Jake Tapper hammered Robert “a recovery that got our economy moving again” Gibbs yesterday on whether the Administration is not doing more for the economy because of political paralysis. After four attempts to avoid answering the question or focus exclusively on blaming Republicans, Gibbs finally suggested there wasn’t all that much the Administration can do to stimulate the economy.

Q Is the reason the President is not pushing for a bolder move on the economy because he doesn’t believe there is one, or because he doesn’t think he could get it through Congress?

MR. GIBBS: Well, Jake, I think you will hear the President — you heard him today after meeting with his economic team, and you will hear him over the course of the next several weeks outlining a series of ideas, some of which are stuck in Congress and some of which we continue to work through the economic team, that will be targeted measures to continue to spur our recovery and to create an environment in which the private sector is hiring.

Q But these are smaller-bore type proposals. These aren’t $787 billion stimulus packages.

MR. GIBBS: No, they’re not. But let’s understand — when you mention small bore — some of you probably saw this article today — “Small businesses sit in holding pattern.” “Small businesses have put hiring, supply buying, and real estate expansion on hold as they wait out the vote on a small business aid bill that is stalled in the Senate earlier this summer.” Right?

As the President said in the Rose Garden, 60 percent of our job losses have come from small business. Small businesses are waiting for the Senate to act on a bill that would cut their taxes and provide them greater loans and investment opportunities with which to expand.

The Republican Party talks a lot about their support for and their helping of small business, and I think the question that the President put toward them today is, if that’s what you support, why are you standing in the way of something that small businesses acknowledge would help with their hiring, with their purchasing, and with their expansion?

Q Okay, but the question I asked was, do you think — does the President think that there should be a bolder move taken beyond a $30 billion small business lending initiative —

MR. GIBBS: Well, again, I think —

Q — and there aren’t the votes for it, or he just didn’t think there is such a thing?

MR. GIBBS: I think, Jake, I think the President mentioned several ideas today that he believes are important to continue that recovery that we will pursue. I think these will be areas and initiatives that are targeted towards spurring recovery and creating an environment for hiring, not some —

Q But does that mean he believes that that is the right approach, or he believes that it’s the only politically possible approach?

MR. GIBBS: Well, look, I don’t think there’s any — I think there’s no doubt that there are — there’s only so much that can be done.

Q Not having to do with politics?

MR. GIBBS: Not having to do with politics. [my emphasis]

At which point Gibbs promptly pivoted and adopted the most thread-bare of DC excuses: whocouldanode.

Q In retrospect, was the stimulus too small?

MR. GIBBS: Look, we always — I think it makes sense to step back just for a second. If you look at — and I don’t think anybody had — and I think we’d be the first to admit that nobody had, in January of 2009, a sufficient grasp at the sheer depth of what we were facing. I think that’s, quite frankly, true for virtually every economist that made predictions. You had — the chart that I generally show, adding the job losses for the last three recessions up doesn’t get you to the job loss that we’ve seen in this recession alone.

It took us a long time to get to this point. We got here not simply because of one thing but because of many things. We’ve seen the housing market collapse. We saw what happened to credit markets. We saw what happened to the stability of our financial system. All of that accumulated after many years into one big pothole that — the size of which any stimulus was unlikely to fill.

I think that for all of the political back-and-forth on the Recovery Act, there should no longer be any doubt — despite some Capitol Hill nonbelievers — that what the Recovery Act did was prevent us from sliding even into a deeper recession, with greater economic contraction, with greater job loss, than we have experienced because of it. [my emphasis]

Calculated Risk didn’t even have to look outside of the Administration–at least as it existed when people were making predictions about the recovery act–to find an economist who had enough of a grasp on what was happening.

How about Christina Romer (the chair of the Council of Economic Advisers)? From Ryan Lizza at the New Yorker:

At the December [2008] meeting, it was Romer’s job to explain just how bad the economy was likely to get. “David Axelrod said we have to have a ‘holy-shit moment,’ ” she began. “Well, Mr. President, this is your ‘holy-shit moment.’ It’s worse than we thought.” She gave a short tutorial about what happens to an economy during a depression, what happened during previous severe recessions, and what could happen if the Administration didn’t act. She showed PowerPoint slides emphasizing that the situation would require a bold government response.

