agency with a long experience—long, successful experience working in Haiti is an agency called Partners in Health. Partners in Health works together with the Haitian Ministry of Health in the countryside. They have long been the largest medical care provider in rural Haiti.

And because its 10 facilities are away from the capital city of Port-au-Prince, they were not damaged by the earthquake. They are up and running.

Tracy Kidder‘s bestselling 2003 book, “Mountains Beyond Mountains” was about Partners in Health and about one of its founders, Dr. Paul Farmer.

Joining us now is Tracy Kidder, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, who also serves on the development committee for Partners in Health.

Mr. Kidder, thanks very much for coming on the show. Appreciate your time.

TRACY KIDDER, AUTHOR, “MOUNTAINS BEYOND MOUNTAINS”: Thank you. It‘s a pleasure, I guess.

MADDOW: Well.

KIDDER: I mean, nice to—nice to be on your show but, yes.

MADDOW: In the circumstances, everything is difficult at this point. I do want to ask you about the status of Partners in Health right now. Am I right to say that their facilities in Haiti were not harmed in the earthquake, that they‘re up and running?

KIDDER: That‘s correct. Not only that, Partners in Health is, you know, almost entirely a Haitian operation, though it gets, it is supported by the United States—by people in America and mostly. And—but only a handful of the people working in Haiti are Americans. All the rest of the staff are Haitian.

There are about a hundred Haitian doctors working for Partners in Health. Many of them live in Port-au-Prince and commute out to the various sites of Partners in Health. So, many of those doctors are in Port-au-Prince now, working out of their homes, receiving patients in their homes.

Partners in Health is now establishing a field hospital sites in Port-au-Prince. They, of course, need more supplies, but they are well-supplied at the moment. And their central hospital, which is in Cange, a town that‘s not that far from Port-au-Prince, but a three-hour drive, has been receiving enormous numbers of patients, I was just told this this evening. And, of course, they‘re not turning anyone away. They‘ve taken the school that‘s within the complex and the church and turned them into hospitals essentially.

I was told—this is horrifying—that people, you know, there are some amputations being performed there, necessary ones, and people who have come all the way from Port-au-Prince for amputations, just imagine that.

So this is—Partners in Health, and I know I‘m biased, but Partners in Health is really one of the truly effective organizations working in Haiti and has been there for a long time. And, of course, they have tremendously strong partnerships with organizations like Doctors Without Borders.

But, of course, they are too small to do all of this, but they could desperately use contributions. And if people want to help them, go to PIH.org. I think it‘s a—for my money, Rachel, it‘s the best organization I know about, and it set a model for how—it seems to me, how Haiti might have a better future after this catastrophe is dealt with.

MADDOW: Tracy, people around the world, not just governments but individual people everywhere, are really eager to help out, millions of dollars of donations being raised for a lot of different charities already.

KIDDER: Yes.

MADDOW: In your op-ed for “The New York Times” yesterday, you described a real problem with international aid in Haiti. You wrote that there are something like 10,000 private humanitarian groups that have been providing services and relief in Haiti even before the earthquake, and there‘s a real question as to whether donations to them and support for them end up being right for Haiti and end up getting anything done on the ground.

Why is that? What are the issues there?

KIDDER: Well, not all aid organizations are created equal. There are some very good ones and I didn‘t mean to slam all of them, you know, in one fell swoop. All I meant to say is that there are 10,000 aid organizations in Haiti, and Haiti is still one of the poorest countries in the world then something‘s wrong with the way things are—the aid is being administered.

It seems to me that the real problem is that—that many organizations are not willing to work together or they don‘t know how to, or, you know, the mechanisms for doing that haven‘t been established. But even more than that, that they have not really endeavored to make their projects, to make their work indigenous. And what I mean by that is they have not done what Partners in Health has really striven to do, which is—which is to work as closely as possible with the government and the particularly that agencies, in their case, with the Ministry of Health. There is no other way, finally, to improve the state of a place like Haiti.

And, you know, Rachel, I just have to say this: given your—I know your good friend Rush Limbaugh—good friends Rush Limbaugh and Pat Robertson have been weighing in on how Haiti has been cursed by God once again, but, you know, the truth of the matter is that this is—this is a manmade disaster in the sense that the extreme vulnerability to earthquakes is manmade. And that has a long history and that‘s a history of—you know, that begins way back with the slave colony that the French established in Haiti, the hideous slave colony, and the fact that the Haitians, the only people on earth who—only slaves on earth who freed themselves and created their own republic and then got punished for it ever since.

And, you know, we need to fix this. We need to fix this problem right now. We need to get as much materiel and doctors and everything in there as we possibly can and do this in a concerted way, but afterward, we need to continue to care about Haiti. It is one of the most beautiful and important cultures ever born under the face of this earth and it is in danger. It seems to me, long-term danger.

We need a concerted effort, one that—one that is not self-serving, but one that attempts to serve the poor of Haiti, the vast majority of Haiti. And to do that through strengthening Haitian institutions instead of doing what the United States has done all too often there, which is to weaken them.

MADDOW: Tracy Kidder.

KIDDER: Sorry.

MADDOW: No, don‘t apologize. That‘s why I asked you on the show, Mr.

Kidder.

Tracy Kidder is author of the book, “Mountains Beyond Mountains,” which is about in part Partners in Health and one of their founders, Paul Farmer. Mr. Kidder‘s most recent book is called “Strength and What Remains.”

Thank you very much for joining us tonight, Tracy. I really appreciate your time.

KIDDER: Thank you, Rachel. Let‘s hope for Haiti.

MADDOW: Indeed.

KIDDER: Thank you.

MADDOW: Our coverage of the catastrophe in Haiti continues right after this.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

MADDOW: Today as aid began to flow into Haiti from around the world, help also came from right next door, from the Dominican Republic. Haiti and the Dominican Republic are two countries that share the island of Hispaniola. There is not much else they share, not language, not ethnicity and their mutual history has often been antagonistic.

But right now. The two countries appear to have put any differences in the face of Haiti‘s need. Today, the Dominican Republic‘s president became the first head of state to travel into Haiti leading a delegation of military and rescue personnel.

He confirmed for reporters for the first time that 7,000 quake victims had been buried. He also announced that his country is helping restore power and is providing hundreds of troops, food, aid, and water for the relief effort in Haiti.

The president also said that the Dominican Republic is not even tabulating the costs of its actions at this point. The Dominican government also confirmed for us tonight that some 2,000 Haitians have been allowed across the border into the Dominican Republic already for medical treatment although the country says it is not opening its border as of now to Haitians who do not have immediate medical needs.

Joining us now is Michelle Wucker. She is the director of the World Policy Institute. She has written extensively about Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Michelle, thanks very much for coming in.

MICHELLE WUCKER, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, WORLD POLICY INSTITUTE: Thanks for having me.

MADDOW: First, let me give you the chance to correct anything I just said that was wrong. I probably got something wrong.

WUCKER: You even pronounced my name right. The name of the book is “Why The Cocks Fight: Dominicans, Haitians and the Struggle for Hispaniola,” which really goes into this very, very long history going back to the Dominican Republic of ups and some pretty dramatic downs between the two countries.

MADDOW: Well, I mean, in terms of just the national history of the two countries, we think of the French as having set up the colony on the western side of the island and the Spanish having done so on the eastern side of the island and lots of fighting therein. But are they two countries that we should really think of as both, not only distinct, but antagonistic?

WUCKER: “Antagonistic” isn‘t quite the right word. They‘ve got a lot of things that they share. They‘ve both been occupied by the United States. They‘ve both got a long history with dictatorship. They‘ve both got a long history of being used as sort of proxies between France and Spain.

Dominicans will tell you that they celebrate their independence from Haiti in 1844 after a brutal and corrupt occupation. They won‘t always tell you that Haiti helped to get their independence from Spain.

Haitians will tell you that in 1937 there was a horrendous ethnic cleansing massacre on the border of Haitians by the Dominican dictator. And of course the Dominican dictator, Trujillo, also did terrible, terrible things to Dominicans as well. So there‘s a lot of shared tragedy between the two countries.

MADDOW: This is a crisis that is confined not only to Haiti right now, but to Haiti‘s capital city. What special role is the Dominican Republic going to have - going to have to have - in the effort to save the people of Port-au-Prince?

WUCKER: Well, I think, logistically, it is going to be incredibly important, getting some of the supplies through the Dominican Republic into Haiti, getting many, many people through the Dominican Republic into Haiti. And I should mention, most people don‘t realize this, but actually the quake was felt in the Dominican Republic.

It was more of a thing that caused a lot of motion sickness but earthquakes are very common in both places. The Dominican Republic is going to be actually very, very crucial in getting food into Haiti, in ongoing medical care, as you mentioned, with the Haitians who have come to the Dominican Republic for medical care.

There is going to be a lot of ongoing cooperation, engineers. Dominicans are going to have to be involved in some of the rebuilding as well. So they‘re absolutely crucial to support for Haiti.

MADDOW: What about the issue of refugees? Obviously, right now, when the president today was asked by NBC - the president of the Dominican Republic - was asked about whether he was worried about a large tide of Haitian refugees coming to the Dominican Republic, he essentially said, “Listen, the earthquake was in Port-au-Prince. And it is a really long walk. It‘s really far. There‘s a geographical problem there.”

That isn‘t always going to be true. People are going to want to leave Haiti. That is going to be the easiest place for them to get to or at least the first place they will think of. What‘s the background - how concerned will the Dominican Republic be about that issue? How will they handle it?

WUCKER: Well, I think it was really striking that he expressed that he wasn‘t quite so concerned about that because in the past, whenever there have been political problems in Haiti - coups, instability, whenever there have been other natural disasters - there‘s been a lot of concern about that in the Dominican Republic.

But I think it is something we should think about in the United States that we shouldn‘t count on the Dominican Republic to necessarily take up the slack. There are a lot of Haitians in the United States who need some sort of legal status, a temporary protected status, that‘s something that‘s often been offered to countries, particularly central American, who‘ve had natural disasters.

And I think it‘s something that would be very appropriate to offer to Haitians right now, not just to help them help Haitians back in Haiti, but also to ease some of the potential pressure on the Dominican Republic.

MADDOW: The United States government may be taking an initial step in that direction already by stopping deportations of people, of Haitians back to that country right now, even people for whom those proceedings had already started.

Michelle Wucker, director of the World Policy Institute, remind us again of the name of your book about the Dominican Republic and Haiti?

WUCKER: “Why The Cocks Fight: Dominicans and Haitians and the Struggle for Hispaniola.”

MADDOW: Thank you very much.

WUCKER: Thank you.

MADDOW: It‘s a pleasure to have you here. Thank you. Since Hurricane Katrina in our country, the American government‘s response to natural disasters has understandably come under some extra scrutiny.

Just ahead, a member of the president‘s cabinet, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, will be here to talk about the crisis in Haiti and the official American response. Stay with us.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

MADDOW: Joining us now here in the studio is our nation‘s Agriculture Secretary, Tom Vilsack. He is coordinating with the rest of the Obama administration on relief efforts in Haiti. He has also just returned from meeting with leaders and with farmers in Afghanistan on U.S. efforts to rebuild their agriculture sector. Mr. Secretary, thank you for being here. It‘s good to have you here.

TOM VILSACK, UNITED STATES AGRICULTURE SECRETARY: It‘s great to be here.

MADDOW: Give me a sense of the urgency with which this issue, the issue of Haiti, is being handled within the administration. We keep hearing about a whole of government response. But what does that really mean?

VILSACK: Well, it means that the president has been very clear to all of us that he wants a coordinated, quick reaction. That means that we have to get emergency food to Haiti. It means we have to get emergency medical supplies to Haiti. We have to get equipment, security - all of that has to be done simultaneously and has to be done in a coordinated fashion.

Fortunately, we have got a good person at the point, Raj Shah, the USAID administrator. He knows what he‘s doing. He has put a good team together and we are responding quickly. You‘re going to see substantial amount of progress, I think, in the next 24 hours as supplies arrive, as personnel arrives, as security arrives, food arrives. Over 14,000 metric tons of food is on its way.

So you‘re going to see a significant step in the right direction. Then, you‘re going to have to take a look at the long term. And this is going to be a commitment that the administration is prepared to make as the president said today for the long term.

Not only do you have to search and rescue and recover, but you also have to reconstruct. And that‘s going to take weeks, months, and years.

MADDOW: We are in a situation right now where it sounds like - when people describe what the response is, it sounds like a comprehensive, almost overwhelming response. And then, we see the footage of what‘s happening on Port-au-Prince and it‘s clear that there is a bottleneck, that things are not getting to the people who need them and what it seems from - We‘re able to talk to people in the airport and in the streets, people able to get some close-up view of what‘s happening, is that it‘s a coordination issue as much as it is a logistics issue.

Yes, the roads are difficult to pass, but who is in charge? There isn‘t much of a Haitian government in operation at this point. The U.N. says they‘re in charge. They‘ve got their own challenges. How does America navigate that?

VILSACK: Well, essentially America takes the position that we need to get equipment in place. Let me give you an example. We‘re going to see helicopters. We‘re going to see air transportation provided. That‘s going to make a big difference in terms of being able to move in and around the city and deliver resources.

We‘re going to see heavy equipment. That‘s going to make a difference in terms of moving concrete blocks that might be in the way. It does take a little time to get this organized and get the items in place and the personnel in place to make sure that there‘s adequate security.

But there is no question the president has made it very clear to all of us he wants us to focus on this and he wants to get it done. He wants to get it done right and he wants to get it done now.

MADDOW: We know about the 82nd airborne, the Marines, the USS Carl Vincent on the way. We know USAID, as you say, is in a coordinating role as part of the State Department. What is the role, say, of your agency? What are other aspects of the government doing that Americans should know in terms of our response?

VILSACK: Well, we‘re reaching out to food companies to determine what surplus food they might be able to provide over the course of the longer haul. We‘ve made discussions with Bunge, Cargill, ADM, Wal-Mart stores that might be able to provide assistance and help.

We‘re taking a look at our own surplus commodities to determine whether they match up or not with what is needed. We‘re making sure we have used our Forest Service personnel who are very much involved in incident command. We have five people at the D.C. Incident Command working on logistics.

We will, over the long haul, no doubt be engaged in helping farmers plant their crops later in the year. Our forest people will probably be there reconstructing roads and building dams and irrigation systems that may have been destroyed by the earthquake.

We may also be using satellite imagery to determine the extent of damage beyond the capital area. So there are a multitude of tasks that the USDA will be engaged in and will be engaged in. And that is true, frankly, of virtually every aspect of the federal government.

MADDOW: And hearing you describe those tasks and honestly reflecting on what Tracy Kidder was saying about trying to build capacity, trying to build indigenous capacity, I am struck by some of the strategic parallels here with our mission in Afghanistan.

I know you‘re just back from Afghanistan but it is that same issue of both trying to help directly but also trying to build up local government capacity, trying not to do harm by the way that we are intervening. Obviously, this is not a military operation the way that that is but are there some of the same challenges?

VILSACK There are, absolutely, and perhaps even more complicated in Haiti because there isn‘t a functioning central government as there is in Afghanistan. There isn‘t a minister of agriculture who has enough resources to actually make something happen as is the case in Afghanistan.

So that is going to be a problem. And it‘s going to be a problem to make sure that we work in concert with Haitians, to make sure that they understand that we are helping them. We‘re not trying to direct them. We‘re not trying to dictate to them.

But at the end of the day, the farmers have to put the crops in the ground. People have to be fed. Water has to be obtained. Systems have to be replaced and repaired. Roads have to be constructed. All of that has to be done.

And I honestly believe that this is a tragic circumstance. The loss of life is horrendous. The key challenge for all of us is whether or not we can make something out of this, whether we can put Haiti back in the right direction.

I think the president believes we can. I think he thinks we have the capacity and the heart and the compassion to do it. And I think it‘s up to every single one of us to contribute. And certainly, I think all of the cabinet members are anxious to do that. And we‘ve instructed our staffs to be fully engaged in this.

MADDOW: To hear you express the desire and the president‘s will and this government‘s will to make it a long-term commitment, could make all the difference. But obviously, right now, the immediate need is to get things moving and fast.

VILSACK: That‘s right.

MADDOW: Tom Vilsack, our nation‘s agriculture secretary, I‘ve had a number of chances to interview you over the years in a number of - well, you‘ve had a number of different jobs and I always really find it a pleasure to talk to you. Thank you.

VILSACK: Thanks, Rachel.

MADDOW: Good to see you. We‘ll be right back with more of our continuing coverage on the catastrophe on Haiti.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

MADDOW: Many of you have already donated money to help the millions of people affected by the earthquake in Haiti. Many more of you will donate in days and weeks ahead. If you donate by credit card, American Express and Visa and Mastercard have all announced that they will waive the few percentage points those companies would normally skim for themselves off of your payment. And good on them for that.

Some of you, however, will end run around the credit card companies altogether to donate money in a completely novel way. It‘s one of the ways that I personally gave today. I gave by text message. After the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004, Americans donated about $200,000 to charity through text messaging.

After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Americans donated about twice that, about $400,000 through text messaging. Last year, for all of 2009, for all causes, fundraising via cell phone hit the $2 million mark nationwide. That was all very good, very philanthropic.

But this time, for this disaster, the charitable donation numbers we are seeing dwarf those totals. A bunch of organizations are raising money this way for Haiti. But to just give you a ballpark idea of donate-by-texting‘s success, the American Red Cross alone has raised almost $6 million through text message donations in two days.

And the icing is that wireless carriers, AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile have agreed to waive their standard text messaging fees for those texted donations. Excellent.

Except for Sprint. Sprint not so much with the excellent. They told MSNBC today that standard text messaging charges will apply. They did say that their customers are free to buy text messaging plans from Sprint to cover the cost of that one text. Helpful. Thanks, Sprint.

Joining us now is Tony Aiello. He‘s the CEO and co-founder of M-Give one of the companies making it possible to donate by phone. M-Give is a for-profit company. They‘ve waived their start-up in transaction fees for the charities raising money for the crisis in Haiti in this sway. Mr. Aiello, thanks very much for joining us.

TONY AIELLO, CEO AND CO-FOUNDER, M-GIVE: Thanks for having me this evening, Rachel.

MADDOW: I know that you‘re waiving all your fees for donations to this disaster. Thank you. Before this quake, tell me how this service worked, how it would be set up. I know the donation amount would show up on a customer‘s phone bill.

AIELLO: Yes. That‘s exactly correct, as using this example as perfect because it works for day-to-day fundraising just like it does for disaster relief. So, in effect, the mobile user would, in this case, text the word Haiti to the number 90999 and receive a text message back asking them to confirm by replying with “yes.”

At that point, their mobile phone bill is tagged with a $10 donation. So that donor then actually pays that to their wireless carrier the next time they pay their bill. And the funds are then funneled to a 501 C3 called M-Give Foundation and then distributed to the appropriate charities. In this case - this campaign - all the funds are going to the Red Cross.

MADDOW: I would also say that if you‘re worried about getting spam on your cell phone because you‘ve done this, I did this today, and after you get sent the “yes” and you get the confirmation, you then get a note that says, “Do you keep getting texts from the American Red Cross?” You can write back and say “no” if you don‘t want to. So it‘s sort of a “whew” if you‘re worried about that.

One of the things that I am worried about this, although I think

it‘s cool to donate at the spur of the moment -

AIELLO: OK.

MADDOW: I‘m worried it‘s a quick way to donate but it takes too long this way for the money to actually arrive at the charity that I just donated to. Can you explain that?

AIELLO: Well, sure. As I mentioned a moment ago, when the - if you and I both give today, we might be paying our mobile bill on a different cycle or a different monthly billing cycle.

So the carriers have to collect all of that money and then distribute it to the 501-C3 clearing house and then distribute it to the charity. So everyone in the chain wants to get the money to the Red Cross as fast as possible.

And all parties involved - they‘re working to try to streamline that effort. And right now, in traditional day-to-day fundraising, it‘s about a 90-day - 90 days between the time that the mobile user presses the buttons on the phone and the dollars arrive at the charity.

We hope to streamline that for this disaster based on the size and scope of this situation. The tragedy boggles the mind, so everybody wants to get the money to the charity as fast as possible.

That said, because this is such a major disaster, I think people are going to be needing dollars for quite some time. So you know, clearly your point is well taken. The goal is to get the money to the charity as quickly as possible.

MADDOW: Mr. Aiello, I think it‘s an incredibly successful way to raise money. If that window does get shorter than the time it is now and you talk about these details on your Web site, let us know and we‘ll tell people. We‘ll help get the word out.

Tony Aiello is the CEO and the co-founder of M-Give, a company that allows you to text donations to nonprofits. As Mr. Aiello Said, if you‘d like to text a donation for relief to Haiti, we have a list of charities that accept text donations posted on our Web site, which is Rachel.MSNBC.com. Mr. Aiello, thank you. And we will be right back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

MADDOW: We‘re back live at 11:00 p.m. Eastern. “COUNTDOWN” with Keith Olbermann starts right now.

Transcript of Hardball with Chris Matthews for January 5, 2010

2010-01-05T14:15:00.000-08:00

Guests: Matt Nesto, Pat Buchanan, David Rivkin, Alejandro Beutel, Susan Page, Mark McKinnon, Drew Westen, Michael Steele

Transcript of program:

CHRIS MATTHEWS, HOST: Obama cracks the whip. Let‘s play HARDBALL. Good evening. I‘m Chris Matthews in Washington. Leading off tonight:

Too slow? President Obama just cracked the whip on the Christmas bombing intelligence failures, but is he going too slow, President Obama‘s big problem? That‘s when something happens, or should happen, it takes him a long time to get on it. Health care waddles its way through Congress, and he watches. There‘s a horrid (ph) terrorist incident at Ft. Hood, and he shows up days later and a bit too cool.

And he‘s only (ph) late today calling a meeting of his security people to find out why a guy nearly blew up an airplane over Detroit on Christmas Day. Is this slowness to act, this tendency to narrate events, rather than control them, the reason President Obama is being hit so hard these days from right, as well as left? Republicans are out to destroy him, obviously, but where are his supporters on the Democratic side? Are they slow to defend him because he, the president, has been slow to lead?

The head of the Republican National Committee, Michael Steele, who‘s coming here, has made his plans clear. His new book is called “Right Now:

A 12-Step Program for Defeating the Obama Agenda.” Could it be that the Republicans poll lower than any point in history because all they do—all they do—is say no? Michael Steele joins us later.

Plus, the increased check on airline passengers from 14 countries. Is this a reasonable thing for us to do, given that the 9/11 killers came from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Lebanon and the Emirates? What are we supposed to do? Let‘s debate it.

And can we talk? How is it possible the underwear bomber makes it onto the plane but Joan Rivers can‘t? That‘s in the “Sideshow,” where it belongs.

And finally, is the tea party movement the answer to a Republican comeback or a sign of its demise?

Let‘s start with President Obama‘s meeting, just held this afternoon, with his national security team. Did he deliver a tough enough call to action in the wake of the failed Christmas Day bombing plot? Pat Buchanan‘s an MSNBC political analyst and Drew Westen is a professor of psychology at Emory University and author of “The Political Brain.”

You‘re a smart guy, Drew. What‘s the president‘s problem? Why does he seem to be taking a lot of heat from all directions, especially right now?

DREW WESTEN, AUTHOR, “THE POLITICAL BRAIN”: Well, I think, in general, what we‘ve seen from the president is just what you describe, which is often too late, too soon—I mean, coming on too—whatever the word—whatever that phrase is! He‘s a little too slow to react and typically waits until the damage has been done.

In this case, I‘m not sure he was—that was the case. I thought he delivered a pretty strong—strong speech today. But the problem was, the conflicting message between him today and his homeland security chief, Janet Napolitano, when this first struck, where her tone was very reassuring, Don‘t worry, the system worked, and now today his tone is very different. But I thought he took a much better tone today.

MATTHEWS: Yes, they‘re still paying for her comment, that the system works, when it‘s like a chicken in every basket. It sounded like something from the Hoover administration.

Here‘s President Obama after the meeting today.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BARACK OBAMA, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: The bottom line is this. The U.S. government had sufficient information to have uncovered this plot and potentially disrupt the Christmas Day attack, but our intelligence community failed to connect those dots which would have placed the suspect on the no-fly list. In other words, this was not a failure to collect intelligence, it was a failure to integrate and understand the intelligence that we already had. The information was there. Agencies and analysts who needed it had access to it, and our professionals were trained to look for it and to bring it all together.

Now, I will accept that intelligence by its nature is imperfect. But it is increasingly clear that intelligence was not fully analyzed or fully leveraged. That‘s not acceptable. And I will not tolerate it.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MATTHEWS: Would that have been a better statement on St. Stephen‘s Day, the day after Christmas, 10 days ago?

PAT BUCHANAN, MSNBC POLITICAL ANALYST: Oh, it sure would. That is tough. He‘s—there‘s some anger in that, Chris. There‘s a sense of, Look, let‘s get to the bottom of this. Somebody dropped the ball here. This is a grave situation. Three hundred people could have been scattered across Detroit area. And I‘m going to find some answers. Somebody didn‘t connect the dots, and I‘m going to find out whether the information didn‘t get to DNI, the director of national intelligence, or whether the dots were not connected there.

I think out of this, you‘re going to see possibly...

MATTHEWS: Didn‘t you know, Pat—as an observer and reporter, didn‘t you know that everything that he just said...

BUCHANAN: Sure.

MATTHEWS: ... a couple days right after Christmas?

BUCHANAN: As soon as you heard...

MATTHEWS: You didn‘t have to wait until the 5th of January.

BUCHANAN: No, as soon as you heard the guy had this manufactured bomb sewn into his underwear, he‘s a 23-year-old Nigerian, somebody...

MATTHEWS: You know all these facts.

BUCHANAN: Well, you can...

MATTHEWS: You knew that we had picked up information in Yemen...

BUCHANAN: Sure.

MATTHEWS: ... just a few days after. You knew the kid‘s father had warned us...

BUCHANAN: Exactly.

MATTHEWS: ... more than a week ago. Why did he give the speech today?

BUCHANAN: Well, that‘s his problem. As Drew was saying, he is late. He is too little, too late. I think this is a good move. I think he is on top of it now, Chris. But he‘s been damaged by these 10 days. And I know Cheney‘s been hit, but I‘ll tell you, Cheney has stung him, and if he stung him to this action, that‘s a good thing.

MATTHEWS: Well, a broken clock is right twice a day. That would include Dick Cheney. Drew, your thoughts about this timing issue. Is this endemic? Is this, to use the term all over the place right now, systemic, this slowness and rather coolness with regard to Ft. Hood? The president arrived several days later and was part of that service down there, appropriately so. Many people thought he was a bit too detached, he didn‘t really feel emotionally connected to the event. It was about our service people getting killed in the line of duty. He didn‘t seem to act emotional, as most presidents would in those circumstances. Is it timing? Is it emotion? Detachment? Size it up.

WESTEN: I think—I think you‘re right on the money on...

MATTHEWS: No, I‘m asking you. You‘ll notice there‘s an interrogate.

(LAUGHTER)

MATTHEWS: I‘m asking you because I know what you think and I‘m asking you to define it.

WESTEN: Well, I think it‘s both timing and emotion. And I‘m really with Pat on this. I think this is—that this is a—I think this is, as the president would use the word, a systemic problem. We saw this on health care, where there was no passion in anything that he did until it got to be October and the plan was almost run into the ground. There wasn‘t a coherent story that he told on health care, really, until October, when he decided to say, OK, I guess there are some problems here, let me tell you about what they are. It took him a long time to get there. And I think that, you know, he‘s a—he‘s a guy who comes across as—he can be phenomenally passionate. That‘s what won him the election. But he‘s preferred to run...

MATTHEWS: OK...

BUCHANAN: Let me tell you his problem...

WESTEN: ... the government much more like a—much more like Dukakis.

BUCHANAN: His problem is he is not a natural executive at all. He is not engaged. He is diffident. He is—quite frankly, he is academic. He is professorial. He is aloof. And even on health care, the thing—the tea party people almost dynamited that thing during the summer. Then he did come back and give his speech...

MATTHEWS: Yes.

BUCHANAN: ... but then he says, OK, Harry Reid‘s got it. He just doesn‘t seem to be terribly...

MATTHEWS: OK, let‘s talk about...

BUCHANAN: ... engaged...

MATTHEWS: ... that executive role. And I want you to jump in here, Drew, because I think we‘re on to something very narrow and very particular and pointed here. Something like the White House security and those grifters broke in—a small matter, you could argue, because nothing really went wrong, but they did break in. They had no right to be there. It took him the longest time.

Now, Sally Quinn, who writes about things in Washington, said today in “The Washington Post” on the op-ed page, he should have fired somebody. It should have been Mark Sullivan out of Secret—somebody, Desiree Rogers, in charge of social life. That was a case. Then the other thing with this thing with the airplane almost being blown up—nobody seems to be—you don‘t get a sense he‘s the boss.

BUCHANAN: Look, I...

MATTHEWS: He‘s got some people like Rahm Emanuel enforcing them. And nobody gets sledgehammered.

BUCHANAN: Well, let me tell you—this is—now, I know you might...

(CROSSTALK)

MATTHEWS: ... what Sally said...

BUCHANAN: You might not like the...

MATTHEWS: ... the president explained (ph) every time.

BUCHANAN: You might not like this comparison, but Nixon would have called in Haldeman, if those two people had walked in there. What went on, Bob? What happened? You get to the bottom of this. Heads roll. And Haldeman would have been right on top of this. I know they ran into a lot of trouble, but I‘ll tell you, that was the best-run White House I have ever been in, first term of Nixon. I mean, when Nixon demanded this kind of action—and he would not have been satisfied...

MATTHEWS: Well, Watergate, was first term, though.

BUCHANAN: Well, Watergate was first term. There‘s no doubt about it.

OK. You can laugh about it, what I‘m saying...

MATTHEWS: I‘m not. I‘m just bringing it up.

BUCHANAN: ... is Bob Haldeman was an executive.

WESTEN: He was decisive.

BUCHANAN: And I don‘t know that—and Rahm Emanuel is a congressman and a guy that runs around getting money from Wall Street.

MATTHEWS: OK, let me get a little dispassionate from you there, Drew, and that is this question. Executive ability—this president was not a governor. He was not a mayor. He‘s not used to cashing the checks or signing them. He‘s not used to being there when there‘s a four-alarm fire downtown.

My idea of a president, my idea of a mayor, a police chief is exactly the same. In fact, the job I‘ve always wanted was police commissioner of Philly, OK? I want to be the guy standing on the curb when there‘s a big fire. I want to be there when the reporters come by and says, What happened here? Have you got things under control? How many engines you got here? Are you going to put it out in an hour or what? I want to see a president on the job. I love that stuff.

I thought Bush was out to lunch during Katrina. I think that really killed his presidency and his role in history because he wasn‘t there. He was somewhere in Crawford with his feet up, drinking near beers. I don‘t know what he was doing, but he wasn‘t on the job.

This president was in Hawaii getting some sun. Fair enough. But it looked terrible. It looked terrible. When there‘s a big fire, the mayor ought to be there.

WESTEN: Well, you‘re absolutely right, and...

MATTHEWS: That‘s my thought. What are your—what‘s your thought...

WESTEN: ... your example of...

MATTHEWS: I mean, you‘re the brain here. You wrote about “The Political Brain.”

(LAUGHTER)

MATTHEWS: Give me some brain, will you?

WESTEN: I just write about brains.

MATTHEWS: Well, tell me what his brain should have been doing.

WESTEN: He—well, you know, what his brain should have been thinking back to was the other Bush, who came out on September 12th with that foghorn because that‘s the Bush who actually captivated the American people...

MATTHEWS: I liked that guy.

WESTEN: ... because he showed the passion. You know, he was right there, and every American stood by him. And the president we saw today...

MATTHEWS: Then he let Cheney eat him up like a Pacman. Cheney and the neocons grabbed that little hero that we loved with the firefighter and turned him into a little agent of their causes.

WESTEN: Let me give you another example...

WESTEN: Absolutely.

(CROSSTALK)

MATTHEWS: We all know that now.

BUCHANAN: Let me give you another example, Chris, Robert Kennedy. If something had gone wrong and Jack Kennedy calls up and said, Find out, he would have been...

MATTHEWS: He would have kneecapped the guy.

BUCHANAN: ... all over—he would have been all over it. Lyndon Johnson—What happened here? And he would have been right on top of it immediately. But you know, to be out there snorkeling...

MATTHEWS: I think—OK, here‘s the problem. Can a president who‘s naturally dispassionate—I‘ve been accused of being yesterday by saying he‘s Ray Milland because he‘s so calm, he never gets ruffled, he never sweats, like Pat and I do. He never shows the passion of leadership. Can he lead without passion?

WESTEN: No, I mean, you can‘t lead without passion. The reality is that you can‘t be motivated without passion. Passion is what gets us to move. And if he can‘t get that passion, if he can‘t get worked up, he‘s not going to be able to lead and he‘s not going to be able to motivate.

(CROSSTALK)

MATTHEWS: People don‘t change, though, Drew.

BUCHANAN: Passion...

MATTHEWS: All my life, I keep asking people, women who want their husbands to change, wives—husbands who want their wives—I always say to people, Have you ever met anybody, Drew, who‘s changed?

BUCHANAN: Chris? Chris?

MATTHEWS: I mean, that‘s my question.

BUCHANAN: Passion is a reflection of conviction and belief.

MATTHEWS: Right.

BUCHANAN: I mean, you get passionate because you really care about it. You can‘t keep faking it if you don‘t have it.

MATTHEWS: OK. Ronald Reagan did not lose his temper often, but people knew where he stood.

BUCHANAN: But he was passionate.

MATTHEWS: Right. Well, what‘s the difference?

WESTEN: Well, this is where...

BUCHANAN: When you‘d go into a meeting with Ronald Reagan...

WESTEN: This is where...

BUCHANAN: ... and he‘d start—go ahead. Go ahead, Drew.

MATTHEWS: Go Drew.

WESTEN: I was going to say, Pat, I fully agree with you. This is where I think the real crux of the issue is, which is that no one really knows where Obama stands on virtually anything because he doesn‘t express his passion on anything.

MATTHEWS: Well, let me—let me...

WESTEN: We don‘t know where he stands on...

MATTHEWS: Let me stop you. Let me stop the music here. I know where he stands. He wants national health insurance. I know where he stands, he‘s a Keynesian economic with the cojones to put out a real fiscal and monetary policy to stop the hell that was breaking loose at the end of the Bush administration. I know those things.

I know—I disagree with him about Afghanistan. He‘s somewhere in the middle of Afghanistan. He‘s with me on Iraq.

BUCHANAN: But Chris, let me ask you...

MATTHEWS: It was a mistake. So I do know where he stands.

BUCHANAN: Well, you know, I agree. I know where he stands.

MATTHEWS: And Pat knows all those things.

BUCHANAN: I know where he stands. But again, about his belief. Do you think this is really a war president? We‘re going to go in and take them out the way Petraeus...

(CROSSTALK)

BUCHANAN: McChrystal and Petraeus believe in the war. I‘m not sure he believes in the war.

MATTHEWS: On the war against al Qaeda, he‘s been clear about from the beginning.

BUCHANAN: OK, he‘s also—we know his position on health care. Does he care deeply enough...

MATTHEWS: OK, Pat, let me tell you a problem. We had—we had Mr. Magoo running us for eight years, by the way. They went over to get al Qaeda. They ended up fighting with Iraq. I mean, they got—they were so off-base. So passion ain‘t enough. Vision, smarts, brains.

BUCHANAN: All right...

MATTHEWS: We should have gone after the guy. I‘m with Michael Smerconish on that, from Philly. We went after to get al Qaeda, we still haven‘t gotten them. We went after to get bin Laden and we went after to get Mullah Omar and the whole rest of them. We still haven‘t gotten them. So we say, Well, we can‘t get them, so let‘s go to war with Saddam Hussein.

BUCHANAN: But look...

MATTHEWS: That‘s what we did do. That was passion.

BUCHANAN: But George W. Bush had passion.

WESTEN: It was idiocy.

BUCHANAN: That‘s why he rolled the Democratic Senate...

MATTHEWS: OK. OK.

BUCHANAN: ... with Daschle and Hillary...

MATTHEWS: OK.

BUCHANAN: ... and Biden and all of them voting for war.

MATTHEWS: OK, a great pollster once said to me—to end up here, Drew—every great leader needs three things—motive—Reagan had it, Thatcher had it, I think this president has it. You know where he‘s going. Big picture, you know where he‘s going. He needs passion and he needs, or she needs, spontaneity, to react quickly to events. The lights are on and somebody‘s home. I think the Obama problem is not passion. It‘s not motive. I know both are there. It‘s spontaneity, the ability to move quick and say, You‘re right, I don‘t like it, let‘s go. You say executive ability. That‘s what I think is missing.

BUCHANAN: Scotty Reston said every journalist needs three things—drive, drive, drive.

MATTHEWS: OK.

BUCHANAN: And that‘s what‘s missing.

MATTHEWS: OK, we all have our list. Pat Buchanan, Drew Westen...

(LAUGHTER)

MATTHEWS: ... “The Political Brain.”

