Center for American Progress


IRAQ
The Man With No Plan

Today, Senate confirmation hearings begin for John Negroponte. If confirmed, he would assume control of the American presence in Iraq on June 30 and would inherit a host of occupation responsibilities and challenges from Paul Bremer. As Peter Ogden writes for American Progress, Negroponte was ambassador to Honduras when "the country was the base for President Reagan's covert war against Nicaragua's Sandinista government." While serving in that position, Negroponte was accused of "covering up abuses by the Honduran military to ensure the flow of U.S. aide from an increasingly skeptical Congress." His current tenure as the U.S. representative to the U.N. has only further undermined his credibility in the international community, especially in regards to Iraq, by leading a diplomatic effort that has been increasingly dismissive of the rest of the world. Other problems: Negroponte doesn't speak Arabic, has never been based in the region and has never been involved in post-conflict reconstruction. American Progress Senior Policy Analyst Michael Pan details ten tough scenarios the Senate should ask Negroponte to consider.

BILLIONS IN RECONSTRUCTION MONEY TO CORPORATE CROOKS: Negroponte will inherit a reconstruction effort that has been badly mismanaged. The United States has awarded billions of dollars of contracts to ten companies in Iraq that "have paid more than $300 million in penalties since 2000 to resolve allegations of bid rigging, fraud, delivery of faulty military parts and environmental damage" while working on projects around the world. For example, the U.S. "is paying more than $780 million to one British firm that was convicted of fraud on three federal construction projects and banned from U.S. government work during 2002." The two largest Iraq contractors – Bechtel and Halliburton – have also paid penalties over the last few years. In December 2001, the Bush administration revoked a Clinton-era rule that ensured "repeated violations of federal law would make a company ineligible for new contracts."

VIOLENCE SLOWS RECONSTRUCTION EFFORTS: The reconstruction efforts are further complicated by escalating violence. The Chicago Tribune reports "insurgents and kidnappers have preyed on foreigners – notably contractors, businessmen and journalists – and have seriously disrupted the economic recovery." According to the U.S. military, over the last several weeks "40 foreigners from a dozen nations have been abducted." Overall, the official estimate is "work has been derailed at 10 percent of Iraq's work sites because of fears, threats of attack and a slowdown of supplies from Kuwait, Jordan and the port of Umm Qasr," but officials privately say the true impact has been even more severe. Larry Diamond, a former member of the Coalition Provisional Authority, said "we just bungled this so badly. We just weren't honest with ourselves or with the American people about what was going to be needed to secure the country." See this American Progress "to do" list for the days remaining before turnover.

COALITION OF THE WILLING NOW COALITION OF THE SHRINKING: At the end of May 2,000 troops from Spain, Honduras and the Dominican Republic will pull out of Iraq. There was hope "that the UK might fill the gap" by sending more troops to ease the burden on the already overstretched U.S. military. But now "U.S. forces are expected to take control." In Britain there was "no great enthusiasm or appetite" to send more troops to Iraq to help patrol Najaf, where "U.S. forces are already in a tense stand-off with the militia loyal to Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr." Poland has also scaled back its role by reducing the size of the zone it patrols. Yesterday, as the already weak coalition continued to deteriorate, Sen. Richard Lugar (R-IN) called the U.S. diplomatic effort to date a "failure" and said "everyone" in the administration was at fault.

INSISTING ON MISSILE DEFENSE AT THE EXPENSE OF OUR TROOPS: Members of Congress are proposing diverting some of the $10 billion the President has requested for missile defense "to fund more troops and equipment in Iraq." The move comes in the wake of "a report GAO issued last week criticizing the president's plan to field a missile defense capability this summer." Currently, the White House has refused to immediately plug serious funding gaps for armor, helmets and other protective equipment military commanders say they need to protect troops. And according to Newsweek, a new study circulating in the Army says refusal to protect the troops may have contributed to one out of every four American casualties in Iraq. The diverted funds could be used to plug the holes, or to "boost the Army's strength by 10,000 troops" – forces that are sorely needed to stabilize the security situation in Iraq. But conservatives in Congress are expected to insist the money be used on the discredited missile defense program.

HEALTH CARE
Drug Card Confusion

Enrollment for the new Medicare drug card program is set to begin next month, and already "seasoned counselors are struggling to come up with easy-to-understand answers for Medicare recipients" about whether the cards will actually save people any money. As one expert noted, "companies offering discount cards do not have to stick with the savings they initially advertise, the new Medicare laws does not specify any base price to which the discounts must apply, and card sponsors can change the list of covered drugs even though Medicare beneficiaries will be locked into the card they choose until the end of the year." Earlier this year the White House spent millions of taxpayer dollars on television ads promoting the cards, only to have those ads cited by the General Accounting Office for grossly misleading seniors, citing omissions about new costs to seniors in the new law. Review the entire Medicare issue on this page of American Progress Medicare columns and analysis.

ADMINISTRATION USES FEDS TO INTIMIDATE SENIORS: According to newly released details, last October the Bush administration took the extraordinary step of stopping and searching a bus full of seniors on their way back from purchasing cheaper medicines in Canada. The intimidation move, which FDA officials note is "not consistent" with past practice, came at the very same time the White House and pharmaceutical industry were working to remove provisions from the new Medicare law that would have formally provided seniors access to lower-priced medicines from abroad. Details of the administration's heavy-handed tactics only emerged this month after Sen. Mark Dayton (D-MN) demanded answers in a letter to the FDA – an agency whose complicity with the drug industry has come into question since the Bush administration took office.