…

The most important question facing Obama that day was how large the stimulus should be. Since the election, as the economy continued to worsen, the consensus among economists kept rising. … Romer had run simulations of the effects of stimulus packages of varying sizes: six hundred billion dollars, eight hundred billion dollars, and $1.2 trillion. The best estimate for the output gap was some two trillion dollars over 2009 and 2010. Because of the multiplier effect, filling that gap didn’t require two trillion dollars of government spending, but Romer’s analysis, deeply informed by her work on the Depression, suggested that the package should probably be more than $1.2 trillion.

So Romer thought the right size was probably about double what was actually enacted (excluding the Alternative Minimum Tax relief).

And then there are the prominent Nobel prize winning economists in the Democratic party who predicted the stimulus was too small.

So basically, the Administration’s strategy for limiting the political damage of the dismal economy (to say nothing of doing something to fix it) is simply to blame Republicans, because actually admitting that the Administration fucked up–much less doing something like firing Tim Geithner and starting fresh–is just not palatable.

A pity for all those struggling Americans who have to pay for the Administration’s arrogance, huh?

From a joint press release:

The American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) today filed a lawsuit challenging the government’s asserted authority to carry out “targeted killings” of U.S. citizens located far from any armed conflict zone.

The authority contemplated by the Obama administration is far broader than what the Constitution and international law allow, the groups charge. Outside of armed conflict, both the Constitution and international law prohibit targeted killing except as a last resort to protect against concrete, specific and imminent threats of death or serious physical injury. An extrajudicial killing policy under which names are added to CIA and military “kill lists” through a secret executive process and stay there for months at a time is plainly not limited to imminent threats.

“The United States cannot simply execute people, including its own citizens, anywhere in the world based on its own say-so,” said Vince Warren, Executive Director of CCR. “The law prohibits the government from killing without trial or conviction other than in the face of an imminent threat that leaves no time for deliberation or due process. That the government adds people to kill lists after a bureaucratic process and leaves them on the lists for months at a time flies in the face of the Constitution and international law.”

The groups charge that targeting individuals for execution who are suspected of terrorism but have not been convicted or even charged – without oversight, judicial process or disclosed standards for placement on kill lists – also poses the risk that the government will erroneously target the wrong people. In recent years, the U.S. government has detained many men as terrorists, only for courts or the government itself to discover later that the evidence was wrong or unreliable.

According to today’s legal complaint, the government has not disclosed the standards it uses for authorizing the premeditated and deliberate killing of U.S. citizens located far from any battlefield. The groups argue that the American people are entitled to know the standards being used for these life and death decisions.

“A program that authorizes killing U.S. citizens, without judicial oversight, due process or disclosed standards is unconstitutional, unlawful and un-American,” said Anthony D. Romero, Executive Director of the ACLU. “We don’t sentence people to prison on the basis of secret criteria, and we certainly shouldn’t sentence them to death that way. It is not enough for the executive branch to say ‘trust us’ – we have seen that backfire in the past and we should learn from those mistakes.”

CCR and the ACLU were retained by Nasser Al-Aulaqi to bring a lawsuit in connection with the government’s decision to authorize the targeted killing of his son, U.S. citizen Anwar Al-Aulaqi, whom the CIA and Defense Department have targeted for death. The complaint asks a court to rule that using lethal force far from any battlefield and without judicial process is illegal in all but the narrowest circumstances and to prohibit the government from carrying out targeted killings except in compliance with these standards. It also asks the court to order the government to disclose the standards it uses to place U.S. citizens on government kill lists. [my emphasis]

For the backup documentation, go here or here.

Great news! My house goes on the market today — at the same price the house next door sold as a foreclosure a few years ago.

Okay — it’s mostly good news insofar as I don’t have to drive back to Ann Arbor every weekend and instead can start enjoying the beauty of west Michigan.

But being in the housing market at its bleakest moment does mean I’m following news closely. Like this story, suggesting the Administration may bring back the housing tax credit.