WESTEN: Good to see you again.

MATTHEWS: Coming up: The chairman of the Republican National Committee, Michael Steele, takes aim at, well, his own party, saying they‘ve screwed up after Ronald Reagan. Well, we‘ll get to that. He‘s much tougher on the Dems. But can Republicans right their ship by standing against everything? Can the no party get a yes from the American people? Michael Steele coming right here to sell his book on HARDBALL next.

You‘re watching it, only on MSNBC.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEAN HANNITY, HOST, “HANNITY”: Do you think you can take over the House? Do you think Republicans...

MICHAEL STEELE, RNC CHAIRMAN: Not this year. And Sean, I‘ll say honestly...

HANNITY: You don‘t think so.

STEELE: Well—well, I don‘t know yet because we don‘t have all the candidates. We still have vacancies that need to get filled.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MATTHEWS: Wow. Welcome back to HARDBALL. That was Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele with Sean Hannity last night. A spokesman for the Republican Congressional Campaign Committee, the NRCC, said, quote, “Independent political analysts and even liberal columnists have stated that Republicans have a very real shot at taking back the majority in 2010. Make no mistake about it, we‘re playing to win.”

Well, Chairman Steele has a new book called “Right Now: A 12-Step Program for Defeating the Obama Agenda.” He joins us tonight from New York. Do you stick with what you said the other night on Sean, that you don‘t think your party can win back the House this time?

STEELE: Well, Chris, let me—let me just start by saying I gave, I think, an honest analysis of the situation. I‘m not a pundit there. I want to play to win. What—the point I was making, if you go through the rest of that interview, was we‘re in the process of now putting our players on the table. We‘re still building that farm team in some races. We‘ve got primaries that are going to be competitive. We want to see how that turns out. So there are a lot of things to take into consideration.

I agree with the NRCC and the NRSC and others around in the party who believe that we have real shots this November. And I‘m playing to win, as well. But I‘m not going to sit here in January, not knowing where all of my pieces are on this playground, or this chess board, and tell you, Oh, we‘re going to do it absolutely this way or that way.

MATTHEWS: OK...

STEELE: So what I was trying to say is, we‘re now beginning to put a good team in place. Coming off the wins in New Jersey and Virginia, I feel very good about next fall and I‘m excited and ready to rock and roll.

MATTHEWS: Let me restate the question...

STEELE: Sure.

MATTHEWS: ... that Sean put to you. Can you—it isn‘t “Will you,” he said, Can you win the House this year?

STEELE: Yes.

MATTHEWS: Can you...

STEELE: Yes, we can.

MATTHEWS: ... Mr. Chairman, win the House?

STEELE: I think we can.

MATTHEWS: OK, so you have a different answer. Let me ask you...

STEELE: Yes, we can.

MATTHEWS: Let me—let me—the question—you know, I get the feeling, reading your book—well, not having read it, but looking at the cover and checking my name in it, like everybody else—and thank you for the mention.

STEELE: Hey, look, if you...

MATTHEWS: A lot of...

STEELE: Can I just say real quick...

MATTHEWS: Well, by the way, I‘ve got to ask—sir, go ahead.

STEELE: No, I was just going to say, you know what I appreciate and why I put that in there? Because the one thing I‘ve always appreciated about you is that you don‘t try to hide or color what your perspectives or your views are.

MATTHEWS: Well, thank you. Well...

(CROSSTALK)

STEELE: You wear that passion...

(CROSSTALK)

STEELE: We know you‘re an unabashed liberal...

MATTHEWS: ... this president, by the way—no, no. I‘ll accept all of that, except I don‘t think unabashed is right, but liberal on a lot of things. But let me tell you this. I‘m also a critic every day of when things go wrong. And I made that comment—I‘ll say it again—I wished him well, like I wished Bush well in the beginning, I wished Clinton well in the beginning. I wish all these presidents well in the beginning. And I have been—I have been rooting for him and I will continue to root for his success because I think I want him to succeed. That‘s clear.

STEELE: Yes.

MATTHEWS: But I‘m a critic every day.

Here‘s a question for you book—for your book, which I found fascinating. I‘m looking, like all Washingtonians do, at your book, and I look in the back of it under P‘s. And I look at these names, Pacino, Al. We know who he is.

(LAUGHTER)

MATTHEWS: Party of Lincoln, great for a Republican like yourself.

STEELE: Yes.

MATTHEWS: Paterson, David, the under-attack governor of New York.

STEELE: Yes.

MATTHEWS: Pawlenty, Tim, from Minnesota. PBS, that‘s an odd thing for a Republican to quote.

(LAUGHTER)

MATTHEWS: Daniel Pearl, of course, the man, the great heroic journalist who was killed over there.

STEELE: Yes.

MATTHEWS: Pelosi, Nancy. Prejean, the beautiful woman from California who was Miss California.

STEELE: Yes.

MATTHEWS: And public option.

But there‘s a big P. missing here.

(LAUGHTER)

MATTHEWS: Where is the big P. from Alaska? What—no mention of her?

(LAUGHTER)

MATTHEWS: She‘s the most admired woman in the country, next to—alongside Hillary Clinton, and you don‘t even give her the respect of a mention in your book as chairman of the Republican Party?

STEELE: Hey, look, she just wrote a book.

MATTHEWS: Here‘s the book. Sarah, you‘re not even in here.

(LAUGHTER)

STEELE: She just wrote a book.

MATTHEWS: You‘re not even in here.

What do we make of that?

STEELE: Well, you know, there‘s nothing to make of that.

MATTHEWS: Nothing to make of it? She notices it, I‘m sure.

STEELE: Well, no, no, no. Look, first off, the governor and I are good buddies. And I have an enormous amount of respect and gratitude for her run last year and what she‘s done as governor of the state.

MATTHEWS: Well, why are you afraid to speak her name?

(CROSSTALK)

STEELE: Oh, come on, Chris. Afraid to speak—Palin, OK? I‘m not afraid to speak her name.

MATTHEWS: Well, what do you go to say about her, since you won‘t write about her?

(CROSSTALK)

STEELE: The emphasis of the book—look, the emphasis of the book, the emphasis of the book—and I invite everyone, starting with you, to actually read it cover to cover. And you will understand that this is not about singling out one individual and focusing on one personality.

MATTHEWS: All right. OK.

STEELE: This is about a party that‘s in recovery, a party that‘s about to enter into a renaissance, in which we can begin connecting to the American people on—I think on some foundational principles, whether you‘re talking health care or the war in Iraq or whatever it happens to be. That‘s the focus here. This is the blueprint and the pathway to do that.

MATTHEWS: Can I use some common language? I want to use some street language with you, if you don‘t mind...

STEELE: Sure

MATTHEWS: ... because I think we speak the language of the people of both parties.

STEELE: Absolutely. You hear me. I‘m street.

MATTHEWS: It seems to me that the Democrats have a problem. The economy is terrible, 10 percent unemployment. The president came in with hell on wheels and he‘s done, I think, a good job. But, clearly, there‘s nothing to hand—no roses to hand out yet, no rewards yet politically.

But the Republican Party keeps in all the polling by “The Wall Street Journal” and NBC keeps coming up as a bad brand.

STEELE: Sure, yes.

MATTHEWS: About one in five Americans call themselves Republicans. Even if you‘re a conservative, people aren‘t willing to say, I‘m a Republican.

STEELE: Yes.

MATTHEWS: If your brand sucks, how can you rebuild the product?

STEELE: Well, that‘s exactly what this blueprint is about.

That‘s what this—this book really focuses on, starting with the mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa, which you and I are familiar with, as good little Catholic boys.

MATTHEWS: We are.

STEELE: And the reality of it is, you can‘t begin to make a step forward unless you understand what you‘re stepping away from, or, more importantly, what you have stepped into.

(CROSSTALK)

MATTHEWS: What, Iraq?

(CROSSTALK)

MATTHEWS: Was Iraq...

(CROSSTALK)

MATTHEWS: What were the big mistakes? Was it Katrina? Because you are getting honest here, and I know you‘re going to pull back, because you‘re almost getting honest.

(CROSSTALK)

STEELE: No, I‘m not going to pull back.

(CROSSTALK)

MATTHEWS: Not paying attention to Katrina, was that a mistake by the president?

STEELE: It was Katrina. It was the government buildup. It was spending.

(CROSSTALK)

MATTHEWS: Going into Iraq, when we should have been fighting al Qaeda, was that a mistake?

(CROSSTALK)

STEELE: No, I don‘t think that was a mistake, because...

(CROSSTALK)

MATTHEWS: Going into Iraq wasn‘t a mistake? The American people think so.

STEELE: Well, look, you have to—you have to look at the—the totality of what the president saw and what the president knew, the information, along with the Democrats, as you noted in the last segment, who stood with the president on the war in Iraq. And, when it became politically expedient for them, they flipped like a jailbird on the issue.

MATTHEWS: OK.

STEELE: But, having said that, the broader point here, more importantly, is that, as a party...

MATTHEWS: Right.

STEELE: ... we stepped away from principle. And this, I think, is a pathway back to regaining that ground.

(CROSSTALK)

MATTHEWS: OK. You know when you stepped away from principle? When President Bush wouldn‘t veto a single overspending bill the entire time your party ran the Congress, not one.

STEELE: Duly noted in the book. Duly noted in the book.

MATTHEWS: Not one.

Let me ask you a tricky question.

STEELE: Yes.

MATTHEWS: You know, I get—there‘s a lot of fight. And I may take the Republican side on this fight, whether we should be taking these people, like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, up to New York and having them a big trial at the cost of $200 million in a year in New York City. And I would say that just exposes us to all kinds of trouble, including crazy jurors, potentially, who just have all kinds of theories.

STEELE: Yes.

MATTHEWS: Let me ask you this.

Is it a reasonable debate or is there a right side and a wrong side to this? Is the right side we have to have military tribunals for these kind of people, and the wrong side we have criminal cases? Is it as simple as that?

STEELE: I think, to a large extent, it is, Chris, because, at the end of the day, you have got to call it what it is. Who are you dealing with here? Who are the—who are the jury of Khalid Mohammed‘s peers? Who are his peers?

I mean, what American or what New York citizen is his peer that can sit in judgment of him?

MATTHEWS: So, that‘s the wrong side of this issue.

STEELE: It‘s the wrong side. And the reason it is...

MATTHEWS: So, then, why did your president, our president at the time, George W. Bush, try the shoe bomber under criminal court in the United States? You said it was the wrong way to go. Well, then why did your president and our president at the time do that?

STEELE: You know, look, again, I wasn‘t in that meeting.

MATTHEWS: Have I tricked you? I have tricked you.

(CROSSTALK)

STEELE: You have not tricked me.

MATTHEWS: I have let you give a policy position here which I have now explained to you ran contrary to what the Republican president did.

(LAUGHTER)

MATTHEWS: You‘re laughing. But you just took a principled position and said it‘s wrong to have a criminal trial.

(CROSSTALK)

STEELE: Wait a minute.

MATTHEWS: And I have just reminded you that the shoe bomber got a criminal trial...

(CROSSTALK)

MATTHEWS: ... and was convicted of life imprisonment.

(CROSSTALK)

STEELE: You haven‘t let me tell answer the question, bro. Let me tell you what the deal is.

(CROSSTALK)

MATTHEWS: You did answer it. I caught you.

STEELE: No, you didn‘t catch me, because you started...

MATTHEWS: I nailed you.

STEELE: I started to tell you that...

MATTHEWS: The tape will show it.

(LAUGHTER)

STEELE: Let‘s go to the videotape.

MATTHEWS: The tape will show, sir, that you said the right position was military tribunals and the wrong position was criminal. And the president of the last instance, George W. Bush, went the criminal route with the shoe bomber. And you cannot explain the contradiction in your thinking.

(CROSSTALK)

STEELE: No, I‘m not. OK. Well, you clearly have answered my question for me. So, I guess I will just leave that as the answer...

MATTHEWS: No, I have judged it. I have judged your answer.

STEELE: ... because all I said—my start was, I wasn‘t in the room on that.

But, then, if you let me finish it, I would have gone on to say that I do not think that we should subject our courts, whether it‘s under a Republican administration or a Democrat administration, to—to terrorists who are not about our Constitution. To wrap our Constitution around these imbeciles is not smart. It‘s not smart politics and it‘s not smart national security policy.

And the reality of it is, again, whether you‘re talking then or now, to be consistent, in review...

MATTHEWS: I agree. By the way, that‘s a reasonable position.

STEELE: ... that this—our criminal justice system tries crooks, common criminals. It doesn‘t try terrorists.

(CROSSTALK)

MATTHEWS: And, by the way, we can disagree, because I could argue that terrorist behavior is criminal.

But let me ask you this. Can you still be a liberal Republican, like the ones we grew up with like Rockefeller, and Henry Cabot Lodge, and Jack Javits, and Bill Scranton? Is it still OK to be a liberal Republican?

(CROSSTALK)

MATTHEWS: Or there‘s no—there‘s not—a liberal Republican, not a moderate, a liberal?

STEELE: Well, I don‘t know what a liberal Republican is, I mean, because I—what I do know, I know Republicans who adhere to certain core principles like, you know, taxes and the amount that we pay, the role of government, free markets and free enterprise, you know, looking at communities and appreciating the ability to create reinvestment and opportunities for people who are trying to move up the ladder of success, if you‘re standing with us on those core principles, if you value, you know, the livelihoods and the lives of individuals to achieve the American dream, then I think this is a party you can stand with.

MATTHEWS: OK. OK. OK. Thank you very much, Michael Steele.

The name of your book is “Right Now: A 12-Step Program For Defeating the Obama Administration.” It sounds like something to do with Alcoholics Anonymous here, a 12-step program.

(LAUGHTER)

MATTHEWS: Anyway, we will talk about that the next time.

STEELE: It‘s all about recovery, my friend.

(LAUGHTER)

MATTHEWS: Oh, God, you‘re open-minded about it.

Up next: How did the underwear bomber get onto an airplane, but comedian Joan Rivers couldn‘t? That‘s coming up next in the “Sideshow.”

There she is.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

MATTHEWS: Back to HARDBALL. Time for the “Sideshow.”

Well, comedians take vacations, too, but they were back last night working the weird side of that attempted Christmas airline bombing.

Let‘s start with our pal Jay.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP, “THE JAY LENO SHOW”)

JAY LENO, HOST, “THE JAY LENO SHOW”: You know, it is good to be back. We were off for Christmas. And, apparently, so was the Department of Homeland Security.

(LAUGHTER)

LENO: Yes.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP, “THE LATE SHOW WITH DAVID LETTERMAN”)

DAVID LETTERMAN, HOST, “THE LATE SHOW WITH DAVID LETTERMAN”: He wants to blow the plane up. He sets his underpants on fire.

(LAUGHTER)

LETTERMAN: And thank God the passengers on the plane subdue the guy.

They secure him. They tie him up, and they move him to first class.

And I was...

(LAUGHTER)

LETTERMAN: Wow. Are we sending the right message there, really?

(LAUGHTER)

(END VIDEO CLIP)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP, “THE DAILY SHOW WITH JON STEWART”)

FRANCES FRAGOS TOWNSEND, CNN CONTRIBUTOR: He paid cash for his ticket.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes.

TOWNSEND: It was a one-way ticket.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Paid nearly $3,000 in cash for his plane ticket and checked no bags.

JON STEWART, HOST, “THE DAILY SHOW WITH JON STEWART”: What the (EXPLETIVE DELETED)?

(LAUGHTER)

STEWART: It‘s December. He‘s going from Nigeria to Amsterdam to Detroit without a coat?

(LAUGHTER)

STEWART: With a one-way ticket? Oh, do you think he‘s going to Detroit to start a better life?

(LAUGHTER)

(END VIDEO CLIP)

(LAUGHTER)

MATTHEWS: I didn‘t know he didn‘t have a coat. It‘s cold in Detroit.

It was cold everywhere here this Christmas.

Anyway, meanwhile, another comic, Joan Rivers herself, got into this thing firsthand. She was bumped from a U.S.-bound flight out of Costa Rica because of her passport, which, according to “The New York Daily News,” reads Joan Rosenberg, AKA Joan Rivers. Doesn‘t anybody in Costa Rica know who Joan Rivers is? Apparently, nobody there at the security line. She was stranded overnight.

Finally, on “LARRY KING” last night, Republican Congressman Ron Paul, the libertarian, who is a hero to many, including a lot of young people out there, took on Dick Cheney‘s constant criticism of President Obama.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP, “LARRY KING LIVE”)

LARRY KING, HOST, “LARRY KING LIVE”: What about Dick Cheney‘s complaints?

(LAUGHTER)

REP. RON PAUL ®, TEXAS: Well, I think he had his eight years and he‘s caused a lot of trouble for our country, and he perpetuated a war in Iraq that was unnecessary and wrongheaded. So, I would say that it best he not be so critical right now.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MATTHEWS: Wow. Well said.

I would add that a vice president whose chief of staff got nailed with four felony convictions shouldn‘t be advising us on how to run things properly.

Up next: The Obama administration orders pat-down searches of all U.S.-bound passengers coming in from 14 countries, and now some groups are crying foul. But when the people who try to attack us come from these countries, isn‘t it better to be safe than worry about hurt feelings? That debate straight ahead.

You‘re watching HARDBALL, only on MSNBC.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

MATT NESTO, CNBC CORRESPONDENT: I‘m Matt Nesto with your CNBC “Market Wrap.”

Stocks ended the day mixed. A blockbuster sales report from Ford helped lift the S&P. The Dow industrials were down 12 points, the S&P up just about 3 ½, and Nasdaq with a tiny little gain of its own.

Ford shares were up 6.5 percent after reporting a 23 percent jump in December sales. That‘s almost three times what analysts were expecting. The other big U.S. automakers not faring as well—GM sales down almost 13 percent. Chrysler saw a 10.5 percent drop, capping the automaker‘s worst year since 1962.

Kraft Foods at the top of the Dow industrials today, up almost 5 percent, after top shareholder Warren Buffett opposed the company‘s plan to issue millions of new shares to buy British candy-maker Cadbury.

And Continental Airlines up 13 percent, after the new CEO said he will forgo his annual salary and bonus until his airline is back in the black.

That‘s it from CNBC. We‘re first in business worldwide—now back to

HARDBALL.

MATTHEWS: Back to HARDBALL.

In an effort to increase security, obviously, the Transportation—the Transportation Security Administration—that‘s the TSA—the people that check us at the airports, has increased screening measures for airline passengers coming from 14 countries. Look at them around the world there. They‘re all highlighted there.

Alejandro Beutel is with the Muslim Public Affairs Council. He says this is the wrong way to go about safety. David Rivkin, a former Reagan and Justice Department official who has been with us, disagrees.

Let me start with you, David.

Why is it smart to go to these 14 countries, Afghanistan, Algeria—it includes Cuba, by the way, Iran, some on the state terrorism list, all these countries, mostly Islamic countries, except for Cuba, I guess. Why do we have to—and what they are doing in these case is have extra pat-downs, basically extra check of your carry-on luggage. It‘s sort of what they do—I travel all the time, gentlemen—it‘s what they do when you get on that SSS list, when they pull you aside and they say, OK, we‘re going to check out everything. We‘re going to wand you. We‘re going to check your luggage by hand.

They do that to you if you break one of the rules or your—the buzzer goes off too many times.

DAVID RIVKIN, FORMER ASSOCIATE WHITE HOUSE COUNSEL: Let‘s agree.

MATTHEWS: Is that a right or a wrong way to go?

RIVKIN: It‘s a reasonable way to go. Let‘s agree that profiling—let‘s leave aside political correctness—is a way of marshaling scare resources to manage a large threat.

The real question, is this the right way to profile? Let‘s agree that these countries, coming from these countries is a reasonable proxy for the probability, enhanced probability, that you might be a terrorist. I, frankly, think we need to look at other factors. We need to look at age. We need to look at gender. We need to do...

(CROSSTALK)

MATTHEWS: What does that tell you? What are you talking for?

RIVKIN: Well, young males are dis—but, again, we shouldn‘t be blinded by it. We have women terrorist bombers. But, by and large...

(CROSSTALK)

MATTHEWS: OK, let me ask you the bluntest question.

The people that attacked us on 9/11, hard, horrific evidence, they were checked. They were called back out of line again because they—they set off the metal detectors. They‘re carrying box-cutters. They were still allowed to get on the plane. They still killed the 3,000 people.

RIVKIN: Chris, we need to do two things.

MATTHEWS: So, what good does it do to pull a person out of line and do one of these pat-downs...

RIVKIN: Nothing.

MATTHEWS: ... if all it‘s going to do is slow somebody down for 10 minutes?

RIVKIN: Nothing if it‘s ineffective, by itself. But if you combine it with other measures—you have to work the process from beginning to end. Selecting people, checking people and making sure they don‘t get through, if they are carrying something suspicious objects. You need to do all of them. It‘s not either/or.

MATTHEWS: Your thoughts? What do we do? These are countries, not ethnic groups, being identified. These are countries. By the way, just to remind everybody, 9/11, 15 Saudis, one Egyptian, one Lebanese and two from the union—from the Emirates countries, the UAE. So they come from certain countries so far. They could be coming from Denmark tomorrow, we don‘t know. But their countries of origin correspond to the countries on this list. Your thoughts?

ALEJANDRO BEUTEL, MUSLIM PUBLIC AFFAIRS COUNCIL: Exactly. My colleague mentioned we need a layered effect, and that‘s correct. But the sort of ethnic and religious profiling—

MATTHEWS: Where is that taking place right now?

BEUTEL: Right now with the USA standards, by selecting these 14 countries, that‘s just basically telegraphing our strategy. If we decide to profile from these countries, then terrorists are just going to recruit elsewhere. Profiling is not going to help against Richard Reid. It‘s not going to help against Jose Padilla. It‘s not going to help against any of the UK bombers in the 2006 plot.

MATTHEWS: Why not?

BEUTEL: because these are people who don‘t fit profiles. A 2005 study by the Library of Congress found that there is no such thing as a reliable terrorist profile, especially based on ethnic background. But this has been—

MATTHEWS: Country of origin.

BEUTEL: I understand that. Again, even based on country of origin -

-

MATTHEWS: If you only check certain people, because you can‘t check everybody, who should you check?

BEUTEL: Well, again—

MATTHEWS: If you have to—since everybody—have you ever been at the LA airport, LAX, in the morning, 6:00, when there‘s a billion people there? Or out here at Reagan, when there‘s a billion people on a Saturday morning? You can‘t check everybody through exhaustive checks or people will never get on a plane. How do you single out the people you check? That‘s a question I want answered.

BEUTEL: Let‘s go back to what President Obama was saying earlier in his statement about the review. What we need to do is make sure our intelligence actually connects the dots.

MATTHEWS: No, in terms of checking people when they get on airplanes, which people should be checked most thoroughly?

BEUTEL: Actually, what you need to do, in terms of a smart defense, is make sure that in the layers themselves, you need to check people beforehand, by having the proper intelligence.

MATTHEWS: No, how do you check people when you get on an airplane?

I‘m asking a simple question.

BEUTEL: I‘m getting to it. It‘s a nuanced issue. You have stage one beforehand. Then, once you get to the airport itself, then afterwards what you do is you look at certain perhaps behaviors that they‘re doing, behavioral profiling. If they‘re doing something that‘s strange, if you‘re asking basic questions about, you know, where are you going to be going --

MATTHEWS: Who asks these questions? I go to the airport and they don‘t ask any questions.

BEUTEL: Behavioral profiling. For instance, at Logan Airport in Boston, they‘re doing something right now where they have a pilot program, where as a part of airport security itself, as one of the last rings of defense, is that they do this thing where they look for things that are possible suspicious behaviors. It doesn‘t look at ethnicity or race or religion, but looks at the actual behaviors themselves, things that might be dead giveaways --

MATTHEWS: Like what?

BEUTEL: -- to someone who might have something suspicious. For instance, if someone‘s going to be doing something where they‘re going to be a little bit fidgety, or if they‘re not answering questions straight.

MATTHEWS: But there are no questions put to you.

BEUTEL: In some cases, though, there will be questions put to individuals.

MATTHEWS: I‘m all for that. But how do you decide who to ask the questions of?

BEUTEL: It‘s not just about questions either, though. It‘s also making sure to read the body language.

MATTHEWS: Give me a procedure to defend America, quickly. What would be your procedure to defend this country? His procedure is to at least start with this country of origin—

RIVKIN: I‘m not suggesting against --

MATTHEWS: What would be your approach?

BEUTEL: My approach would be a layered defense, starting with smart intelligence, making sure that we share the information. Then from there, making sure that once we get closer to the airport, we have behavioral assessments that don‘t rely on certain profiles that are not going to be—

MATTHEWS: Like country of origin.

BEUTEL: Like country of origin, ethnicity or—

MATTHEWS: OK. I just don‘t know how you would—you said ask questions. They don‘t ask any questions right now.

RIVKIN: We need this kind of profiling. I‘m not against nuanced We don‘t have the resources for behavioral profiling. Let me tell you, if we push al Qaeda to stop recruiting the people they‘ve been recruiting and start looking for Scandinavians—

MATTHEWS: They will.

RIVKIN: They will, but they would trickle down. This is what you do in warfare. You push your enemy to operate in less than optimal ways. I would bet you they‘re not going to be able to recruit enough Scandinavians.

Profiling is just a starting point. You‘re supposed to look at other things. It‘s not a panacea. To deny that it‘s useful as a foundational stone is just silly.

BEUTEL: It only displaces the problem. All it takes is one or two people to do these things. That‘s all it takes.

MATTHEWS: Let‘s get away from race and ethnicity to the simple question. Let‘s get to nationality. If you are looking for IRA, provisional IRA people, back 10 years ago, right, 20 Years ago, wouldn‘t you start with the Irish?

RIVKIN: Of course.

MATTHEWS: Is that unreasonable? Is that prejudicial? I‘m asking, is that prejudicial—no—to look for the IRA among the Irish. Is it prejudicial?

BEUTEL: No.

MATTHEWS: Because they recruit among the Irish.

BEUTEL: But the thing is it‘s very specific. There‘s a difference between the IRA, which was an ethnic-based group—

MATTHEWS: Don‘t you recruit Islamic terrorists among Islamic people?

BEUTEL: How can you tell who is a Muslim?

MATTHEWS: No, I‘m asking you—

(CROSS TALK)

MATTHEWS: They are starting by nation states. Like you would start with Ireland. If the guy‘s got a passport from Northern Ireland—

BEUTEL: Chris, how can you tell.

MATTHEWS: You can‘t tell.

BEUTEL: Exactly.

(CROSS TALK)

MATTHEWS: A thousand people get on the plane. And you can only check ten. Which ten do you check? That‘s what we‘re talking about.

RIVKIN: Not the elderly grandmother. That‘s for sure.

MATTHEWS: Do you check Joan Rivers?

BEUTEL: No.

MATTHEWS: She got bumped off a flight the other day. I get a little heated on this, because I think everybody likes to push aside the issue. You have limited resources. I don‘t think we pay the TSA people enough. I think we need some New York cops, retired cops, with street instinct standing around those airports, who have the sense of these questions. By the way, you can‘t interrogate passengers. You can‘t ask them all these questions right now. We would need—

RIVKIN: My colleague doesn‘t want profiling, let‘s be candid, because you are afraid it would lead to broad stigmatization of the community. This is not what this country is about.

(CROSS TALK)

RIVKIN: All we‘re talking about is allocation of scarce resources.

MATTHEWS: Everybody from those countries knows why this is going on. And it‘s not done by prejudiced people. It‘s done because common sense tells you—by the way, if Americans kept attacking Arab countries, we would be checked.

RIVKIN: Of course. Profiling—

MATTHEWS: I can tell you. If everybody that bombed these countries were from America, we‘d be checked. Please come back. I hate to say it, but this conversation is going to get more heated as time goes on. If we get hit again, this won‘t be a calm conversation.

Up next, is there room in the Republican party for anyone other than these protesters? They seem to be running the party right now, even though they say they‘re not Republicans. They‘re all Republicans. The politics fix is next. This is HARDBALL. They don‘t just have the party label right now. This is HARDBALL, only on MSNBC.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

MATTHEWS: Back with the politics fix, with “The Daily Beast‘s” Mark McKinnon and “USA Today‘s” Susan Page. What do we think about this fact, Mark—and I go with you—here‘s your “Daily Beast” quote, “tea is the new Kool-Aid for Republicans and a lot of candidates and office holders on the right are drinking from it like a fire hose. The Tea Party crowd is unlikely to become a third party, but their ability to leverage energy behind candidates and policies could be very similar to what MoveOn.org has accomplished on the left. Movements are often identified by a clear leader. The question is who will lead?”

So who will lead the Tea Baggers? Will it be Rick Perry down in Texas? Will it be Michele Bachmann out in Minnesota? Will it be Sarah Palin? You first, Mark. It is your idea. The Tea Baggers are an interesting group to watch. They‘re not far right. They‘re probably center right, in fact some centrists. But they‘re generally Republican voters, right? Is that fair to say? They vote Republican?

MARK MCKINNON, “THE DAILY BEAST”: Yeah, they‘re conservative voters, unquestionably. What‘s happened is the GOP brand is so damaged that when you ask overall voters right now their favorable impressions of the parties, they have a more favorable impression of the Tea Party than they do of the Republican party. And you ask that among the independent voters, and they have a more favorable opinion of the Tea Party than either the Democratic party or the Republican party.

MATTHEWS: That‘s true. Does that mean they end up voting—when they go to the voting booth, there is no Tea Party candidate. So I would argue that‘s good for Republicans, because they will end up voting for a Chris Christie or a McDonnough (ph) or a Tom Coburn from Pennsylvania this year. They will find a Republican that‘s not offensive to them and vote for them. Even if it is Pat Toomey, they‘ll just vote for any Republican because they are steamed up.

MCKINNON: They are the movement—movements are about people that are angry at the institution and the establishment. So, yes, they‘re Republicans. They‘re people who are out of power. They‘re unhappy. And the Tea Party‘s become the vessel through which they‘re fueling their anger.

MATTHEWS: They‘re monochromatic, right?

MCKINNON: I don‘t know that they‘re monochromatic.

MATTHEWS: They‘re not? Every picture I see shows them to be.

MCKINNON: There‘s a lot of people out there that cuts across a lot of demographics who feel disenfranchised.

MATTHEWS: But not that other demographic?

MCKINNON: The other demographic?

MATTHEWS: Meaning they‘re all white, all of them. Every single one of them is white.

MCKINNON: I think that‘s a fair characterization, predominantly.

MATTHEWS: What‘s that about? Let me ask Susan. What‘s that about?

SUSAN PAGE, “THE USA TODAY”: I don‘t think these are really Republican voters. These are the kind of populist—

MATTHEWS: Who do they vote for? McCain or Obama?

PAGE: Well, they vote for McCain over Obama.

MATTHEWS: OK, well, that‘s how we keep score.

PAGE: They vote for Palin over McCain.

MATTHEWS: They‘re both Republicans.

PAGE: They are both Republicans.

MATTHEWS: Why are you resisting this? Tea Baggers are Republicans.

PAGE: I don‘t think that‘s true. I think these are voters who don‘t like either party, and who went for Pat Buchanan and went for Ross Perot.

MATTHEWS: In almost all state elections for governor, senator, congress-people, there is a Republican candidate, Democratic candidate. And this coming election, coming in November, they‘ll vote Republican.

PAGE: The risk for republicans is not so much in the general election but will they be a real force for—in primaries to get Republican candidates who will not fare well.

MATTHEWS: When we come back, Mark and Susan, we are going to have a real full-mooner for you to watch. He is from Minnesota and he thinks the real danger to America are the—what he calls the radicals—wait until you hear his words. It is not the terrorists. It is the Democrats. Wait until you hear this guy. He‘s ready to fight, this guy. We‘ll be right back with Susan and Mark. You‘re watching HARDBALL.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

MATTHEWS: We‘re back with Mark McKinnon and Susan Page for more of the fix. Let‘s watch this right now. Here‘s Republican Congressional Candidate Allen Quist, who is running out in Minnesota. Let‘s listen to him.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ALLEN QUIST ®, MINNESOTA CONGRESSIONAL CANDIDATE: I, like you, have seen that our country is being destroyed. I mean this is—every generation has had to fight the fight for freedom. This is our fight, and this is our time.

This is it. Terrorism, yes. But that‘s not the big battle. The big battle is in DC with the radicals. They aren‘t liberals. They‘re radicals. Obama, Pelosi, they‘re not liberals. They‘re radicals. They are destroying our country.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MATTHEWS: Wow. You know, I think liberal is an OK word. This guy says liberal‘s not bad enough for Obama. What do you think, Mark McKinnon?

MCKINNON: I think he ought to be running for the border instead of the Republican party nomination.

MATTHEWS: Well, he obviously thinks this will sell, this hard-right

Democrats are all a bunch of radicals and they‘re worse than terrorists.

What a statement.

MCKINNON: That‘s the problem. I think we‘re pushing the extremes to the utter extreme, and we keep lowering the bar. I think a lot of this is about just being as outrageous as you can, to get attention from the media. And here we are providing it. But hopefully, over the long haul, they‘ll pay the penalty at the place that it really counts, in the voting booth.

MATTHEWS: I‘m comfortable with suburban Republicans in the northeast. My whole family fits that category. They‘re nice people. They‘re reasonable. They may and bit more conservative than me. But I have to tell you, they are reasonable people. They must think this guy‘s a barn burner.

PAGE: Welcome to Youtube, Mr. Quist. He may not have thought that this little affair he was talking to in Minnesota was going to get this kind of attention. Good news for Tim Waltz, who is a Democratic congressman from that district. It is pretty liberal for this—

MATTHEWS: He calls him a radical.

PAGE: You can do worse with an opponent.

MATTHEWS: This is the kind of crazy stuff that goes on in the Middle East, where every enemy is evil and the demon and everybody has to go crazy. It‘s tribalism. It‘s run amok.

Anyway, thank you, Mark McKinnon. Thank you. Mark McKinnon is a smart guy, Susan, and so are you.

Join us again tomorrow night at 5:00 and 7:00 Eastern for more HARDBALL. Right now it is time for “THE ED SHOW” with Ed Schultz.

Transcript for The Rachel Maddow Show, January 4, 2010

2010-01-04T20:06:00.001-08:00

Guests: Richard Wolffe, E.J. Dionne, Jonathan Cohn, Kent Jones

Transcript:

RACHEL MADDOW, HOST: Happy New Year to you, Keith. It‘s great to have you back. Thanks.

We begin tonight with some breaking news. On the White House investigation into exactly what happens with the Christmas Day botched terror attempt. MSNBC political analyst Richard Wolffe is actually joining us now by phone with that.

Richard, I know you just shared some reporting on COUNTDOWN about a potentially very inflammatory development in the Christmas Day terror plot investigation. What can you tell us about that reporting and what else you‘ve been able to learn?

RICHARD WOLFFE, MSNBC POLITICAL ANALYST: Well, Rachel, this investigation is still very much at the fact-finding stage where the White House is looking at still what happened. It‘s very preliminary. Obviously, the president has just got back from vacation and just started prepping for his big session tomorrow—which I‘m told is still going to focus on things like the screening processes that people face.

But the question here is whether or not the systemic failure that the president has talked about was anything more than human error. Was this some kind of failure because of the system‘s internal tensions? Or was there actually just a surplus of information that people didn‘t understand or report fully?

So, the question about how intelligence was shared is very much uppermost in the president‘s mind. He is still—I am told—very steamed about the whole affair and the failings that led to such a serious breach of security. But it‘s still very early in the phase of where this investigation is going.

MADDOW: Richard, I believe that the—I think the reason that you‘re reporting tonight has an exclamation point on it for many of us who saw your interview on COUNTDOWN, you were thinking about where this might led, is the prospect, not just that intelligence leads that should have been followed weren‘t followed, that intelligence dots that should have been connected weren‘t connected, that there isn‘t enough communication among the different parts of the American intelligence community. That‘s important analysis but not new analysis.

What‘s new and very worrying is the prospect that intelligence was deliberately withheld by one part of the American intelligence community from another either because of a grudge to make somebody look bad or for any other reason that put petty politics above national security.

Is that, in fact, the path that this White House inquiry is going down?

WOLFFE: That I think is 10 steps ahead of where the White House is right now.

MADDOW: OK.

WOLFFE: I just checked in with White House people again. And, look, there are—there‘s lots of finger-pointing going on in the intelligence community, where you have people who are in the center of it all, who are tasked with pulling these things together who say the information was there and it wasn‘t flagged up or it wasn‘t shared adequately. So, there is a line of inquiry that goes to the heart of why wasn‘t this stuff shared adequately?

I think the early suspicions from inside the White House are that this comes down to human error more than this is some willful withholding. But the questions are being asked and they‘re being asked because some people are saying this stuff wasn‘t shared adequately and they say it could have been.

MADDOW: MSNBC analyst Richard Wolffe joining us, helping us sort out what‘s turning out to be both a fascinating story and a deeply troubling story about America‘s response to the terror alert or the terror incident on Christmas Day, and what we could have pieced together ahead of time.

Richard, thanks very much for your time. We appreciate it.

