Efforts to add the DREAM Act to the defense authorization bill failed Tuesday when Republicans filibustered the bill. (Mark Samala/ZUMApress.com)

Senate Republicans filibustered the defense authorization bill Tuesday afternoon, ending a push by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) to pass the DREAM Act, which would provide legal status to some undocumented immigrants in exchange for school or military service, and a repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell as amendments to the legislation.

The defense authorization bill has been passed for the past 48 consecutive years. It failed to move to the Senate floor today in a 56-43 vote, with no “yea” votes by Republicans.

The main argument marshaled against continuing with the defense bill was that both a Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell repeal and the DREAM Act have too little relevance to defense. But both proposals have major implications for those who serve — or wish to serve — in the military. A repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell would allow gays and lesbians to serve openly, without fear their sexual orientation would lead to discharge from the military. The DREAM Act would allow illegal immigrants who came to the U.S. as children to earn legal status by serving in the military or attending two years of college, providing what many have said would be a needed boost for military recruitment.

After the filibuster, Reid said he will continue to push for the DREAM Act, which was originally proposed in 2001 by Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) — who voted against bringing the defense authorization bill to the floor today. The DREAM Act has come up several times since 2001 but only went to a vote as a standalone bill once, in 2007. Although he did not specify a timeline, Reid said today the act is not dead.

“We’re going to vote on the DREAM Act, it’s just a question of when,” Reid said after the filibuster. “This isn’t the end of this. We’re going to continue to move on.”

The vote was a major disappointment to immigration reform advocates and GLBT rights supporters. Rea Carey, executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, said in a statement the senators “who led and supported the filibuster effort should be ashamed.”

Mary Giovagnoli, director of Immigration Policy Center, told TWI the vote showed “a lack of leadership” by Republican senators. “This was clearly putting procedural wrangling and partisan politics over social issues that are clearly something the American public wants action on,” she said.

Democrats needed at least one Republican to vote to move forward with the bill to stop a Republican filibuster. But procedural squabbles deterred Republicans from voting for the legislation, arguing that Reid was denying them the chance to amend the bill.

Reid previously said he would allow only three amendments: a repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell; the DREAM Act; and an amendment to ban the practice of placing “secret holds” on presidential nominees.

Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, repeatedly quoted a floor statement by Reid last Thursday, when Reid said he was “willing to work with Republicans on a process that will permit the Senate to consider these matters and complete the bill as soon as possible.”

But Republicans argued the short timetable before a pre-election recess would prevent them from adding enough amendments. Two moderate Republicans who Democrat leaders hoped would vote for moving forward with the bill, Maine Sens. Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe, decided to vote against cloture for this reason.

“I will defend the right of my colleagues to offer amendments on this issue and other issues that are being brought up in connection with the defense authorization bill,” Collins said this morning. “They need to have a civil, fair and open debate on the Senate floor.”

To that end, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) proposed a motion to move to debating the bill only if Democrats would agree that none of the first 20 amendments would relate to immigration — effectively killing off the chance that Reid could add the DREAM Act to the defense authorization bill. He also tried to get Reid to agree to allow Republicans and Democrats to offer amendments in an alternating order. “We should start work on this bill and tackle the unrelated issues later,” McConnell said. Reid objected and brought the bill to a vote.

Many Republicans’ arguments against moving the bill to the floor were rooted in their opposition to a Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell repeal or to the DREAM Act. Some Republicans also argued a repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell would be inappropriate, because the Department of Defense has not yet completed its review of how the policy would impact the military. The proposed amendment would have remained pending until review was completed and submitted to the president, secretary of defense and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Opponents of the DREAM Act also relied on the argument that it did not belong in the defense authorization bill to begin with. “We’ve opposed the DREAM Act on its merits and we were certainly opposed to the use of the military authorization bill as a vehicle to reward people who are in the country illegally,” Ira Mehlman, a spokesman for the pro-enforcement group FAIR, told TWI after the vote.

But the DREAM Act has supporters in the defense community. The Department of Defense’s Strategic Plan for the 2010 to 2012 fiscal years recommends passage of the DREAM Act as a way to help the military “shape and maintain a mission-ready All Volunteer Force.”

Colin Powell, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and a retired general, encouraged Republicans to vote for the DREAM Act during an appearance on Meet the Press Sunday. “We can’t be anti-immigration,” Powell said. “Immigrants are fueling this country. Without immigrants, America would be like Europe or Japan with an aging population and no young people coming in to take care of it. We have to educate our immigrants. The DREAM Act is one way to do that.”

Moving forward, immigrant rights advocates said they will continue to pressure Senators to support the DREAM Act, whether it be as a standalone bill or an amendment to another piece of legislation.

“This isn’t lost,” Juan Escalante, a spokesperson for The DREAM is Coming, told TWI. “We’re going to push Senator Reid to make sure the DREAM Act happens in another way.”

Ignatius reports that it would take a wide, regional focus:

The American peace plan would be linked with the issue of confronting Iran, which is Israel’s top priority, explained the second senior official. He described the issues as two halves of a single strategic problem: “We want to get the debate away from settlements and East Jerusalem and take it to a 30,000-feet level that can involve Jordan, Syria and other countries in the region,” as well as the Israelis and Palestinians.