The Obama administration has not decided whether it should resurrect a popular tax credit for first-time homebuyers, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan said on Sunday.”It’s too early to say whether the tax credit will be revived,” Donovan said in an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union” program. He said the administration would “do everything we can” to stabilize the shaky U.S. housing market.

Now, policy wonks of all political persuasions have agreed since last year that it was always a stupid policy (and note, this is from  before it was extended to more buyers).

“It’s terrible policy,” says Mark Calabria of the libertarian Cato Institute.

“It’s awful policy,” says Andrew Jakabovics, associate director for housing and economics at the liberal Center for American Progress. “It’s incredibly expensive. It’s not well targeted.”

Home sales have risen dramatically in the past year, but most economists don’t attribute the increase to the tax credit. August single-family-home sales in Southern Nevada, for instance, hit 3,229, up more than 25 percent from a year earlier.

But economists attribute most of the rising sales to the plunge in prices, not the tax credit. The median sale price of single-family homes was off more than 35 percent from a year earlier.

“A heck of a lot of people would have bought the house anyway,” says Ted Gayer, an economist at the Brookings Institution.

According to an estimate by the National Association of Realtors, of the 2 million new homebuyers since the credit was instituted, 350,000 say they would not have bought a house without the tax break.

“We paid $8,000 to at least 1.5 million people to do something they were going to do anyway,” Jakabovics says.

The tax break, due to expire at the end of November, is on track to cost $15 billion, twice what Congress had planned. In other words, it will cost $43,000 for every new homebuyer who would not have bought a house without the tax break.

Unlike Cash for Clunkers, there was no societal benefit tied to the credit (however ineffective C4C was at saving gas). Moreover, the benefit was small enough — given the cost of a house — that it wasn’t helping all that many marginal buyers get into a new home.

More importantly, as Calculated Risk notes (and has been noting, for over a year), the credit doesn’t affect the underlying problem in the housing market: too few households and therefore too much supply.

The problem in housing is there is too much supply (at the current price). Incentivizing people to buy existing homes just shuffles households around — it does NOT reduce the overall supply unless the buyer is moving out of their parent’s basement. I doubt that happened very often. Note: It is important to remember that rental units are part of the overall supply, so moving people from a rental unit to homeownership doesn’t help.

And if the tax credit leads to more new home sales — that ADDS to the excess supply. And that makes the situation WORSE.

It would be far better for housing and the economy to announce “There will be no further housing tax credits.”

But, a tax credit is a Republican policy championed by former realtor Johnny Isakson (R-GA) which means it has the plus — in DC terms — of being hopey-changey bipartisan and of being celebrated as a tax cut for market behavior in DC’s twisted sense of morality. And so, we consider re-upping the tax credit.

And while HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan says the Administration would “do anything we can” to prop up the housing market, they seem to be ignoring the underlying causes of the problem. Joe Nocera has a great piece talking about how all players in the housing market right now have reason to be really cautious. But for most, the issue still comes back to oversupply and therefore prices that will fall for some time.

The second reason is that, Mr. Yun notwithstanding, most people simply do not believe that housing prices are even close to hitting bottom. “In the Bay Area, a house that was worth $300,000 a decade ago became a million-dollar home,” said Greg Fielding, a real estate broker and blogger. “Now it is listed at $800,000.” That price, he suggested, was still unrealistically high. The seller, meanwhile, doesn’t want to face the fact that his or her home is too richly priced, and won’t sell at a more realistic price — which may well be below his or her mortgage debt.

There is also an immense amount of inventory that has yet to hit the market but will, sooner or later. People in the real estate business have taken to calling this “the shadow inventory.” It consists of homes for which the owners have stopped paying the mortgage but the banks haven’t foreclosed on yet, foreclosed properties that have not yet been put up for sale, homes with modified mortgages that the owners still can’t afford and will soon default on and so on.