WOLFFE: Thank you, Rachel.

MADDOW: All right. We begin our first show of 2010, now, with the death of a political truism that doesn‘t seem to have survived 2009. The truism is the conventional wisdom that Republicans sure know how to do terror politics. 2010 being an election year—right now, Republicans all over the country are busy waxing poetic about terrorism on campaign trails all around the country.

For example there‘s this gentleman in Minnesota.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ALLEN QUIST (R-MN), HOUSE CANDIDATE: I, like you, have seen that our country is being destroyed. I mean, this is—every generation has had to fight the fight for freedom. This is our fight. And this is our time.

This is it. Terrorism, yes. But that‘s not the big battle. The big battle is in D.C. with the radicals. They‘re not liberals. They‘re radicals. They are destroying our country.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MADDOW: House candidate Allen Quist of Minnesota. Terrorism isn‘t the big battle. The big battle is between us and the liberals.

That sort of political speech right there is what it looks like when something that used to work for you stops working. Someone obviously once told that Republican congressional candidate in Minnesota, “Hey, you should campaign on terrorism. That always works out great for Republicans.”

That is the common wisdom and it might have been true at one point, but it does actually matter how you do it. And if you‘re saying things like, “I hate Democrats more than I hate al Qaeda,” I‘m pretty sure you‘re not doing it right.

Now that the calendar has flipped to 2010 we‘re experiencing a little outbreak of Republicans blowing it. Republicans blowing something they used to be pretty good at, the politicization of terrorism.

The latest is Republican Senator Kit Bond of Missouri. In trying to attack President Obama‘s handling of the Christmas Day underpants bomber, Mr. Bond stepped on the same rake that a number of his colleagues have already recently stepped on.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CHRIS WALLACE, FOX NEWS: Do you think it was a mistake to charge Abdulmutallab as a criminal defendant?

SEN. KIT BOND ®, MISSOURI: Clearly. As you said, in your interview, as soon as he got a lawyer, he lawyered up. We should have held him as an enemy combatant and tried him under the military commissions.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MADDOW: We should have held him as an enemy combatant.

After facing questions about why he thinks President Obama is wrong to try the Christmas Day bomber in federal court, when President Bush made the exact same decision about the shoe bomber, Richard Reid, back in 2002, Senator Bond, after facing those questions, decided to double-down apparently without checking his own record. The senator is now seeking to go back in time to try to create the impression that he was against the shoe bomber being charged in federal court back in 2002, now, calling it a mistake—even though Senator Bond made not one peep of protest about that at the time.

In fact, at the time, the Justice Department, the Bush Justice Department was prosecuting Richard Reid—at that time, Senator Kit Bond was asked specifically if he had any criticism of the Bush Justice Department‘s role in fighting terrorism. Senator Bond said he had none.

(BEGIN AUDIO CLIP)

BOND: I believe that the Department of Justice is observing constitutional guidelines and safeguards, but they‘re going after people who come from areas of the world which might spawn terrorists, and I think that‘s appropriate.

(END AUDIO CLIP)

MADDOW: In 2002, he said what the Justice Department was doing was appropriate. Now looking back on it he says, back in 2002, that was a huge mistake—huge mistake to use the Justice Department for this sort of thing. How dare Obama do this now, this thing I said at the time was appropriate?

Then there‘s Republican Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina. And after facing pressure for putting an indefinite hold on President Obama‘s nominee to run transportation security, Mr. DeMint has now, sort of, caved, saying that he‘ll allow a vote on the TSA nominee as long as he gets time to debate the nomination on the Senate floor. While caving on the TSA issue, Senator DeMint continues to embarrassing himself—embarrass himself by pressing another issue.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIPS)

SEN. JIM DEMINT ®, SOUTH CAROLINA: A lot of us have been concerned over the last year that the president did seem to downplay the threat of terror. He doesn‘t use the word anymore.

GLORIA BORGER, CNN: Senator DeMint, how has he downplayed the risk of terror?

DEMINT: Well, it begins with not even being willing to use the word.

The concern that a lot of us have had over the last year is we‘ve even dropped the word “terror.”

(END VIDEO CLIPS)

MADDOW: You know, when you see Jim DeMint saying this sort of thing, it might be useful to remember that he‘s just making it up as he goes along. You should hear a little laugh track in your head when he does that, as evidenced by President Obama repeatedly on tape saying this word that Jim DeMint says he never says.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIPS)

BARACK OBAMA, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Terror and extremism that threatens the world‘s stability.

Extremists sewing terror in pockets of the world.

Suffering and civil wars that breed instability and terror.

New acts of terror.

(END VIDEO CLIPS)

MADDOW: When Jim DeMint says that Barack Obama never uses the word “terror,” he‘s lying. It should probably be pointed out when that happens.

As we have noted here before the outbreak of people inexpertly trying to politicize terrorism, trying to politicize terrorism but blowing it, that effort sort of has a mascot in Republican Congressman Pete Hoekstra of Michigan. Mr. Hoekstra is now apparently unwilling to defend his decision to raise money off of the attempted murder of 300 Americans on Christmas Day.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Are you proud of that, of fundraising off the national crisis like that?

REP. PETE HOEKSTRA ®, MICHIGAN: Well, I‘ve been leading on national security for the last nine years that I‘ve been on the intelligence committee. And over the last two to three months, I‘ve been very concerned about where this administration is taking us on national security issues, the refusal to acknowledge that the Fort Hood attack was a terrorist attack.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: But I‘m asking about raising money off the attempted murder of 300 people three days after it occurred.

HOEKSTRA: I am proud of the role that I have played in making sure that America is safe.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MADDOW: Mr. Hoekstra dodging that question not once but twice yesterday. And that‘s actually a big change from the way the Hoekstra camp had been talking about his raising money off a terrorist attack against American citizens.

Just last week, Mr. Hoekstra‘s campaign told us that Pete Hoekstra himself signed off on that fundraising letter and that we should expect more similar efforts from him. Just a few days later, Congressman Hoekstra has been forced to become embarrassed about this. Now, apparently, unwilling to defend the effort when he‘s personally called out on it.

Even as Mr. Hoekstra apparently realizes the step on the rake face plant that he has made here, trying to raise money off of the attempted murder of 300 Americans on Christmas Day, three days after it happened, even as Hoekstra finally starts to get embarrassed about that, the Republican Party seems to be following Mr. Hoekstra‘s lead.

The National Republican Senatorial Committee sending out a fundraising pitch that reads in part, quote, “This country was one faulty detonator away from an American airliner being blown out of the sky. When a foreigner tries to blow up an airliner, it is an attempted terrorist attack. Will you please give $5 or $10 by midnight tomorrow so we have the money necessary to fight the Obama machine?”

The National Republican Congressional Committee also sending out its own fundraising e-mail using the specter of terrorist attacks against Americans to cash in.

Republicans are doubling down on trying to raise money off of an attempted terrorist attack. And while some are trying to win the terror debate by actively attacking President Obama publicly, others are making the strategic decision to keep quiet.

Peter Baker of “The New York Times” reported this weekend, quote, “A half-dozen former senior Bush officials involved in counterterrorism told me before the Christmas Day incident that for the most part, they were comfortable with Obama‘s policies, although they were reluctant to say so on the record. Some worried they would draw the ire of Cheney‘s circle if they did. They generally resent Obama‘s anti-Bush rhetoric and are unwilling to give him political cover by defending him.”

Republicans are supposed to be good at politicizing terrorism, yet here are four former senior Bush administration officials actually telling a reporter that there are things they think are keeping the public safe that they will not publicly support because of partisan politics. They won‘t let anyone know they support these policies they actually support and think are good for the country because they‘re afraid of Dick Cheney being mad at them. They told that to a reporter.

You know, keeping your name off that quote is not going to be enough to help your cause if you‘re willing to admit to being that craven.

Joining us now is “Washington Post” columnist, E.J. Dionne.

E.J., it‘s great to see you. Thank you for being here tonight.

E.J. DIONNE, WASHINGTON POST COLUMNIST: Good to be with you. Happy New Year.

MADDOW: Happy New Year.

It seems to me like there have been a lot of political missteps as people have tried to sort of politicize and capitalize off of terrorism in the wake of this Christmas Day incident. Are the people who are supposed to be good at this getting bad at this, or has the political context changed?

DIONNE: Well, you know, it‘s like a team that uses one play and does really great one season, the 2002 election, and it works great. The next season, the 2004 election, and they figure they can use the same play over and over again and not adjust it.

And I think what they ran into in the last week is the first couple days, President Obama was trying to reassure people. A lot of folks thought he looked too laid-back, wasn‘t engaged. If they had just hit him a little then and moved on, they might have gotten some mileage out of it, but instead, they sort of pushed way farther. Part of it was just over-politicization. A lot of people objected to the fundraising letter.

Some of it was just pure mendacity, the notion that Obama doesn‘t use the word “terror.” And just part of it was hypocrisy. You know, many examples where policies that President Bush pursued that Obama is pursuing suddenly became bad because Obama is pursuing the same policies and that just didn‘t work.

And so, I think they took a situation where they might have gained a little ground and at the end of it all, I think they lost ground in the last week.

MADDOW: And I think if we‘re going to sort of maintain the pseudo sports metaphor here, in terms of playing.

DIONNE: Forgive me.

MADDOW: No, I think it‘s actually appropriate because what this sort of seems like is an own goal on behalf of the Republicans. It seems like they‘ve tried to turn this into an offensive maneuver—like they always have—and it has back fired on them. They‘ve ended up scoring a goal on themselves.

And I don‘t feel though, like Democrats have made political progress with this. Democrats have been able to turn this to any offensive advantage here for them politically.

Are Democrats playing this same game with Republicans? Or are they just letting Republicans hurt themselves?

DIONNE: Well, the old line that if your enemy is losing a battle, don‘t interfere. And I actually think that there was a moment when it turned and that moment was when Dick Cheney came out and said the things that he said that were untrue and there is, I don‘t think, anyone better at mobilizing the Democratic base than Dick Cheney.

You found all sorts of people who had been critical of President Obama on the health care plan or on Afghanistan suddenly wanting to say, hold on a minute. Dick Cheney is going after Obama on something in, you know, what was, clearly, an unfair way. And so, I think this helped Obama immensely with his own base. I‘m not sure it mattered to a lot of other people, but it sure mattered with his own side.

MADDOW: What‘s your reaction to these anonymous, former Bush senior officials telling “The New York Times” that they support President Obama‘s counterterrorism policies but they won‘t say so publicly? To me, that seems like a relatively craven admission.

DIONNE: Well, I also liked in that Peter Baker article that some of them said, “If we supported Obama, it would actually make his policies more unpopular. If they said they were like President Bush‘s policies.”

You know, some of it is about how tribal and divisive we‘ve gotten on these kind of issues. Professionals used to be professionals and Republicans and Democrats could support each other, you can‘t do that now. And it‘s bad for you in the next administration.

But there are Republicans who have spoken out. I was really struck on “Meet the Press” yesterday when General Michael Hayden, former head of the CIA, and also, Michael Chertoff, who can be a fairly partisan Republican, emphasized the continuity between certain Obama policies in terms of just stopping and catching terrorists and the Bush policies.

And so, when you have the Republican professionals in this field speaking out and saying, “Hold on, you know, some of this stuff, our own side is saying isn‘t true,” they didn‘t put it that way but that was the effect of it—when I saw that I said, this game is really over.

MADDOW: Yes. E.J. Dionne, columnist for “The Washington Post”—it‘s really good to have your insight on this. Thanks very much for your time tonight.

DIONNE: Good to be with you. Thank you.

MADDOW: As Republicans arguably start to blow it on politicizing terrorism, another man bites dog as Democrats seem to be officially out-maneuvering Republicans on health reform—out-maneuvering them in terms of legislative tactics. Yes, I know these are words that you thought you would never hear. It took almost a year but Democrats do appear to be pulling it off. We have that story coming up next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

MADDOW: If man-made islands, an indoor skiing mountain in the middle of a desert, and a billion-dollar Tiger Woods golf course complete with palaces overlooking the greens—if all of those things weren‘t enough to spear Dubai into everyone‘s mind as a place that‘s clearly compensating for something, well today, the tiny kingdom unveiled the tallest structure in the world.

There it is, in all of its tallness. The Burj Khalifa is a 160-story, 2,717-foot high monument to height. The official news agency of Dubai is calling it, quote, “Another unique achievement by Dubai to be added to the pages of humanity‘s modern history.”

For extra credit, can you name the structure that was the world‘s tallest manmade thing before this? Before the Burj Khalifa was unveiled? What was the tallest manmade thing in the world? Can you even guess what country it was in?

If you guessed Warren Beatty‘s little black book, you have a keen sense of topical humor but you‘re wrong. Up until now, the tallest structure in the world was this television transmission tower three miles west of Blanchard, North Dakota. And it transmits the heck out of Channel 11 in Fargo. The KVLY-TV mast northwest of Fargo is now the second tallest manmade structure on earth. That is until Fargo figures out how to one up Dubai over this whole Burj Khalifa thing.

I‘m sure Fargo‘s got something in the works. I love rivalries like this. Fargo, Dubai, Fargo, Dubai.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

MADDOW: If you used whatever vacation time you had over the past few weeks to get away from the relentless debate in the Senate about health care reform, I‘m sorry to tell you vacation is over. The House and the Senate are gearing back up for yet another round on health reform. But according to new reporting today, the Democrats may have found a way to get this bill done, despite the full court press by the Republican Party to try to stop it.

On December 1st, you might remember that Republican Senator Judd Gregg wrote a memo laying out all of the procedural road blocks available to the Republican Party to try to stop health reform, a veritable arsenal of obstruction. TPM posted it all online.

Republicans, it turns out, have used a lot of these techniques.

There‘s this one, for example, from section one, the “new legislative day.” We asked a senior Democratic leadership aide about this today who confirmed to us that, yes, basically, every time you saw 92-year-old Senator Robert Byrd being wheeled into the Senate in the middle of the night, Republicans were using the “new legislative day” tactic as the reason for that.

Then in section two of Judd Gregg‘s how-to-obstruct memo, there was this one: reading of amendments and conference reports in entirety. Remember when Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma tried that one? He forced a tag team of Senate clerks to spend a whole bunch of hours reading an amendment before Bernie Sanders let rip a righteous howl on the Senate floor to put an end to that one?

Senator Gregg‘s obstruction instructions also suggested using Senate points of order to slow things down saying, quote, “A senator may make a point of order at any point he or she believes that a Senate procedure is being violated with or without cause.” We saw that trick pulled out of the bag a few times, including when Senator John Ensign of Nevada unwisely decided to deride health reform as unconstitutional by waxing eloquent about how solemnly he takes his oaths—which was awkward for a married man undergoing an ethics investigation for shtooping his campaign staffer.

Then there was the “motion to recommit” gambit. That‘s where you try to send a bill back to committee asking for changes or additions. That was a tactic the GOP used repeatedly.

But, of course, despite all of these tactics, health reform did pass the Senate. So now the fight‘s over, right? We can retire Senator Judd Gregg‘s version of “The Art of War”? It turns out, no. We can‘t.

Republicans have one last hope, one last arrow in the quiver, one last section in the obstruction memo. It‘s the conference committee process where the House and the Senate reconcile their two different versions of the bill. And according to Sun Tzu, obstruction master of the Republican Party, Senator Judd Gregg, that conference committee process provides yet more opportunities to stall this thing.

Did you know it takes three more votes just to send a bill to the conference committee? Just think what the minority party could do with three more votes. Three more chances to slow this thing down, to slow it down enough to try to kill it yet again.

Well, according to new reporting today, Republicans are not likely to get that chance. As my next guest was first to report today, Democrats are planning to skip the whole conference committee thing and work out the differences between the House and Senate bills informally, which—yes, means they‘ll be working them out without the Republicans.

Jonathan Cohn, senior editor of “The New Republic” and author of “Sick,” is the man who broke the story today.

Mr. Cohn, thank you very much for being here.

JONATHAN COHN, THE NEW REPUBLIC: It‘s good to be here. Thanks for having me.

MADDOW: In your reporting today, you wrote that a Senate staffer had told you it‘s time for a little ping pong. Ping pong being the legislative alternative to the conference committee.

What does it really mean?

COHN: Well, ping pong is basically a reference to the fact that instead of having a group of senators meet and work out a final version of the bill and then have each chamber vote on it, basically, you have—the House will now basically take the bill that the Senate passed, say, “All right, this is our starting template. Let‘s see what we like about this and let‘s modify it a little bit to make us so we can be happy with it.” They pass it. And then they send it back to the Senate and then the Senate does the same thing. Ping pong.

But, of course, as this is all happening, there is an informal negotiation going on. And in effect, the discussions that are taking the place of the conference committee and that‘ll be the Democratic leaders, will be, you know, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid and will be the main committee players and perhaps some other people, and they will be having the discussions how to work out, “OK, how do we come to agreement on this, so as you said we can finally be done with this and we can finally get a bill onto President Obama‘s desk?”

MADDOW: Is it true that by doing things this way, rather than through a formal conference committee, Democrats are effectively denying Republicans further opportunity to slow down, obstruct, or maybe even stop the bill?

COHN: Well, there will still be a few opportunities. There has to be a final vote by the Senate, and as we‘ve seen, the Republicans will take any opportunity they can in the Senate to try to gum up the works. But this greatly diminishes the opportunities.

As you said, if we were going to go through the formal conference process, there would have to be a whole set of votes and a whole set of debates, and this thing could drag out for much, much longer. And, you know, it‘s fine, you know, to have this process of a conference committee and go through this formality if you‘re working with a minority party that‘s sincerely interested in trying to negotiate and come up with a compromise that, you know, some of their members can like. But I think we‘ve seen by now that that‘s simply not what the Republican Party is interested in.

You know, the time to cooperate, the time to talk about how to find some compromise that everyone can live with, you know, we had that time. We had the entire year to do that. And the Republicans made very clear that they were not interested.

So, I think, the Democrats now have gotten that lesson and they‘re reacting accordingly saying, “All right. You don‘t want to be part of this? We‘ll just take care of business on our own and we‘ll get this done and we‘ll try to come up with the best bill that we can.”

MADDOW: I guess the opportunity cost here is the prospect that the conference committee could actually be a chance to make the bill better, that it could be a place to constructively work out any kinks in the bill, to try to smooth out any policy awkwardnesses before it‘s actually signed by the president. I guess by having to do things this way or by choosing to do things this way—depending how you look at it—you do miss the opportunity to actually, in conference, make the policy, a better policy for the country.

COHN: Well, sure. I mean, look, in an ideal world, I‘m sure there are some ideas from the Republican side that would be useful to have as part of this discussion. And, frankly, I think Democrats over the last few months, even with the Republicans being relatively obstructionist about this, have actually made a lot of efforts to accommodate Republican concerns.

But look, at the end of the day, you need two to tango here. And if the Republicans aren‘t going to make themselves available in a constructive way, there is really no alternative but to proceed without them. I do think there‘s probably some opportunity cost there but, you know, you have to weigh that against the benefit, which is we can finally get this done. And I think that‘s the most important goal here.

MADDOW: And I think that any argument about that, and we have seen Republicans—particularly Republicans like John McCain—complaining loudly about Republicans being kept out of the process. But when they go so far as to put in black and white, to put in writing all of the different ways they‘re going to try to procedurally obstruct any form of health reform from going through, it becomes hard to also argue that they want to have a constructive role in the process. I guess they‘ve sort of ceded that territory, politically.

COHN: Well, I think so. I mean, don‘t forget on Christmas Eve, when we had that final, you know, climactic vote in the Senate and everyone was so exhausted, the last thing we heard from the Republicans was Mitch McConnell giving a speech on the floor vowing to fight on. “We‘re not going to let this bill happen. We‘re going to keep resisting.”

You know, frankly I think if Democrats were still trying to get the Republicans to cooperate and still bending over backwards, there‘ll be something wrong with them.

I mean, look, the Republicans have made their point. They don‘t want to be part of this discussion. That‘s their right. Let‘s move on without them.

MADDOW: Jonathan Cohn, senior editor at “The New Republic” - all cross the country right now, people are shell-shocked by the concept that Democrats are just taking the ball and running with it and trying to score. This is a new idea for liberals. I think it‘s just starting to sink in.

Thanks a lot, Jonathan.

COHN: Thanks for having me.

MADDOW: There is news brewing in the political blogosphere tonight about a Palin, a Palin who is not Sarah Palin. We will get to the bottom of it next.

And stay tuned for a full-on review of the constitutional provision that Michele Bachmann says is surely out to get you. Or at least she used to say it was surely out to get you. Now, she‘s not so sure. It‘s an interesting, backsliding story. Stick around.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

MADDOW: Still ahead, if you are a Republican member of Congress who has a deep-seated fear of the census, but you also rely on the census for the very existence of your job, 2010 could be a very complicated year for you. TMI on Michele Bachmann and the census she fears, ahead.

But first, a few holy mackerel stories in today‘s news.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

HILLARY CLINTON, UNITED STATES SECRETARY OF STATE: The instability in Yemen is a threat to regional stability and even global stability.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MADDOW: That was Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, speaking earlier today. The head of Cent Com, Gen. David Petraeus, took a surprise visit to Yemen this weekend. It was his third trip to Yemen in the 14 months that he has been the head of Cent Com.

Gen. Petraeus met with Yemen‘s president for about an hour and a half on Saturday. And then, the very next day on Sunday, the United States shut down our embassy in Yemen citing security threats. So did the Brits.

Today, the French, the Germans, the Japanese and the Czechs all followed suit, all either closing their embassies in that country entirely or limiting access to them.

Meanwhile, Andrea Mitchell reported on “Nightly News” tonight that truck-fuls of explosives are said to have gone missing somewhere inside Yemen, which may of course be why everything just got so suddenly shut down. We will keep you posted.

While we are talking about things going wrong in important places, political instability remains the huge story of Iran, a vast, growing, and powerful protest movement that has continued long beyond the summer‘s botched election. Government crackdowns have led to mass arrests, violence, and censorship.

Politically speaking, it is therefore incumbent upon the Iranian regime to at least try to appear unfazed, unified, and gaff-free in the face of this strong and growing opposition.

Now, you can cue the inadvertently hilarious new year‘s related government face plant. It is standard operating procedure for Iran‘s soccer league to send out a new year‘s greeting to all the members of the International Soccer Federation, FIFA.

This year was no different. The message was E-mailed out to everyone including, accidentally, a country whose existence Iran does not officially recognize - Israel, a soccer team that refuses to play in competition. A country its president has made quite a name for himself by insulting, dismissing, and denouncing.

So the message was essentially, “Happy New Year to everybody including soccer team of the country we refuse to admit exists.”

For this grave crime of accidentally forgetting to exclude Israel from the generic international New Year‘s greeting, accidentally including Israel in the happy new year, a senior official from the Iranian Soccer Federation has already offered his resignation.

According to the BBC, for their part, Israel took it all in stride. Quote, “They decided to make the most of it and replied with similar good wishes to, in their words, ‘all the good people of Iran‘ and ending the message with an E-mail wink. So Israeli soccer winning this round of word war three with cunningly deployed emoticons.

And finally, a story that has been percolating on blogs and throughout the Internet today - it has all the trappings of a monumental blockbuster of an Internet scoop. So one of our producers spent all day today looking into it and I have some very important information to share with you about a Palin.

Now, back in September, someone in Alaska filed paperwork to establish themselves as the organizer of a new limited liability company, an LLC. That person was Bristol Palin - 19-year-old Bristol Palin, the daughter of Sarah and Todd Palin, the mother of Tripp, now in the news for something completely un-tabloid-y.

The particular type of LLC that Bristol Palin established uses the federal classification code 541820 which means that Ms. Palin the younger has just formed a company that intends to provide lobbying, public relations, and political consulting services.

This is why it seemed like the real deal. First the lawyer named as the registering agent of this LLC is Thomas Van Flein who practices law at the address listed here on this document that we‘ve blurred out for the sake of his privacy.

Mr. Van Flein‘s previous gig was representing Gov. Sarah Palin during the trooper-gate scandal. Also, this also seemed like it was real, right? The registered company is called BSMP - BSMP - ah, the initials of Bristol Sharon Marie Palin.

Also, and although this is not real evidence, but it is neat, the signature on the document and Levi Johnston‘s ring tattoo of Bristol Palin‘s signature look a lot alike.

So adding all of this up, it seems like what you‘ve ended up with here is Bristol Palin, political consultant, lobbyist and public relations executive at the age of 19. Go, Bristol, go, right?

Actually, no. Mr. Van Flein finally got back to us late this evening. He told us in an E-mail, quote, “The code for BSMP, LLC pertains to several areas but includes public relations. Bristol Palin provides public relations services and is currently an ambassador for the Candie‘s Foundation.

The Candie‘s Foundation is a pro-abstinence organization. Bristol Palin has essentially set herself up to be paid as an incorporated entity as opposed to being paid as an individual and that‘s sort of a common choice people make when they have money coming in from various sources like this.

So BSMP, LLC, may just be a pretty smart financial decision by a very astute 19-year-old, or Bristol Palin is about to launch a lobbying and consultancy firm to run her mom‘s 2012 presidential campaign. Theoretically possible, but probably not.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

MADDOW: As the Republican Party searches for meaning in the political minority, one of its newest members is of course Alabama Congressman Parker Griffith who announced last month he was leaving the Democratic Party and becoming a Republican.

When he made that announcement, Mr. Griffith‘s campaign consulting team announced right away that they would be dropping Mr. Griffith because of his defection to the Republican Party.

Today, saying that Congressman Griffith had made a mistake, his chief-of-staff resigned as well, as did his legislative director and his legislative assistant and his other legislative assistant and his press secretary and his staff assistant and his legislative correspondent and his other legislative correspondent and his congressional fellow and his other congressional fellow. And even his intern quit.

Shout out to you, Andrew Menafee(ph). The entire Parker Griffith staff even waited until after the winter break so they could come back to Washington and do this en masse resignation in person and to release their “you made a big mistake” statement about their former employer.

And Mr. Griffith may have many, many virtues as a congressman and employer. Who knows, but inspiring confidence in those closest to him does not appear to be one of those virtues.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

MADDOW: First, Michele Bachmann encouraged everyone not to participate in the census. It‘s a conspiracy. Now, Michele Bachmann has changed her tune. If anything requires TMI, this story does. It‘s next. Stay with us.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

MADDOW: The secretary of commerce, the mayor of New York, and the director of the United States Census were all together in Times Square today to kick off a big, nationwide ad campaign.

This ad campaign includes a 13-vehicle bus tour traveling more than 150,000 miles, stopping at the Super Bowl in Miami, Mardi Gras in New Orleans, and even, I guess, bus-boating it somehow to Puerto Rico. The goal is to persuade Americans to fill out the census form, the form that should arrive in a mail box near you in mid-March.

The government is planning on spending over $300 million this year to persuade us all to spend 10 minutes answering that questionnaire and sending it back. The patriotic case for participating in the census is being made slightly more difficult this year by conservative Fringy McFringersons among us deciding that this year - even though it happens every 10 years, this year, the census must be some sort of commu-bamanist plot. For help unraveling this we turn to Kent Jones and TMI.

(MUSIC)

Oh, a special report.

KENT JONES, MSNBC CORRESPONDENT: Oh.

MADDOW: Oh. Kent, so tell me, how is it that once in a decade - fill out the census campaign, happens every decade. This year, they have to cope with conspiracy theories about the census, too.

JONES: That‘s right. Two magic words - Michele Bachmann.

MADDOW: Oh, yes.

JONES: Have a look.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

(voice-over): The congresswoman from the sixth district of Minnesota is drawing a line about the 2010 census.

REP. MICHELE BACHMANN (R-MN): I‘m not encouraging Americans not to fill out the census. I‘m saying for myself and for my family, our comfort level is we will comply with the Constitution, Article I, Section 2, we will give the number of the people in our home, and that‘s where we‘re going to draw the line.

JONES: Don‘t tread on me with your counting the people in my household.

BACHMANN: How do we know that our information that‘s given to the government, personal information, will stay private? What guarantees do the American people have that hackers won‘t get into the system?

JONES: You know what TMI means? Too much information, and that goes for your snoopy neighbors too.

BACHMANN: They‘ll go to our neighbors on our left and on our right and ask our neighbors to give them information about our personal lives. This is very concerning.

JONES: Actually, this is the census, which happens every 10 years, at least until Michele Bachmann can stop it.

BACHMANN: Look at American history. Between 1942 and 1947 the data that was collected by the Census Bureau was handed over to the FBI and other organizations at the request of President Roosevelt.

And that‘s how the Japanese were rounded up and put into the internment camps. I‘m not saying that that‘s what the administration is planning to do. But I am saying that the private personal information that was given to the census bureau in the 1940s was used it against Americans to round them up.

JONES: Whew! So what kind of deranged extremists would want to do that to its own people? Who came up with this flagrant insult to the Constitution? The guys who wrote the Constitution.

Back in 1787, the United States became the first nation to make a census mandatory in its constitution, quote, “The actual enumeration of the population shall be made within three years after the first meeting of the Congress and within every subsequent term of 10 years.”

It‘s data from that 10-year census that‘s used to redraw congressional maps - congressional maps like in Minnesota, which is facing the possible loss of a congressional seat after the next census.

Maybe that‘s why we haven‘t heard Bachmann railing about hackers or snoopy neighbors or interment camps since at least last August. Because if Michele Bachmann doesn‘t fill out the census and her constituents don‘t fill out their census, then what happens to her district? I think she‘s figuring out.

BACHMANN: The census is the mother load of all data collection in the United States.

JONES: Moral? Be nice to your mother lode.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

MADDOW: Thank you, very much, Kent. I appreciate that. A brand-new segment is premiering on “COUNTDOWN” tonight. Keith‘s quick comment on Dick Cheney versus President Obama.

But first is to catch a senator. John Ensign on camera asked about the ethics investigation into him shtupping his staffer and paying her off and getting her husband hired as a lobbyist. That‘s next. Stay with us.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

MADDOW: Tonight‘s “Cocktail Moment” is all about the secretive religious organization known as The Family about which we‘ve reported quite a bit on this show.

First up, former C Street denizen and Family member, Sen. John Ensign of Nevada. Since his June 16th confessional, awkwardly in front of a public restroom sign, he has been particularly adept at avoiding the media when it comes to questions about his extramarital affair with a staffer and about the investigations into his professional relationship with her husband, former aide-turned-lobbyist, Doug Hampton.

In fact, the first time we remember seeing Sen. Ensign actually having to respond to anyone on camera about Mr. Hampton was when CNN‘s Dana Bash and a producer attached themselves to Sen. Ensign outside on Capitol Hill.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DANA BASH, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Senator, why was it so important to get Doug Hampton those jobs?

SEN. JOHN ENSIGN (R-NV): Just look at our state. Just look at our state. He‘s very clear on that stuff.

BASH: Is there any chance that you - are you considering resigning?

ENSIGN: I am focused on doing my work, and I am going to continue to focus on doing my work.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MADDOW: Since that, Mr. Hampton has said in interviews that Sen. Ensign knowingly violated ethics rules by helping him get lobbying clients and meetings less than a year after he left the senator‘s employ.

So when CNN‘s Rick Sanchez got the chance to interview Sen. Ensign at the end of the year, the anchor gamely tried to get some kind of explanation from Mr. Ensign, only to be evaded for a full six minutes.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ENSIGN: You know, Rick, I‘ve been dealing with health care reform.

My state has over 12 percent unemployment rate. We have two wars going on.

RICK SANCHEZ, CNN ANCHOR: Right.

ENSIGN: These latest terrorist attacks - there are so many other bigger issues. I‘ve commented on all I needed to comment on those kinds of things. I‘ve commented on all I was going to comment on that.

I‘m not going to answer any of the questions because I‘m focused on doing my job right now. All that stuff will take care of itself over time. I‘ve spoken all that I need to speak on this.

And everything will take care of itself over time. I‘ve answered all of those questions. In the end, everything will be answered in its fullest. We will cooperate, and I think, you know, based on the facts, that the evidence committee would clear me, and I‘ll be able to go on being a senator. I‘ve answered the questions that I‘m going to answer, and I go back to my statements ...

SANCHEZ: All right.

ENSIGN: ... that I have done nothing ethically or illegal in this matter. And in the end, it‘s going to absolutely - we feel that we will be completely exonerated.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MADDOW: What we, senator? You know, speaking of The Family, the “New York Times” today picked up on the reporting we‘ve done, for the last five weeks or so, on the kill-the-gays bill proposed in Uganda.

As we have reported, the legislator who introduced the kill-the-gays bill and the country‘s president whose government has supported it are members of The Family.

Three weeks ago, we finally found out what the extremely secretive and media-averse Family thinks of the bill in Uganda.

Bob Hunter, a former Ford and Carter administration official, who‘s also been one of the Family‘s key contacts with Uganda, told investigative reporter, Jeff Sharlet, that The Family is opposed to that bill.

And not only that, Mr. Hunter said he‘s actively working to get U.S. politicians to actively fight against the bill. For the first time since we started reporting on The Family many, many months ago, we finally have been able to schedule an interview with someone who is a part of the group.

Mr. Bob Hunter is the interview on THE RACHEL MADDOW Show right here tomorrow night which happens at our regular time, which is 9:00 p.m. Eastern. We are really, really, really looking forward to having him on the show. It is long overdue.

We will see you tomorrow for that. In the meantime, “COUNTDOWN” with Keith Olbermann starts right now. Have a great night.

$400 Per Gallon Gas To Drive Debate Over Cost Of War In Afghanistan

2009-10-16T04:39:00.000-07:00

The Hill reports:

The Pentagon pays an average of $400 to put a gallon of fuel into a combat vehicle or aircraft in Afghanistan.

The statistic is likely to play into the escalating debate in Congress over the cost of a war that entered its ninth year last week.

Pentagon officials have told the House Appropriations Defense Subcommittee a gallon of fuel costs the military about $400 by the time it arrives in the remote locations in Afghanistan where U.S. troops operate.

“It is a number that we were not aware of and it is worrisome,” Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.), the chairman of the House Appropriations Defense panel, said in an interview with The Hill. “When I heard that figure from the Defense Department, we started looking into it.”

The Pentagon comptroller’s office provided the fuel statistic to the committee staff when it was asked for a breakdown of why every 1,000 troops deployed to Afghanistan costs $1 billion. The Obama administration uses this estimate in calculating the cost of sending more troops to Afghanistan.

The Obama administration is engaged in an internal debate over its future strategy in Afghanistan. Part of this debate concerns whether to increase the number of U.S. troops in that country.

The top U.S. general in Afghanistan, Stanley McChrystal, reportedly has requested that about 40,000 additional troops be sent.

Democrats in Congress are divided over whether to send more combat troops to stabilize Afghanistan in the face of waning public support for the war.

Any additional troops and operations likely will have to be paid for through a supplemental spending bill next year, something Murtha has said he already anticipates.

Afghanistan — with its lack of infrastructure, challenging geography and increased roadside bomb attacks — is a logistical nightmare for the U.S. military, according to congressional sources, and it is expensive to transport fuel and other supplies.

A landlocked country, Afghanistan has no seaports and a shortage of airports and navigable roads. The nearest port is in Karachi, Pakistan, where fuel for U.S. troops is shipped.

From there, commercial trucks transport the fuel through Pakistan and Afghanistan, sometimes changing carriers. Fuel is then transferred to storage locations in Afghanistan for movement within the country. Military transport is used to distribute fuel to forward operating bases. For many remote locations, this means fuel supplies must be provided by air.

One of the most expensive ways to supply fuel is by transporting it in bladders carried by helicopter; the amount that can be flown at one time can barely satisfy the need for fuel.

The cheapest way to transport fuel is usually by ship. Other reasonable methods to provide fuel are by rail and pipeline. The prices go up exponentially when aircraft are used, according to congressional sources.

The $400 per gallon reflects what in Pentagon parlance is known as the “fully burdened cost of fuel.”

“The fully burdened cost of fuel is a recognition that there are a lot of other factors that come into play,” said Mark Iden, the deputy director of operations at the Defense Energy Support Center (DESC), which provides fuel and energy to all U.S. military services worldwide.

The DESC provides one gallon of JP8 fuel, which is used for both aircraft and ground vehicles, at a standard price of $2.78, said Iden.

The Commandant of the Marine Corps, Gen. James Conway, told a Navy Energy Forum this week that transporting fuel miles into Afghanistan and Iraq along risky and dangerous routes can raise the cost of a $1.04 gallon up to $400, according to Aviation Week which covered the forum.

“These are fairly major problems for us,” Conway said, according to the publication.

The fully burdened cost of fuel accounts for the cost of transporting it to where it is needed, said Kevin Geiss, program director for energy security in the Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Army for Installations and Environment.

And moving fuel by convoy or even airlift is expensive, according to the Army news release from July 16, which quoted Geiss. In some places, Geiss said, analysts have estimated the fully burdened cost of fuel might even be as high as $1,000 per gallon.

Energy consumed by a combat vehicle may not even be for actual mobility of the vehicle, Geiss said, but instead to run the systems onboard the vehicle, including the communications equipment and the cooling systems to protect the electronics onboard.

