Our guest blogger is Lawrence J. Korb, a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress

If President Obama is serious about controlling spending, he can’t exempt the Pentagon. In announcing a three-year spending freeze, he exempted all security-related funding. This exemption applies to the budgets of the Pentagon, Department of Homeland Security, foreign aid and the Department of Veterans Affairs. Because the budgets of these agencies, particularly that of the Pentagon, are responsible for a large and increasing share of the discretionary portion of the federal budget, the president’s spending freeze will have a marginal effect.

Rather than exclude these accounts from the freeze for fear of appearing weak on defense, the president should mandate that the baseline defense budget also be frozen.

Indeed, freezing the base defense budget at its current level of about $532 billion would not hinder the Pentagon’s ability to conduct the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq because they will be funded separately through a $160 billion supplemental. Moreover, freezing defense spending would force the Pentagon to make the hard choices it has avoided over the past decade. In the last ten years, the baseline defense budget nearly doubled from $290 billion in FY2000 to $532 billion, an increase of $242 billion or 83 percent, or more than 8 percent a year. Even if one controls for inflation, the real growth amounts to nearly 50 percent, about 5 percent a year in real terms. By way of contrast, non-defense discretionary spending, which the administration proposes to freeze, has averaged only 5 percent annual growth, or 2 percent real growth during that same period.

Additionally, spending on future weapons systems has outpaced spending on our troops. The Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments has pointed out (pdf) that the operations and support portion of the base defense budget – which includes costs for recruitment, training, military and civilian personnel pay, and operating and maintaining equipment – has increased. Yet it has risen less in real terms than the investment portion of the budget, which includes procurement, research and development, and construction. The operations and support part has increased by 3.5 percent a year in real terms over the past decade, while the growth in investment has exceeded 5 percent.

To keep the baseline budget level at $532 billion, the Pentagon could reduce the FY2011 projected budget level for weapons development and purchases from about $190 billion to $170 billion. This could be done through a number of reductions in baseline defense spending. In particular, the U.S. government could acquire $20 billion in savings by taking some of the following measures, which I recommended in my recent report, Paying for the Troop Escalation in Afghanistan (pdf):

-Cut missile defense, while maintaining funding for its continued research and development. Saves about $6 billion.
-Keep the Virginia-class attack submarine production steady at one per year instead of ramping up to two per year in FY 2011. Saves about $2 billion
-Cancel the Zumwalt-class DDG-1000 at two ships. Saves about $1 billion
-Cancel the MV-22 Osprey and substitute cheaper helicopters while continuing production of the CV-22. Saves about $2 billion
-Cancel the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle program. Saves about $294 million
-Cut the FY 2011 F-35 purchase to twenty, slow down production of the aircraft, cancel the alternate engine program, and replace the cut planes with drones. Saves about $4 billion
-Cut FY 2011 funding for the Army’s Future Combat Systems by one third. Saves about $763 million
-Continue offensive space-based weapons development at a low rate. Saves about $100 million
-Reduce the U.S. nuclear arsenal to 600 deployed warheads and 400 in reserve. Saves about $13 billion

This would still leave the FY 2011 baseline defense budget $15 billion higher in real terms than it was at the height of the Reagan buildup. And by using a unified approach to national security budgeting—which brings together national security spending from the Departments of Defense, Homeland Security, State, and the U.S. Agency for International Development—additional funds could be transferred from DOD to the Department of Homeland Security so that its budget is not cut.

Yesterday, Jeff Stein reported that “John Kiriakou, the former CIA operative who affirmed claims that waterboarding quickly unloosed the tongues of hard-core terrorists, says he didn’t know what he was talking about.”

Kiriakou, a 15-year veteran of the agency’s intelligence analysis and operations directorates, electrified the hand-wringing national debate over torture in December 2007 when he told ABC’s Brian Ross and Richard Esposito in a much ballyhooed, exclusive interview that senior al Qaeda commando Abu Zubaydah cracked after only one application of the face cloth and water.[...]

Now comes John Kiriakou, again, with a wholly different story. On the next-to-last page of a new memoir, The Reluctant Spy: My Secret Life in the CIA’s War on Terror (written with Michael Ruby), Kiriakou now rather off handedly admits that he basically made it all up. [...]