Mr. Barnes describes the shadow inventory as akin to “ranks of Napoleonic infantry, rows deep, hidden in the fog.” This inventory, estimated by Rick Sharga of RealtyTrac to be between three million and four million homes, is almost certain to drag down home prices for the foreseeable future. “The disinterest of buyers, in an interest-rate environment that may be the lowest ever, is striking,” Mr. Barnes said. But, he added, it makes perfect sense. Since 2007, housing prices have been in a deflationary spiral, and nobody can say when it will end. “It doesn’t matter if interest rates go down to 2 percent,” Mr. Barnes said — buyers won’t reappear in big numbers until they can see the light at the end of the tunnel.

The Administration has not yet, however, considered the most obvious “do everything we can” to affect this bleak scenario: stop the shrinkage in the number of households. If, rather than declaring victory over giving the banks more power to unwind foreclosures over time (thus creating the Napoleonic army of shadow inventory Barnes refers to), the Administration had done what was needed to actually keep people in homes, this downward spiral would be slowed, at least.

The downward spiral in housing is not going to be arrested until we’re able to keep the people who want to stay in their houses in them. But thus far I see no sign of a policy solution that will do that.

Add this to the list of things I might laugh about if it weren’t so damned sad and awful. The Administration has now realized trying a Canadian accused of murder for killing someone in an active battlefield as a teenager exposes the Gitmo show trials as a kangaroo court. But they don’t know whether they have the authority to intervene to stop it.

Administration officials would speak only anonymously about deliberations on whether to try to abort the trial. But their view about the need to improve the system’s perceived credibility — so allies will cooperate by providing evidence or extraditing defendants — was echoed by Kenneth L. Wainstein, assistant attorney general for national security in the Bush administration.

“It is important for the government to be able to proceed through a trial, to do so in a transparent way, and have the world see that this is a fair process with strong safeguards and full due process,” he said. “The sooner that happens, the better.”

[snip]

Administration officials have discussed whether senior civilian leaders at the Pentagon or elsewhere could get involved, helping to revive plea negotiations or even directing Admiral MacDonald to make a more attractive offer. (Admiral MacDonald did not respond to an interview request.)

A similar high-level intervention would clearly be allowed in the regular court system, where the attorney general supervises prosecutions. But tribunal rules insulate commission officials.

A provision in the Military Commissions Act prohibits “unlawful command influence,” defined as attempting “to coerce, or, by any unauthorized means, influence” the judgment or actions of prosecutors or the convening authority. Officials are debating what that means.

But it seems there are at least two things complicating this picture (I’ll think of more after I drink more coffee).

First, in discussions of Khadr’s potential plea deal, no one seems to admit that the plea deals themselves discredit the military commissions. The press reacted little more favorably to Ibrahim al Qosi’s pretend 14 year sentence that everyone knew was actually two years than they have to the rulings in the Khadr case admitting rape threat tainted evidence. The kabuki quality of the plea deal was one of the reasons Khadr cited for firing his lawyers and rejecting the plea deal they were offering him (they were offering him 30 pretend years and 5 real ones). So a sweeter plea deal, without fixing the whole double secret sentence business, won’t do all that much to restore the credibility of the military commissions.

Also, it seems like the Administration has one other option (and I hope the Canucks will expand on this in comments). After all, our government has transferred every other western detainee back to his home country. There have been discussions with Canada about doing the same. Why not make Omar Khadr Stephen Harper’s problem? Nothing in the military commissions would preclude the Administration from engaging in foreign policy, would it?

Of course, that would require the courage to stand up to the screeching fear-mongers who would attack the Obama Administration for making the same kind of deals that the Bush Administration made.

But international credibility doesn’t come for free. If the Administration is serious about winning international credibility for our kangaroo court, it is going to have to be willing to make the case for credibility itself. And right now, it still seems to be hoping for some gimmick to get out of its Khadr problem.

I’ll admit it. I’ve got ulterior motives for posting trash two weeks before the regular season begins.

First, I will once again be mostly away from the Toobz this weekend as I continue to experience the joys of moving. So I wanted to leave you with something more fun than CIA corruption, our failing economy, and Gitmo show trials to keep you busy. Hopefully, this will be the last weekend I’ll be entirely AWOL (though I might do something crazy next weekend and actually treat it like a holiday).