Some 8o percent of U.S. military casualties in Afghanistan are due to improvised explosive devices, many of which are placed in the path of supply convoys — making it even more imperative to use aircraft for transportation.

According to a Government Accountability Office report published earlier this year, 44 trucks and 220,000 gallons of fuel were lost due to attacks or other events while delivering fuel to Bagram Air Field in Afghanistan in June 2008 alone.

High fuel demand, coupled with the volatility of fuel prices, also have significant implications for the Department of Defense’s operating costs, the GAO said. The fully burdened cost of fuel — that is, the total ownership cost of buying, moving and protecting fuel in systems during combat — has been reported to be many times higher than the price of a gallon of fuel itself, according to the report.

The Marines in Afghanistan, for example, reportedly run through some 800,000 gallons of fuel a day. That reflects the logistical challenges of running the counterinsurgency operations but also the need for fuel during the extreme weather conditions in Afghanistan — hot summers and freezing winters.

With the military boosting the number of the all-terrain-mine resistant ambush-protected vehicles (M-ATVs) in Afghanistan meant to survive roadside bombs, the fuel consumption will likely rise even higher, since those vehicles are considered gas-guzzlers.

The Pentagon comptroller’s office did not return requests for comment by press time.

Stanley McChrystal's Long War

2009-10-16T04:09:00.000-07:00

Interactive Map of Troop Levels in Afghanistan
[click on]

The NY Times reports:

Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal stepped off the whirring Black Hawk and headed straight into town. He had come to Garmsir, a dusty outpost along the Helmand River in southern Afghanistan, to size up the war that President Obama has asked him to save. McChrystal pulled off his flak jacket and helmet. His face, skeletal and austere, seemed a piece of the desert itself.

He was surrounded by a clutch of bodyguards, normal for a four-star general, and an array of the Marine officers charged with overseeing the town. Garmsir had been under Taliban control until May 2008, when a force of American Marines swept in and cleared it. Since then, the British, then the Americans, have been holding it and trying, ever so slowly, to build something in Garmsir — a government, an army, a police force — for the first time since the war began more than eight years ago.

The Marines around McChrystal, including the local battalion commander, Lt. Col. Christian Cabaniss, looked surprised, even alarmed, when McChrystal removed his protective gear. But as the group walked the rutted streets into Garmsir’s bazaar, they began taking off their helmets, too.

“Who owns the land here?” McChrystal asked, peering up the street and into the shops. “Is it owned by the farmers or by landlords?”

It was the sort of question a sociologist, or an economist, would ask. No one offered an answer.

“If you owned 200 acres here, would you live on it, or would you live somewhere else?” McChrystal asked.

The entourage entered the bazaar. The Afghans sensed that an important American had arrived, and they began to gather in groups inside the stalls. Then the general stopped and turned.

“What do you need here?” McChrystal asked.

A translator turned the general’s words into Pashto.

“We need schools!” one Afghan called back. “Schools!”

“We’re working on that,” McChrystal said. “Those things take time.”

McChrystal walked some more, engaging another group of Afghans. He posed the same question.

“Security,” a man said. “We need security. Security first, then the other things will be possible.”

“That is what we are trying to do,” McChrystal said. “But it’s going to take time. Success takes time.”

The questions kept coming, and the answer was the same. After a couple of hours, McChrystal put on his helmet and flak jacket, boarded the Black Hawk and flew to another town.

Success takes time, but how much time does Stanley McChrystal have? The war in Afghanistan is now in its ninth year. The Taliban, measured by the number of their attacks, are stronger than at any time since the Americans toppled their government at the end of 2001. American soldiers and Marines are dying at a faster rate than ever before. Polls in the United States show that opposition to the war is growing steadily.

Worse yet, for all of America’s time in Afghanistan — for all the money and all the blood — the lack of accomplishment is manifest wherever you go. In Garmsir, there is nothing remotely resembling a modern state that could take over if America and its NATO allies left. Tour the country with a general, and you will see very quickly how vast and forbidding this country is and how paltry the effort has been.

And finally, there is the government in Kabul. President Hamid Karzai, once the darling of the West, rose to the top of nationwide elections in August on what appears to be a tide of fraud. The Americans and their NATO allies are confronting the possibility that the government they are supporting, building and defending is a rotten shell.

In his initial assessment of the country, sent to President Obama early last month, McChrystal described an Afghanistan on the brink of collapse and an America at the edge of defeat. To reverse the course of the war, McChrystal presented President Obama with what could be the most momentous foreign-policy decision of his presidency: escalate or fail. McChrystal has reportedly asked for 40,000 additional American troops — there are 65,000 already here — and an accelerated effort to train Afghan troops and police and build an Afghan state. If President Obama can’t bring himself to step up the fight, McChrystal suggested, then he might as well give up.

“Inadequate resources,” McChrystal wrote, “will likely result in failure.”

The magnitude of the choice presented by McChrystal, and now facing President Obama, is difficult to overstate. For what McChrystal is proposing is not a temporary, Iraq-style surge — a rapid influx of American troops followed by a withdrawal. McChrystal’s plan is a blueprint for an extensive American commitment to build a modern state in Afghanistan, where one has never existed, and to bring order to a place famous for the empires it has exhausted. Even under the best of circumstances, this effort would most likely last many more years, cost hundreds of billions of dollars and entail the deaths of many more American women and men.

And that’s if it succeeds.

A few days after McChrystal filed his report, I sat down with him in his headquarters in Kabul. He seemed upbeat and relaxed. The report was still secret — it hadn’t yet leaked to the public. The ensuing furor was still to come, as was talk that McChrystal was considering resigning, which he was forced to publicly dispel. The atmosphere was not tense — not yet. Only urgent.

“I took this job because I was asked to take it, and because it is very, very important,” McChrystal told me. “Admiral Mullen” — head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — “specifically said to me: ‘You go out, you decide what needs to be done, and you tell me whatever you need to do that. Don’t constrain yourself because of politics. You tell me what you need.’ ”

I asked him about Obama.

“I didn’t get any assurances from anyone that I would be given any amount of time,” McChrystal said. “I didn’t get any assurances from anyone that I would be given any amount of resources. I didn’t ask for any assurances.”

For a moment, McChrystal paused.

“I don’t feel like the lonely man in the arena,” he said, “with all the pressure on my shoulders.”

II.

THE MARINES WERE walking along the sandy road when the Afghans lined up to watch the bomb.

The Marines, members of Echo Company of the Second Battalion, Eighth Marine Regiment, had plodded through a mile of sodden cornfields in the heat of Helmand Province and climbed a rock promontory to an observation post once manned by soldiers of the Soviet Union. They arrived in early July as part of the big push ordered by President Obama; General McChrystal had visited their command post in Garmsir, 12 miles up the road, three days before.

The Marines had been in plain view for more than two hours. And when they moved down from the old Soviet lookout and walked up the dirt path that runs alongside the hamlet of Mian Poshteh, the Afghans started to come out.

At first, a lone man walked along the edge of one of Mian Poshteh’s mud-brick houses. Then he stopped and turned and stood, watching. Then another man, this one in an irrigation ditch, stuck his head up over the ledge. A pair of children stopped playing. They turned to watch.

“Something’s going down,” Sgt. Jonathan Delgado said. He was 22 and from Kissimmee, Fla.

“Watch that guy,” said Lance Cpl. Joshua Vance, pointing. He was also 22, from Raleigh, N.C.

Two more Afghans arrived. They stopped and stood and looked at a spot just ahead of the Marines. A man on a motorcycle drove past, driving slowly, turning his head. Then the bomb went off. It had been buried in the path itself, a few feet under the sand, a few feet in front of the Marines.

The blast from the bomb was sharp and deep, and a dirty cloud shot up a hundred feet. Waves from the blast shot out, toward the village and toward us. Ten Marines at the front of the line disappeared.

“We’re hit! We’re hit!” Delgado shouted, and everyone ran to the front.

Marines began staggering out of the cloud. They were holding their ears and eyes.

“God, I’m still here,” Cpl. Matt Kaiser said, rubbing his ears. Kaiser had been at the front, sweeping the ground with a mine detector. He was from Oak Harbor, Ohio. “I’m still here.”

“No one’s hit,” Delgado said. “Jesus, no one’s hit.”

The rest of the young men staggered out of the cloud while the Marines trained their guns on Mian Poshteh.

The Afghans were gone.

“My bell’s rung pretty bad,” Kaiser said. He was shaking his head and glancing up and down and half laughing.

The bomber had missed. The weapon had been what the Marines refer to as “command-detonated,” which meant that someone, probably in Mian Poshteh, had punched a trigger — on a wire leading to the bomb — when the Marines came up the path. The triggerman needed to remember precisely where he had buried his bomb. Clearly, he had forgotten. If he had waited five more seconds, he would have killed several Marines.

Delgado, Kaiser and the others gathered themselves and walked toward Mian Poshteh. On their radio, the Marines could hear voices coming from inside the village.

“Is everything ready?” a voice said in Pashto.

“Everything is ready,” another voice said. “Let’s see what they do.”

The Marines stayed back. Earlier in the war, they would have gone into Mian Poshteh; they would have surrounded the village and kicked in doors until they found the bomber. Most likely they would have found him — and maybe along the way they would have killed some civilians and smashed up some homes. And made a lot of enemies. The Marines are a very different force now, with very different goals. They walked to within 50 feet of Mian Poshteh, and Lt. Patrick Bragan shouted: “Send us five men. Five men.”

Minutes passed, and five Afghans appeared. They were unarmed and ordinary looking.

“I have no idea who did that,” an old man named Fazul Mohammed said.

“Maybe they came at night,” a man named Assadullah said.

“I only heard the explosion,” a man named Syed Wali said.

The face of Lieutenant Bragan was pink from the heat and from pleading.

“All you have to do is tell us,” he said. “We’re here to help you.”

The Marines gave up. Near sunset, they started back the way they came, through the head-high corn. Delgado turned to one of his buddies, Cpl. John Shymanik, 22.

“They didn’t get us today,” Delgado said.

“They’re still trying, though,” Shymanik said.

III.

STANLEY MCCHRYSTAL SAT at the head of a U-shaped bank of tables in a sealed room at Bagram Airfield, a main hub of the war. He was surrounded by five giant video screens. On each screen was another general — American, German, Dutch, French, Italian — each commanding a different part of Afghanistan. It was McChrystal’s morning briefing, known as the commander’s update.

One by one, the generals scrolled through the events from the day before: a roadside bomb in Khost, small-arms fire in Ghazni, a British soldier killed in Helmand Province. Then one of the European generals started talking about an airstrike. A group of Taliban insurgents had attacked a coalition convoy, and the soldiers called for air support. A Hellfire missile, the European general said, obliterated an Afghan compound. The general — he cannot be named because of the confidentiality of the meeting — was moving on to the next topic when McChrystal stopped him.

“Can you come back to that, please?” McChrystal said.

McChrystal’s voice is higher than you would expect for a four-star general.

“Yes, sir,” the European general said.

“We just struck a compound,” McChrystal said. “I would like for you to explain to me the process you used to shoot a Hellfire missile into a compound that might have had civilians in it.”

The European commander looked at an aide and muttered something. The killing of Afghan civilians, usually caused by inadvertent American and NATO airstrikes, has become the most sensitive issue between the Afghans and their Western guests. Each time civilians are killed, the Taliban launch a campaign of very public propaganda.

“Were there civilians in that compound?” McChrystal asked. He was leaning into the microphone on the table.

The commander started to talk, but McChrystal kept going.

“Who made that decision?” McChrystal said.

An aide handed the European general a sheaf of papers.

“I’m sorry, but the system is not responsive enough for us to get that kind of information that quickly,” the general said.

McChrystal’s face began to tighten. Generals tend to treat one another with the utmost deference.

“We bomb a compound, and I don’t know about it until the next morning?” McChrystal said. “Don’t just tell me, ‘Yeah, it’s O.K.’ I want to know about it. I’m being a hard-ass about it.”

The European general looked down at his papers.

“It seems it was not a Hellfire missile but a 500-pound bomb,” he said.

McChrystal took off his reading glasses and looked around the room — at the video screens and the other American officers.

“Gentlemen, we need to understand the implications of what we are doing,” he said. “Air power contains the seeds of our own destruction. A guy with a long-barrel rifle runs into a compound, and we drop a 500-pound bomb on it? Civilian casualties are not just some reality with the Washington press. They are a reality for the Afghan people. If we use airpower irresponsibly, we can lose this fight.”

IV.

LATER THAT DAY, during a drive through Kabul, McChrystal told me that he had decided to drastically restrict the circumstances under which airstrikes would be permitted: for all practical purposes, he was banning bombs and missiles in populated areas unless his men were in danger of being overrun.

“Even if it means we are going to step away from a firefight and fight them another day, that’s O.K.,” McChrystal told me.

McChrystal’s missive was the first in an array he has drafted aimed at radically transforming the way America and its allies wage war here. In his first weeks on the job, McChrystal issued directives instructing his men on how to comport themselves with Afghans (“Think of how you would expect a foreign army to operate in your neighborhood, among your families and your children, and act accordingly”); how to fight (“Think of counterinsurgency as an argument to win the support of the people”); even how to drive (“in ways that respect the safety and well-being of the Afghan people”). At the heart of McChrystal’s strategy are three principles: protect the Afghan people, build an Afghan state and make friends with whomever you can, including insurgents. Killing the Taliban is now among the least important things that are expected of NATO soldiers.

“You can kill Taliban forever,” McChrystal said, “because they are not a finite number.”

That strategy is underscored by an extraordinary sense of urgency — that eight years into this war the margin for error for the Americans has shrunk to zero. “If every soldier is authorized to make one mistake,” McChrystal said, “then we lose the war.”

While Afghanistan is not Iraq, McChrystal’s plan does resemble in some ways that of General David H. Petraeus, who took command of American forces in Iraq in early 2007, when the country was disintegrating in a civil war. For four years, the American military had tried to crush the Iraqi insurgency and got the opposite: the insurgency bloomed, and the country imploded.

By refocusing their efforts on protecting Iraqi civilians, American troops were able to cut off the insurgents from their base of support. Then the Americans struck peace deals with tens of thousands of former fighters — the phenomenon known as the Sunni Awakening — while at the same time fashioning a formidable Iraqi army. After a bloody first push, violence in Iraq dropped to its lowest levels since the war began.

“It was all in,” Petraeus told me about that time.

And so if it was Petraeus who saved Iraq from cataclysm, it now falls to McChrystal to save Afghanistan.

Petraeus and McChrystal are in fact close — their bond solidified in the crucible of Iraq. Petraeus, now head of the U.S. military’s Central Command, with overall responsibility for both Iraq and Afghanistan, pushed McChrystal for the job. “He was a key part of the team in Iraq,” Petraeus told me.

Now 55, Stanley McChrystal is the son of Herbert J. McChrystal Jr., an Army general who served in Germany during the American occupation and fought in Korea and Vietnam. Stanley McChrystal was the fourth child in a family of five boys and one girl; all of them grew up to serve in the military or marry someone who did. “My dad was always the soldier I wanted to be,” McChrystal said.

He graduated from West Point in 1976, at the Army’s post-Vietnam nadir. Over the next 30 years, McChrystal ascended the ranks, mostly by way of the elite, secretive wing of Special Operations, in units like the Rangers. He served as a staff officer and an operations officer in the first gulf war and did stints at Harvard and the Council on Foreign Relations (where he is remembered for running a dozen miles each morning to the council’s offices on the Upper East Side).

With his long and gaunt face and his long and lean body, McChrystal looks almost preternaturally alert — coiled, hungry. He pushes himself mercilessly, sleeping four or five hours a night, eating one meal a day. He runs eight miles at a clip, usually with an audiobook at his ears. “I was the fastest runner at Fort Stewart, Ga., until he arrived,” Petraeus told me recently. “He’s a tremendous athlete.” On a recent daylong helicopter trip touring bases around the country, McChrystal yawned throughout the day — the only evidence of his exhaustion. He drank regularly from a large mug of coffee, black.

As McChrystal drives himself, he sometimes affords little tolerance to those who do not.

V.

MCCHRYSTAL WAS ONLY a month into his new job when he strode into the area inside NATO’s International Security Assistance Force headquarters in Kabul known as Destille Gardens. A collection of one-story buildings with a courtyard and patio, it is the only thing at headquarters that resembles a lounge or a recreation area. Soldiers and Marines — most of them staff officers — would gather there for coffee and even, if they were European, a glass of beer or wine. It’s a world away from Helmand Province.

McChrystal was coming for a haircut, and as he walked through the courtyard, he passed a table of coalition officers chatting and drinking. According to several officers present, his face showed immediate disapproval, but no one noticed and he kept on going. Twenty minutes later, when McChrystal walked back across the courtyard, his hair freshly trimmed, the officers were still at their table. Some of them had dozed off. The general’s mouth tightened. He walked over to their table.

He woke one officer and said: “Good afternoon, I’m Stan McChrystal. Is there a problem with your office space?”

He turned and walked off. Six weeks later, McChrystal issued an order banning alcohol from I.S.A.F. headquarters.

Yet for all his asceticism, McChrystal displays a subtlety that suggests a wider view of the world. “If you were to go into his house, he has this unreal library,” Maj. Gen. Michael Flynn, McChrystal’s intelligence chief and longtime friend, told me this summer. “You can go over and touch a binding and ask him, ‘What’s that one about?’ And he’ll just start. His bad habit is wandering around old bookstores. He’s not one of these guys that just reads military books. He reads about weird things too. He’s reading a book about Shakespeare right now.”

Also on his recent reading list this past summer: “Vietnam: A History,” Stanley Karnow’s unsparing account of America’s defeat.

When McChrystal decided to come to Afghanistan, a lot of people signed up to come with him. “I first worked for him in the gulf war, and General McChrystal was the sharpest, fastest staff officer I have ever come across — and I had been serving for 20 years at that point,” said Graeme Lamb, a retired British general and former commander of the Special Air Service, Britain’s equivalent of Delta Force. “He could take ideas, concepts, directions, and he could turn them into language, into understanding, and pass it out at an electric rate.”

Lamb was getting ready to retire earlier this year when McChrystal asked him to join his team. Lamb flew to Washington to talk it over, and the two men sealed the deal at a Mexican restaurant in Arlington, Va. “I don’t think there is a Brit that could have made the same call,” Lamb told me.

One big question hovering over McChrystal is whether his experience in Iraq truly prepares him for the multiheaded challenge that faces him now. For nearly five years, McChrystal served as chief of the Joint Special Operations Command, which oversees the military’s commando units, including the Army Delta Force and the Navy Seals. (Until recently, the Pentagon refused to acknowledge that the command even existed.)

As JSOC’s commander, McChrystal spent no time trying to win over the Iraqis or training Iraqi forces or building the governing capacity of the Iraqi state. In Iraq (and, for about a third of his time, in Afghanistan), McChrystal’s job, and that of the men under his command, was, almost exclusively, to kill and capture insurgents and terrorists.

The rescue of Iraq from the cataclysm that it had become by 2006 is an epic tale of grit and blood and luck. By February of that year, Iraq had descended into a full-blown civil war, with a thousand civilians dying every month. Its central actors were the gunmen of Al Qaeda, who, with their suicide bombers, carried out large-scale massacres of Shiite civilians; and the Shiite militias, some of them in Iraqi uniforms, who retaliated by massacring thousands of young Sunni men.

Breaking the cycle of attack and revenge was crucial to stopping the civil war, and it was here, McChrystal and his colleagues say, that JSOC played a critical role. In a series of operations that climaxed in 2006 and 2007, McChrystal’s commandos set out to destroy Al Qaeda of Mesopotamia.

“The aim was to go after the middle of their network — in a regular army, their senior noncommissioned officers. We tried to cause the network to collapse,” McChrystal told me. “We took it to an art form. It really became a machine.”

McChrystal said that as early as the fall of 2006 — when Al Qaeda was at its murderous peak — it looked like the group was coming apart. “We sensed that Al Qaeda was going to implode,” he said. “We could just feel it. We were watching it and feeling it and seeing it.” In addition to driving the civil war, Al Qaeda gunmen were seen as a main obstacle to Iraq’s Sunnis’ reconciling with the Americans and the Iraqi government. By degrading Al Qaeda, McChrystal and others say, they helped significantly reduce the civil war, and by so doing created a space that allowed a broader movement of reconciliation — the Sunni Awakening — to succeed.

“What General McChrystal was doing with the forces he had under command in Iraq was absolutely essential to setting the conditions that allowed the Awakening to move forward,” Lamb, the former S.A.S. head, told me.

The most significant moment in McChrystal’s tenure was on June 6, 2006, when a crucial piece of information came across one of JSOC’s video screens. For months, according to sources involved in the operation (though not McChrystal), McChrystal and his commandos had been hunting Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian head of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. Zarqawi, of course, was the man responsible for the murder of many hundreds of innocents in car bombings and suicide attacks. McChrystal was so desperate that he created a separate task force to get him. The task force narrowly missed Zarqawi several times; a few months before the June sighting, the operator of a Predator drone, a pilotless airplane, had spotted Zarqawi in a taxicab in Anbar Province. He lost him — and Zarqawi jumped out — when the operator changed the focus on the Predator’s camera lens.

This time, McChrystal believed, Zarqawi was in his sights. The tip was long in coming, a result of thousands of hours of intelligence work, but according to several sources, it boiled down to this: Under interrogation, an Iraqi insurgent who was a member of Zarqawi’s inner circle pointed to an Iraqi named Abd al-Rahman, who, the insurgent said, served as Zarqawi’s spiritual adviser. Whenever Rahman was preparing to meet Zarqawi, the source told the Americans, he would send his wife and family out of Baghdad the day before.

McChrystal and his JSOC team watched Rahman for 17 consecutive days. Then, on June 6, 2006, it happened — Rahman’s family was seen piling into a vehicle and leaving the city. The next day, a Predator drone followed Rahman himself as he made his way northeast out of Baghdad, to a small house in a palm grove near the village of Hibhib. Rahman went inside. McChrystal had a commando team on the ground, 18 minutes away.

As McChrystal and his staff watched through the Predator camera, a man, dressed in black, walked from the house to the edge of the road. The man looked to his right, then to his left. It was Zarqawi. He walked back inside. They were sure it was him.

At an operations center, a senior Special Forces commander, realizing that time was short, ordered an airstrike. Two F-16’s were dispatched; one of them was hooked up to a refueling plane; the second jet was told to go alone. A pair of 500-pound bombs killed Zarqawi. McChrystal and his staff were waiting at JSOC’s headquarters in Balad when the corpse came in.

McChrystal’s tenure as JSOC’s commander was not flawless. JSOC never got its most wanted quarry, neither Osama bin Laden nor Ayman al-Zawahiri. One of JSOC’s units, Task Force 6-26, was cited for abusing detainees, many of them at a site known as Camp Nama, in Baghdad. McChrystal himself was not implicated, but at least 34 task-force members were disciplined. “There were cases where people made mistakes, and they were punished,” McChrystal told me. “What we did was establish a policy and atmosphere that said that is not what you do. That is not acceptable.”

He also signed off on the Silver Star recommendation for Cpl. Pat Tillman, the N.F.L. star and Army Ranger killed in Afghanistan in April 2004. The medal recommendation erroneously suggested that Tillman was killed by enemy fire; in fact he was killed accidentally by his own men, which McChrystal suspected at the time. The medal was awarded at a memorial service for Tillman, in which he was lionized as a man killed by the enemy.

McChrystal said he did indeed sign off on the recommendation for Tillman, because he believed it was warranted. The award was for valor, and Tillman had been extraordinarily brave, regardless of who killed him. McChrystal said he never intended for Tillman’s death to be exploited politically or to convey an incorrect impression about his death. “I certainly regret the way this came out,” McChrystal told me.

As for his current job, McChrystal said there are two lessons from Iraq that apply to Afghanistan. The first is that his role — killing insurgents — worked there only because it was part of a much larger effort to not only defeat the insurgency but also to build an Iraqi state that could stand on its own. “Ours was just a supporting effort,” he said. The second lesson is perhaps more startling. It is that no situation, no matter how dire, is ever irredeemable — if you have the time, resources and the correct strategy. In the spring of 2006, Iraq seemed lost. The dead were piling up. The society was disintegrating. One possible conclusion was that it was time for the United States to cut its losses in a country that it never truly understood. But the American military believed it had found a strategy that worked, and it hung in there, and it finally turned the tide.

“One of the big take-aways from Iraq was that you have to not lose confidence in what you are doing,” McChrystal said. “We were able to go to the edge of the abyss without losing hope.”

VI.

SHORTLY AFTER HIS ARRIVAL in Afghanistan in June 2009, McChrystal sat down with the commanders of the 82nd Airborne Division, which oversees a broad swath of eastern Afghanistan. The briefing, given by the 82nd’s officers, was sophisticated but sobering: corruption in the Afghan government is pervasive, the officers said; the insurgency, supported from Pakistan, is resilient. Every valley and every village is different, each its own patchwork of ethnic groups and tribes, each with its own history. The Americans are having to learn them all.

“The environment is so complex that there is no overarching solution,” Brig. Gen. William Fuller told McChrystal.

When the briefing was finished, McChrystal looked around the room. “Gentlemen, I am coming into this job with 12 months to show demonstrable progress here — and 24 months to have a decisive impact,” he said. “That’s how long we have to convince the Taliban, the Afghan people and the American people that we’re going to be successful. In 24 months, it has to be obvious that we have the clear upper hand and that things are moving in the right direction. That’s not a choice. That’s a reality.”

In a tour of bases around Afghanistan, McChrystal repeated this mantra to all his field commanders: Time is running out.

Yet even if McChrystal’s plan succeeds, even if he can turn the Afghan venture around, neither he nor anyone else in the upper echelons of the military believes that the job — the one President Obama has given them to do — will be finished then.

“It feels like Iraq in 2004,” said Michael Flynn, McChrystal’s deputy. “Part of it is that the insurgency is stronger — we didn’t realize how strong it was. What we are trying to do is make sure everyone understands what it is we are facing — a much stronger insurgency, certainly much more capable. Their capacity to lay I.E.D.’s on the battlefield, for instance — it’s just stunning.”

I asked General Flynn to imagine the future here. “We are going to go in and ask for some resources,” he told me. “If those resources are brought to bear in a timely manner, I believe that it’s probably going to take us three years to really turn the insurgency to the point where it’s waning instead of waxing. To do that we have to fix the Afghan security forces, we have to build their capacity and capability, and we have to absolutely culturally change the way they operate. And then I think beyond those three years, we are looking at another two years when the government of Afghanistan and the security forces of Afghanistan begin to take a lot more personal responsibility. The challenge to us is: What can we do in 12 months? What should we expect? If people’s expectations are that we are going to have the south turned around, for instance, it’s not going to happen.”

The strategy that McChrystal, Flynn and the other senior commanders want to employ in Afghanistan has two main prongs: one hard, one soft.

In the military arena, McChrystal wants to put as many of his men as close to the Afghan people as he can. That means closing some of the smaller bases in remote valleys and opening them in densely populated areas like the Helmand River valley. Here, at least, military force will play a central role, at least in the early phase of his strategy, as the Americans fight their way into areas they have not been in before.

“The insurgency has to have access to the people,” McChrystal told me. “So we literally want to go in there and squat among the people. We want to make the insurgents come to us. Make them be the aggressors. What I want to do is get on the inside, looking out — instead of being on the outside looking in.”

“There will be a lot of fighting,” McChrystal added. “If we do this right, the insurgents will have to fight us. They will have no choice.”

And that’s the rub: the population-focused strategy requires more troops — as many as 40,000 more. This is the decision that confronts President Obama and his advisers now.

The other part of the military option is one with which McChrystal is familiar but does not completely control. It’s his old portfolio — killing and capturing insurgents and terrorists. Much of that is being carried out in Pakistan, where Al Qaeda’s leadership has gathered in havens just across the border from Afghanistan. Both bin Laden and Zawahiri are believed to be hiding there.

In Pakistan, a C.I.A.-led program using Predator drones to hunt down and kill leaders of Al Qaeda and the Taliban has proved remarkably successful, even if controversial inside Pakistan itself. To date, American officials say, they have killed 11 of the top 20 Al Qaeda leaders, without having to launch large-scale military operations across the border.

With its 180 million people, several dozen nuclear warheads and havens for Al Qaeda and the Taliban, Pakistan is one wild card in McChrystal’s campaign. “If we are good here, it will have a good effect on Pakistan,” he told me. “But if we fail here, Pakistan will not be able to solve their problems — it would be like burning leaves on a windy day next door. And if Pakistan implodes, it will be very hard for us to succeed.”

The softer side of McChrystal’s strategy has two main thrusts: training Afghan soldiers and police and persuading insurgents to change sides. It is here where the best chances of long-term success in Afghanistan may lie.

The first of these is a vast, expensive and painstaking project. In the ninth year of the war, Afghan forces are neither large nor able enough to take over for NATO. The Afghan Army has about 85,000 soldiers, and the police force has about 80,000 men. McChrystal wants to boost the size of the army to about 240,000 and the police to 160,000. “I think we can do it,” he told me.

But experience suggests that it won’t be easy. In Iraq, the building of the security forces was fraught with disaster: in 2004 and 2005, Iraqi soldiers and the police disintegrated whenever they came under attack. In later years, Iraqi forces became more sectarian, with some Shiite-dominated units carrying out massacres of Sunni civilians. It was only much later — by early 2008 — that the Iraqi Army and the police began to show promise.

And Iraq was an urban and literate society. Afghanistan is neither. The Afghan police are widely seen as corrupt and complicit in the opium trade — the world’s largest. And while many Afghan soldiers have shown themselves willing to fight, it usually falls to the Americans and their NATO allies to pay them, feed them and support them in the field.

Earlier this year, Maj. Gen. Richard Formica, who oversees the training of the Afghan security forces, spoke to me about the difficulties of creating an army in a country where only one in four adults is literate. “What percentage of police recruits can read?” Formica asked when we met at his headquarters in Kabul. “When I was down in Helmand, where the Brits were training police officers, they said not only could none of them read but they didn’t understand what a classroom was. How can you train officers if they can’t write arrest reports?”

Perhaps McChrystal’s most intriguing idea is his belief that he can persuade large numbers of Taliban to change sides. Coaxing insurgents back into the fold was, after all, one key to pulling Iraq back from the brink of apocalypse. Beginning in late 2006, tens of thousands of Sunni tribesmen, many of them former insurgents, agreed to stop fighting and to come onto the payroll, usually as policemen. Almost overnight, the Iraqi insurgency was reduced to Al Qaeda fanatics and a handful of others who could be targeted by McChrystal’s commandos in JSOC. This shaky — very shaky — arrangement is still keeping what peace there is in Iraq today.

McChrystal says he intends to begin a similar effort in Afghanistan. The idea, he said, would not be to try to flip the Taliban’s leaders — that’s not likely — but rather its foot soldiers. The premise of the program, McChrystal says, is that most of the Taliban’s fighters are not especially committed ideologically and could be brought into society with promises of jobs and protection. “I’d like to go pretty high up,” McChrystal said, referring to the Taliban’s hierarchy. “It could be people who are commanders with significant numbers of troops. I think they can be given the opportunity to come in.”

The effort, McChrystal said, is based on his own reading of the Taliban and of Pashtun culture: most of the people fighting the United States, he argued, are motivated by local and personal grievances. They want more of a voice in local governance, for instance, or they want jobs. “Historically, the Pashtuns are very practical people,” McChrystal told me. “Pashtun culture adjudicates disagreements in a way that mitigates blood feuds. The Pashtun people go out of their way not to do things that cause permanent feuds. They have always been willing to change positions, change sides. I don’t think much of the Taliban are ideologically driven; I think they are practically driven. I’m not sure they wouldn’t flip to our side.”

To help him achieve this, McChrystal recruited his old friend Graeme Lamb, who played a similar role in Iraq. The trick in Iraq, Lamb said, was timing: by late 2006, many Iraqis, even the insurgents, had grown tired of fighting. “What we did in Iraq in mid-2006 — had we tried to do it in mid-2004, it would have crashed and burned,” Lamb told me. “Because at the end of the day, people hadn’t exercised their revenge. They hadn’t stood at the edge of the abyss and looked into it.”

Lamb said the time may have arrived for something similar in Afghanistan, if only because everyone is exhausted by so much war. “Now is a good time,” he said, “because people are very serious on all sides.”

The reconciliation plan might end up bringing into the fold some disreputable characters, but neither Lamb nor McChrystal has much of a problem with that. “In my view,” McChrystal said of the insurgents, “their past is not important. Some people say, ‘Well, they have blood on their hands.’ I’d say, ‘So do a lot of people.’ I think we focus on future behavior. They can enter the political process if they want to.”

The notion that large groups of Taliban fighters could be persuaded to quit is not new. Previous efforts have ended in failure, often because neither the Americans nor their allies were able to protect people who changed sides.

Earlier this year, for example, a local Taliban commander in Wardak Province named Abdul Jameel came forward with a group of fighters and declared that he wanted to quit. Wardak’s governor, Halim Fidai, accepted his surrender and told him he was free to go home. Two weeks later, Taliban gunmen entered Jameel’s home and killed him, his wife, his uncle, his brother and his daughter.

“We had nothing to offer him,” Fidai told me.

In another case, Gulab Mangal, the governor of Helmand Province, told me that during a recent American military operation he got a telephone call from a Taliban commander. “He wanted to surrender,” Mangal said. And then the military operation was over — and the American troops went back to their bases. “He never called back after that,” Mangal said.

With more American troops, McChrystal told me, he would be better able to squeeze the insurgents into changing sides. “I think a lot of them need to be convinced that they are not going to be successful,” he said.

So many things could scuttle McChrystal’s plans: a Taliban more intractable than imagined, the fractured nature of Afghan society and, no matter what President Obama does, a lack of soldiers and time. But there is something even worse, over which neither McChrystal nor his civilian comrades in the American government exercise much control: the government of Hamid Karzai, already among the most corrupt in the world, appears to have secured its large victory in nationwide elections in August by orchestrating the stealing of votes. A United Nations-backed group is trying to sort through the fraud allegations, and American diplomats are trying to broker some sort of power-sharing agreement with Karzai and his main rival, Abdullah Abdullah.

But increasingly, McChrystal, as well as President Obama and the American people, are being forced to confront the possibility that they will be stuck fighting and dying and paying for a government that is widely viewed as illegitimate.

When I asked McChrystal about this, it was the one issue that he seemed not to have thought through. What if the Afghan people see their own government as illegitimate? How would you fight for something like that?

“Then we are going to have to avoid looking like we are part of the illegitimacy,” the general said. “That is the key thing.”

VII.

A GROUP OF American Marines were bumping along a sandy road in their Humvee as the twilight turned to dark.

“One guy lost his legs,” Sgt. David Spaulding said, riding in the front passenger’s seat. “They were walking in a field.”

The Humvee bounced along some more.

“You know the guy who got shot in the head?” Lance Cpl. Jeremy Dones said, from a seat in the back. “They got him to Germany. His parents flew to Germany. They took him off life support.”

A moment passed.

“Apparently a guy got blown to pieces, and they can’t find all of him,” Spaulding said. “They don’t know if they have all the pieces.”

The men rode together in silence.

McChrystal’s plans come to earth along the banks of the Helmand River, where members of the 2/8 Battalion are trying to retake a 20-mile stretch of orchards and villages around the city of Garmsir. The 2/8 Battalion, about 800 men, is part of the 10,000 Marines dispatched to Helmand by President Obama earlier this year.

Since arriving in early July, the 2/8 has lost 13 men, most to homemade bombs. About five times that number have been wounded. The Marines here fight nearly every day.

Yet for all their difficulties, the battalion’s progress has been real. Garmsir, a district of about 90,000 people, boasts a functioning government with a governor and a local council. About 300 Afghan soldiers are deployed here, led by an Afghan colonel educated at the United States Army’s school for its best junior officers. About 250 Afghan police officers are stationed at bridges and checkpoints. An array of public-works projects is under way.

Most important, the town of Garmsir and the villages around it are quiet. They are part of an area, roughly six miles wide and six miles long, that has been secured by the Marines along the east bank of the Helmand. They call the area “the snake’s head” for its oblong shape. Outside of Garmsir, the Taliban roam and attack. Inside, life for local Afghans is remarkably sane.

Garmsir is a devastated and impoverished place; 30 years of war has seen to that. None of its roads are paved, leaving the farmers unable to sell their grapes and corn in markets outside of town. There are no cellphones, no electricity, no running water. Building a city here that could function on its own would take many years. But in Garmsir’s calm, the first hints of normal life are beginning to show.

One day in August, I tagged along with a group of Marines to the monthly meeting of Garmsir’s district council. Our leader was Capt. Micah Caskey, a civil-affairs officer from Irmo, S.C. At 28, Caskey had already done two tours in the hardest years of the Iraq war. In 2007, he left the Marines to begin a dual graduate degree in law and business at the University of South Carolina. He spent the summer of 2008 studying law abroad. But he stayed in the Marine Reserve, and a few months ago they called him back.

“I had a job all lined up for the summer,” Caskey said. “And now I’m here for seven months. I can’t tell you it was easy. Sometimes it really makes me wonder.”