“I wasn’t there when the interrogation took place; instead, I relied on what I’d heard and read inside the agency at the time.”[...]

“Now we know,” Kiriakou goes on, “that Zubaydah was waterboarded eighty-three times in a single month, raising questions about how much useful information he actually supplied.”

Kiriakou also claims in his book “that the disinformation he helped spread was a CIA dirty trick: ‘In retrospect, it was a valuable lesson in how the CIA uses the fine arts of deception even among its own.’”

Kiriakou’s disavowal of his claims drew a frantic response from Bush administration speechwriter and leading torture apologist Marc Thiessen, who has cited the Abu Zubaydah stories repeatedly in his work. Thiessen insisted “I have spoken to the people who — unlike Kirakou — were in the room for the interrogations of Zubaydah, KSM and other terrorists held by the CIA.”

Thiessen admits, then, that he, like Kiriakou, wasn’t actually there for any of these interrogations, and that he, like Kiriakou, got all of his information second-hand. This raises the interesting question of whether Thiessen got played by his CIA sources, who saw Thiessen as a willing dupe in their effort to cover their behinds, as Kiriakou now claims to have been.

Meanwhile, Tom Ricks shares his account of a recent lecture given by intelligence and interrogation expert Army Col. Stuart Herrington. According to Ricks, “was one of the first people to blow the whistle on Abu Ghraib and on the broader abuse of prisoners that was occurring in many locations in Iraq back then.”

One of the most striking aspects of [Herrington's] talk is the cold professional contempt he has for Cheney, Rumsfeld and others who not only encouraged a brutal approach, but were amateurish in doing so.

Herrington began his talk by looking back to Vietnam, where he insisted on providing his prisoners(and intelligence targets) with “unconditional decent treatment-food, medical care and clothing.” He showed his Vietnamese colleagues, fond of using “water torture and electrocution,” that “One can employ legions of effective stratagems to achieve control over a potential recruit, but brutality, abuse and torture have no place.”

His bottom line:

“There was no room on our team for charlatans who believed in sleep deprivation, inducing hypothermia, stress positions, face slapping, forced nudity, water boarding, blaring heavy metal music, or other amateurish, ineffective and ethically flawed tricks.”

As of January 20, 2009, that’s America’s bottom line too.

General Colin Powell in an introduction to a new film called the Nuclear Tipping Point didn’t mince words. In a forceful and direct presentation, the former Cold Warrior talked about his experience in dealing with nuclear weapons throughout his military career. Powell discussed the nuclear planning that he conducted against the Soviets in Europe and the responsibility of having oversight of 28,000 nuclear weapons as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Through these experiences, Powell concluded that nuclear weapons are “useless” and ought to be eliminated.

POWELL: The more I got into nuclear weapons. The more I realized that these weapons must never be used. And then I became Chairman of the Joint chiefs of staff in 1989 and I had 28,000 nuclear weapons under my supervision. And every morning I looked to see where the Russian submarines were off the coast of Virginia and how far away those missions were from Washington. I kept track where the Russian missiles were in Europe and in the Soviet Union. The one thing that I convinced myself after all these years of exposure to the use of nuclear weapons is that they were useless. They could not be used. If you can have deterence with an even lower number of weapons, well then why stop there, why not continue on, why not get rid of them altogether…This is the moment when we have to move forward and all of us come together to reduce the number of nuclear weapons and eliminate them from the face of the earth.

Watch it:

Powell’s call for the elimination of nuclear weapons comes at a critical time. With President Obama in need of 67 votes in the Senate to ratify two treaties critical to the nuclear non-proliferation agenda, he must convince 8 GOP Senators to abandon the politics of obstruction and support these efforts that serve to enhance America’s security and reduce the likelihood for nuclear attack. Powell could certainly be a powerful force in that effort.

Furthermore, Powell’s statements just further expose a growing divide among the right. Nuclear Tipping Point was put together by the Nuclear Threat Initiative and is part of the robust efforts of former Secretaries George Schultz, Bill Perry, Henry Kissinger and Senator Sam Nunn to warn of the dangers of nuclear terrorism and to work for the elimination of nuclear weapons. While former senior Republican national security officials like Powell, Kissinger, Schultz, and Brent Scowcroft call for reductions in nuclear weapons, neoconservatives like Senator Jon Kyl (R-AZ) actually favor building new nuclear weapons.