Next, I wanted to remind you that this is the most fun preseason weekend–cause you get to see things like the formerly hapless Rams, now led by Sam Bradford and his apparently healthy arm, come from behind to beat the Pats and their sieve-like defense, even with Brady playing most of the game.

Even more fun for the few of us who like the Pats but hate the Colts is seeing Aaron Rogers outplay Peyton Manning in Green Bay’s thumping of the Colts (yes, Phred, it is time to gear up for hubcap season).

Speaking of which…

The real reason I’m posting trash today is to share a terrible discovery.

As most of you know, I’m in the middle of a move to the west part of MI. I’ve been self-congratulatory as I looked forward to football for several weeks now. Not only can we be cautiously optimistic about the Lions this year (in the same way that, with MI having the best job creation last month but still being the second biggest clusterfuck state, we can be optimistic that things will improve, but not all that much). But, I thought, living on Lake Michigan I would have the right to root for any of three teams as the “local” team: the Lions, Da Bears, and even (because really Lake Michigan isn’t all THAT big), Green Bay.

Think of the fun of rooting against Old Man Geezer in every divisional game, if only to wind bmaz up.

Alas.

Last night I did the math. Using means of transport readily available to me, I would have to root for Peyton Manning before Aaron Rogers:

• Chicago (2 hours, 42 minutes)
• Detroit (2 hours, 58 minutes)
• Indy (4 hours, 23 minutes)
• Cleveland (5 hrs, 15 minutes)
• Cincinnati (6 hours, 5 minutes)
• Green Bay (6 hours, 8 minutes)

Mind you, if I suddenly came into possession of a very big boat, then Chicago would be even more local (and I’d be even more bummed about the prospect of rooting for Jay Cutler). Or, if I suddenly learned to fly and stumbled upon my own private plane, Green Bay would actually be closer than Detroit (though tickets to Lions games would still be far easier to acquire).

So if I disappear from blogging and become a bankster anytime soon, you’ll all know it’s not really that I’m an asshole who hates real people, I’m just trying to avoid rooting for Peyton Manning.

In the meantime, some other potentially interesting pre-season games: The ‘Skins discover the joy of an injured McNabb as he sits out their game against the Jets. The Gents go to Baltimore. And two of the best pre-season contests for the QB job–temporarily in Pittsburgh (at least until Big Ben’s next brush with the law) and permanently in Denver–play out in Mile High.

(Hubcap image from liza31337)

Keep in mind as you read these four paragraphs from WaPo’s follow-up on NYT’s story on Mohammed Zia Salehi that the person quoted is almost certainly from the same CIA that profiles terrorist organizations that, regardless of the charitable work they do, may not legally receive money.

U.S. officials did not dispute that Salehi was on the CIA payroll, which was first reported by The New York Times. But officials sought to draw a distinction between agency payments and corruption probes.

“The United States government had nothing to do with the activities for which this individual is being investigated,” the second U.S. official said. “It’s not news that we sometimes pay people overseas who help the United States do what it needs to get done. . . . Nor should it be surprising, in a place like Afghanistan, that some influential figures can be both helpful and – on their own, separate and apart – corrupt to some degree.”

The flow of CIA money into the region dates to the agency’s support for mujaheddin fighters who ousted Soviet forces three decades ago.

The spigot was tightened during the 1990s but reopened after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Much of the money went to support warlords whose militias helped to overthrow the Taliban regime, which had provided sanctuary for Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda training camps. Salehi had served as an interpreter for one of the most prominent of those warlords, Abdurrashid Dostum, an ethnic Uzbek whose forces played a critical role in the campaign against the Taliban.

The unnamed “second US official” almost certainly is at the CIA or it’s close vicinity. And this person wants to claim that the money CIA pays to Salehi has absolutely nothing to do with the corruption of which he stands accused. The story elsewhere details the alleged corruption to include sheltering New Ansari (a money transfer firm used to drain aid money out of Afghanistan), doling out cash and cars to Hamid Karzai supporters, and negotiating with the Taliban. So the CIA actually wants to claim that the money it pays to Salehi is not then laundered into payments to Karzai supporters or cooperative Taliban members.