Garmsir’s governor, Abdullah Jan, arrived ahead of the meeting, and he and Caskey and a group of Marines sat in the courtyard of the district headquarters in a circle of plastic chairs. Governor Jan is the beneficiary of Afghanistan’s strangely centralized political system; he was appointed by Helmand’s governor, Mangal, who was directly appointed by Karzai.

Caskey’s experience in Iraq shows immediately. He is unfailingly polite, even deferential, to Jan. And each time one of the councilmen enters, he stops the conversation and rises to shake his hand.

“Peace be upon you,” Caskey said to Jan. “It’s very nice to see you after so long.”

Jan, who grew up in the district, told Caskey not to worry about local support for the Taliban — there wasn’t any. But in the absence of a stable government, and with no guarantee of safety, ordinary Afghans were often forced to go along. “I can assure you that the people of Garmsir appreciate what you are doing here,” Jan said. “Unfortunately the people are held hostage by the Taliban.”

An Afghan — one of Jan’s assistants — arrived bearing a tray of tea and cakes while Jan talked.

“Ninety percent of the local people support the government,” Jan told Caskey. “Maybe 10 percent really like the Taliban.”

That seemed an overstatement; there were too many roadside bombs in the area — even inside the snake’s head. But the point Jan was making seemed valid enough: once there is law and order, public opinion begins to change.

“You guys,” Jan said, looking at Caskey and the other Americans, “you come in, you help and then you leave. The Afghan people are not 100 percent sure that you are going to stay. They are not sure they won’t have their throats cut if they tell the Americans where a bomb is.”

The council’s meeting began with its 16 members taking their seats on the floor of a large, airy room. Caskey and the other Americans sat in the back. The agenda for the meeting was to decide on a list of development projects, which the Americans would pay for. As Caskey explained, the Americans didn’t want to direct the projects — they wanted to strengthen the Afghan leaders by funneling the money through them.

“The Americans are only going to pay for projects that we decide on,” Jan announced. “It’s up to us.”

The Afghans — all men — began to talk. Their first choice was unanimous: the main sluice gates that lead to the irrigation canals off the Helmand River, built by American aid workers in the 1950s, were badly in need of repair. Some of the fields were going dry.

“It’s been 30 years since anyone did any work on that canal,” Hajji Anwar, one of the councilmen, said.

With the meeting under way, Caskey and the other Americans got up to leave. “I have one request,” Caskey said to one mullah. “Would you be willing to record a message that we can play over the radio station saying that fighting the government violates the idea of jihad — that it’s not jihad?”

Jan thought for a second and nodded. Caskey and the other Marines strapped on their helmets.

“May you have a son just like yourself,” Jan told him.

VIII.

THE ABANDONED ELEMENTARY school in Mian Poshteh that houses the 240 Marines of 2/8’s Echo Company has no bedrooms, no beds, no electricity, no water. It’s a vacant, dirty building filled with tired and dirty men. They sleep on the floor, a dozen to a room, or they sleep in the dirt outside, shirtless in the heat. They fight every day. When the Marines don’t attack the Taliban, the Taliban attack the Marines.

No Americans have ever come this far south before, at least not permanently. With fewer than 8,000 British troops covering all of Helmand, there never were enough to go around. Garmsir is 12 miles up a single dusty road, where Echo Company’s supply convoys get bombed nearly every day.

Mian Poshteh is like Garmsir but worse. There is no government: no mayor, no city council, no police. Thirty Afghan soldiers live here, only 10 of whom leave the base at any given time. As in Garmsir, the Marines in Mian Poshteh have come to build a government — but they have to defeat the Taliban first.

“We’re not going to clear anything that we can’t hold onto,” said Capt. Eric Meador, Echo Company’s commander.

Even with 240 men, they can’t hold onto much. By the time Echo Company and the rest of the 2/8 leave at the end of October, Meador said, he would like to control a perimeter that extends perhaps a mile and a half around his fort. “I’d be doing pretty well,” he said. To the south, there isn’t another Marine base for miles.

When you see a place like Mian Poshteh — wild, broken and isolated — it’s not difficult to see why McChrystal believes he doesn’t have enough troops to do what President Obama has asked him to.

One of Echo Company’s typical days unfolded in late August, when the Marines set out on foot for a village named Tarakai. Led by a young lieutenant, Patrick Nevins, 24, from Chapel Hill, N.C., Echo Company’s First Platoon walked through a vast field of shoulder-high corn. The fields had been flooded recently, so they were filled with muck. The trek might have been easier had the Marines taken the farmers’ raised footpaths, but the Taliban had taken to laying land mines in those, so the Marines waded straight into the field itself. The mud below was crisscrossed by gullies and rows of broken ground. The helmets of the Marines bobbed above the top of the corn.

The fields, deep and green, were eerily empty of other men.

“I guess all the farmers took the day off,” Nevins said, hacking his way through the corn.

Helmand’s summers are long and merciless, and on this day the temperature hovered around 120 degrees. Crossing the fields, with all the muck, it was hotter still. Nevins and his men tromped through the corn in full gear, including helmets and flak jackets. In the heat, my own boots fell apart.

As he walked, Nevins talked a little about himself. He seemed an unlikely presence in the fields of Helmand. His father is a cancer researcher at Duke University. “My dad is really good at what he does,” Nevins said, hacking and pushing his way through the mud and corn. “I guess I didn’t want to compete with him.”

An hour later, Nevins’s platoon popped out on the other side. Behind them were trails of toppled corn. “Sorry about your field,” Nevins said to an Afghan man standing nearby.

“It’s O.K.,” he said.

We arrived at Tarakai. A group of Afghans lined up. They were talking about the Afghan presidential election, to be held only a few days later.

“We can’t vote,” said Hakmatullah, who, like many Afghans, has only one name. “Everybody knows it. We are farmers, and we cannot do a thing against the Taliban.”

The others said much the same. The Taliban had passed word that they would cut off the right index finger of anyone caught casting a ballot. Not that there was much chance of that: the area around Mian Poshteh was so anarchic that the Afghan government didn’t send anyone to register voters. The closest polling place was in Garmsir.

But there was more to talk about. “The children are frightened,” one of the men said.

And so were the adults. The Taliban owned Tarakai; they taxed the corn and kept watch over the town.

“When you leave here, the Taliban will come at night and ask us why we were talking to you,” a villager told Nevins. “If we cooperate, they would kill us.”

“They will cut out our stomachs,” another man said.

“Is there anything I can do for you?” Nevins asked.

“Don’t come close to our houses,” the first villager said. “Don’t try to negotiate with us.”

Nevins was polite but insistent. The Americans were here now, and they were going to stay. “I will try to be respectful, and I will try to keep my distance,” Nevins told the men. “But I have a job to do, and I need to be able to come by from time to time.”

An old man with a long white beard stepped forward. “We’re afraid you’re going to leave this place after a few months,” the old man said. “And the Taliban will take their revenge.”

“I promise you,” Lieutenant Nevins said, “we will be here when the weather gets cold, and when it gets hot again.”

Nevins shook hands with the Afghans and said goodbye. Then he turned, and his men disappeared into the cornfield.

IX.

IN AMERICA, the chorus is insistent and growing: scale back the Afghan mission. It’s too hard and too expensive, and we’ve overstayed our welcome.

George F. Will, the columnist, recently said as much. So did Rory Stewart, the British scholar-diplomat who has spent years in the region. Vice President Biden is said to favor such a choice.

The exact shape of a scaled-down commitment is not clear, but it goes something like this: American Special Forces units, aided by Predator drones, can keep Al Qaeda off-balance, while American soldiers stay on to train the Afghan Army and the police.

It’s an attractive argument, of course: it offers the hope that the United States can achieve the same thing — American security — at a much-reduced cost. (The fate of the Afghan people themselves is basically left out of this equation.)

Last month, I visited Richard Haass, one of the idea’s chief proponents, at his office in New York, where he is president of the Council on Foreign Relations. (Before that, through June 2003, Haass was director of policy planning at the State Department under President George W. Bush.)

Haass is particularly persuasive, in part because he does not pretend to have easy answers. After eight years of mismanagement and neglect, Haass says, every choice the United States faces in Afghanistan is dreadful. The weight of the evidence, he says, suggests that curtailing our ambitions is the option least dreadful.

“It’s not self-evident that doing more will accomplish more,” Haass told me. “And I’m skeptical about how central Afghanistan is anymore to the global effort against terror. I’m not persuaded that you can transform the situation there.”

The bulk of Al Qaeda’s leadership, Haass pointed out, is now in Pakistan. That’s where the United States should really be focused — in Pakistan, with a population six times larger than Afghanistan’s and with at least 60 nuclear warheads. “No one wants Afghanistan to become a sponge that absorbs a disproportionate share of our country’s resources,” he said.

General McChrystal and most of the rest of the Pentagon say that Haass’s argument is essentially an illusion. If the United States drew down substantially in Afghanistan, they say, much of the country would quickly be overrun by the Taliban, rendering the other things — training and counterterrorism — impossible. Al Qaeda would return, possibly to the place it had before the 9/11 attacks, and Pakistan would be likely to follow.

When I pitched McChrystal’s counterargument to Haass, he said he was glad that he wasn’t in Obama’s shoes. “Let’s not kid ourselves,” he said. “We’re not going to find some wonderful thing that’s going to deliver large positive results at modest costs. It’s not going to happen.”

Haass went on to say: “I keep going back to Yogi Berra. You know: ‘When you reach a fork in the road, take it.’ I bet there are days when Obama wakes up and sees the fork in the road and decides he’s not going to take it. Because both choices are so bad.”

X.

DURING HIS TRIP to Garmsir, Stanley McChrystal took a moment to meet with Abdullah Jan, the governor. The two sat down in the same council chambers where Jan had met with Captain Caskey.

“Tell me how we can do better,” McChrystal said.

Jan thought for a second, then offered an unusual answer.

“You need to live in a building, not a bunch of tents,” he said.

McChrystal gave him a quizzical look.

“Everyone in Garmsir sees that you are living in tents, and they know that you are going to be leaving soon,” Jan told McChrystal. “You need to build something permanent — a building. Because your job here is going to take years. Only then will people be persuaded that you are going to stay.”

McChrystal nodded.

“We’ll stay as long as we have to until our Afghan partners are completely secure,” he said. “Even if that means years.”

McChrystal started to get up, but Jan wasn’t finished yet.

“The Afghan people are impatient,” he said. “We’ve been waiting for 30 years! We don’t want to wait any longer. We’re impatient!”

McChrystal held back a smile.

“Believe me,” he told Jan. “I work for a lot of impatient people, too.”

A Window Into CIA's Embrace of Secret Jails

2009-08-12T11:33:00.000-07:00

NY Times reports:
In March 2003, two C.I.A. officials surprised Kyle D. Foggo, then the chief of the agency’s main European supply base, with an unusual request. They wanted his help building secret prisons to hold some of the world’s most threatening terrorists.

Kyle D. Foggo, who helped build jails for the C.I.A. in the campaign against terrorism, after his arraignment in San Diego in 2007.

Brent R. Wilkes, right, with his lawyer, Mark Geragos, arriving for a 2007 arraignment connected to dealings with Mr. Foggo.

Mr. Foggo, nicknamed Dusty, was known inside the agency as a cigar-waving, bourbon-drinking operator, someone who could get a cargo plane flying anywhere in the world or quickly obtain weapons, food, money — whatever the C.I.A. needed. His unit in Frankfurt, Germany, was strained by the spy agency’s operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, but Mr. Foggo agreed to the assignment.

“It was too sensitive to be handled by headquarters,” he said in an interview. “I was proud to help my nation.”

With that, Mr. Foggo went on to oversee construction of three detention centers, each built to house about a half-dozen detainees, according to former intelligence officials and others briefed on the matter. One jail was a renovated building on a busy street in Bucharest, Romania, the officials disclosed. Another was a steel-beam structure at a remote site in Morocco that was apparently never used. The third, another remodeling project, was outside another former Eastern bloc city. They were designed to appear identical, so prisoners would be disoriented and not know where they were if they were shuttled back and forth. They were kept in isolated cells.

The existence of the network of prisons to detain and interrogate senior operatives of Al Qaeda has long been known, but details about them have been a closely guarded secret. In recent interviews, though, several former intelligence officials have provided a fuller account of how they were built, where they were located and life inside them.

Mr. Foggo acknowledged a role, which has never been previously reported. He pleaded guilty last year to a fraud charge involving a contractor that equipped the C.I.A. jails and provided other supplies to the agency, and he is now serving a three-year sentence in a Kentucky prison.

The C.I.A. prisons would become one of the Bush administration’s most extraordinary counterterrorism programs, but setting them up was fairly mundane, according to the intelligence officials.

Mr. Foggo relied on C.I.A. finance officers, engineers and contract workers to build the jails. As they neared completion, he turned to a small company linked to Brent R. Wilkes, an old friend and a San Diego military contractor.

The business provided toilets, plumbing equipment, stereos, video games, bedding, night vision goggles, earplugs and wrap-around sunglasses. Some products were bought at Target and Wal-Mart, among other vendors, and flown overseas. Nothing exotic was required for the infamous waterboards — they were built on the spot from locally available materials, the officials said.

Mr. Foggo, 55, would not discuss classified details about the jails. He was not charged with wrongdoing in connection with the secret prisons, but instead accused of steering other C.I.A. business to Mr. Wilkes’ companies in exchange for expensive vacations and other favors. Before leaving the C.I.A. in 2006, he had become its third-highest official, and his plea was an embarrassment for the agency.

After the 2001 terrorist attacks, the intelligence world’s embrace of dark-of-night snatch-and-grabs, hidden prisons and interrogation tactics that critics condemned as torture has stained the C.I.A.’s reputation and led to legal challenges, investigations and internal divisions that may take years to resolve. The Justice Department is now considering opening a criminal investigation, with much of the attention focused on the agency’s network of secret prisons, which have become known as the “black sites.”

From Fringes to Spotlight

The demands of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had transformed Mr. Foggo from a fringe player into the C.I.A.’s indispensable man. Before the 9/11 attacks, the Frankfurt base was a relatively sleepy resupply center, running one or two flights a month to outlying stations. Within days of the attacks, Mr. Foggo had a budget of $7 million, which quickly tripled.

He managed dozens of employees, directing nearly daily flights of cargo planes loaded with pallets of supplies, including saddles, bridles and horse feed for the mounted tribal forces that the spy agency recruited. Within weeks, he emptied the C.I.A.’s stockpile of AK-47s and ammunition at a Midwest depot.

He was a logical choice for the prison project: aggressive, resourceful, patriotic, ready to dispense a favor; some inside the C.I.A. jokingly compared him to Milo Minderbinder, the fictional character who rose from mess hall officer to the black-market magnate of Joseph Heller’s World War II novel “Catch-22.”

Early in the fight against Al Qaeda, agency officials relied heavily on American allies to help detain people suspected of terrorism in makeshift facilities in countries like Thailand. But by the time two C.I.A. officials met with Mr. Foggo in 2003, that arrangement was under threat, according to people briefed on the situation. In Thailand, for example, local officials were said to be growing uneasy about a black site outside Bangkok code-named Cat’s Eye. (The agency would eventually change the code name for the Thai prison, fearing it would appear racially insensitive.) The C.I.A. wanted its own, more permanent detention centers.

Eventually, the agency’s network would encompass at least eight detention centers, including one in the Middle East, one each in Iraq and Afghanistan and a maximum-security long-term site at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, that was dubbed Strawberry Fields, officials said. (It was named after a Beatles song after C.I.A. officials joked that the detainees would be held there, as the lyric put it, “forever.”)

The C.I.A. has never officially disclosed the exact number of prisoners it once held, but top officials have put the figure at fewer than 100.

At the detention centers Mr. Foggo helped build, several former intelligence officials said, the jails were small, and though they were built to house about a half-dozen detainees they rarely held more than four.

The cells were constructed with special features to prevent injury to the prisoners during interrogations: nonslip floors and flexible, plywood-covered walls to soften the impact of being slammed into the wall.

The detainees, held in cells far enough apart to prevent communication with one another, were kept in solitary confinement 23 hours a day. For their one hour of daily exercise, they were taken out of their cells by C.I.A. security officers wearing black ski masks to hide their identities and to intimidate the detainees, according to the intelligence officials.

Just like prisons in the United States, the jailers imposed a reward and punishment system: well-behaved detainees received books, DVDs and other forms of entertainment, which were taken away if they misbehaved, the officials said.

C.I.A. analysts served 90-day tours at the prison sites to assist the interrogations. But by the time the new prisons were built in mid-2003 or later, the harshest C.I.A. interrogation practices — including waterboarding — had been discontinued.

Winning a Promotion

Mr. Foggo’s success in Frankfurt, including his work on the prisons, won him a promotion back in Washington. In November 2004, he was named the C.I.A.’s executive director, in effect its day-to-day administrative chief.

The appointment raised some eyebrows at the agency. “It was like taking a senior NCO and telling him he now runs the regiment,” said A. B. Krongard, the C.I.A.’s executive director from 2001 to 2004. “It popped people’s eyes.”

Mr. Foggo soon became embroiled in agency infighting. The C.I.A. was reeling from criticism that it had exaggerated Iraq’s weapons programs. Mr. Foggo came to Washington as part of a new team that almost immediately began firing top C.I.A. officials, causing anger among veteran clandestine officers. Mr. Foggo’s fast rise and blunt approach unsettled some headquarters officials, according to Brant G. Bassett, a former agency officer and friend who served with Mr. Foggo.

“Dusty went in there with a blowtorch,” Mr. Bassett said. “Some people were overjoyed, but there were a few others who said, we’ve got to take this guy down.”

In 2005, before he came under investigation, Mr. Foggo and other officials, including John Rizzo, the agency’s top lawyer, paid a rare visit to some of the prison sites, assuring C.I.A. employees that their activities were legal, according to former intelligence officials. Mr. Foggo also met with representatives of Eastern European security services that had helped with the prisons. He expressed gratitude and offered assistance — a gesture the officials politely declined.

In February 2007, Mr. Foggo and Mr. Wilkes were indicted. Prosecutors believed that the C.I.A. had paid an inflated price to Archer Logistics, a business connected to Mr. Wilkes that had a $1.7 million C.I.A. supply contract. In return, the prosecutors claimed, Mr. Wilkes had taken Mr. Foggo on expensive vacations, paid for his meals at expensive restaurants and promised him a lucrative job when he retired.

“I was taking a trip with my best friend,” Mr. Foggo said in his defense. “It looked bad, but we had been taking trips together since we were 17 years old.”

Mr. Foggo said he had turned to Mr. Wilkes’ companies to bypass the cumbersome C.I.A. bureaucracy, not to provide a sweetheart deal to his oldest friend. “I needed something done by someone I trusted in private industry,” Mr. Foggo said.

Downfall in Court

Mr. Wilkes maintains his innocence, but he was eventually convicted in a bribery scandal involving former Representative Randall Cunningham of California. Mr. Foggo pleaded guilty and is serving a sentence on the fraud count, but he still maintains that he was unfairly prosecuted.

His lawyer, Mark J. MacDougall, said he believed that Mr. Foggo’s legal problems stemmed in part from controversies over his stint as executive director. “Nobody ever accused Dusty Foggo of putting a dime in his pocket, failing to do his job, or compromising national security,” Mr. MacDougall said. “Dusty may have made some mistakes, but this case was driven by professional animosity at C.I.A. and personal ambition.”

When Mr. Foggo’s lawyers tried unsuccessfully to obtain access to agency files about his role in the prison program, prosecutors complained that he was trying to disclose a secret program. Mr. Foggo claimed that he was reluctant to divulge his role in classified programs and pleaded guilty, in part, to avoid revealing his secrets.

In an Aug. 1, 2007, letter, a C.I.A. lawyer informed Mr. Foggo’s lawyers that they could not review any classified files related to the prisons. The agency’s letter concluded, “In light of the president’s statements regarding the extraordinary value and sensitivity of the C.I.A. terrorist detention and interrogation program, the C.I.A. denies your request in its entirety.”

2 U.S. Architects of Harsh Tactics in 9/11's Wake

2009-08-12T11:09:00.000-07:00

NY Times reports:
Jim Mitchell and Bruce Jessen were military retirees and psychologists, on the lookout for business opportunities. They found an excellent customer in the Central Intelligence Agency, where in 2002 they became the architects of the most important interrogation program in the history of American counterterrorism.

Dr. Bruce Jessen joined his Air Force colleague to build a thriving business that made millions of dollars selling interrogation and training services to the C.I.A.

A former Air Force explosives expert and a natural salesman, Dr. Jim Mitchell and his colleague had no expertise on Al Qaeda and had never conducted an actual interrogation. But they had psychological credentials and an intimate knowledge of a brutal treatment regimen used decades ago by Chinese Communists.

They had never carried out a real interrogation, only mock sessions in the military training they had overseen. They had no relevant scholarship; their Ph.D. dissertations were on high blood pressure and family therapy. They had no language skills and no expertise on Al Qaeda.

But they had psychology credentials and an intimate knowledge of a brutal treatment regimen used decades ago by Chinese Communists. For an administration eager to get tough on those who had killed 3,000 Americans, that was enough.

So “Doc Mitchell” and “Doc Jessen,” as they had been known in the Air Force, helped lead the United States into a wrenching conflict over torture, terror and values that seven years later has not run its course.

Dr. Mitchell, with a sonorous Southern accent and the sometimes overbearing confidence of a self-made man, was a former Air Force explosives expert and a natural salesman. Dr. Jessen, raised on an Idaho potato farm, joined his Air Force colleague to build a thriving business that made millions of dollars selling interrogation and training services to the C.I.A.

Seven months after President Obama ordered the C.I.A. interrogation program closed, its fallout still commands attention. In the next few weeks, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. is expected to decide whether to begin a criminal torture investigation, in which the psychologists’ role is likely to come under scrutiny. The Justice Department ethics office is expected to complete a report on the lawyers who pronounced the methods legal. And the C.I.A. will soon release a highly critical 2004 report on the program by the agency’s inspector general.

Col. Steven M. Kleinman, an Air Force interrogator and intelligence officer who knows Dr. Mitchell and Dr. Jessen, said he thought loyalty to their country in the panicky wake of the Sept. 11 attacks prompted their excursion into interrogation. He said the result was a tragedy for the country, and for them.

“I feel their primary motivation was they thought they had skills and insights that would make the nation safer,” Colonel Kleinman said. “But good persons in extreme circumstances can do horrific things.”

For the C.I.A., as well as for the gray-goateed Dr. Mitchell, 58, and the trim, dark-haired Dr. Jessen, 60, the change in administrations has been neck-snapping. For years, President George W. Bush declared the interrogation program lawful and praised it for stopping attacks. Mr. Obama, by contrast, asserted that its brutality rallied recruits for Al Qaeda; called one of the methods, waterboarding, torture; and, in his first visit to the C.I.A., suggested that the interrogation program was among the agency’s “mistakes.”

The psychologists’ subsequent fall from official grace has been as swift as their rise in 2002. Today the offices of Mitchell Jessen and Associates, the lucrative business they operated from a handsome century-old building in downtown Spokane, Wash., sit empty, its C.I.A. contracts abruptly terminated last spring.

With a possible criminal inquiry looming, Dr. Mitchell and Dr. Jessen have retained a well-known defense lawyer, Henry F. Schuelke III. Mr. Schuelke said they would not comment for this article, which is based on dozens of interviews with the doctors’ colleagues and present and former government officials.

In a brief e-mail exchange in June, Dr. Mitchell said his nondisclosure agreement with the C.I.A. prevented him from commenting. He suggested that his work had been mischaracterized.

“Ask around,” Dr. Mitchell wrote, “and I’m sure you will find all manner of ‘experts’ who will be willing to make up what you’d like to hear on the spot and unrestrained by reality.”

A Career Shift

At the time of the Sept. 11 attacks, Dr. Mitchell had just retired from his last military job, as psychologist to an elite special operations unit in North Carolina. Showing his entrepreneurial streak, he had started a training company called Knowledge Works, which he operated from his new home in Florida, to supplement retirement pay.

But for someone with Dr. Mitchell’s background, it was evident that the campaign against Al Qaeda would produce opportunities. He began networking in military and intelligence circles where he had a career’s worth of connections.

He had grown up poor in Florida, Dr. Mitchell told friends, and joined the Air Force in 1974, seeking adventure. Stationed in Alaska, he learned the art of disarming bombs and earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in psychology.

Robert J. Madigan, a psychology professor at the University of Alaska who had worked closely with him, remembered Dr. Mitchell stopping by years later. He had completed his doctorate at the University of South Florida in 1986, comparing diet and exercise in controlling hypertension, and was working for the Air Force in Spokane.

“I remember him saying they were preparing people for intense interrogations,” Dr. Madigan said.

Military survival training was expanded after the Korean War, when false confessions by American prisoners led to sensational charges of communist “brainwashing.” Military officials decided that giving service members a taste of Chinese-style interrogation would prepare them to withstand its agony.

Air Force survival training was consolidated in 1966 at Fairchild Air Force Base in the parched hills outside Spokane. The name of the training, Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape, or SERE, suggests its breadth: airmen and women learn to live off the land and avoid capture, as well as how to behave if taken prisoner.

In the 1980s, Dr. Jessen became the SERE psychologist at the Air Force Survival School, screening instructors who posed as enemy interrogators at the mock prison camp and making sure rough treatment did not go too far. He had grown up in a Mormon community with a view of Grand Teton, earning a doctorate at Utah State studying “family sculpting,” in which patients make physical models of their family to portray emotional relationships.

Dr. Jessen moved in 1988 to the top psychologist’s job at a parallel “graduate school” of survival training, a short drive from the Air Force school. Dr. Mitchell took his place.

The two men became part of what some Defense Department officials called the “resistance mafia,” experts on how to resist enemy interrogations. Both lieutenant colonels and both married with children, they took weekend ice-climbing trips together.

While many subordinates considered them brainy and capable leaders, some fellow psychologists were more skeptical. At the annual conference of SERE psychologists, two colleagues recalled, Dr. Mitchell offered lengthy put-downs of presentations that did not suit him.

At the Air Force school, Dr. Mitchell was known for enforcing the safety of interrogations; it might surprise his later critics to learn that he eliminated a tactic called “manhandling” after it produced a spate of neck injuries, a colleague said.

At the SERE graduate school, Dr. Jessen is remembered for an unusual job switch, from supervising psychologist to mock enemy interrogator.

Dr. Jessen became so aggressive in that role that colleagues intervened to rein him in, showing him videotape of his “pretty scary” performance, another official recalled.

Always, former and current SERE officials say, it is understood that the training mimics the methods of unscrupulous foes.

Mark Mays, the first psychologist at the Air Force school, said that to make the fake prison camp realistic, officials consulted American P.O.W.’s who had just returned from harrowing camps in North Vietnam.

“It was clear that this is what we’d expect from our enemies,” said Dr. Mays, now a clinical psychologist and lawyer in Spokane. “It was not something I could ever imagine Americans would do.”

Start of the Program

In December 2001, a small group of professors and law enforcement and intelligence officers gathered outside Philadelphia at the home of a prominent psychologist, Martin E. P. Seligman, to brainstorm about Muslim extremism. Among them was Dr. Mitchell, who attended with a C.I.A. psychologist, Kirk M. Hubbard.

During a break, Dr. Mitchell introduced himself to Dr. Seligman and said how much he admired the older man’s writing on “learned helplessness.” Dr. Seligman was so struck by Dr. Mitchell’s unreserved praise, he recalled in an interview, that he mentioned it to his wife that night. Later, he said, he was “grieved and horrified” to learn that his work had been cited to justify brutal interrogations.

Dr. Seligman had discovered in the 1960s that dogs that learned they could do nothing to avoid small electric shocks would become listless and simply whine and endure the shocks even after being given a chance to escape.

Helplessness, which later became an influential concept in the treatment of human depression, was also much discussed in military survival training. Instructors tried to stop short of producing helplessness in trainees, since their goal was to strengthen the spirit of service members in enemy hands.

Dr. Mitchell, colleagues said, believed that producing learned helplessness in a Qaeda interrogation subject might ensure that he would comply with his captor’s demands. Many experienced interrogators disagreed, asserting that a prisoner so demoralized would say whatever he thought the interrogator expected.

At the C.I.A. in December 2001, Dr. Mitchell’s theories were attracting high-level attention. Agency officials asked him to review a Qaeda manual, seized in England, that coached terrorist operatives to resist interrogations. He contacted Dr. Jessen, and the two men wrote the first proposal to turn the enemy’s brutal techniques — slaps, stress positions, sleep deprivation, wall-slamming and waterboarding — into an American interrogation program.

By the start of 2002, Dr. Mitchell was consulting with the C.I.A.’s Counterterrorist Center, whose director, Cofer Black, and chief operating officer, Jose A. Rodriguez Jr., were impressed by his combination of visceral toughness and psychological jargon. One person who heard some discussions said Dr. Mitchell gave the C.I.A. officials what they wanted to hear. In this person’s words, Dr. Mitchell suggested that interrogations required “a comparable level of fear and brutality to flying planes into buildings.”

By the end of March, when agency operatives captured Abu Zubaydah, initially described as Al Qaeda’s No. 3, the Mitchell-Jessen interrogation plan was ready. At a secret C.I.A. jail in Thailand, as reported in prior news accounts, two F.B.I agents used conventional rapport-building methods to draw vital information from Mr. Zubaydah. Then the C.I.A. team, including Dr. Mitchell, arrived.

With the backing of agency headquarters, Dr. Mitchell ordered Mr. Zubaydah stripped, exposed to cold and blasted with rock music to prevent sleep. Not only the F.B.I. agents but also C.I.A. officers at the scene were uneasy about the harsh treatment. Among those questioning the use of physical pressure, according to one official present, were the Thailand station chief, the officer overseeing the jail, a top interrogator and a top agency psychologist.

Whether they protested to C.I.A. bosses is uncertain, because the voluminous message traffic between headquarters and the Thailand site remains classified. One witness said he believed that “revisionism” in light of the torture controversy had prompted some participants to exaggerate their objections.

As the weeks passed, the senior agency psychologist departed, followed by one F.B.I. agent and then the other. Dr. Mitchell began directing the questioning and occasionally speaking directly to Mr. Zubaydah, one official said.

In late July 2002, Dr. Jessen joined his partner in Thailand. On Aug. 1, the Justice Department completed a formal legal opinion authorizing the SERE methods, and the psychologists turned up the pressure. Over about two weeks, Mr. Zubaydah was confined in a box, slammed into the wall and waterboarded 83 times.

The brutal treatment stopped only after Dr. Mitchell and Dr. Jessen themselves decided that Mr. Zubaydah had no more information to give up. Higher-ups from headquarters arrived and watched one more waterboarding before agreeing that the treatment could stop, according to a Justice Department legal opinion.

Lucrative Work

The Zubaydah case gave reason to question the Mitchell-Jessen plan: the prisoner had given up his most valuable information without coercion.

But top C.I.A. officials made no changes, and the methods would be used on at least 27 more prisoners, including Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who was waterboarded 183 times.

The business plans of Dr. Mitchell and Dr. Jessen, meanwhile, were working out beautifully. They were paid $1,000 to $2,000 a day apiece, one official said. They had permanent desks in the Counterterrorist Center, and could now claim genuine experience in interrogating high-level Qaeda operatives.

Dr. Mitchell could keep working outside the C.I.A. as well. At the Ritz-Carlton in Maui in October 2003, he was featured at a high-priced seminar for corporations on how to behave if kidnapped. He created new companies, called Wizard Shop, later renamed Mind Science, and What If. His first company, Knowledge Works, was certified by the American Psychological Association in 2004 as a sponsor of continuing professional education. (A.P.A. dropped the certification last year.)

In 2005, the psychologists formed Mitchell Jessen and Associates, with offices in Spokane and Virginia and five additional shareholders, four of them from the military’s SERE program. By 2007, the company employed about 60 people, some with impressive résumés, including Deuce Martinez, a lead C.I.A. interrogator of Mr. Mohammed; Roger L. Aldrich, a legendary military survival trainer; and Karen Gardner, a senior training official at the F.B.I. Academy.

The company’s C.I.A. contracts are classified, but their total was well into the millions of dollars. In 2007 in a suburb of Tampa, Fla., Dr. Mitchell built a house with a swimming pool, now valued at $800,000.

The psychologists’ influence remained strong under four C.I.A. directors. In 2006, in fact, when Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and her legal adviser, John B. Bellinger III, pushed back against the C.I.A.’s secret detention program and its methods, the director at the time, Michael V. Hayden, asked Dr. Mitchell and Dr. Jessen to brief State Department officials and persuade them to drop their objections. They were unsuccessful.

By then, the national debate over torture had begun, and it would undo the psychologists’ business.

In a statement to employees on April 9, Leon E. Panetta, President Obama’s C.I.A. director, announced the “decommissioning” of the agency’s secret jails and repeated a pledge not to use coercion. And there was another item: “No C.I.A. contractors will conduct interrogations.”

Agency officials terminated the contracts for Mitchell Jessen and Associates, and the psychologists’ lucrative seven-year ride was over. Within days, the company had vacated its Spokane offices. The phones were disconnected, and at neighboring businesses, no one knew of a forwarding address.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: August 15, 2009
An article on Wednesday about two former military psychologists who designed the Central Intelligence Agency’s interrogation program in 2002 misstated the credentials of an Air Force officer who criticized the interrogation methods but suggested that the two psychologists had acted out of patriotic motives. The officer, Steven M. Kleinman, is a career intelligence officer and former interrogator; he is not a psychologist and is not “Dr. Kleinman.” (He has master’s degrees in strategic intelligence and forensic sciences, but does not have a doctorate.)

Torture Memos: Inquiry Suggests No Prosecutions

2009-05-05T22:43:00.000-07:00

The New York Times reports:

An internal Justice Department inquiry has concluded that Bush administration lawyers committed serious lapses of judgment in writing secret memorandums authorizing brutal interrogations but that they should not be prosecuted, according to government officials briefed on its findings.

The report by the Office of Professional Responsibility, an internal ethics unit within the Justice Department, is also likely to ask state bar associations to consider possible disciplinary action, which could include reprimands or even disbarment, for some of the lawyers involved in writing the legal opinions, the officials said.

The conclusions of the 220-page draft report are not final and have not yet been approved by Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. The officials said that it is possible that the final report might be subject to further revision but that they did not expect major alterations in its main findings or recommendations.

The findings, growing out of an inquiry that started in 2004, would represent a stinging rebuke of the lawyers and their legal arguments.

But they would stop short of the criminal referral sought by some human rights advocates, who have suggested that the lawyers could be prosecuted as part of a criminal conspiracy to violate the anti-torture statute. President Obama has said the Justice Department would have to decide whether the lawyers who authorized the interrogation methods should face charges, while pledging that interrogators would not be investigated or prosecuted for using techniques that the lawyers said were legal.

The draft report is described as very detailed, tracing e-mail messages between the Justice Department lawyers and officials at the White House and the Central Intelligence Agency. Among the questions it is expected to consider is whether the memos were an independent judgment of the limits of the federal anti-torture statute or were deliberately skewed to justify the use of techniques proposed by the C.I.A.

At issue is the question of whether the lawyers acted ethically and competently in writing a series of Justice Department legal opinions from 2002 to 2007.

The opinions permitted the Central Intelligence Agency to use a number of methods that human rights groups and legal experts have condemned as torture, including waterboarding, wall-slamming and shackling for hours in a standing position. The opinions allowed many of these practices to be used repeatedly and in combination.

The main targets of criticism are John Yoo, Jay S. Bybee and Steven G. Bradbury, who, as senior officials of the department’s Office of Legal Counsel, were principal authors of the opinions.

It was unclear whether all three would be the subject of bar association referrals. One person who saw the report said it did not recommend bar action against Mr. Bradbury.

Mr. Bradbury, and lawyers for Mr. Yoo, now a law professor at Berkeley, and for Mr. Bybee, now a federal appeals court judge in Nevada, all declined to comment Tuesday, saying Justice Department rules require confidentiality for ethics reviews.

The work of other lawyers in the counsel’s office was also questioned in the report, the officials said, but none are believed to be the subject of disciplinary recommendations. The report reaches no conclusions about the role of lawyers at the White House or the C.I.A. because the jurisdiction of the ethics unit does not extend beyond the Justice Department.

The draft report on the interrogation opinions was completed in December and provoked controversy inside the Bush administration Justice Department. But criticism of the legal work in the memos has intensified since last month when the Obama administration disclosed one previously secret opinion from 2002, drafted mainly by Mr. Yoo and signed by Mr. Bybee, and three from 2005, signed by Mr. Bradbury, which for the first time described the coercive interrogation methods in detail.

Michael B. Mukasey, attorney general when the draft report was first completed, was said by colleagues to have been critical of its quality and upset over its scathing conclusions. He wrote a 10-page rebuttal to its findings, and, in his farewell speech to employees, warned against second-guessing the legal work of the department’s lawyers.

Several legal scholars have remarked that in approving waterboarding, the near-drowning method Mr. Obama and his aides have described as torture, the Justice Department lawyers did not cite cases in which the United States government previously prosecuted American law enforcement officials and Japanese World War II interrogators for using the procedure.