AMERICA'S MAYOR BECOMES AMERICA'S DRUG INDUSTRY SHILL: Sparing no expense in its fear-mongering campaign to scare seniors, the drug industry has hired its longtime crony Rudolph Giuliani to help them fight off efforts to lower the price of medicine. The former mayor of New York, who raked in almost $100,000 from drug industry executives in just the few months he considered running for Senate in 2000, is being bankrolled to use his law enforcement credentials to claim cheaper drugs from Canada are unsafe. Of course, Giuliani has no proof – there has been no substantive data showing Canadian drugs are unsafe, and the FDA itself says it can guarantee a safe reimportation system for just $54 million (a fraction of the billions that could be saved with lower prices). For his part, Giuliani is refusing to "tell reporters how much PhRMA pays his company" for his services.

STILL REFUSING TO PROVIDE CONGRESS WITH DETAILS: During the Medicare debate in Congress, the Bush administration threatened to fire a government actuary if he told lawmakers the true cost of the bill. Now, with the bill costing at least $100 billion more than lawmakers were told, the White House is refusing to make public the actual cost estimates it withheld. In response, House Democrats are now "poised to sue the Bush Administration" in a lawsuit that "could clearly define the long-debated parameters of congressional oversight over the executive branch." Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA), senior minority member on the Government Reform Committee, last month invoked the "seven-member rule," whereby administrations traditionally release documents if seven members of the oversight panel request them. He was rejected by the administration.

PFIZER CEO/BUSH FUNDER CONTINUES CUTTING OFF SENIORS: Gov. Tim Pawlenty (R-MN) last week used his state's pension fund holdings to sponsor a Pfizer stockholder resolution that would force the drug industry giant to only raise prices at the rate of inflation. In response, Pfizer CEO Henry McKinnell – a top Bush fundraiser – claimed to "sympathize with financially strapped patients, but vowed to continue efforts to cut off supplies" of drugs to Canadian pharmacies that sell to U.S. customers. Another Pfizer vice president claimed that the drug price problem was not exorbitant prices in the United States, but that "the French and Germans and Canadians are not paying their fair share." What he did not mention was that the drug industry is, by far, the most profitable in America, and that a minor reduction in drug prices here would do little to reduce those profits. As a new Boston University study shows, because lower prices and drug reimportation would allow more people to buy drugs who don't buy them now, industry profits and R&D funding could actually rise.







9/11 – CONGRESSMEN DEMAND FULL ACCOUNTING OF EMERGENCY MONEY: On the heels of reports the president diverted $700 million into Iraq invasion planning without informing Congress, Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV) and Rep. David Obey (D-WI) pressed the White House on Monday "for a full accounting of how the Bush administration had spent $40 billion in emergency money that was provided by Congress just days after the Sept. 11 attacks." In a letter to the White House, Byrd and Obey say that "contrary to the requirements of law, there appeared to have been no consultation with Congress on how $20 billion specifically handed over to the president for his allocation had been distributed. They also said the administration had not submitted required quarterly reports on the use of the entire $40 billion for almost a year."

HOMELAND SECURITY – NUCLEAR LABS REMAIN VULNERABLE: Rep. Christopher Shays said yesterday that the nation's nuclear weapons labs "remained vulnerable and that the Energy Department was underestimating the threat it faces." The GAO will release a report today, largely confirming Shays' concerns, that finds "the threat posed by terrorists against the nation's weapons labs is estimated by intelligence agencies to be far more lethal than what the Energy Department has accepted in its most recent planning for security." Mathew Zipoli, a leader of the security police at a nuclear facility at Lawrence Livermore Lab near San Francisco, said that "there were major deficiencies in training, equipment and personnel practices at the lab." Earlier, when Zipoli provided information about security lapses at Livermore to the Energy Department Inspector General, he was fired but later reinstated by court order.

CIVIL LIBERTIES – HOSPITAL STOPS ASHCROFT: Thanks to a lawsuit filed by the National Abortion Federation against Attorney General John Ashcroft, a New York hospital may have turned the tide in the argument over "whether the government should have access to confidential medical records, even in redacted form." Today's NYT reports "In a reversal, Justice Department lawyers defending the new federal law that bans a type of abortion voluntarily withdrew a subpoena for abortion records from a Manhattan hospital yesterday… In defense of the law, the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act, which is being challenged in lawsuits in three states, Bush administration lawyers had argued in pretrial hearings that the medical records were needed to prove that the procedure was never medically necessary."

9/11 COMMISSION – ASHCROFT'S MISINFORMATION CAMPAIGN DEBUNKED: As conservatives continue their assault on the 9/11 Commission in general and commissioner Jamie Gorelick in particular, Kate Martin of the Center for National Security Studies sets the record straight. Martin writes "Contrary to the repeated mischaracterization by the Attorney General and others, ["the wall"] never prohibited sharing information between law enforcement and intelligence communities; to the contrary, it expressly provided for such sharing." Further, "while the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was interpreted to mean that prosecutors could not direct foreign intelligence wiretaps, as opposed to criminal wiretaps, the 9/11 failures had nothing whatsoever to do with the inability of prosecutors to direct such surveillance."




________________________________________________________________________________