You know, the Taliban? The guys we claim to be fighting, since there are no more al Qaeda members in Afghanistan?

And you have to love the understated irony of the passage, the way Greg Miller and Joshua Partlow remind readers that the CIA has funded a lot of Islamic extremists, including some who loosely cooperated with other mujahadeen groups like those that would become al Qaeda. It’d be nice, mind you, if they also reminded readers that Rashid Dostum is the creep behind the Convoy of Death massacre, but that might just be too much irony for this short passage.

It’s bad enough that the CIA openly admits funding this guy, yet claims their payments could have nothing to do with the deep corruption of which he is accused.

But on top of that there’s this blind belief that these kind of payments never, ever, have blowback.

I would be laughing my ass off at this if I weren’t about to put my home on the market for what the house next door sold as a foreclosure several years ago. (h/t CR)

By postponing the date at which they lock in losses, banks and other investors positioned themselves to benefit from the slow mending of the real estate market. But now industry executives are questioning whether delaying foreclosures — a strategy contrary to the industry adage that “the first loss is the best loss” — is about to backfire. With home prices expected to fall as much as 10% further, the refusal to foreclose quickly on and sell distressed homes at inventory-clearing prices may be contributing to the stall of the overall market seen in July sales data. It also may increase the likelihood of more strategic defaults.

[snip]

Some servicing executives acknowledged that stalling on foreclosures will cause worse pain in the future — and that the reckoning may be almost here.

“The industry as a whole got into a panic mode and was worried about all these loans going into foreclosure and driving prices down, so they got all these programs, started Hamp and internal mods and short sales,” said John Marecki, vice president of East Coast foreclosure operations for Prommis Solutions, an Atlanta company that provides foreclosure processing services. Until recently, he was senior vice president of default administration at Flagstar Bank in Troy, Mich. “Now they’re looking at this, how they held off and they’re getting to the point where maybe they made a mistake in that realm.”

Extend and pretend always assumed that at some point things would start turning around. But since that’s not going to happen anytime soon, this is like death by a thousand cuts.

To both the banksters and homeowners.

What no one seems to be honestly accounting for is the degree to which this process contributes to weighing the economy down.

Take a look at this graphic. It’s a version of a graphic that has gotten a lot of play over the last year showing the growth in unemployment rates over time across the country. But this one adds foreclosures and bankruptcy. While it still doesn’t show what I think needs to be shown, it does at least show how foreclosures preceded unemployment in the housing bubble states (as opposed to the Mid-West, where unemployment led to foreclosures). Some of the foreclosure-driven unemployment came through the collapse of the building industry. But as more and more people get stuck in houses, particularly as foreclosures drive down the price of real estate and therefore strand even those who have kept up with their mortgages, it leads to a whole lot less mobility which in turn leads to extended unemployment.

It sucks to sell a house for foreclosure level prices. But I’m very, very grateful we can do even that, because it means we’re able to move to a new job. But I’m acutely aware we’re paying this price because of a failed policy, one which tried to make homeowners bear all the cost for the shared mistakes of the banksters and the creditors.

So, yeah, in the not too distant future banksters are going to have to unload their shadow inventory and they’ll end up taking even bigger hits on their balance sheets than if they had not been pretending to be solvent all this time. But unfortunately, all homeowners are going to feel the pain as well.

I suspect this looming problem might finally convince the MOTUs at Treasury that they have to implement a policy that works this time–for both banksters and the homeowners.

The WaPo reports that the Administration has shelved plans to try Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri in military commissions.

The decision at least temporarily scuttles what was supposed to be the signature trial of a major al-Qaeda figure under a reformed system of military commissions. And it comes practically on the eve of the 10th anniversary of the attack, which killed 17 sailors and wounded dozens when a boat packed with explosives ripped a hole in the side of the warship in the port of Aden.

In a filing this week in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, the Justice Department said that “no charges are either pending or contemplated with respect to al-Nashiri in the near future.”

The statement, tucked into a motion to dismiss a petition by Nashiri’s attorneys, suggests that the prospect of further military trials for detainees held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, has all but ground to a halt, much as the administration’s plan to try the accused plotters of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in federal court has stalled.