In a letter on Monday, the Justice Department advised two Democratic senators on the Judiciary committee, Richard J. Durbin of Illinois and Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, that the former department lawyers who wrote the opinions had until May 4 to submit written appeals to the findings.

The letter, written by Ronald Weich, an assistant attorney general, also said the report had been given to the C.I.A. for review and declassification, and some officials said they expected a version to be made public, probably late this month.

Mr. Durbin and Mr. Whitehouse, who have criticized the Bush administration’s interrogation policies, have repeatedly demanded the release of the report. Mr. Whitehouse is scheduled to hold a hearing on May 13, to examine issues related to the report.

The professional responsibility office first began examining the actions of the lawyers nearly five years ago. Recently, Mr. Holder named Mary Patrice Brown, a senior federal prosecutor in Washington to head the office, moving its longtime chief, H. Marshall Jarrett, to another job within the Justice Department.

The Quiet Coup

2009-05-01T10:41:00.000-07:00

The crash has laid bare many unpleasant truths about the United States. One of the most alarming, says a former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, is that the finance industry has effectively captured our government—a state of affairs that more typically describes emerging markets, and is at the center of many emerging-market crises. If the IMF’s staff could speak freely about the U.S., it would tell us what it tells all countries in this situation: recovery will fail unless we break the financial oligarchy that is blocking essential reform. And if we are to prevent a true depression, we’re running out of time.

In The Atlantic Monthly, Simon Johnson writes:

One thing you learn rather quickly when working at the International Monetary Fund is that no one is ever very happy to see you. Typically, your “clients” come in only after private capital has abandoned them, after regional trading-bloc partners have been unable to throw a strong enough lifeline, after last-ditch attempts to borrow from powerful friends like China or the European Union have fallen through. You’re never at the top of anyone’s dance card.

The reason, of course, is that the IMF specializes in telling its clients what they don’t want to hear. I should know; I pressed painful changes on many foreign officials during my time there as chief economist in 2007 and 2008. And I felt the effects of IMF pressure, at least indirectly, when I worked with governments in Eastern Europe as they struggled after 1989, and with the private sector in Asia and Latin America during the crises of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Over that time, from every vantage point, I saw firsthand the steady flow of officials—from Ukraine, Russia, Thailand, Indonesia, South Korea, and elsewhere—trudging to the fund when circumstances were dire and all else had failed.

Every crisis is different, of course. Ukraine faced hyperinflation in 1994; Russia desperately needed help when its short-term-debt rollover scheme exploded in the summer of 1998; the Indonesian rupiah plunged in 1997, nearly leveling the corporate economy; that same year, South Korea’s 30-year economic miracle ground to a halt when foreign banks suddenly refused to extend new credit.

But I must tell you, to IMF officials, all of these crises looked depressingly similar. Each country, of course, needed a loan, but more than that, each needed to make big changes so that the loan could really work. Almost always, countries in crisis need to learn to live within their means after a period of excess—exports must be increased, and imports cut—and the goal is to do this without the most horrible of recessions. Naturally, the fund’s economists spend time figuring out the policies—budget, money supply, and the like—that make sense in this context. Yet the economic solution is seldom very hard to work out.

No, the real concern of the fund’s senior staff, and the biggest obstacle to recovery, is almost invariably the politics of countries in crisis.

Typically, these countries are in a desperate economic situation for one simple reason—the powerful elites within them overreached in good times and took too many risks. Emerging-market governments and their private-sector allies commonly form a tight-knit—and, most of the time, genteel—oligarchy, running the country rather like a profit-seeking company in which they are the controlling shareholders. When a country like Indonesia or South Korea or Russia grows, so do the ambitions of its captains of industry. As masters of their mini-universe, these people make some investments that clearly benefit the broader economy, but they also start making bigger and riskier bets. They reckon—correctly, in most cases—that their political connections will allow them to push onto the government any substantial problems that arise.

In Russia, for instance, the private sector is now in serious trouble because, over the past five years or so, it borrowed at least $490 billion from global banks and investors on the assumption that the country’s energy sector could support a permanent increase in consumption throughout the economy. As Russia’s oligarchs spent this capital, acquiring other companies and embarking on ambitious investment plans that generated jobs, their importance to the political elite increased. Growing political support meant better access to lucrative contracts, tax breaks, and subsidies. And foreign investors could not have been more pleased; all other things being equal, they prefer to lend money to people who have the implicit backing of their national governments, even if that backing gives off the faint whiff of corruption.

But inevitably, emerging-market oligarchs get carried away; they waste money and build massive business empires on a mountain of debt. Local banks, sometimes pressured by the government, become too willing to extend credit to the elite and to those who depend on them. Overborrowing always ends badly, whether for an individual, a company, or a country. Sooner or later, credit conditions become tighter and no one will lend you money on anything close to affordable terms.

The downward spiral that follows is remarkably steep. Enormous companies teeter on the brink of default, and the local banks that have lent to them collapse. Yesterday’s “public-private partnerships” are relabeled “crony capitalism.” With credit unavailable, economic paralysis ensues, and conditions just get worse and worse. The government is forced to draw down its foreign-currency reserves to pay for imports, service debt, and cover private losses. But these reserves will eventually run out. If the country cannot right itself before that happens, it will default on its sovereign debt and become an economic pariah. The government, in its race to stop the bleeding, will typically need to wipe out some of the national champions—now hemorrhaging cash—and usually restructure a banking system that’s gone badly out of balance. It will, in other words, need to squeeze at least some of its oligarchs.

Squeezing the oligarchs, though, is seldom the strategy of choice among emerging-market governments. Quite the contrary: at the outset of the crisis, the oligarchs are usually among the first to get extra help from the government, such as preferential access to foreign currency, or maybe a nice tax break, or—here’s a classic Kremlin bailout technique—the assumption of private debt obligations by the government. Under duress, generosity toward old friends takes many innovative forms. Meanwhile, needing to squeeze someone, most emerging-market governments look first to ordinary working folk—at least until the riots grow too large.

Eventually, as the oligarchs in Putin’s Russia now realize, some within the elite have to lose out before recovery can begin. It’s a game of musical chairs: there just aren’t enough currency reserves to take care of everyone, and the government cannot afford to take over private-sector debt completely.

So the IMF staff looks into the eyes of the minister of finance and decides whether the government is serious yet. The fund will give even a country like Russia a loan eventually, but first it wants to make sure Prime Minister Putin is ready, willing, and able to be tough on some of his friends. If he is not ready to throw former pals to the wolves, the fund can wait. And when he is ready, the fund is happy to make helpful suggestions—particularly with regard to wresting control of the banking system from the hands of the most incompetent and avaricious “entrepreneurs.”

Of course, Putin’s ex-friends will fight back. They’ll mobilize allies, work the system, and put pressure on other parts of the government to get additional subsidies. In extreme cases, they’ll even try subversion—including calling up their contacts in the American foreign-policy establishment, as the Ukrainians did with some success in the late 1990s.

Many IMF programs “go off track” (a euphemism) precisely because the government can’t stay tough on erstwhile cronies, and the consequences are massive inflation or other disasters. A program “goes back on track” once the government prevails or powerful oligarchs sort out among themselves who will govern—and thus win or lose—under the IMF-supported plan. The real fight in Thailand and Indonesia in 1997 was about which powerful families would lose their banks. In Thailand, it was handled relatively smoothly. In Indonesia, it led to the fall of President Suharto and economic chaos.

From long years of experience, the IMF staff knows its program will succeed—stabilizing the economy and enabling growth—only if at least some of the powerful oligarchs who did so much to create the underlying problems take a hit. This is the problem of all emerging markets.

Becoming a Banana Republic
In its depth and suddenness, the U.S. economic and financial crisis is shockingly reminiscent of moments we have recently seen in emerging markets (and only in emerging markets): South Korea (1997), Malaysia (1998), Russia and Argentina (time and again). In each of those cases, global investors, afraid that the country or its financial sector wouldn’t be able to pay off mountainous debt, suddenly stopped lending. And in each case, that fear became self-fulfilling, as banks that couldn’t roll over their debt did, in fact, become unable to pay. This is precisely what drove Lehman Brothers into bankruptcy on September 15, causing all sources of funding to the U.S. financial sector to dry up overnight. Just as in emerging-market crises, the weakness in the banking system has quickly rippled out into the rest of the economy, causing a severe economic contraction and hardship for millions of people.

But there’s a deeper and more disturbing similarity: elite business interests—financiers, in the case of the U.S.—played a central role in creating the crisis, making ever-larger gambles, with the implicit backing of the government, until the inevitable collapse. More alarming, they are now using their influence to prevent precisely the sorts of reforms that are needed, and fast, to pull the economy out of its nosedive. The government seems helpless, or unwilling, to act against them.

Top investment bankers and government officials like to lay the blame for the current crisis on the lowering of U.S. interest rates after the dotcom bust or, even better—in a “buck stops somewhere else” sort of way—on the flow of savings out of China. Some on the right like to complain about Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, or even about longer-standing efforts to promote broader homeownership. And, of course, it is axiomatic to everyone that the regulators responsible for “safety and soundness” were fast asleep at the wheel.

But these various policies—lightweight regulation, cheap money, the unwritten Chinese-American economic alliance, the promotion of homeownership—had something in common. Even though some are traditionally associated with Democrats and some with Republicans, they all benefited the financial sector. Policy changes that might have forestalled the crisis but would have limited the financial sector’s profits—such as Brooksley Born’s now-famous attempts to regulate credit-default swaps at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, in 1998—were ignored or swept aside.

The financial industry has not always enjoyed such favored treatment. But for the past 25 years or so, finance has boomed, becoming ever more powerful. The boom began with the Reagan years, and it only gained strength with the deregulatory policies of the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations. Several other factors helped fuel the financial industry’s ascent. Paul Volcker’s monetary policy in the 1980s, and the increased volatility in interest rates that accompanied it, made bond trading much more lucrative. The invention of securitization, interest-rate swaps, and credit-default swaps greatly increased the volume of transactions that bankers could make money on. And an aging and increasingly wealthy population invested more and more money in securities, helped by the invention of the IRA and the 401(k) plan. Together, these developments vastly increased the profit opportunities in financial services.

Click the chart above for a larger view

Not surprisingly, Wall Street ran with these opportunities. From 1973 to 1985, the financial sector never earned more than 16 percent of domestic corporate profits. In 1986, that figure reached 19 percent. In the 1990s, it oscillated between 21 percent and 30 percent, higher than it had ever been in the postwar period. This decade, it reached 41 percent. Pay rose just as dramatically. From 1948 to 1982, average compensation in the financial sector ranged between 99 percent and 108 percent of the average for all domestic private industries. From 1983, it shot upward, reaching 181 percent in 2007.

The great wealth that the financial sector created and concentrated gave bankers enormous political weight—a weight not seen in the U.S. since the era of J.P. Morgan (the man). In that period, the banking panic of 1907 could be stopped only by coordination among private-sector bankers: no government entity was able to offer an effective response. But that first age of banking oligarchs came to an end with the passage of significant banking regulation in response to the Great Depression; the reemergence of an American financial oligarchy is quite recent.

The Wall Street–Washington Corridor
Of course, the U.S. is unique. And just as we have the world’s most advanced economy, military, and technology, we also have its most advanced oligarchy.

In a primitive political system, power is transmitted through violence, or the threat of violence: military coups, private militias, and so on. In a less primitive system more typical of emerging markets, power is transmitted via money: bribes, kickbacks, and offshore bank accounts. Although lobbying and campaign contributions certainly play major roles in the American political system, old-fashioned corruption—envelopes stuffed with $100 bills—is probably a sideshow today, Jack Abramoff notwithstanding.

Instead, the American financial industry gained political power by amassing a kind of cultural capital—a belief system. Once, perhaps, what was good for General Motors was good for the country. Over the past decade, the attitude took hold that what was good for Wall Street was good for the country. The banking-and-securities industry has become one of the top contributors to political campaigns, but at the peak of its influence, it did not have to buy favors the way, for example, the tobacco companies or military contractors might have to. Instead, it benefited from the fact that Washington insiders already believed that large financial institutions and free-flowing capital markets were crucial to America’s position in the world.

One channel of influence was, of course, the flow of individuals between Wall Street and Washington. Robert Rubin, once the co-chairman of Goldman Sachs, served in Washington as Treasury secretary under Clinton, and later became chairman of Citigroup’s executive committee. Henry Paulson, CEO of Goldman Sachs during the long boom, became Treasury secretary under George W.Bush. John Snow, Paulson’s predecessor, left to become chairman of Cerberus Capital Management, a large private-equity firm that also counts Dan Quayle among its executives. Alan Greenspan, after leaving the Federal Reserve, became a consultant to Pimco, perhaps the biggest player in international bond markets.

These personal connections were multiplied many times over at the lower levels of the past three presidential administrations, strengthening the ties between Washington and Wall Street. It has become something of a tradition for Goldman Sachs employees to go into public service after they leave the firm. The flow of Goldman alumni—including Jon Corzine, now the governor of New Jersey, along with Rubin and Paulson—not only placed people with Wall Street’s worldview in the halls of power; it also helped create an image of Goldman (inside the Beltway, at least) as an institution that was itself almost a form of public service.

Wall Street is a very seductive place, imbued with an air of power. Its executives truly believe that they control the levers that make the world go round. A civil servant from Washington invited into their conference rooms, even if just for a meeting, could be forgiven for falling under their sway. Throughout my time at the IMF, I was struck by the easy access of leading financiers to the highest U.S. government officials, and the interweaving of the two career tracks. I vividly remember a meeting in early 2008—attended by top policy makers from a handful of rich countries—at which the chair casually proclaimed, to the room’s general approval, that the best preparation for becoming a central-bank governor was to work first as an investment banker.

A whole generation of policy makers has been mesmerized by Wall Street, always and utterly convinced that whatever the banks said was true. Alan Greenspan’s pronouncements in favor of unregulated financial markets are well known. Yet Greenspan was hardly alone. This is what Ben Bernanke, the man who succeeded him, said in 2006: “The management of market risk and credit risk has become increasingly sophisticated. … Banking organizations of all sizes have made substantial strides over the past two decades in their ability to measure and manage risks.”

Of course, this was mostly an illusion. Regulators, legislators, and academics almost all assumed that the managers of these banks knew what they were doing. In retrospect, they didn’t. AIG’s Financial Products division, for instance, made $2.5 billion in pretax profits in 2005, largely by selling underpriced insurance on complex, poorly understood securities. Often described as “picking up nickels in front of a steamroller,” this strategy is profitable in ordinary years, and catastrophic in bad ones. As of last fall, AIG had outstanding insurance on more than $400 billion in securities. To date, the U.S. government, in an effort to rescue the company, has committed about $180 billion in investments and loans to cover losses that AIG’s sophisticated risk modeling had said were virtually impossible.

Wall Street’s seductive power extended even (or especially) to finance and economics professors, historically confined to the cramped offices of universities and the pursuit of Nobel Prizes. As mathematical finance became more and more essential to practical finance, professors increasingly took positions as consultants or partners at financial institutions. Myron Scholes and Robert Merton, Nobel laureates both, were perhaps the most famous; they took board seats at the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management in 1994, before the fund famously flamed out at the end of the decade. But many others beat similar paths. This migration gave the stamp of academic legitimacy (and the intimidating aura of intellectual rigor) to the burgeoning world of high finance.

As more and more of the rich made their money in finance, the cult of finance seeped into the culture at large. Works like Barbarians at the Gate, Wall Street, and Bonfire of the Vanities—all intended as cautionary tales—served only to increase Wall Street’s mystique. Michael Lewis noted in Portfolio last year that when he wrote Liar’s Poker, an insider’s account of the financial industry, in 1989, he had hoped the book might provoke outrage at Wall Street’s hubris and excess. Instead, he found himself “knee-deep in letters from students at Ohio State who wanted to know if I had any other secrets to share. … They’d read my book as a how-to manual.” Even Wall Street’s criminals, like Michael Milken and Ivan Boesky, became larger than life. In a society that celebrates the idea of making money, it was easy to infer that the interests of the financial sector were the same as the interests of the country—and that the winners in the financial sector knew better what was good for America than did the career civil servants in Washington. Faith in free financial markets grew into conventional wisdom—trumpeted on the editorial pages of The Wall Street Journal and on the floor of Congress.

From this confluence of campaign finance, personal connections, and ideology there flowed, in just the past decade, a river of deregulatory policies that is, in hindsight, astonishing:

• insistence on free movement of capital across borders;

• the repeal of Depression-era regulations separating commercial and investment banking;

• a congressional ban on the regulation of credit-default swaps;

• major increases in the amount of leverage allowed to investment banks;

• a light (dare I say invisible?) hand at the Securities and Exchange Commission in its regulatory enforcement;

• an international agreement to allow banks to measure their own riskiness;

• and an intentional failure to update regulations so as to keep up with the tremendous pace of financial innovation.

The mood that accompanied these measures in Washington seemed to swing between nonchalance and outright celebration: finance unleashed, it was thought, would continue to propel the economy to greater heights.

America’s Oligarchs and the Financial Crisis
The oligarchy and the government policies that aided it did not alone cause the financial crisis that exploded last year. Many other factors contributed, including excessive borrowing by households and lax lending standards out on the fringes of the financial world. But major commercial and investment banks—and the hedge funds that ran alongside them—were the big beneficiaries of the twin housing and equity-market bubbles of this decade, their profits fed by an ever-increasing volume of transactions founded on a relatively small base of actual physical assets. Each time a loan was sold, packaged, securitized, and resold, banks took their transaction fees, and the hedge funds buying those securities reaped ever-larger fees as their holdings grew.

Because everyone was getting richer, and the health of the national economy depended so heavily on growth in real estate and finance, no one in Washington had any incentive to question what was going on. Instead, Fed Chairman Greenspan and President Bush insisted metronomically that the economy was fundamentally sound and that the tremendous growth in complex securities and credit-default swaps was evidence of a healthy economy where risk was distributed safely.

In the summer of 2007, signs of strain started appearing. The boom had produced so much debt that even a small economic stumble could cause major problems, and rising delinquencies in subprime mortgages proved the stumbling block. Ever since, the financial sector and the federal government have been behaving exactly the way one would expect them to, in light of past emerging-market crises.

By now, the princes of the financial world have of course been stripped naked as leaders and strategists—at least in the eyes of most Americans. But as the months have rolled by, financial elites have continued to assume that their position as the economy’s favored children is safe, despite the wreckage they have caused.

Stanley O’Neal, the CEO of Merrill Lynch, pushed his firm heavily into the mortgage-backed-securities market at its peak in 2005 and 2006; in October 2007, he acknowledged, “The bottom line is, we—I—got it wrong by being overexposed to subprime, and we suffered as a result of impaired liquidity in that market. No one is more disappointed than I am in that result.” O’Neal took home a $14 million bonus in 2006; in 2007, he walked away from Merrill with a severance package worth $162 million, although it is presumably worth much less today.

In October, John Thain, Merrill Lynch’s final CEO, reportedly lobbied his board of directors for a bonus of $30 million or more, eventually reducing his demand to $10million in December; he withdrew the request, under a firestorm of protest, only after it was leaked to The Wall Street Journal. Merrill Lynch as a whole was no better: it moved its bonus payments, $4 billion in total, forward to December, presumably to avoid the possibility that they would be reduced by Bank of America, which would own Merrill beginning on January 1. Wall Street paid out $18 billion in year-end bonuses last year to its New York City employees, after the government disbursed $243 billion in emergency assistance to the financial sector.

In a financial panic, the government must respond with both speed and overwhelming force. The root problem is uncertainty—in our case, uncertainty about whether the major banks have sufficient assets to cover their liabilities. Half measures combined with wishful thinking and a wait-and-see attitude cannot overcome this uncertainty. And the longer the response takes, the longer the uncertainty will stymie the flow of credit, sap consumer confidence, and cripple the economy—ultimately making the problem much harder to solve. Yet the principal characteristics of the government’s response to the financial crisis have been delay, lack of transparency, and an unwillingness to upset the financial sector.

The response so far is perhaps best described as “policy by deal”: when a major financial institution gets into trouble, the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve engineer a bailout over the weekend and announce on Monday that everything is fine. In March 2008, Bear Stearns was sold to JP Morgan Chase in what looked to many like a gift to JP Morgan. (Jamie Dimon, JP Morgan’s CEO, sits on the board of directors of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, which, along with the Treasury Department, brokered the deal.) In September, we saw the sale of Merrill Lynch to Bank of America, the first bailout of AIG, and the takeover and immediate sale of Washington Mutual to JP Morgan—all of which were brokered by the government. In October, nine large banks were recapitalized on the same day behind closed doors in Washington. This, in turn, was followed by additional bailouts for Citigroup, AIG, Bank of America, Citigroup (again), and AIG (again).

Some of these deals may have been reasonable responses to the immediate situation. But it was never clear (and still isn’t) what combination of interests was being served, and how. Treasury and the Fed did not act according to any publicly articulated principles, but just worked out a transaction and claimed it was the best that could be done under the circumstances. This was late-night, backroom dealing, pure and simple.

Throughout the crisis, the government has taken extreme care not to upset the interests of the financial institutions, or to question the basic outlines of the system that got us here. In September 2008, Henry Paulson asked Congress for $700 billion to buy toxic assets from banks, with no strings attached and no judicial review of his purchase decisions. Many observers suspected that the purpose was to overpay for those assets and thereby take the problem off the banks’ hands—indeed, that is the only way that buying toxic assets would have helped anything. Perhaps because there was no way to make such a blatant subsidy politically acceptable, that plan was shelved.

Instead, the money was used to recapitalize banks, buying shares in them on terms that were grossly favorable to the banks themselves. As the crisis has deepened and financial institutions have needed more help, the government has gotten more and more creative in figuring out ways to provide banks with subsidies that are too complex for the general public to understand. The first AIG bailout, which was on relatively good terms for the taxpayer, was supplemented by three further bailouts whose terms were more AIG-friendly. The second Citigroup bailout and the Bank of America bailout included complex asset guarantees that provided the banks with insurance at below-market rates. The third Citigroup bailout, in late February, converted government-owned preferred stock to common stock at a price significantly higher than the market price—a subsidy that probably even most Wall Street Journal readers would miss on first reading. And the convertible preferred shares that the Treasury will buy under the new Financial Stability Plan give the conversion option (and thus the upside) to the banks, not the government.

This latest plan—which is likely to provide cheap loans to hedge funds and others so that they can buy distressed bank assets at relatively high prices—has been heavily influenced by the financial sector, and Treasury has made no secret of that. As Neel Kashkari, a senior Treasury official under both Henry Paulson and Tim Geithner (and a Goldman alum) told Congress in March, “We had received inbound unsolicited proposals from people in the private sector saying, ‘We have capital on the sidelines; we want to go after [distressed bank] assets.’” And the plan lets them do just that: “By marrying government capital—taxpayer capital—with private-sector capital and providing financing, you can enable those investors to then go after those assets at a price that makes sense for the investors and at a price that makes sense for the banks.” Kashkari didn’t mention anything about what makes sense for the third group involved: the taxpayers.

Even leaving aside fairness to taxpayers, the government’s velvet-glove approach with the banks is deeply troubling, for one simple reason: it is inadequate to change the behavior of a financial sector accustomed to doing business on its own terms, at a time when that behavior must change. As an unnamed senior bank official said to The New York Times last fall, “It doesn’t matter how much Hank Paulson gives us, no one is going to lend a nickel until the economy turns.” But there’s the rub: the economy can’t recover until the banks are healthy and willing to lend.

The Way Out
Looking just at the financial crisis (and leaving aside some problems of the larger economy), we face at least two major, interrelated problems. The first is a desperately ill banking sector that threatens to choke off any incipient recovery that the fiscal stimulus might generate. The second is a political balance of power that gives the financial sector a veto over public policy, even as that sector loses popular support.

Big banks, it seems, have only gained political strength since the crisis began. And this is not surprising. With the financial system so fragile, the damage that a major bank failure could cause—Lehman was small relative to Citigroup or Bank of America—is much greater than it would be during ordinary times. The banks have been exploiting this fear as they wring favorable deals out of Washington. Bank of America obtained its second bailout package (in January) after warning the government that it might not be able to go through with the acquisition of Merrill Lynch, a prospect that Treasury did not want to consider.

The challenges the United States faces are familiar territory to the people at the IMF. If you hid the name of the country and just showed them the numbers, there is no doubt what old IMF hands would say: nationalize troubled banks and break them up as necessary.

In some ways, of course, the government has already taken control of the banking system. It has essentially guaranteed the liabilities of the biggest banks, and it is their only plausible source of capital today. Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve has taken on a major role in providing credit to the economy—the function that the private banking sector is supposed to be performing, but isn’t. Yet there are limits to what the Fed can do on its own; consumers and businesses are still dependent on banks that lack the balance sheets and the incentives to make the loans the economy needs, and the government has no real control over who runs the banks, or over what they do.

At the root of the banks’ problems are the large losses they have undoubtedly taken on their securities and loan portfolios. But they don’t want to recognize the full extent of their losses, because that would likely expose them as insolvent. So they talk down the problem, and ask for handouts that aren’t enough to make them healthy (again, they can’t reveal the size of the handouts that would be necessary for that), but are enough to keep them upright a little longer. This behavior is corrosive: unhealthy banks either don’t lend (hoarding money to shore up reserves) or they make desperate gambles on high-risk loans and investments that could pay off big, but probably won’t pay off at all. In either case, the economy suffers further, and as it does, bank assets themselves continue to deteriorate—creating a highly destructive vicious cycle.

To break this cycle, the government must force the banks to acknowledge the scale of their problems. As the IMF understands (and as the U.S. government itself has insisted to multiple emerging-market countries in the past), the most direct way to do this is nationalization. Instead, Treasury is trying to negotiate bailouts bank by bank, and behaving as if the banks hold all the cards—contorting the terms of each deal to minimize government ownership while forswearing government influence over bank strategy or operations. Under these conditions, cleaning up bank balance sheets is impossible.

Nationalization would not imply permanent state ownership. The IMF’s advice would be, essentially: scale up the standard Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation process. An FDIC “intervention” is basically a government-managed bankruptcy procedure for banks. It would allow the government to wipe out bank shareholders, replace failed management, clean up the balance sheets, and then sell the banks back to the private sector. The main advantage is immediate recognition of the problem so that it can be solved before it grows worse.

The government needs to inspect the balance sheets and identify the banks that cannot survive a severe recession. These banks should face a choice: write down your assets to their true value and raise private capital within 30 days, or be taken over by the government. The government would write down the toxic assets of banks taken into receivership—recognizing reality—and transfer those assets to a separate government entity, which would attempt to salvage whatever value is possible for the taxpayer (as the Resolution Trust Corporation did after the savings-and-loan debacle of the 1980s). The rump banks—cleansed and able to lend safely, and hence trusted again by other lenders and investors—could then be sold off.

Cleaning up the megabanks will be complex. And it will be expensive for the taxpayer; according to the latest IMF numbers, the cleanup of the banking system would probably cost close to $1.5trillion (or 10percent of our GDP) in the long term. But only decisive government action—exposing the full extent of the financial rot and restoring some set of banks to publicly verifiable health—can cure the financial sector as a whole.

This may seem like strong medicine. But in fact, while necessary, it is insufficient. The second problem the U.S. faces—the power of the oligarchy—is just as important as the immediate crisis of lending. And the advice from the IMF on this front would again be simple: break the oligarchy.

Oversize institutions disproportionately influence public policy; the major banks we have today draw much of their power from being too big to fail. Nationalization and re-privatization would not change that; while the replacement of the bank executives who got us into this crisis would be just and sensible, ultimately, the swapping-out of one set of powerful managers for another would change only the names of the oligarchs.

Ideally, big banks should be sold in medium-size pieces, divided regionally or by type of business. Where this proves impractical—since we’ll want to sell the banks quickly—they could be sold whole, but with the requirement of being broken up within a short time. Banks that remain in private hands should also be subject to size limitations.

This may seem like a crude and arbitrary step, but it is the best way to limit the power of individual institutions in a sector that is essential to the economy as a whole. Of course, some people will complain about the “efficiency costs” of a more fragmented banking system, and these costs are real. But so are the costs when a bank that is too big to fail—a financial weapon of mass self-destruction—explodes. Anything that is too big to fail is too big to exist.

To ensure systematic bank breakup, and to prevent the eventual reemergence of dangerous behemoths, we also need to overhaul our antitrust legislation. Laws put in place more than 100years ago to combat industrial monopolies were not designed to address the problem we now face. The problem in the financial sector today is not that a given firm might have enough market share to influence prices; it is that one firm or a small set of interconnected firms, by failing, can bring down the economy. The Obama administration’s fiscal stimulus evokes FDR, but what we need to imitate here is Teddy Roosevelt’s trust-busting.

Caps on executive compensation, while redolent of populism, might help restore the political balance of power and deter the emergence of a new oligarchy. Wall Street’s main attraction—to the people who work there and to the government officials who were only too happy to bask in its reflected glory—has been the astounding amount of money that could be made. Limiting that money would reduce the allure of the financial sector and make it more like any other industry.

Still, outright pay caps are clumsy, especially in the long run. And most money is now made in largely unregulated private hedge funds and private-equity firms, so lowering pay would be complicated. Regulation and taxation should be part of the solution. Over time, though, the largest part may involve more transparency and competition, which would bring financial-industry fees down. To those who say this would drive financial activities to other countries, we can now safely say: fine.

Two Paths
To paraphrase Joseph Schumpeter, the early-20th-century economist, everyone has elites; the important thing is to change them from time to time. If the U.S. were just another country, coming to the IMF with hat in hand, I might be fairly optimistic about its future. Most of the emerging-market crises that I’ve mentioned ended relatively quickly, and gave way, for the most part, to relatively strong recoveries. But this, alas, brings us to the limit of the analogy between the U.S. and emerging markets.

Emerging-market countries have only a precarious hold on wealth, and are weaklings globally. When they get into trouble, they quite literally run out of money—or at least out of foreign currency, without which they cannot survive. They must make difficult decisions; ultimately, aggressive action is baked into the cake. But the U.S., of course, is the world’s most powerful nation, rich beyond measure, and blessed with the exorbitant privilege of paying its foreign debts in its own currency, which it can print. As a result, it could very well stumble along for years—as Japan did during its lost decade—never summoning the courage to do what it needs to do, and never really recovering. A clean break with the past—involving the takeover and cleanup of major banks—hardly looks like a sure thing right now. Certainly no one at the IMF can force it.

In my view, the U.S. faces two plausible scenarios. The first involves complicated bank-by-bank deals and a continual drumbeat of (repeated) bailouts, like the ones we saw in February with Citigroup and AIG. The administration will try to muddle through, and confusion will reign.

Boris Fyodorov, the late finance minister of Russia, struggled for much of the past 20 years against oligarchs, corruption, and abuse of authority in all its forms. He liked to say that confusion and chaos were very much in the interests of the powerful—letting them take things, legally and illegally, with impunity. When inflation is high, who can say what a piece of property is really worth? When the credit system is supported by byzantine government arrangements and backroom deals, how do you know that you aren’t being fleeced?

Our future could be one in which continued tumult feeds the looting of the financial system, and we talk more and more about exactly how our oligarchs became bandits and how the economy just can’t seem to get into gear.

The second scenario begins more bleakly, and might end that way too. But it does provide at least some hope that we’ll be shaken out of our torpor. It goes like this: the global economy continues to deteriorate, the banking system in east-central Europe collapses, and—because eastern Europe’s banks are mostly owned by western European banks—justifiable fears of government insolvency spread throughout the Continent. Creditors take further hits and confidence falls further. The Asian economies that export manufactured goods are devastated, and the commodity producers in Latin America and Africa are not much better off. A dramatic worsening of the global environment forces the U.S. economy, already staggering, down onto both knees. The baseline growth rates used in the administration’s current budget are increasingly seen as unrealistic, and the rosy “stress scenario” that the U.S. Treasury is currently using to evaluate banks’ balance sheets becomes a source of great embarrassment.

Under this kind of pressure, and faced with the prospect of a national and global collapse, minds may become more concentrated.

The conventional wisdom among the elite is still that the current slump “cannot be as bad as the Great Depression.” This view is wrong. What we face now could, in fact, be worse than the Great Depression—because the world is now so much more interconnected and because the banking sector is now so big. We face a synchronized downturn in almost all countries, a weakening of confidence among individuals and firms, and major problems for government finances. If our leadership wakes up to the potential consequences, we may yet see dramatic action on the banking system and a breaking of the old elite. Let us hope it is not then too late.

Simon Johnson, a professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, was the chief economist at the International Monetary Fund during 2007 and 2008. He blogs about the financial crisis at baselinescenario.com, along with James Kwak, who also contributed to this essay.

Interview with Naomi Klein

2009-04-28T22:00:00.000-07:00

The Wall Street Bailout Is the Greatest Heist in Monetary History

At wowowow.com, Joan Juliet Buck interviews Naomi Klein:

As all the pieces of all the world’s economy started crashing around our heads, I realized that the person I most wanted to ask about it all was Naomi Klein, whom I had met briefly last year when Laurie Anderson put together a protest evening at St. Anne’s. Naomi Klein’s books, No Logo and The Shock Doctrine, examined the roots of what is happening now. Here’s what she had to say about the present crisis. -JJB

JOAN JULIET BUCK: You must be having some very intense reactions to everything that’s happening right now.

NAOMI KLEIN: It’s an adventure reading the paper every morning.

JOAN: Where does that leave the end of history?

NAOMI: So many of the debates that we were told are over are reemerging. That’s the good part of what’s going on right now. There were so many attempts to arbitrarily claim that ideas about social justice, about economic justice, were finished, and there’s only one model. In The Shock Doctrine I quote Larry Summers, from back in 1991 when he was a honcho at the World Bank. He was talking about the World Bank policies that used to be called The Washington Consensus. And he said, “Spread the truth — the laws of economics are like the laws of engineering. One set of laws works everywhere.” It was all about deregulation, privatization, the market is always best, the market’s always supreme. And there was the feeling of certainty — that we had figured everything out. Summers even said a couple of years later that there are many basic economic ideas that are “passé” — no longer worthy of debate. One of the issues that he listed as over was the idea that government could invest in programs to stimulate the economy. And here he is … right!

JOAN: What does the present moment mean?

NAOMI: It’s created space; there’s new oxygen to propose alternatives. One of the things that I try to show in my book is that these debates were not won on their own merits. They were often won using violence, by actually eliminating the left, in countries in Latin America, and then declaring ideological victory.

JOAN: In The New Yorker, you’re quoted as saying, “This is a progressive moment. It’s ours to lose.” What did you mean?

NAOMI: Capitalism is on trial. And you have an organic, grassroots, sort of spontaneous revolt against the elite – which is actually what we’re hearing with this rage at CEOs, and bonuses and government collusion with the elites. Rage is an opportunity. The rage is there, and the country is seething, the world is seething with rage. The question is, where is it going to be directed? I feel there’s a moral responsibility for the Left and for progressives to provide an alternative in this moment that is moral, that is principled, that is just, that is hopeful, because if we don’t, then that anger is so easily directed at “those damn Mexican immigrants,” at “the first African American president.” So I feel a tremendous sense of urgency. It’s not just, “Hey, our time has come.” It’s, “We’d better get our act together because this anger is going somewhere.”

JOAN: Now, who would the leaders of this Left be?

NAOMI: That is a very complicated question in the United States right now. Pretty much everywhere else in the world, besides maybe North Korea, there’s a really healthy distrust of those in power. You know, people are in the streets in this moment, as well they should be – whether it’s in France or whether it’s in Britain or Iceland. They may have a left-leaning government, like the government of Gordon Brown. But that doesn’t mean they’re giving him a pass. In Britain the choice is very clear. The anger is either going to be directed at the banks or it’s going to be directed at immigrants. I’m not afraid of it being directed at the banks. I’m appalled at news that there’s a 17-year-old girl who is facing jail time for having a few beers and breaking a window at the RBS Bank during the G-20 protests, when not a single banker is going to jail for burning down the global economy. What kind of a system is that? I think we should rally to this young woman’s defense. What you see again and again in Europe is that, in this critical moment, there is an opposition that is organizing with this healthy distrust of power. In the U.S., Obama mania complicates this.

JOAN: You said, talking about the Obama video "Yes We Can," "Now, finally, a politician is making ads that are as good as Nike."

NAOMI: In the ‘90s I wrote a lot about branding and how corporations were tapping into the deeply human need to be part of something bigger than just consumerism. “We’re not just selling sneakers. We’re not just selling laptops. We’re selling transcendence and a connection and community.” That trend actually made me feel hopeful that, actually, we don’t just want things, and all of this expensive market research was telling Microsoft and Starbucks and Nike that what we actually want is to be part of something larger. Even though I thought the phenomenon was culturally insidious, I felt, in many ways, the same sense of responsibility. Like, hey, they’ve done our market research for us, but they’re actually not offering community and political engagement. They’re offering lattes and laptops and running shoes. So it’s actually up to progressive movements to provide the real deal. I do believe that the Yes We Can movement started pretty empty, and it was really tapping into just the deep shame of the Bush years and the desire for something different, and using these very creative marketing techniques where you’re able to project your own longings onto this blank slate.