Yesterday, Ohio Sheriff Richard K. Jones appeared in federal court facing charges that he violated the constitutional rights of an undocumented immigrant. The plaintiff, Luis Rodriguez, claims that Jones infringed on his 4th and 14th amendment rights. Cincinnati’s Local 12 channel reports:

[Officials [police] said they were at the site to talk to a supervisor about undocumented workers, but while there Rodriguez and others were interrogated and asked to provide identification, said Rodriguez’s attorney, Al Gerhardstein. Gerhardstein said his client, who had lived in Butler County for 11 years, was arrested and charged with providing a false identification and was deported to Mexico, though he was later acquitted of the charge.

Rodriguez is seeking damages and also trying to establish the principle that there aren’t any exceptions to the Fourth or 14th amendments.

The deputization of immigration law has become a growing trend and rampant allegations of racial profiling and civil rights violations have proliferated alongside it. Immigration hardliners often argue that Jones and other sheriffs who take a similar approach to the immigrant community have done no wrong because they are dealing with a population to whom the Bill of Rights doesn’t apply. However, the American Civil Liberties Union points out that both the language and intent with which it was written suggests otherwise:

The fundamental constitutional protections of due process and equal protection embodied in our Constitution and Bill of Rights apply to every “person” and are not limited to citizens. The framers of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights as well as the authors and ratifiers of post-Civil War amendments, all understood the essential importance of protecting non-citizens against governmental abuse and discrimination…Upholding the rights of immigrants is important to us all. When the government has the power to deny legal rights and due process to one vulnerable group, everyone’s rights are at risk.

Back in 2006, NPR reported that Jones was on a mission to “prod and shame the federal government into more action” on the immigration issue. Back then, Jones went as far to implement mass arrests of Latino workers and put a big yellow sign proclaiming “Illegal Aliens Here” in front of the county jail to “let people know that there are illegals here, and it is a problem, and we want some help.” Nonetheless, when Congress tried to address the problem in 2007, Jones was part of the “anti-immigrant minority” that was “dancing in the streets” over the bill’s failure.

Before getting to Robert Kagan’s call for President Obama to just go ahead already and roll the dice on Iranian regime change, a little background.

One of the most interesting articles written during the 2008 presidential campaign was Michael Scherer’s and Michael Weisskopf’s July 2008 analysis of Barack Obama and John McCain approach to gambling. “For both men,” Scherer and Weisskopf wrote, “games of chance have been not just a hobby but also a fundamental feature in their development as people and politicians“:

For Obama, weekly poker games with lobbyists and fellow state senators helped cement his position as a rising star in Illinois politics. For McCain, jaunts to the craps table helped burnish his image as a political hot dog who relished the thrill of a good fight, even if the risk of failure was high. [...]

In the past decade, [McCain] has played on Mississippi riverboats, on Indian land, in Caribbean craps pits and along the length of the Las Vegas Strip. Back in 2005 he joined a group of journalists at a magazine-industry conference in Puerto Rico, offering betting strategy on request. “Enjoying craps opens up a window on a central thread constant in John’s life,” says John Weaver, McCain’s former chief strategist, who followed him to many a casino. “Taking a chance, playing against the odds.”

When you look at candidates’ waged the rest of their campaigns, I think this turns out to have been impressively predictive. McCain the crazy craps player repeatedly went for broke with questionable risky moves, declaring himself a Georgian in response to the August 2008 Georgia-Russia conflict, selecting the unknown (and, as we now know, un-vetted) Sarah Palin as his vice-president, suspending his campaign and rushing back to Washington in an attempt to signal that he “got” the economic crisis, and trying to delay the candidates’ first debate, to which Obama the methodical poker player responded with a successful raise.

In addition to his status as a war-hero, this audacious approach to politics, particularly foreign policy, also speaks to why neoconservatives like Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan originally identified McCain in the late 1990′s as an ideal salesman for their “national greatness conservatism,” which John Judis described in his 2006 profile of McCain’s neocon conversion as “a philosophy that linked the development of American character to the exercise of power overseas” and an “emphasis on America’s responsibility to transform the world.”