Only two cases are moving forward at Guantanamo Bay, and both were sworn and referred for trial by the time Obama took office. In January 2009, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates directed the Convening Authority for Military Commissions to stop referring cases for trial, an order that 20 months later has not been rescinded.

Which of course means that our government (though the article suggests this is a distinction between the Bush and Obama Administrations, since Gates–though he spans both Administrations–has not ordered the Convening Authority to start referring cases) has decided it’s okay to try Omar Khadr, who was 15 and arguably acting in self-defense for his alleged crime, in a military commission. But not to try al-Nashiri, at least allegedly a genuine terrorist.

To be fair, the WaPo suggests the Administration is holding off until it can have civilian trials for other High Value Detainees (presumably, still the 9/11 conspirators). So it may well be a supportable goal. But it all seems to add to the Kangaroo stench around the military commissions.

Federal bureaucracies which, according to the confirmation hearing questions he asked of prospective directors, Chris Dodd believes require no management experience to run:

• Securities and Exchange Commission
• Housing and Urban Development
• Federal Housing Administration
• Export-Import Bank
• National Credit Union Administration
• Federal Reserve
• Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation
• Office of Thrift Supervision (which oversaw AIG and GE, among other TBTF “entities”)
• Office of the Comptroller of the Currency

Federal bureaucracy which, according to his recent interviews, Chris Dodd believes can only be led by someone who has what he judges to be adequate management experience:

• Consumer Finance Protection Board

Call me crazy, but I don’t think Chris Dodd’s newfound concern about management experience stems from either the recognition that his past confirmation negligence led to failures at (in particular) SEC and OTS or his genuine concern that the CFPB wouldn’t effectively protect consumers’ interests if it were led by Elizabeth Warren.

Dexter Filkins’ story reporting that a top, corrupt, Hamid Karzai aide is on the CIA payroll is not, by itself, all that interesting.

Mohammed Zia Salehi, the chief of administration for the National Security Council, appears to have been on the payroll for many years, according to officials in Kabul and Washington. It is unclear exactly what Mr. Salehi does in exchange for his money, whether providing information to the spy agency, advancing American views inside the presidential palace, or both.

But read it in conjunction with Filkins’ other two stories this week. His week started, after all, with the equally unsurprising story that Abdul Ghani Baradar’s capture some months ago may have been orchestrated by Pakistan’s ISI to prevent peace negotiations between Karzai’s government and the Taliban. That story relies on both Pakistani officials boasting of their ploy, Afghan officials explaining how they attempted to negotiate peace, and a Pakistani spiritual leader talking about his role in the attempted negotiations. It includes the allegation–made by a former Afghan official and a NATO official–that Ahmed Wali Karzai had met with Baradar. But perhaps most interesting for our purposes is this passage:

Some American officials still insist that Pakistan-American cooperation is improving, and deny a central Pakistani role in Mr. Baradar’s arrest. They say the Pakistanis may now be trying to rewrite history to make themselves appear more influential. It was American intellgence that led to Mr. Baradar’s capture, an American official said.

“These are self-serving fairy tales,” the official said. “The people involved in the operation on the ground didn’t know exactly who would be there when they themselves arrived. But it certainly became clear, to Pakistanis and Americans alike, who we’d gotten.”

Other American officials suspect the C.I.A. may have been unwittingly used by the Pakistanis for the larger aims of slowing the pace of any peace talks.

That is, among Filkins’ American sources, one side denies Pakistan would be so tricky with the US (read, the CIA). That person calls the entire story “self-serving fairy tales.” And the other side “suspect[s] the CIA may have been unwittingly used by the Pakistanis.”

That is, among Filkins’ American sources, this story is a debate over whether the CIA is incompetent or not.

Now move to Tuesday’s story. The headline reports another case of civilian killings by vaguely described “special forces.”

Details were sketchy, but the governor of Tala Wa Barfak, a district in Baghlan Province, said the Afghans had been killed in the village of Naik early Sunday by what appeared to have been a raid carried out by special forces.