JOAN: And can Obama provide the real deal?

NAOMI: What gave me hope was that when the economic crisis hit, Obama got serious and his analysis became more concrete. It’s really worth remembering that he started winning the election when Lehman collapsed and he started putting the ideology of Reaganism on trial. He started saying, “This economic crisis is the result of the policies of deregulation and trickle-down economics that have dominated this country.” But he said, “for the last eight years.” That was wrong. And that was part of the problem.

JOAN: Because it’s the last 30.

NAOMI: It’s the last 30 and, you know, that was a piece of intellectual dishonesty that I think has cost us dearly. That was a good electoral line because we all wanted to be able to blame it all on Republicans, because that was a much more sellable election slogan. “Everything was fine in the ‘90s when you had Clinton and we just need to get back to that.” And what that did was gloss over the absolutely central role that Robert Rubin and Larry Summers played in creating this crisis. And lo and behold, they’re back with their protégés in tow. There’s really a shared responsibility, and it’s an argument for more intellectual honesty, more principled stands and fewer strategic calculations. What worries me so much is that it’s fine for politicians to be strategic. But social movements should be principled. They shouldn’t always be thinking about what’s the right strategy, what’s the sellable message, what’s the talking point, because then you end up in a situation like this. Larry Summers is back. Larry Summers was given a pass during the entire election.

JOAN: Is it effective what Obama’s doing? What do you think of it?

NAOMI: If you mean the bank bailout, I think it’s a disaster, crony capitalism at the absolute worst. I think the timing of the release of Larry Summers’s financial records from last year is really interesting. He worked at a hedge fund one day a week and was paid $5.2 million. He was paid $135,000 for one speech to one of the bailed-out banks. And when he got the post he was presented as an egghead academic, as if he wasn’t coming from Wall Street. In fact he wasn’t just working for one bank; he was working for all of them. He collected $8 million in these fees in one year. The question people have been asking about the bank bailout is, “Why is this happening?” And I think part of the answer is that in the United States, there’s so much mythology around the purity of American intentions. There’s always this desire to blame incompetence as opposed to greed. But sometimes things are just what they look like.

NAOMI: Larry Summers and Tim Geithner came up with a plan to bail out the banks that is actually a disguised bailout for the hedge funds — where the government is not bailing out the hedge funds directly because they can’t sell that, but hedging the hedge funds to buy the toxic assets of the banks — instead of nationalizing the banks and breaking them up, which is what needs to happen. This is very different from what FDR had the guts to do. He used that progressive movement, he used the rage at the banks, to pass Glass-Steagall. And there’s no excuse for the fact that there’s been no serious re-regulation of the financial sector. The idea that you would somehow hand out trillions of dollars to the banks and then regulate them months later is crazy. You have the leverage when you’re handing out the money. “You say you want a bailout? Well here are the new rules.” And somehow we’re supposed to believe that the plan is to hand out trillions of dollars to the banks, and then later, once they’ve taken and spent the money, impose new rules. That’s the stupidest plan I’ve ever heard in my life. And I don’t believe these guys are dumb. I think they’re corrupt.

JOAN: Which guys?

NAOMI: Summers. Geithner. It may be legal corruption but I still consider it corrupt. Wall Street funded Obama’s campaign. They funded his Inauguration. They paid huge speaking and consulting fees to some of his closest advisers. What I am calling corruption is better understood as “crony capitalism.” It’s the systematic trading of favors between corporate and political elites to secure wealth and power. And the truth is, most of the time the trading of favors doesn’t even need to be explicit. It’s more that this corporate-political nexus creates an impenetrable culture in Washington, so the hedge-fund managers and bank CEOs are the ones who are in the ears of the Washington policy makers — they are their constituency, their community, the ones saying whether or not a given policy will work. And, of course, the problem is that the voices of regular people are left out.

JOAN: Why is my perception that Obama was funded by the tiny donations?

NAOMI: Because both are true. His campaign was historic in the number of small donations and the grassroots campaigning that brought him to office. But it was also historic in the levels of Wall Street financing. The grassroots movement that brought Obama to power needs to understand that the fight is on, that Wall Street is pushing Obama hard behind the scenes because they feel they have a claim to him. And the appointment of Summers and Geithner were all messages to Wall Street – “Don’t worry, things are not going to change too much.” And the market cheered. For the people who sent the $100 donations and volunteered their time for the Obama campaign, the only way to respond to this is to push hard from the other direction. Because the dynamic where Obama’s grassroots support just cheers him and defends anything he does, while the Wall Street heavy hitters and the defense companies take the gloves and lobby hard for their agenda does not work. The grassroots will lose that battle because they aren’t actually fighting. What they’re saying to Obama is, “You can take us for granted.”

NAOMI: I’m not saying Obama is corrupt. But I’m saying that, so far, what he has actually done is go to great lengths to reassure Wall Street and it’s very much a top-down recovery model, which is the opposite of what he campaigned on. He campaigned on the idea of a bottom-up recovery. Reinvesting in Main Street, reinvesting in manufacturing. That can happen, but only if we demand it, because in Washington the momentum for the status quo is so tremendous. That’s the problem with the bailout. His stimulus package has some very, very good things in it. The news is not all bad. But the problem is that the bank bailout is so bad that it practically cancels everything else out, in the sense that taxpayers have taken on so much risk, so much debt in the interest of bailing out the banks, that they’ve created a crisis down the road which will then be used to justify cutting social security, cutting health care and not making good on those promises. That’s the real concern.

JOAN: You really think that’s going to happen?

NAOMI: I really believe that this bailout is not a bailout for the economy. The best writing about this has been done by Joseph Stiglitz, Paul Krugman, Jeffrey Sachs. These are very, very respected economists. Two of them with Nobel prizes. What’s really shocking to me is that they’re in the position of criticizing from the sidelines, as opposed to being in the administration. This administration is trapped in the kind of thinking that created the crisis and I think it should be just gloves-off criticism on this, because it’s very, very serious. It’s very serious that Joseph Stiglitz has not been invited to play a pivotal role in the administration, that Paul Krugman is seen as too extreme. That’s why Summers matters, because Summers is the gatekeeper. Summers appears to be keeping people away from Obama. He’s defining the terms of the debate, and they are outrageously narrow. I think we should take Stiglitz and Krugman and Sachs at their word on the bailout: It’s worse than we thought. The debts that these banks hold are enough to swallow the country’s entire GDP and then some, if we keep throwing money into that black hole. It happened in Iceland. We just saw a national economy be wiped out by the debts accumulated by private banks.

JOAN: Just start with the Icelandic protests. Why are there no protests in the streets in America?

NAOMI: This comes back to the problems of hero worship. It’s hard to protest your hero. But it’s more than that. It’s also that the virulence of the Right in the United States is so frightening and the problem is that it is the merger of the extreme far right and large corporations, in the form of media conglomerates. So Glenn Beck on Fox or Lou Dobbs on CNN have these unbelievable megaphones to attack Obama, and to spread fear, which makes reasonable people feel that their main political role is to defend the Obama administration against this very frightening right-wing onslaught. It’s understandable but it’s also hard to do that while being in the streets protesting that administration’s bailout – which is what’s happening in Britain, which is what’s happening in France, what’s happening in Italy. I think the problem in the U.S. is that many people who were part of the campaign to get Obama into power now see their role as being kind of an unofficial arm of the administration, with some groups even taking talking points from the White House. It’s a recipe for political failure, because what actually makes space for Obama to do more of what we want him to do is to make him look less radical, by being more radical ourselves.

JOAN: A very good point.

NAOMI: And that’s actually doing him a favor. That’s how political victories were won in the ‘30s and ‘40s, and it’s really the only route. Another obstacle we face are these wild theories about what Obama’s actually planning to do. During the campaign people forgave a lot that they disagreed with by saying, “Well, you know, he has to say that in order to get elected." Or, "When he gets the power he’s going to change his position," which I think is really problematic for progressives, because what you’re actually doing is hoping he’s lying. And we actually want politicians to tell the truth so that we can hold them to their promises on the campaign trail.

JOAN: And now?

NAOMI: Now you have this new level of theorizing where people think maybe Obama’s strategy is to try the free-market bailout model. You know, bailing out the banks, letting them stay private, doing this hedge-fund bailout, so that he can show that it failed, so that he can then do what he really wants to do.

JOAN: Machiavelli.

NAOMI: Yeah, except for one problem: There’s not going to be any money left for the second stage of this supposedly ingenious plan. The bottom line is that we need to get out of trying to imagine what Obama might be thinking and all of his strategizing, and just stand on principle and make principled demands. I do have enough faith in Obama to believe that if he is faced with a mobilized population making clear, principled, radical demands, he will broker a pretty good compromise. But he’s not going to do it while he is just being cheered by his supporters.

JOAN: Given that many people consider that this moment is exposing the fundamental flaws of capitalism, is it a moment for a radical rethinking of capitalism, of economics, of the markets? For a whole new model?

NAOMI: I do think that. I do. That’s both the fear and the promise of this moment. Here’s something else that I thought was really exciting about the protest in London during the G-20 Summit: Most of those activists came out of the environmental movement. They were making connections between the financial crisis and the ecological crisis, the logic of “there’s no tomorrow,” and short-term thinking that underlies both the financial crisis and the climate crisis, and the perpetual-motion machine of economic growth above all else.

It is a real crisis that we’re facing and it goes well beyond the financial markets. The frightening part of this political moment has been watching how the crisis in the financial sector has just swept all of these other issues aside. Do we ever hear about the food crisis? Do we think it’s solved? Do we ever hear about the AIDS pandemic or are we talking about climate change anymore? It can go either way. This crisis can swallow us up in every way. The financial crisis can be the only thing we talk about. It can drink up all of our collective resources. On the other hand it does provide this opportunity because the failures of the economic logic are so clear. When you start making those connections and talking about solutions that are multitasking solutions that address the financial crisis, AND the climate crisis AND the health-care crisis, then people start getting really inspired. So much of what has paralyzed progressive movements over the past 20, 30 years has been this idea of a shrug from government. We can’t do anything collectively. Yeah, sure, that’s a big problem, but we have to leave things to the market, and government isn’t very good at doing anything. That notion of collective impotence has also shattered, along with so many of the other myths.

We’re seeing such incredible government effort that’s being marshaled in order to save the financial system. There’s a sense of possibility about anything right now. Why can’t we have universal health care? Why can’t we have an incredible mass-transit system across the country? You never know what this generation’s going to do with that, because they are not afflicted with what my generation was afflicted with, which was just total indoctrination and Reaganism and this idea that we can’t do anything collectively. That’s also what’s hopeful about what Obama unleashed in his campaign. People felt the tremendous sense of common purpose. And also they got a victory.

JOAN: They did.

NAOMI: When people start winning things, it can go either way. People can just get disillusioned and go, “Well I thought Obama was going to fix everything, and he didn’t. And now I’m never going to do anything ever again. I’m now officially cynical at, you know, 23.” Or, it can be, “Wait a minute. We’ve made history electing this guy who everyone said couldn’t get elected and let’s go make some more history.”

JOAN: Now, a little question about the whole idea of progressive movements that, of course, come out of our parents’ generation and are fueled by Communist ideals — and Communism in our lifetime was revealed to be an unworkable model. So you’re saying the only basis for progressive movements is justice itself?

NAOMI: Well, justice, democracy and also any major new progressive movement is going to have ecology at its very center, which necessarily questions the fundamentals of capitalism, which is based on endless growth. Young people understand that much better than we do, just in their bones — a sense of a feeling of real ecological limits. That, to me, was what was so insidious about the role that Sarah Palin played in the campaign — at this moment, when we’re suddenly, collectively getting in touch with the reality that the resources of the planet are not limitless, that we have a deep challenge to the American dream, to the frontier myth, which is the myth of abundance and wide-open spaces. And just when we’re starting to come to grips with the reality that we have to live within our means, along comes Sarah Palin who says, “Come up to Alaska. It’s the final frontier. We’ve got enough oil and gas and resources to fuel your way of life forever and ever. Drill, baby, drill.” I think it was such an extraordinary moment, the Republican convention of, “No, we don’t have to think about tomorrow.”

JOAN: Right.

NAOMI: That aspect of the role that Sarah Palin played in revising the myth of the frontier hasn’t really been examined enough. What I try to show in the Shock Doctrine is that capitalism and its various spokespeople have always tried to create a false duality between free markets and free people on the one hand, and Communism and enslaved people on the other, as if those are the only two choices available to us. We see that even in the way that the Glenn Becks and the Sean Hannitys and the Bill O’Reillys are immediately casting Obama as a Communist for extremely moderate Keynesian policies. It serves them to pretend there is nothing between extremist market fundamentalism and Communism, to erase everything in the middle.

In tracking the history of this very dangerous right-wing ideology, what was so striking to me was that it was always more dangerous to these right-wing ideologues to have democratic socialism or Scandinavian-style social democracy, rather than iron-rule, Soviet-style totalitarianism. That’s an easy enemy. That’s fun. The Cold War was fun. What is much more challenging for the Right is when people start experimenting with combinations of democracy, socialism and markets. For instance, in Poland, the first Eastern-bloc country to have elections, the party that came to power was Solidarity. And Solidarity’s vision for an alternative was not Reaganism. It was the idea that the factories could be turned into workers’ co-ops. This was Upton Sinclair’s idea in 1934 when he ran for governor of California — all of these abandoned farmlands and factories that are closing should be given to workers to run democratically. And in the rare places where they have been tried — these are the so-called “third ways” — they usually turn out to be some of the best places in the world to live, like the Scandinavian countries, or parts of Northern Italy where you have a large portion of the economy run by co-ops.

JOAN: When I read The Shock Doctrine I got so angry. Has that feeling of frustration that you communicate, of frustration and horror, has that abated a bit for you, or is it worse?

NAOMI: It hasn’t abated. What enrages me more than anything is impunity. I am in a state of rage about the impunity of the elites at the moment. I’m very disturbed by this idea that we just have to keep looking forward, we can’t look backward. That is a declaration in favor of legal impunity for the elites, whether we’re talking about torture, whether we’re talking about the financial crimes that created this crisis, whether we’re talking about what happened under TARP and the first $700 billion. Elizabeth Warren has done such a fantastic job and has raised some very, very deep legal issues about what happened with that money, and there seems to be no desire to prosecute. This brings us back to that 17-year-old girl who broke a window. You can’t have a society where the elites enjoy this flagrant impunity and expect people to respect the rule of law.

That’s why I dwell on Summers. I think that somebody who played a key role in pushing shock therapy economic policy on Russia in the ‘90s, when 72 million people were thrown into poverty, should not be declared a genius. I’ve really been struck recently by the fact that this is such a boys’ club that we’re talking about. Men get sort of deified and their intelligence inflated beyond all reason and evidence — the “maestro” Alan Greenspan and the “oracle” Larry Summers, as he was recently declared in The New Republic — really projecting onto these guys otherworldly intelligence, otherworldly powers. And I’m calling this the “brain bubble” because I actually think it’s more dangerous than the real-estate bubble, and I think it’s more dangerous than the subprime mortgage crisis.

JOAN: It infantilizes the watcher.

NAOMI: It infantilizes all of us because these men are just too smart for us, so that we just have to trust them, no matter how spectacularly and repeatedly wrong they have been. I’ve also been struck by how spectacularly right a few key women have been in this process, and, interestingly, women never get the “brain bubble” treatment.

JOAN: OK, who?

NAOMI: Brooksley Born [chairwoman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission], who, during the Clinton administration, blew the whistle on the unregulated derivative industry and wanted to regulate it like any other banking sector. For her prescience she was bullied by Rubin and Greenspan and Summers, who’s actually the enforcer of the three. He was the one who called her. They argued that just by talking about the need to regulate derivatives, she was going to create market panic. So not only wouldn’t they consider it, they wouldn’t even let her talk about it. She saw this whole crisis coming. You often hear this: “Well, no one saw this coming.” And that is such a reflection on who these men believe is someone. But there are so many people who saw this coming, and they’re considered nobodies. The only way you get to be a somebody is if you agree with them. Brooksley Born saw it coming. Elizabeth Warren has been an incredible watchdog. Sheila Bair, chair of the FDIC, also had a much more principled and ethical vision of what the bailout should be, in arguing that they should be offering direct aid to homeowners, as opposed to this top-down bailout. I feel like this gender split is not coincidental. There’s a need for more of a feminist analysis in understanding how we got here.

JOAN: As a child you rejected feminism, which your mother supported. What was it about feminism that you initially found so distasteful?

NAOMI: I think it was a combination of just basic boring teenage rebellion and, really, these basic, aesthetic objections.

JOAN: Hairy legs?

NAOMI: Yes. And it’s not that my mom was hardcore in that way, but I didn’t like being policed in any way. I rejected feminism as something that I felt was getting in my way of, you know, wanting to wear what I wanted to wear and do what I wanted to do. I really didn’t like the idea that it would be assumed that I would agree with my parents. It was a combination of just wanting to wear tight jeans and also just not wanting to be bossed around. I was a bit of a brat about it.

But when I was in first-year university at University of Toronto, there was a terrible crime against women that is really not known about outside of Canada. It was a massacre at the University of Montreal, the city where I was born and in which I grew up. A gunman went into an engineering school. At that time there were big debates about why there aren’t more women in engineering and in the hard sciences. And there were people arguing that it’s because women lack the certain intrinsic ability. As an aside, that’s what Larry Summers suggested when he was president of Harvard, which got him in so much trouble. There were other people who were arguing that it was the culture of the schools themselves, and that there needed to be more of an effort to bring women into the sciences. And affirmative action was being practiced at the engineering schools. The vitriol around this was so strong that this gunman, Mark Lepine, got it into his head that he had not gotten into this school because of feminists. He went to an engineering classroom at the University of Montreal and separated the men from the women. He turned to the women and said, “You’re all a bunch of fucking feminists,” and gunned them down. Fourteen women were killed. So it was a crime against women, a crime against feminism.

JOAN: You did a lot of feminist activism starting then, right?

NAOMI: Yes, right away. Because I had grown up with it, it was a bit like, “Oh, I know how to do this,” even though I had always rejected it. The connection between the way that this was being reported on in the media and the way this twisted man incorporated it in his mind was so clear that a whole generation of feminists was created in that moment. The media kept saying, “He’s just a madman. It’s not a crime against women. It’s not about politics.” And this is so familiar. It happens every time, right? We wanted to talk about the fact that we felt it was bigger than just one man, that we were all feeling vulnerable. So we put up some signs around campus saying that we were going to have a meeting to talk about the Montreal massacre. And 900 people showed up. I was asked to chair the meeting. I’d never done any public speaking or done anything like that before. And from then on I was just in this role of leadership. But I always was a writer. I was always writing for the campus newspaper, more than I was leading rallies. I’ve never been comfortable in that role.

JOAN: Is there anything good about globalization?

NAOMI: Yes. There are many good things about internationalism. I consider myself an internationalist, not a nationalist. Globalization is such a slippery term and that’s why I almost never use it. I always say the so-called anti-globalization movement. And in my first book, No Logo, I talk about how we were seeing a rise in anti-corporate activism, and anti-corporate globalization activism. I never just say anti-globalization, because what was exciting about the movement that I was writing about and that I was a part of, that came to world attention in Seattle, is precisely that it was global; that these new technologies, like the Internet, were allowing us to create connections that were absolutely unprecedented between producers and consumers on other sides of the world. What we opposed was the globalization of a specific ideology. It was about an ideology that Larry Summers talks about – privatization, deregulation.

JOAN: What do you think of the branding of social justice and causes like the Red Campaign, which has become a brand? It leaves me completely cold. Do you think it’s effective? Do you think it’s a good redirection of branding and consumerism? Or do you think it’s like a false idea wrapped around a good idea?

NAOMI: Every time I talk about this I get into trouble. What’s interesting about Red is it really hasn’t taken off. There was so much hype about it. And so much marketing. What was so scandalous was comparing the advertising budgets to the actual dollars that went into the Global Fund. Considering the paid and free advertising that this campaign got, I think it’s quite amazing how unsuccessful it was. And I think because a lot of people had that feeling that there was something wrong about the idea of shopping your way out a humanitarian crisis. The message of Red was: You don’t have to change anything about your lifestyle; in fact, we need to just buy more. Like, you’ve got a cell phone, but you don’t have a red cell phone! It was such a hyper-consumerist model, it didn’t resonate with the target market, which was young people, who actually do understand that this idea of limitless consumption is at the core of the problem of global inequality, not the solution.

NAOMI: And my other discomfort with not just Red, but the Make Poverty History branding, is that I really feel that it is — and was — a very real step backward from what was happening before September 11 in the global justice movement, not the anti-globalization movement, but the global justice movement that you saw not just in the protest in North America but in Porto Alegre, Brazil, with the huge World Social Forum, and the Africa Social Forum, and also the Durban World Conference against racism, the UN Conference that happened just before September 11, which was a tremendous forum for African nations and for people of African descent around the world, including in the U.S., to talk about the legacies of colonialism and slavery, to talk about real reparations, and what Africa actually deserves in terms of economic justice, not charity. And what was so exciting about these events is that Africans were actually speaking on their own behalf on the world stage and coming up with some pretty radical demands that actually challenged who owes who. They were talking about how much has been looted from that continent in terms of people and natural resources, and turning the tables on this idea of "we just want your aid, we just want your charity." And when I think back to that time, and then I look to the Gleneagles G-8 Summit and Bob Geldof and Bono talking about saving Africa, it makes my stomach churn. So that’s why I get myself into trouble when I talk about this.

JOAN: Are you too left?

NAOMI: I think we’ve established that, surely! I think the question is too left for what? I mean, I’m not running for office.

JOAN: Shoshana Zuboff wrote about Wall Street’s economic crimes against humanity in BusinessWeek. Do you think these are crimes against humanity?

NAOMI: "Crimes against humanity" has a very specific legal connotation, and I think that some Wall Street firms have been complicit in specific crimes against humanity. But whether the financial crisis is itself a crime against humanity, according to the UN definition, I think we should really be careful with those terms — because they need to have meaning. But I do believe that the Wall Street bailout is the greatest heist in monetary history.

JOAN: Who profits from the heist? From the Wall Street bailout?

NAOMI: This is an unprecedented transfer of public wealth into private hands. And it has been done on completely false pretenses. We were told that when they announced the first $700 billion it was to get the banks to start lending again. And then the banks said, “Oh, actually we’re just going to keep it because it makes us comfortable.” It’s theft. And it’s not mysterious who profits from it.

Who profits from it is exactly who seems to be profiting from it. Who will pay for it are the most vulnerable people in the world. And that’s why, maybe, I wouldn’t call it a crime against humanity. I think it is, honestly, a class war. I think we are seeing a class war, before our eyes, of the wealthiest segment of the population saving themselves and having the most vulnerable, poorest people pay the price – because that’s what it really means to bankrupt the government to save the banks. It means you’re not going to have money for food stamps. You’re already hearing these tragic stories of scholarship programs being cut. I mean, the most vulnerable people are paying for the banks to save themselves from a crisis that they created, and that is so deeply immoral. People should be angry about it, and the anger should be directed where it belongs.

JOAN: One more question, Naomi. You suggested in The Nation a boycott of Israel to end the increasingly bloody occupation. Can you expand on that? You must have caused a shit storm by saying that.

NAOMI: I was actually much more surprised by the amount of support I got for that. Every time you write about Israel you get angry letters. But what surprised me was the number of supportive letters I got, including from Jewish Israelis. I think it was about people’s sense of rage and feelings of helplessness during the Israeli attack on Gaza, a sense that the old ways of putting pressure behind the scenes, lobbying and hoping for the best, and signing a petition weren’t working. I got so many letters from Israelis who had always opposed the idea of sanctions against the Israeli government saying, “Progressives in Israel are beside themselves, and the country is moving hard right on its own.” You have overt racism against Arabs becoming acceptable in public discourse in Israel.

And progressives are ready to try some new tactics because they’re losing this battle. Right now the Israeli government has a sense that no matter what they do in the occupied territories, they’re still going to receive financial support from the West, they’re still going to be able to increase trade with the West. And they’ve had one of the fastest-growing economies of the past decade. A boycott does put pressure on the business community in Israel and on the broader population to put pressure on their own government. That’s what happened in South Africa. Apartheid ended when South African businesses finally had had enough of the boycott, and they turned to de Klerk and said, “This isn’t working for us. We need to negotiate.” And it wasn’t because they opposed Apartheid on principle. It was because it was no longer profitable.

JOAN: I’m reading William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition. Have you read William Gibson? I think that this book is so profoundly influenced by No Logo.

NAOMI: But not enough people have read Pattern Recognition, so they don’t know what we’re talking about. The incredible main character in Pattern Recognition is allergic to logos.

JOAN: Particularly Mickey Mouse and the Michelin Man.

NAOMI: William Gibson didn’t read No Logo that I know of. He just saw the title in the bookstore and that’s where he came up with the idea of a main character who had an allergy to brands. I interviewed him at a literary festival when the book first came out and we talked about this.

JOAN: And he’s the person who brought your thinking into literature, into fiction, in an extraordinary way. And it shows me that the arts can be influenced by political thinking, new political thinking.

NAOMI: Everyone should read Pattern Recognition. It’s brilliant There’s another book that I think did a great job of looking at branding and I don’t think enough people have read it. It’s called Jennifer Government.

JOAN: Jennifer Government?

NAOMI: Yes. By Max Barry. He’s a young Australian writer and it’s a sort of sci-fi thriller set in the near future, where everyone has to take the last names of the corporation they work for. John Nike, things like that, unless you work for the government, in which case your last name is “Government.” So that main character is Jennifer Government. It’s really great. Apparently it was optioned by George Clooney’s company, so I’m hoping it will be made into a film.

JOAN: What are the three things that you see that are the real solid rays of hope now?

NAOMI: I talked about some of them. One of the most interesting meetings I had in recent months was with the workers from the Republic Windows & Doors factory in Chicago, who occupied their factory in December. They were so smart. They had been fired without notice. And it turned out that this had happened because Bank of America had cut off credit to the factory — Bank of America who’d gotten all these bailout funds. They were so smart, the workers and their union, UE, because they went after Bank of America instead of just the owners of the factory. And they turned it into a story about the bailout. All great struggles have to involve storytelling. I thought that was a fantastic example. I’ve been hearing about a lot more cases of these kinds of workplace occupations.

JOAN: Like in Argentina.

NAOMI: This is what I made a documentary about a few years back with my husband. Factories were being closed down in the midst of the economic crisis. There were 200 of them where the workers turned them into democratically run co-ops. This is starting to happen in the economic crisis around the world. I’ve got a little file going of this and one thing that would give me a lot of hope is if we really started talking about this alternative in terms of the newspaper industry.

JOAN: I was just thinking that, and magazines.

NAOMI: We are facing a crisis in journalism and we’ve been talking about impunity, and I’ll tell that when you’ve already got a culture of impunity, the very worst thing that could happen is to lose all of the newspapers. But, you know, this crisis is twofold. The crisis that the industry is facing is a crisis of their corporate control, because many of these newspapers are profitable, they’re just not profitable enough for their owners. Having spent a lot of time in factories that are trying to turn themselves into co-ops and other workplaces, I can tell you that there are some workplaces that are harder to turn into co-ops than others. But having worked at newspapers and worked at magazines, it’s actually a pretty straightforward industry to run, and journalists are pretty good at running it. And once you take out the need to have huge profits, or really profits at all, and when the goal becomes the creation and protection of jobs, but also the providing of a much-needed service, a service that is crucial to democracy, then it actually becomes economically viable. You don’t have to pay the huge bonuses. This is an example of something where you can solve two problems at once because not only could you save newspapers, but I think you’d have better newspapers if newspapers were run by journalists again.

JOAN: But what about the fact that the advertising then vanishes because of the market?

NAOMI: This is why it’s become less profitable. But a lot of the newspapers could still run if their goal wasn’t to make a profit, but the goal was to put out a good newspaper and provide jobs. Because you know what? That’s enough.

JOAN: But there has to be money to run the thing and to pay everyone.

NAOMI: I don’t believe that the model has completely failed. There is still some ad revenue. People are still willing to buy newspapers, they’re just not willing to buy them in the same numbers and buy the number of ads that satisfy shareholders. Another ray of hope is looking forward to the Copenhagen summit on climate change. This is the next big climate summit to come up with what they call the post-Kyoto consensus. And at this point, I think there’s a lot of rightful cynicism about the Kyoto protocol because the whole question of "How are we going to respond to climate change?" was entirely infected by market fundamentalism. Bringing it back full circle to where we started, the ideas that have dominated for the past 30 years have utterly shaped the environmental debate during the Kyoto era. So the idea was to always find “market-based solutions” to climate change, which meant that we couldn’t really legislate, and everything had to be creating market incentives for the private sector to solve the problem for us. And I think that’s a much harder sell today in the context of people rightfully losing faith in the ability of the market to solve our most pressing problems. So I think you’re going to see a lot of very different, non-market-based solutions being proposed ahead of the Copenhagen Summit, which is in December 2009.

JOAN: What’s an example of a non-market solution?

NAOMI: A non-market solution is this idea that I’ve become really interested in. It’s been kicking around academic circles for a while but for the first time it’s being applied, which is the idea of “ecological debt” or “climate debt.” I’ll give you a concrete example. Where this issue is most alive is in Ecuador right now. Ecuador is an enormously resource-rich country, as we know. They have very large oil reserves. But they also have a very, very active environmental movement and a very, very strong indigenous movement, particularly — though not exclusively — in the Amazon. This is one of the most biodiverse parts of the world, quite pristine wilderness. But there’s a lot of oil under the ground, and there’s a huge push to take the oil out of the area I’m talking about, which is called the Yasuni National Park. And there’s a battle that’s been going on, which is really about the limits of growth-based economics. It’s not just about the Right, because in Ecuador there’s a left-wing president, part of what they call the Pink Tide in Latin America. His name is Rafael Correa and he calls himself a socialist. He was originally in favor of extracting the oil and reinvesting the profits in health care and education. He doesn’t want the profits to just fly out of the country, as they have so often in the past. He was going to negotiate a really good deal with the oil company, unlike his predecessors. That was his vision. What’s interesting is that he has come up against tremendous resistance from indigenous groups and from environmentalists in Ecuador saying, “That’s not good enough.” Their slogan is "Leave It in the Ground." They don’t want the oil being extracted. But then you have this problem: Ecuador needs money for health care and education and has been held back by regressive economic policies.

So what’s the solution? They’ve come up with this idea of ecological debt, which basically argues that the rich world, the industrialized world that has created the problem of climate change, knowing full well the science that has been in for a long time, owes an ecological debt to developing countries like Ecuador. What they’re saying is they’re owed an ecological debt because they are living through climate changes, and this is an Andean nation that is already dealing with water scarcity and many of the issues associated with global warming. And so they are proposing to the world, and Rafael Correa has signed on to this idea in theory, that there should be some sort of global fund where we in the rich world are paying them to leave it in the ground and reduce their emissions, particularly because this is a world heritage site and we all need the Amazon. Developing countries shouldn’t have to choose between having money for health care and education and reducing emissions. So it’s a completely different logic. Once again, as with reparations for slavery and colonialism, it turns the world on its head and asks this fundamental question of “who owes who?” — who’s the real debtor and who’s the real creditor?

I think these are the ideas that are going to take off in the next 20 years. And I’ll tell you something. I’ve been thinking about this idea and it definitely ties in with who I’m talking to, because I wrote it down: Who Owes Who. The acronym is W.O.W. It’s a pretty great name for a movement challenging the underlying causes of global inequality. The WOW project, that’s what we need.

What Is US Attorney Mary Beth Buchanan Still Doing in Obama's Justice Department? Using Cell Phones To Track People

2009-04-27T23:07:00.000-07:00

At BuzzFlash, Christine Bowman writes:

BuzzFlash and a few other progressive news sites have noted that the Obama Administration is not in the least free yet of the legacy of the US attorney firing scandal of 2007 known as Prosecutorgate. Sure, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales was forced to exit in disgrace. Bradley Schlozman, Monica Goodling and Kyle Sampson also gained notoriety due to Congressional hearings. But the legacy of a deeply politicized Department of Justice (DOJ) remains. More independent-minded former US attorneys David Iglesias and Carol Lam
, who failed to target Democrats for prosecution, are out. Prosecutors like Mary Beth Buchanan and Leura Canary, who have energetically targeted Democratic office holders, are in and still causing trouble.

US Attorney Mary Beth Buchanan, still heading up the Western District of Pennsylvania office, certainly personifies the problem if any one attorney does. In December 2008, having served since September 2001, Buchanan declared herself unwilling to give up her office -- Alice Martin of Birmingham, AL also refuses to bow out -- in defiance of the long-standing tradition that US Attorneys tender their resignations at the start of every new administration.

Yet Scott Horton writing at The Daily Beast notes:

In the key period of 2004-05, while groundwork was laid for what later became the U.S. attorney's scandal, Buchanan served as director of the Executive Office for U.S. Attorneys, the key position at Justice that oversaw all the 94 U.S. attorneys. A later internal Justice Department probe, in which Buchanan figures prominently, highlights the role played by that office in Karl Rove’s plan to sack U.S. attorneys.

What is Buchanan's agenda as a prosecutor? From the get-go in 2001, she pursued obscenity cases and chased down marijuana dealers -- and high-profile drug paraphernalia vendor Tommy Chong, as BuzzFlash reported -- very publicly and aggressively advancing a right-wing "values" agenda. She "took the directives from Washington to heart," as Charlie Deitch, writing for the Pittsburgh City Paper, put it.

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette further describes Buchanan as a person of "hard-driving ambition," and quotes Thomas J. Farrell, a former assistant federal prosecutor, as saying, "whether you like her or not, she probably will end up being one of the most influential U.S. attorneys we've had."

Reagan and G. H. W. Bush Attorney General and former PA Governor Dick Thornburgh saw problems with Buchanan's partisan approach when he was on the defense team of one of her Democratic targets, Allegheny County Coroner Dr. Cyril H. Wecht. In addition to Wecht, Buchanan has tenaciously pursued a Democratic Pittsburgh mayor, a Democratic sheriff, and a Democratic county judge, but not Republicans -- not even former Senator Rick Santorum, whose several ethics issues helped him lose his reelection bid. (Santorum had enthusiastically supported Buchanan's nomination and confirmation as a US attorney.)

Buchanan's current passion is apparently to chip away at privacy protections that are guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment. She's all for warrantless wiretapping, but also for using cell-site location information (CSLI) -- in other words, accessing cell phone company records to pinpoint any cell-phone user's past or present whereabouts. Talk Left reports that Buchanan wants that power not only in national security or terrorism-related cases, but for just any old criminal prosecution like a narcotics case.

At issue in the Pennsylvania case is "historical" cell phone location records. Buchanan argues it's no different than pen registers and trap and traces because it doesn't intercept the voice. Scholars and many other judges have disagreed, saying when you use the cell phone to determine location, it's like a tracking device. The law requires probable cause for tracking devices....

It should be a no-brainer that when the Government seeks information about your location from your cell phone they need a warrant based on probable cause, not some boiler-plate statement to the judge that the information is relevant to an ongoing investigation.

The lower court's opinion in the Pennsylvania case is here (pdf). The Obama Justice Department briefs, filed by Buchanan, are here (pdf) and here (pdf). The second was filed just last week.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, American Civil Liberties Union, and Center for Democracy and Technology have argued that a showing of probable cause is needed before a cell phone service provider could be compelled to disclose geographic data about a subscriber, according to arstechnica.com.

Meanwhile, prominent and powerful Western PA US Representative John Murtha, a Democrat, is finding himself, or at least his friends, the target of investigations, as David D. Kirkpatrick reported in The New York Times April 25. Not only have prosecutors "raided the offices of the PMA Group — a lobbying firm founded by a former Murtha associate" [but] ... "Reports of the PMA investigation coincided with the news that federal agents had also raided Kuchera Industries, a Johnstown, Pa., company built on Mr. Murtha’s patronage whose owners held a fund-raiser for him on their private game ranch." Murtha is the top Democrat on the House Defense Appropriations Committee which oversees huge earmarks for military spending.

A writer at Firedoglake speculated in February that Buchanan intends to hang on beyond her welcome as US attorney in order to get Rep. Murtha:

But I think she's got much bigger Democratic fish she wants to stick around to fry: Jack Murtha. The NYT follows up on what ABC reported earlier: that investigators conducted two raids on entities associated with Murtha. ...

Note the timing: Murtha wins his closest election in years in November. And then the Feds raid a lobbying firm closely connected to him. In December, Buchanan refuses to step down. And in January the FBI raids Kuchera--a company that has no clear ties to PMA, but is closely associated with Murtha.

Mind you, Murtha has long been acknowledged to be one of the most corrupt Democrats in Congress. I'm sure there's at least something that Buchanan used to justify this investigation.

But just as Murtha has long been acknowledged to be one of the most corrupt Dems, Buchanan has been acknowledged to be one of the most corrupt US Attorneys. Which means, given Buchanan's obstinate refusal to leave, this one may blow up into a full-fledged political witch hunt.

