Obama Acts: Guantanamo to Close

OK, now I'll join the optimists who expect an Obama Administration commitment --- despite the last, desperate interference of Vice President Dick Cheney --- to shut down Camp X-Ray soon after the Inauguration in January 2009:

The Defense Department is drawing up plans to close the Guantanamo Bay military prison in anticipation that one of President-elect Barack Obama's first acts will be ordering the closure of the detention center associated with the abuse of terror suspects.

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates still technically works for George W. Bush, so the confirmation from the Pentagon indicates that the current Administration is standing aside. More importantly  the Department of Defense, which helped launch this illegal and counter-productive regime, is now prepared to shut it down.

The downside of this process is that it will still take months to find and implement an arrangement for the 250 detainees still at the prison. It is unclear how many will be kept under lock-and-key in the American system and if those released can return to their home countries, have to be accommodated in the United States, or will be accepted by a third country such as Portugal.

Iraq Non-Surprise of the Day (2): Deconstruction

In the category of If You Don't Build It, The Insurgency Will Come, from The New York Times:

An unpublished 513-page federal history of the American-led reconstruction of Iraq depicts an effort crippled before the invasion by Pentagon planners who were hostile to the idea of rebuilding a foreign country, and then molded into a $100 billion failure by bureaucratic turf wars, spiraling violence and ignorance of the basic elements of Iraqi society and infrastructure.

The report's conclusion is a bit of a downer:

The hard figures on basic services and industrial production compiled for the report reveal that for all the money spent and promises made, the rebuilding effort never did much more than restore what was destroyed during the invasion and the convulsive looting that followed.

It could have been worse, however. The authors might have noted that this failure was a major cause of the immediate breakdown of "Mission Accomplished" into a war by local groups against the US-led "coalition". And, since the report is still private as it is passed amongst "technical reviewers, policy experts and senior officials", it may be watered down even further to spare Bush Administration blushes.

Kudos to the Times, then, for providing a full draft version of the report.

Update: The Pentagon and Propaganda

In the category of You Heard It First on Enduring America:

Giles Scott-Smith of our Holland Bureau, 29 November 2008:

When referring to the dominance of the Pentagon, it is not just a matter of weaponry or the questionable deployment of US marines. Looking to develop its role in the field of ‘strategic influence’, the military has also greatly expanded its activities in communications and media, with questionable consequences.

Walter Pincus in The Washington Post, 12 December 2008:

The Pentagon's inspector general said yesterday that the Defense Department's public affairs office may have "inappropriately" merged public affairs and propaganda operations in 2007 and 2008 when it contracted out $1 million in work for a strategic communications plan for use by the military in collaboration with the State Department.