What this approach essentially boils down to is enshrining the adage “history favors the bold” as a foreign policy imperative, while ignoring its somewhat lesser-known corollary, “history frowns upon the recklessly boneheaded.” (Which one are you? You’ll find out soon!)

All of these tendencies are on display in Robert Kagan’s op-ed today, in which he gushes “President Obama has a once-in-a-generation opportunity over the next few months to help make the world a dramatically safer place… by helping the Iranian people achieve a new form of government.” Read more

Nuclear weapons huggers are tripping over themselves to claim that last week’s op-ed by the “four horsemen” – George Schultz, Bill Perry, Henry Kissinger and Sam Nunn (all global zero advocates) – has struck a blow to the President’s effort to get a new START treaty. Senator Jon Kyl (R-AZ) and Frank Gaffney both claim that the four leaders came out in support of building a new nuclear warhead. That would be a real problem for the President if those leaders had done that. But they did no such thing.

Despite the fact that there is nothing written in the op-ed that says anything about building a new warhead (in fact it actually rebuffs Kyl on a number of points), Kyl and Gaffney both infer that the four statesmen – by endorsing the congressionally mandated Strategic Posture Commission report that came out last May – are, by extension, endorsing the construction of new nuclear warheads. Kyl in a letter to the Wall Street Journal makes the logical leap, as he says the four statesmen:

deliver a clarion call for the “necessity to maintain the safety, security and reliability of our own [nuclear] weapons.” In so doing, they have associated themselves with…the experts on the bipartisan Perry-Schlesinger Commission, who have urged significant and immediate funding to develop a modern warhead and repair our decrepit Manhattan Project-era nuclear infrastructure.

There are two catastrophic problems with this claim.

First, the Perry-Schlesinger Commission NEVER advocated building a new warhead. It just didn’t. Kingston Rief at Nukes of Hazard, who happened to be on the staff of the Strategic Posture commission, corrects the record:

The Commission, simply does not say that the U.S. needs new warheads … Instead it notes that existing life extension programs and new warhead designs represent opposite ends of a spectrum of options. What we have learned about our nuclear weapons to date suggests that existing life extension programs, not new warhead designs, make the greatest technical and strategic sense.

Three possibilities arise from Kyl’s totally fraudulent claim that that the commission “urged significant and immediate funding” for a new warhead. Either Jon Kyl and his staff, along with the Wall Street Journal, and other conservatives have not read the Strategic Posture report; or they read it, but lacking proper reading comprehension skills they misunderstood it; or finally – and most likely – they are knowingly and deliberately lying about what it says.

Second, Kyl, Gaffney, et al. don’t seem to understand the meaning of the word “modernize.” They interpret the word modernize to only mean the replacement of something with something else. Therefore when reports call for the “modernizing” of US nuclear forces they assume that this can only mean the construction of new nuclear warheads. This is nonsense.

To modernize something does not have to entail replacing it, it can just as easily entail refurbishing, or renovating. Using the online Webster’s dictionary I discovered that modernize means, “to bring up to date in style, design, methods.” Modernizing a nuclear weapon therefore does not mean that one has to build an entirely new one. Thus, the Perry-Schlesinger commission, the Obama administration, and the four horsemen can all be for modernizing the US nuclear arsenal, while simultaneously being against a new nuclear warhead. Stephen Pifer of the Brookings Institution explained the distinction:

We [the US] take a missile frame and we modernize it, and we refurbish it, whereas the Russian practice is to take a missile, they use it for 15 years and then they replace it completely. So you’ll see new numbers coming up on the Russian side and you may think that, gosh, the Americans are still deploying these 1970s missiles. I suspect when they retire the last Minuteman III in 2030, it may have three of the original bolts on it from 1970 but it’s going to be a very different missile.

While conservatives can try to argue wrongly that this type of modernization is insufficient, it is simply a lie to argue that the Perry-Schlesinger commission report that calls for modernizing the nuclear arsenal is arguing to build a completely new nuclear warhead.