As yet there seems to be no news to contradict the "Get Murtha" theory. Of course, Rep. Murtha became a magnet for right-wing hate when he called for bringing American troops home from the Iraq War in 2005. That seems as likely an underlying reason for a sudden attack as earmarks or campaign contributions.

Will Eric Holder's Justice Department bring Buchanan's anti-Democratic, anti-progressive era to an end? The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reported on several possible replacements for her back in March. How about picking one and moving on? Justice still has lots of repairs to its integrity to undertake.

Transcript & Video of State of the Union with John King - April 26, 2009

2009-04-27T00:21:00.000-07:00

John King intervews Valerie Jarrett, Lindsey Graham, Dianne Feinstein and Joe Lieberman

Transcript of State of the Union with John King:

JOHN KING, HOST: I'm John King, and this is our STATE OF THE UNION report for this Sunday, April 26th. Today, a special look at President Obama's first 100 days in the White House, including unique behind- the-scenes accounts and images.

One of the president's closest aides and friends, senior adviser Valerie Jarrett, joins us for an exclusive look at both the policy and the personal challenges.

The release of top secret memos on CIA interrogations is fueling one of the most sensitive debates of Barack Obama's presidency. Three key senators, Lindsey Graham, Dianne Feinstein, and Joe Lieberman, on whether making the documents public undermines national security and what happens next.

Plus, strides and missteps. Two of the best political strategists assess the first 100 days, appearing together only on STATE OF THE UNION, James Carville and Mary Matalin on the first chapter of a historic presidency.

That's all ahead in this hour of STATE OF THE UNION.

A live picture there of the White House on day 97, day 97 of the Obama presidency. I asked the president about our first guest, and he'll tell you he doesn't like to make any major decisions without consulting her. A woman who has earned several nicknames like "first friend" and "the other side of Obama's brain." So who better to talk about it as we approach that important benchmark, the 100 days of the Obama presidency, than Valerie Jarrett. Valerie Jarrett, thanks for joining us on STATE OF THE UNION.

JARRETT: Thank you, John. And good morning and congratulations on your 100th day as well.

KING: Thank you. Yours is a bit more important than ours, but thank you very much. I want to start -- I want to get to some of your personal reflections on history. But I want to start with the news dominating the headlines this morning. This is The San Diego Union- Tribune. "Swine flu outbreak gets more worrisome."

The San Antonio Express-News, "In Texas flu fears shut down a high school." The administration has been aware of this since late last week, had a number of meetings and will have a briefing later today. What do we expect from the White House? Will it include, say, travel restrictions on going to Mexico? JARRETT: Well, I don't want to prejudge what the officials are going to say later today. But let's just put it this way, the president is taking this very seriously. He has assembled his teams from the Centers for Disease Control and Homeland Security. He has been briefed regularly. And he has asked them to speak to the American people and give the appropriate counsel later today.

So I'll let the experts speak to that.

KING: An interesting circumstance in that he and a number of senior officials had just been to Mexico. I understand he has been tested and he's in the clear?

JARRETT: He's fine. He is just fine. Thank you for asking, though.

KING: Let's move on to this momentous decision he has made in the past week, which was to release the CIA documents, the internal legal documents about the CIA interrogations. And I want to get your sense. You have watched him make hard decisions.

And I'm told by senior officials that this one weighs right up there with the decision to send more troops into Afghanistan as the toughest he has had to make in his first 100 days in office, in part, because only 44 men have been president of the United States, and in making this decision, he did something no president before him has done, put out former top secret memos on the previous administration so soon after taking office. Why?

JARRETT: Well, look, first of all, we are a nation of laws and the law requires us to release the documents unless there's some national security interest that would make it more important to keep them secret.

But the fact of the matter is there is nothing in the documents that the American people hadn't already seen all over the news. The techniques that were being used by the prior administration were well- known. When the president came in office, he said, we're not going to use those techniques anymore. That's not who we are as a country. In fact, Denny Blair, his intelligence adviser, has said in fact using those techniques makes us less safe. So the president said, let's release them and then let's move forward.

KING: In the context of let's move forward, there is a question about should there be a truth commission, should there be investigations, should there be prosecutions? And there is a big policy debate, but there's also a political debate that some say has been intensified by what they see as mixed messages from the White House.

If you turn over your right shoulder, I want to you take through some of the timeline. When the president released the memos on April 16th, he said, this is a time for reflection, not retribution. Three days later, his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, echoed the president, saying, the president believes those who devised the policy should not be prosecuted. But then on April 23rd, just a few days after the chief of staff was out, the president seemed to give a different message. Let's listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: With respect to those who formulated those legal decisions, I would say that that is going to be more of a decision for the attorney general within the parameters of various laws, and I don't want to prejudge that.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KING: Why did the president change his mind? He seems open now to possible prosecution.

JARRETT: No. Let me be clear where the president stands on this. What he has said is that anyone who followed the advice of the Justice Department and did any kind of acts that were within the confines of that advice, he doesn't think we should prosecute.

The rest of it, he leaves up to the U.S. Attorney General. That is who is supposed to make decisions about prosecution. So I think the president has been very clear and what he said is, we need to be a nation of laws, we need to be consistent, and he leaves it to the attorney general to figure out who should be prosecuted for what.

KING: Who should be prosecuted for what. If it's not those who acted on the advice they were given, who were told it was legal, what are we talking about here? Are we talking about the attorney general in the previous administration, the CIA director, Secretary Rumsfeld?

JARRETT: You and I aren't talking about anything. We are going to leave that all up to the attorney general. As you know, the Senate Intelligence Committee is having hearings as well. That is the appropriate place I think for any further investigation. And then the rest we leave to the attorney general. KING: You have a fascinating job because you have the trust of the president and you have become his conduit to many of the CEOs around America right now. He is dealing with the auto bailout. He is dealing with the financial institutions and the banks. He is in negotiations now over credit card reforms.

And you are the person who is often in touch with these CEOs, getting their advice and telling the administration things, seeking their input. One of the questions on the table is these stress test for all of the banks.

JARRETT: Yes.

KING: And without naming names, are there banks out there that are in deep trouble, and, if so, will the president and the White House, as in the case of General Motors, say, you know what, you're in trouble, you're not doing this as fast or as aggressively we thought you should do, if you want more money from us, the CEO has to go? JARRETT: Let's not leap forward. Let's look at where we are. The stress test results are just now being shared with the banks. We're going to have an announcement, I believe it's May 4th, coming from the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve.

They've been going through an in-depth analysis of those top largest 19 banks over the course of the last several months. Let's see where we are and let's not prejudge the outcome. I think what the president's direction has been very clearly is we want to help the economy.

In order to have a healthy economy, we need to have strong banks. They need to be well-capitalized. They need to be able to lend dollars and help support our economy. And so at the end of the stress test, we want to make sure that those are -- that the banks are in a position to do that.

And so whether management changes occur, whether banks are asked to raise more capital, all of that is going to come forth in the coming week.

KING: You helped the president in the campaign. You were one of his a big fundraisers, one of his top advisers. One of the messages he gave to the American people in the campaign is, elect me and I will change the way that crazy town of Washington works, I'm not afraid to deal with Republicans, I will be bipartisan, will change the partisan, nasty tone in Washington.

I want you to listen something he said just after the election.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

OBAMA: I know we will succeed, once again, if we put aside partisanship and politics and work together. That's exactly what I intend to do as president of the United States.

(END VIDEO CLIP) KING: And, yet, in the first 100 days, only three Republican votes on the stimulus plan, no Republican votes on the Obama budget, and now the White House has pressured Democrats in Congress to use their power in the rules so, that if necessary, you can pass health care reform with 51 votes, a majority, not 60 votes.

Has the president decided that because of the mood in this town and because of the unwillingness of this town and both sides to perhaps change, that it is more important to get things done, like health care reform, like climate change, like education policy, than to make friends with the Republicans right off the bat?

JARRETT: Look, what the president has said throughout, he said in the campaign, he said it in his address the night of his election, and the way he has behaved since he took office is one of reaching out to both sides.

He includes everybody in the dialogue. He has reached out more aggressively, I think, to the Republican Party than I've ever imagined a president could possibly do. So I think the burden is on him to reach out his hand and that is what he has done. And that is what he is going to continue to do throughout this administration.

He has not changed tactics whatsoever. That is who he is as a person.

KING: Let's close -- sorry, go ahead.

JARRETT: But let me -- on the issue of health care, health care is extraordinarily important. I think there is bipartisan support for pushing health care forward. It's good for our country. It's good for our economy. And the president is determined to get it done this year.

KING: Let's close with a bit of history. I want to ask you to get up and walk over here with me as we walk over to the wall. This is a diagram of the West Wing of the White House. And you see the Oval Office here, the president's study, some of the cabinet rooms and the Roosevelt rooms, some of these offices, this is the second floor here, I believe this is Valerie Jarrett's office up here, they are highlighted for a reason.

I was a reporter at the White House for almost nine years. I walked those halls every day and never did you see this, an African- American first lady, an African-American senior adviser, an African- American deputy chief of staff, an African-American woman as the domestic policy adviser, as the deputy legal counsel, as the White House social secretary.

Barack Obama has made history. What is it like to work in a White House like this, African-American women in such positions of power?

JARRETT: Well, it's terrific. You are seeing very strong, I hope smart, intelligent African-American women. But I think have to round it out and look at the whole diversity of team. And I think what has been so extraordinary about President Obama is he appreciates diversity and he thinks it will make him think harder.

We push him to make sure that he has had a wide range of ideas as he makes decisions. And so as you fill out the rest of the team, it's extraordinary as well. But these are some pretty terrific women.

KING: And I want you to look over here at this picture. This has never been released before. We're going to have Pete Souza in here at the end of the program today to talk about looking at history through the lens of his camera.

This is a picture of the president and the first lady dancing. I believe that is the East Room of the White House right there. Take us inside and what is it like from a personal standpoint to see your two close friends in this position now? Can you believe it yet?

JARRETT: I still pinch myself every day. It's a terrific picture. It was the night of the Governors Ball, our first state dinner. And I think the president left right before they broke out into a conga line. And I think all of the folks who were there said they never had a conga line in the White House before. So it makes me happy. I'm so just extraordinarily proud of both of them. And I know that they wake up every day and they think about the American people.

And there so many people out there who are suffering and they need our help here in government. And it's his job to make sure that he delivers on the promises he made to the American people.

KING: Valerie Jarrett, here to mark the 100 days. A lot of challenges will be dealt in the second 100 days. We'll have you right back here to assess them at the end of that.

JARRETT: Look forward to it. I look forward to it.

KING: Thank you so much.

JARRETT: Thank you for having me.

KING: Thank you so much.

KING: Now we just heard Team Obama's position on the release of the so-called torture memos. What happens next? We ask three key senators about calls for investigations and prosecutions just ahead.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

OBAMA: If can you think about what Washington, D.C. was like 50 years ago or 60 years ago. And the notion that I now will be standing there and sworn in as the 44th president, I think, is something that hopefully our children take for granted, but our grandparents, I think, are still stunned by it and it's a remarkable moment.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

KING: Do you believe the president of the United States has made Americans less safe?

FORMER VICE PRESIDENT DICK CHENEY: I do. And now he is making some choices that, in my mind, will, in fact, raise the risk to the American people of another attack.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KING: Vice President Dick Cheney there on this program just about a month ago. President Obama's election mandate was to fix a struggling U.S. economy but as he starts his 97th day in office today national security challenges are front and center. A debate whether releasing Bush administration terror policies was a blunder and over whether some of the Bush officials should be prosecuted and fresh violence in both Iraq and Pakistan will test the new administration's military and diplomatic strategies. Joining us to talk about this and assess the president's first 100 days, Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, the chairwoman of the Select Committee on Intelligence, Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, the independent, former Democrat and from South Carolina, Republican Senator Lindsey Graham.

Chairwoman, I want to start with you. On the vice president's point, you heard the vice president say there he thinks the new administration is making the American people less safe. He also says that there are other memos not released into the public that prove his point that these controversial interrogation tactics used in limited circumstances actually produced intelligence that saved U.S. lives, including preventing an attack in your home State of California, the City of Los Angeles. Is he right?

FEINSTEIN: Well, I've received those memos. I asked him for them and he sent them to me. They are classified memos so I won't go into them. That's the reason why I believe the Intelligence Committee is the oversight agency for 16 intelligence agencies, including the CIA. It is our responsibility to do oversight. We have access to the classified information. And we have set upon a course, a bipartisan course with a program scope, approved by the committee, to review the conditions of detention and the techniques of interrogation of each of the high value detainees. We estimate that will take six to eight months. My hope is that the public debate quells, that we have an opportunity to do our work. The committee will consider it and then we will release, most likely, findings and recommendations.

KING: Findings and recommendations. I want to get to the other senators but to the vice president's point he believes the documents would show that the tactics worked, saved lives.

FEINSTEIN: It's very hard to tell on the face, because you have to go into who learned what at the time. Now I can go into one, at least one specific case, and it's very uncertain. So we need to find these things out and we need to do it in a way that's calm and deliberative and professional, because I think all of this, on the front burner, before the public, does harm our intelligence gathering, it does harm America's position in the world. And President Obama has worked so hard now to open a new page, to go to so many countries, to say that America is now on a different course. Let us do our work and let us do it the way it should be done.

KING: Senator Graham, you and Senator Lieberman opposed relieving these documents even though you were critics of the interrogation tactics, you thought it would undermine the mission of the united states and the CIA and now that some are out does the former vice president have a point? If some are out, should all be out?

GRAHAM: Well, here is my concern, is that, one, I think it was a mistake to release the techniques that we're talking about and inform our enemy as to what may come their way. I like what Senator Feinstein said, to go through it. And there's no doubt in my mind you may have gotten some useful information out of these techniques but the other side of the story is very real. The more than America embraces these techniques like waterboarding that comes from the Inquisition, the harder to get allies to go with us into the Mid East to fight the insurgents. You inflame the opposition. Our energy uses these images against us.

To say these techniques have brought about no good or no information is wrong, but also to say that it's been a net positive is wrong. There's a way to get good information in an aggressive manner to protect this nation without having to go into the Inquisition era. I believe you can do both. KING: And what about going forward, Senator Lieberman? The president, in relieving these memos, you didn't like that he did, but the president's message let's look forward, not look back but then the president said I'll leave this up to my attorney general who should be prosecuted. Let's listen to Mr. Holder.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ATTORNEY GENERAL ERIC HOLDER: I will not permit the criminalization of policy differences. However, it is my responsibility, as the attorney general, to enforce the law. It is my duty to enforce the law. If I see evidence of wrongdoing, I will pursue it to the full extent of the law.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KING: Are you comfortable with that? Do you think this should be pursued and if you rule out the interrogators saying they were told, they were following orders and acting on legal advice what they were doing was right, what are we talking about here? Are we talking about the CIA director, are we talking about the attorney general in the previous administration, Secretary Rumsfeld, somebody in the White House?

LIEBERMAN: Yeah, no, it is not clear who we are talking about. And I think it is a mistake. I go back to what the president said at the beginning, it is time to look forward. These are top secret documents. These were lawyers, you could disagree with them but in my opinion they were trying to do what they thought would protect our country.

And here is the most important point. This whole debate is moot. President Obama has prohibited these tactics from being used in interrogation, so what do we gain -- well, what do we gain, first, by releasing the memos, but, secondly, what do we gain from indicting lawyers for their opinions, if that is a possibility here, or holding a so-called Truth Commission that the reality is, it will poison the water here in Washington. It will achieve nothing.

LIEBERMAN: It will make it harder for the president to do some of the big things he wants to do for the country -- not just get the economy going, but get some Republican support for health care reform, energy independence and education reform.

So let the Intelligence Committee do its work. That should be the end of it. KING: And one of the questions in the political debate, as you well know, there are people out there saying, wait a minute. You have all these politicians -- and largely Democrats, now -- saying, you know, investigate; truth commission; investigate; we had no idea.

A timeline released by your committee, Senator Feinstein, says -- and this is backed up the former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee -- and then-CIA Director Porter Goss -- Pete Hoekstra -- you know, select members of Congress were briefed -- were briefed, way back at the beginning, including now-Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

And the timeline by your committee says that they were briefed on the use of waterboarding on three detainees, Abu Zubaydah, Abdul Rahim al-Nashiri, and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed.

The now-Speaker Pelosi says, no way; she was told there were legal -- there were -- legal opinions were written but not that the tactics had been used. Is she telling the truth?

FEINSTEIN: Well, I can't comment on that. I wasn't there. Just four people were briefed. The full committee, including myself, were briefed in September of '06. Now, that's four years later or so. So there is a big gap.

I am really strongly opposed to just certain members being briefed on something this seriously. It seems to me the whole committee should be briefed at a given time. We've been very good at retaining security, and I think it's a real disadvantage to the system just to have a few people briefed.

Because it really is a notification; there is no real discussion. When you deal with the whole committee, everybody fires back questions; there's a discussion; there's a dialogue. And I think a point of view emerges.

KING: Well, if -- to Senator Feinstein's point, Senator Graham, if the committee, the Intelligence Committee is going to look into this, and you all think that's the more responsible, measured way to do it, should the committee also look into whether Porter Goss or Nancy Pelosi is telling the truth about what came up at those briefings?

GRAHAM: Well, I'll leave that up to the committee. But the point is, if a member of Congress was read into this program, does it matter?

Yes, I think it matters. It's clear to me that the people who were devising these interrogation techniques were not trying to commit a crime against an individual person. They were trying to create tools for our intelligence community to get information to prevent what we all thought was going to be an imminent attack.

The Geneva Convention did not apply, until 2005, to the war on terror. So I can't conceive of a statute that you could prosecute anyone under because their endeavor was not to commit a crime but to look at the law and come up with aggressive interrogation techniques to get information from an enemy that we all thought was coming after us again.

So, however, if you think what they did was a crime, and you read someone into it, they're part of the crime.

So I think it's ridiculous to say the lawyers were trying to break the law. They were trying to interpret the law to protect the nation. And any member of Congress that was read into the program, I don't think they have any culpability either, because what we were trying to do is defend the nation, not conspire to hurt somebody individually, but techniques to protect us all.

KING: I want to move on to other big challenges facing the country right now.

But, before we do that and before we take a quick break, early in the Bush administration, the criticism in Congress was they never pick up the phone; they never consult us; you know, we've got some pretty smart people up here; we can help you.

I'm told that this decision was anguished; the president came in inclined to release them, changed his mind a couple times during the debate and then came back in the end and decided to release them.

At any point in that process -- I'll start with you, Senator Lieberman -- anybody from the White House pick up the phone and say, "What do you think?"

LIEBERMAN: They did not. And I can tell you, listening to what Lindsey said about looking at these decisions that were made early in the Bush administration, remembering that it was immediately after 9/11/01 there was worry about another attack imminently -- I'm proud to be the chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee. Our enemies are out there planning and plotting to attack us every day.

So, as we think about what we want to release, how much information we want to make public, what kind of mud fight we want to get into about something that happened seven years ago, we better remember that and focus on our security today, not back-biting and vendettas from a time passed.

KING: Quickly to you, you're the chairwoman of the committee. You're investigating these matters, anyway. Do they pick up the phone and call you?

FEINSTEIN: No. They did not.

KING: Is that a mistake?

FEINSTEIN: Well, if they had, I probably would have said, as I said, let us do our work first. Since the first two cases have already been done, let us do the rest of it before anything is released, so that at least the Intelligence Committee can see everything in context and make some decisions.

KING: All right. Much more with our Senate guests in just a moment. We ask them to lay out the stakes in the tough choices facing the United States in three major hot spots, Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan. "State of the Union" will be right back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

KING: On a scale of 1 to 10, sir, how confident are you, 10 being fully confident, that you will meet that deadline, that all U.S. troops will be gone at the end of 2011?

GENERAL RAY ODIERNO (USA), COMMANDER, MULTI-NATIONAL FORCE-IRAQ: As you ask me today, I believe it's a 10 that we will be gone by 2011.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KING: We're back with our three senators, Democrat Dianne Feinstein, Independent Joe Lieberman and Republican Lindsey Graham.

That was General Odierno on this program, Easter Sunday morning. Since then, as you're all aware, there has been an uptick, as the military would call it, in violence across Iraq, Mosul, Baqubah, including in Baghdad.

And on the front page of the New York Times today, "Iraq Resists Pleas by U.S. to Placate Hussein's Party."

Essentially, Nouri al-Maliki, the prime minister, has not, at least if you believe U.S. officials, reached out to former Baath Party members and said, it's time to move on; it's time to reconcile.

Senator Lieberman, to you first, are you worried at all about the combination of those things, more violence and the slower pace of political reconciliation will knock the U.S. timetable off track?

LIEBERMAN: Sure, I am. I'm concerned about it. And incidentally, it's part of why I'm so grateful that President Obama did not yield to the calls for a precipitous rapid withdrawal of our troops from Iraq. He's got us on a timeline. It's based on conditions on the ground. And what's happening now shows that all that we've sacrificed so much and worked so hard to gain is not quite set. So we need to be careful here.

LIEBERMAN: But I think Prime Minister Maliki has really done a pretty good job at reconciling a lot of the divisions in Iraqi politics. The Sunnis are much more involved than they used to be. I know that there's some problems with former leaders what was basically Saddam Hussein's party. We ought to encourage Prime Minister Maliki to try to bring them in as well so they all could be united at what seems to be remnants of al Qaeda in Iraq that are carrying out these brutal bombings against Shia, this an attempt by al Qaeda to try to stimulate sectarian conflict again in Iraq and neither Prime Minister Maliki or the American forces or the Iraqi forces can let that happen.

KING: And if that challenge were not great enough for the military to deal with and the president to deal with, Senator Graham, you also have this expansion of the Taliban influence inside Pakistan. And ... GRAHAM: Right.

KING: ... Admiral Mullen was just there, the is due back for a White House meeting on Monday, administration officials say they have some big decisions to make based on what Admiral Mullen tells them. There are now more U.S. troops heading into Afghanistan and the question to you is if Pakistan is in such trouble and you have the Taliban on the move inside Pakistan, is it time for the president to slow down the deployment of U.S. troops in Afghanistan? Will they be at risk on the other side of the border or will we need perhaps more troops because of the uncertainty in Pakistan?

GRAHAM: I would counsel the president to do what General Petraeus and others in the region tell him about troops. There is a provision in the supplemental that is coming up in about a month that provides economic aid to Pakistan and $400 million to help them create a counterinsurgency program. I've been talking with administration officials, Republican Party leaders, to see if we can break some of that money out and pass it as a standalone provision soon to show the Pakistani people and government that we're with you, to give them some money to accelerate their counterinsurgency program and give them some money to provide economic aid to their people, the people do not want the Taliban to run Pakistan, but the economy in Pakistan is on its knees and we've got to get the Pakistani Army focused on the insurgency, as well as the government.

The threat the Pakistan is not an invasion by India. It's insurgents, the Taliban and others destabilizing the country and I think we need to be all in in helping Pakistan As to Iraq in 2011, I hope we will have a strong contingent of Americans there training their Air Force, their Navy. It is in our long-term best interest to have an enduring relationship with the people of Iraq, militarily and otherwise.

KING: Admiral Mullen says Pakistan could be at a tipping point. You see the intelligence. Is the Taliban, Senator Feinstein, a threat to the government, the central government of Pakistan?

FEINSTEIN: Oh, in my opinion, yes. I also think that these bombings, the size of the bombings in Iraq are a real danger signal. And I think that Mr. Maliki has to step up to the plate on this. And it's going to be very interesting in the next few weeks to see how he handles this. If these bombings continue and there is an escalation of violence, I think it jeopardizes everything the united states is trying to do.

With respect to the Taliban and particularly in both Afghanistan, as well as Pakistan, I think the takeover of the Swat Valley, the movement up north is a very serious thing. The fact that, despite the fact that we provide money for the Pakistani military, they have done nothing to stop this Taliban advance, I think, causes me great concern that Pakistan may be in very deep trouble. And I would think that -- and most of us, I think, do agree that Pakistan is sort of Ground Zero for terror today and that this thing has to get sorted out and sorted out quickly or you could lose the government of Pakistan and Pakistan is a in nuclear power and that concerns me deeply. KING: A grave issue there. I want to close on a lighter note.

And that is, as we approach the 100 day note we are in a political environment where people are making assessments.

I want to take you, Senator Lieberman back to something you said when you were campaigning for John McCain at the Republican National Convention. Let's listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

LIEBERMAN: Senator Barack Obama is a gifted and eloquent young man who I think can do great things for our country in the years ahead, but, my friends, eloquence is no substitute for a record. Not in these tough times for America.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KING: We've been discussing a number of tough issues and there are many more, senator, has he proven you wrong, Barack Obama, in his first 100 days.

LIEBERMAN: First, John, let me thank you for running that tape.

KING: Tape is a dangerous thing.

LIEBERMAN: I have no regrets about supporting John McCain and really what I said then, I meant. Barack Obama is extremely gifted. Coming in at a very difficult time. I was thinking particularly about Iraq and Afghanistan, the war on terror. And McCain, of course, great experience, bipartisan record. Once the election was over, I said I would do everything to support Barack Obama as president. He is our president. I have, but I'll say this. I've been impressed by what he has done. He is a young man but he is extremely gifted. He has acted with strength, I think, and purpose in Iraq and Afghanistan, rebuilt some of our relations around the world and acted very boldly here at home on the economy where we needed him to particularly with the stimulus package.

But it's early but I would say he is off to a very good start. Maybe the most important thing he's done overall is that he has restored the confidence of the American people in the American presidency and he has raised their hopes about the future of our country. That is critically important.

KING: We're out of time. I want to give Senators Graham and Feinstein one sentence each. Senator Graham, to you the question is what does the Republican Party need to do in the second 100 days?

GRAHAM: To stand up for fiscal responsibility, work with the president and to make sure that we end Iraq right, win in Afghanistan and stabilize Pakistan, be a partner where we can and loyal opposition where we need to.

KING: There is a question as to whether you want to be the next governor of California. FEINSTEIN: Well, let me answer the prior question. No. You said in a sentence so give me an opportunity.

KING: All right.

FEINSTEIN: I think the Republican Party should stop being the party of no. This is a president well elected by a large number of people. He has had a very strong first 100 days. He has traveled to countries abroad, he has turned the page, he has opened a new day, he has taken strong executive actions, he has put together programs. He has delved into the economy. And I would hope that the second 100 days would find more Republican cooperation.

KING: When do we get the answer to that other question?

FEINSTEIN: Oh, you'll see.

KING: We'll see. Great. We're out of time. Senators Feinstein and Lieberman and Graham, thanks so much for coming.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Up next, Mary Matalin and James Carville have both counseled presidents in crisis. Their take on the challenges and the 100 day mark, something you will see only right here on STATE OF THE UNION. Stay with us.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

KING: We've added a sharp and occasionally spicy political team to our "State of the Union" report. The only place you'll see these tested strategists together on TV is right here.

And joining us now from New Orleans, our newest CNN political contributor, Republican Mary Matalin, alongside our longtime contributor Democrat James Carville.

I want to get, from both of you -- good morning from Jackson Square. It looks beautiful there, this morning -- a little breezy.

I want to get, from both of you, your 100-day headline, your assessment. But first, I want to share with you the assessment of somebody we got to know in the last campaign; that is the Alaska governor, Sarah Palin.

She says this of the first 100 days, the former vice presidential nominee, "For now, Obama's back-peddle on the bipartisanship promise just makes him look insincere. At some point, Obama will need Republicans on his side. He'd be smart to spend his second 100 days making up for the serious snubs of his first."

James Carville, does Sarah Palin have a point?

CARVILLE: Well, you know, I'd rather go with Senator Lieberman's point, who supported Senator McCain, and I completely agree with him -- without going through a recital of all the accomplishments, the signature accomplishment of this president is we have a restoration of confidence in this country. People are feeling better about the country. And that's a magnificent achievement.

And I thought that Senator Lieberman did a very good job of bringing that out. And I would prefer to go with his definition of the first 100 days than Governor Palin's.

KING: And what does Mary Matalin think, at this point?

If you look at the numbers, Mary, this president does have -- about two-thirds of the American people approve of his job. Even a higher number like him as a person and like the imagery of this presidency.

What do you think? MATALIN: Yes, he's maintained his personal popularity, but -- which is on par with his predecessors, but what he's lost, after starting out with record-setting approval ratings which included a goodly amount of Republicans, a lot of independents, he has lost that support, because what he is not is what he was perceived to be in the campaign, a centrist.

He's spent more than all of his predecessors since the beginning of this country. He's expanded government, the greatest in two generations. So he's not a centrist. He's also not post-partisan.

It's not just that he demonizes his opponents, which is old politics. He'd knee-cap his own guys. He's got Valerie Jarrett, who's the liaison -- your former guest is the liaison to MoveOn.org, who is running ads against moderate Democrats. He's not a centrist. He's not post-partisan. But he is -- elections have consequences. We lost, fair and square, and let's -- that's what this debate is about. I hope Republicans can rise to the challenge and oppose him and stop some of this expansion.

KING: Well, I want to talk about some terror policy in a minute. But since you raised that point, Mary, that you lost and you hope Republicans rise to the challenge, I want you to listen to something that your friend and your former colleague in the Bush White House, Steve Schmidt, said the other day about the decline of the Republican Party. Let's listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

STEVE SCHMIDT, REPUBLICAN STRATEGIST: It is near-extinct, in many ways, in the Northeast. It is extinct, in many ways, on the West Coast. And it is endangered in the Mountain West, increasingly endangered in the Southwest, particularly with Hispanic demographics. And if you look at the state of the party, it is a shrinking entity.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KING: Mary, Steve Schmidt says the leadership vacuum has him thinking you're in the "Lord of the Flies" phase of the Republican Party.

What's the road back?

MATALIN: You know, one of the advantages of age -- I didn't think I'd ever brag about this, but I'm much older than Steve and I've been through this before. And we will come back.

The Republican Party brand is irrefutably ruined, but that's because they lost their connection to conviction conservatism, common- sense conservatism. We've been here before and we've come back, not only strong but to ascend to the majority.

And there are many -- and there's a good nucleus of smart fiscal conservatives, strong defense, back to basics, personal liberty Republicans who will restore the brand and reassociate it with conservatism as we know it: Eric Cantor, Paul Ryan. You know who they are.

So the advantage of being aged is that you've been through it a couple, two or three times.

(LAUGHTER)

KING: James, I want to ask you, on this...

MATALIN: You went down, honey. You've been down.

CARVILLE: Yes, if age confers any wisdom, then you're looking at -- our combined age would make us very wise.

(LAUGHTER)

But, look, I think Steve is a very bright guy. He came down to my class at Tulane, and of course, as you know, Speaker Gingrich did, too.

But I think there's a lot of people who are trying to get under the hood of the Republican Party because, as Ross Perot said, it really needs some fixing. And there's a lot of different voices, here, and we're going to have to see what emerges.

But while all of that is going on, it's indisputable this president's enjoying a 69 percent approval rating. He's getting things done, left and right. He's got any number of things to deal with. And I think he's off to one heck of a start here. And it's understandable because the Republicans are all -- have a cacophony (ph) because they're not doing very well right now.

It's not...

KING: Mary...

MATALIN: It's not a -- it's not a cacophony (ph).

You know, John, can I just add to that?

We keep looking -- and all the pundits like to look at his top number, which is high, but as I said earlier, comparable to his predecessors. The danger spots for this president -- I'm just looking at all the polls, and they're 100 percent consistent on this. It's an 80 percent issue that people of all stripes, across the aisle, are concerned about the rapid and expansive growth of government that this president has ushered in.

That's not an old idea; it's not a stale idea; it's not Republican obstructionism. People just do not like how fast and how far this president has gone. That's an 80 percent issue.

So he's at -- he may be at 60 percent, but concerns over the things that he's done so far -- and that doesn't even include his foreign policy problems, you know -- he's got some undercurrents of issues, here, in this first 100 days. KING: Let me -- let me close on a lighter note, and that is, to James, you are a friend of now-Secretary of State Clinton. You were trying to help her retire her campaign debt when she was Senator Clinton...

(LAUGHTER)

... running against now-President Obama. And the Clinton campaign organization, trying to reduce its debt, has put out a letter offering people who contribute three potential prizes.

One is a day with former President Clinton in New York City. One is tickets to the "American Idol" season finale. And the third is, spend a weekend in Washington, D.C. with James Carville and Paul Begala.

(LAUGHTER)

Mary, you've got the checkbook there?

(LAUGHTER)

MATALIN: Oh, well, as you can see, I'd rather be here at Jazz Fest and the Zurich Classic and the Bubba Gump Run. And good luck in Washington with your crazy, loony lefties.

(LAUGHTER)

CARVILLE: I don't know.

MATALIN: That's a prize. What's the second prize, James?

CARVILLE: I always insist, the last two words, with Secretary of State Clinton and any conversation we have -- and they have always been, "Yes, ma'am."

(LAUGHTER)

So, whatever she wants, I'm delighted to do.

KING: James Carville and Mary Matalin, we are -- we are thrilled to have you back with us, together. We will see you again on "State of the Union" in the near future. Enjoy what looks like a beautiful morning, there in New Orleans.

(CROSSTALK)

KING: Take care, guys.

KING: During President Obama's time in office, we've traveled to 17 different states to hear your concerns and opinions. A unique perspective on the first 100 days from people we've been lucky to meet all across the country, next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

KING: We launched STATE OF THE UNION the weekend of the Obama inauguration, promising to chronicle the big issues here in Washington and also to come see how the debates affect you. Our first of 17 states in these 100 days was Ohio, where on a factory floor, we asked the man about to make history to assess the many challenges and the moment.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

KING: You took your family to the Lincoln Memorial.

OBAMA: Now, this is a good story. I love the Lincoln Memorial at night. We go and look at the Lincoln Second Inaugural, Sasha looks up and she says that's a long speech. Do you have to give one of those? I said, actually, that one's pretty short. Mine may even be longer. At which point, the Malia turns to me and says, first African American president. Better be good.

Today I say to you that the challenges we face are real. They are serious and they are many. They will not be met easily or in a short span of time, but know this, America, they will be met.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KING: A hundred days, of course, is far too soon to judge whether this new president will get his way and whether his way will work. But in our travels to 17 states in those 100 days, from Vermont and New York in the Northeast to Nevada and Arizona out in the Southwest, a fascinating look through your eyes of the many challenges, the uncertainty, and right here early on in Peoria, Illinois, of the pain.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

(UNKNOWN): I don't want to be on unemployment. I have never been on unemployment before.

KING (voice-over): For John and Mary Beth Fagan (ph), a double whammy. Both worked at Caterpillar, both out of work effective Friday. Three children, two cars and a mortgage.

(UNKNOWN): If things really got that bad, I would probably volunteer to go back overseas, and that's pretty bad to say.

KING: You would volunteer to go to Iraq or Afghanistan?

(UNKNOWN): For my family, I would, yes.

(END VIDEO CLIP) KING: One swift achievement in the first 100 days was passage of a $787 billion economic stimulus. The president signed it into law less than one month into his administration.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

OBAMA: We have begun the essential work of keeping the American dream alive.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KING: Just a few weeks later, a $75 billion administration plan to help millions of homeowners make their mortgage payments.

Another bold and controversial White House move, forcing the CEO of General Motors to step down as a condition for more government bailout money.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

OBAMA: This restructuring, as painful as it will be in the short-term, will mark not an end, but a new beginning for a great American industry, an auto industry that is once more out-competing the world.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KING: Speaking of the auto industry, we have visited a handful of states with auto plants over the past hundred days, including Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, and down here in Springhill, Tennessee, many union autoworkers told us they believe the president is overreaching.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

(UNKNOWN): Yeah, we need help, but to say that the president tells a company's CEO that he has to leave, I just don't believe that should happen.

KING: Make no mistake, Brenda Carter says she loves President Obama, but her concerns, a proof of the risks Mr. Obama faces as he takes an aggressive role in the restructuring of GM and Chrysler. The Lansing Grand River assembly line. Modern, clean and efficient. These Cadillacs among GM's best-selling models. And yet, this plant is down from two shifts to one. New cars just aren't selling.

(UNKNOWN): It's scary times right now for a lot of people.

KING: To listen, to look around is to hear and see a way of life fading. Generous Motors was the nickname when Brad Fredline was growing up. Both grandfathers retired from GM. His father, too. (UNKNOWN): You graduated on a Friday and by Monday you were working at the factory, you knew you had a rock solid job for 30 years, you buy a little place up north and you retire. Those days are gone, I'm afraid.

(END VIDEO CLIP) (COMMERCIAL BREAK)

KING: I'm John King and this is what's coming up this next hour of our STATE OF THE UNION report for this Sunday, April 26th, 2009.

Did the United States use torture to get information from suspected terrorists? The story is being covered by virtually every media outlet, but is it being done right? Howie Kurtz will grill a panel of top Washington journalists.

A pair of new movies with journalists as the stars. No problem. Just play ourselves, right? Wrong. Ahead, the real life newspaper man who helped turn Russell Crowe and Robert Downey Jr. into convincing reporters.

And as we continue CNN's special coverage of Barack Obama's first 100 days, we'll get real-world perspective from three former White House staffers who know just how tough things can get inside the Oval Office. That's all ahead this hour on STATE OF THE UNION.