The governor, Mohammed Ismail, said a group of tribal elders he had sent to the village had returned with details. Among the dead were two women and a child, he said. Six of the dead were found in Naik, and two more villagers were found later in a field farther away, he said.

“It was a cruel act against the civilians,” he said.

Witnesses said the raid began Sunday at 2 a.m., when a number of helicopters descended on Naik. Groups of commandos entered a pair of houses, where the gunfire began, the witnesses said.

So a story of “special forces” apparently fucking up again, along with some context on how counterproductive such fuck-ups are. Curiously, though, this Filkins story (truly, this has been a very busy week) also reports a small group of Taliban fighters turning in their arms.

Also in northern Afghanistan, a group of 21 Taliban fighters surrendered their weapons and gave up fighting last week, officials said Tuesday. The surrender offered a glimpse of what Afghan and American officials hope might one day grow into a larger movement.

The fighters, led by a Taliban commander named Mullah Obeidi, gathered Friday at a government building in Muqoor, a district in Badghis Province, and promised to fight no more. Each of the erstwhile fighters received a “re-integration certificate” and congratulations from several hundred tribal elders who had gathered to celebrate.

This balances the fuck-up of the special forces against success of the strategy the Barader capture was supposed to thwart–the formation of an Afghan peace without Pakistani involvement. Of special note, one of the fighters described giving up the fight when he realized his instructions–coming from Pakistani advisors–did not serve the interests of Afghanistan.

His commander, Mr. Obeidi — as well as Taliban advisers who had traveled from Pakistan — urged him to attack construction crews upgrading the national highway. The road runs through Badghis and links the province to the rest of Afghanistan.“‘If you see the engineers or the laborers, try your best to kill them,’ ” Mr. Karim said. “This is what our Pakistani advisers were telling us.”

So to follow-up the story on Pakistan’s apparent role in thwarting efforts to get Taliban fighters to turn over their arms, a former Taliban fighter blames the Pakistanis for anti-Afghan advice.

See how these themes keep repeating across these stories?

Which brings us back to the shocking! news that two people close to Karzai, one of them the brother alleged to have met with Barader in Filkins’ earlier story, have been getting payments from the CIA. There’s actually some very interesting details about the investigation into Afghanistan’s payment courier system, New Ansari, which has been key to the export of billions out of Afghanistan (I hope to return to this). But there is, of course, discussion of how American sources are split over how central the fight against corruption should be in our overall Afghan strategy.

The ties underscore doubts about how seriously the Obama administration intends to fight corruption here. The anticorruption drive, though strongly backed by the United States, is still vigorously debated inside the administration. Some argue it should be a centerpiece of American strategy, and others say that attacking corrupt officials who are crucial to the war effort could destabilize the Karzai government.

The Obama administration is also racing to show progress in Afghanistan by December, when the White House will evaluate its mission there. Some administration officials argue that any comprehensive campaign to fight corruption inside Afghanistan is overly ambitious, with less than a year to go before the American military is set to begin withdrawing troops.

“Fighting corruption is the very definition of mission creep,” one Obama administration official said.

Others in the administration view public corruption as the single greatest threat to the Afghan government and the American mission; it is the corrupt nature of the Karzai government, these officials say, that drives ordinary Afghans into the arms of the Taliban.

[snip]

“Corruption matters to us,” a senior Obama administration official said. “The fact that Salehi may have been on our payroll does not necessarily change any of the basic issues here.”

So after stories about who is doing more damage, special forces or credulous CIA, the debate shifts to whether it is more important to crack down on the corruption within Karzai’s government–even if it means cracking down on CIA’s key assets–or whether we have to deal with corruption because that’s the way of the world.

Boy, Dexter Filkins sure has had an interesting week cataloging the sniping within American strategy, huh? Mind you, I’m not complaining about Filkins’ reporting (though his descriptions of anonymous sources doesn’t seem to comply with the NYT’s policy on identifying the motives for these anonymous leaks–it’s sure be useful to readers if he’d place his sources a little better, because no one on the inside is really fooled by these anonymous citations).

But he does seem to be the focus of a lot of competing leaks of late.