“Incrementalism hasn’t worked,” continued the second official, explaining that the United States cannot allow the Palestinian problem to keep festering — providing fodder for Iran and other extremists. “As a global power with global responsibilities, we have to do something.” He said the plan would “take on the absolute requirements of Israeli security and the requirements of Palestinian sovereignty in a way that makes sense.”

This has apparently come with the aid of foreign-policy greybeards from both parties, like Brent Scowcroft, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Sandy Berger, Frank Carlucci, Robert MacFarlane and Colin Powell. The administration certainly leaked that to frame this prospective initiative as a consensus view. (Because, frankly, it is.)

That, and the other specificity cited by Ignatius — the administration could start interagency discussions modeled on the Afghanistan-Pakistan strategy and unveil a plan by the fall — support the initial judgment that this has already been well-discussed internally. On the other hand, it could be a shot across Netanyahu’s bow, telling him that if he doesn’t take some confidence-building measures — and soon — the Obama administration will launch its own very big peacemaking agenda, and that’s not going to be something Israel will want to be viewed as opposing.

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Navy Adm. Mike Mullen (Defense Department photo)

It’s not the Mullen Doctrine — yet. But in a recent speech that’s attracted little notice outside the defense blogosphere, Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, offered the first set of criteria for using military force since Gen. Colin Powell held Mullen’s job nearly 20 years ago. And Mullen’s inchoate offerings provide something of an update — and something of a refutation — to Powell’s advice.

[Security1] Mullen’s speech, delivered to Kansas State University on March 3, was not intended to provide an inflexible blueprint for how the U.S. ought to use its military, aides to the chairman said. Instead, the speech meant to draw conclusions from Mullen’s three years as chairman advising two administrations about the scope — and, Mullen’s aides emphasize, the limitations — of military force in an era of stateless and unconventional threats after nine years of continuous warfare.
“This is his legacy,” said Patrick Cronin, a defense analyst with the Center for a New American Security. “He has articulated the Pentagon’s rediscovery of limited war theory.”

Perhaps Mullen’s most provocative “principle,” as he called it in the speech, is that military forces “should not – maybe cannot – be the last resort of the state.” On the surface, Mullen appeared to offer a profligate view of sending troops to battle, contradicting the Powell Doctrine’s warning that the military should only be used when all other options exhaust themselves. Powell’s warning has great appeal to a country exhausted by two costly, protracted wars, one of which was launched long before diplomatic options had run out.

But Mullen’s aides said the chairman was trying to make a subtler point, one that envisioned the deployment of military forces not as a sharp change in strategy from diplomacy but along a continuum of strategy alongside it. “The American people are used to thinking of war and peace as two very distinct activities,” said Air Force Col. Jim Baker, one of Mullen’s advisers for military strategy. “That is not always the case.” In the speech, Mullen focused his definition of military force on the forward deployment of troops or hardware to bolster diplomatic efforts or aid in humanitarian ones, rather than the invasions that the last decade saw.

“Before a shot is even fired, we can bolster a diplomatic argument, support a friend or deter an enemy,” Mullen said. “We can assist rapidly in disaster-relief efforts, as we did in the aftermath of Haiti’s earthquake.”

As much as it seems as though Mullen’s first principle allows for an era of increased conflict, his additional principles flowing from that insight would appear to place constraints on the military. Mullen’s major proposal is that the military should be deployed for future counterinsurgencies or other unconventional conflicts “only if and when the other instruments of national power are ready to engage as well,” such as governance advisers, development experts, and other civilians. “We ought to make it a precondition of committing our troops,” Mullen said, warning that “we aren’t moving fast enough” to strengthen the institutional capacity of the State Department and USAID in order to lift the greatest burdens of national security off the shoulders of the military.

“We shouldn’t start something unless we have the capacity to bring everybody on board,” Baker elaborated, highlighting the “precondition” as among the most important aspects of Mullen’s speech. “I almost read that as more of a cautionary note.” That, at least, is commensurate with the spirit of the Powell Doctrine’s cautions about a national over-reliance on military force. “If you’re going to have anything to sustainable to resolve a conflict, then there’s got to be something that follows,” Baker added, “or you’re going to dump it on the military.”

Stating the position from another — and more controversial — angle, Mullen contended in his speech that foreign policy had become “too dependent upon the generals and admirals who lead our major overseas commands,” an implicit rebuke of the structural factors resulting in the increased diplomatic profile of military leaders like Gen. David Petraeus of U.S. Central Command and Adm. James Stavridis of U.S. European Command. In other words, if State and USAID don’t like being outshined by officers like Petraeus, they need to show a greater assertiveness and capacity to respond to foreign policy challenges before a president turns to the military to solve a problem.

“There is an imbalance in our civilian capacity to work alongside the military in fragile states,” said Cronin, a former senior official at USAID. “The combatant commands are regionally based out in the world, and we don’t have any civilian equivalent of that. So we have to find a way to connect our civilian organization, which is essentially a country team centered on an ambassador, with the interagency represented underneath, with the combatant commander, who has broad swaths of geography and can work across boundaries — which is necessary when you’re dealing with non-state and mobile threats.”

Significantly, Mullen, the first chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to embrace the theorist-practitioners of counterinsurgency — who contend that the loyalties of a civilian population are decisive in a conflict between a government and internal rebels — offered insights that reflected the worldview of the counterinsurgents. “Force should, to the maximum extent possible, be applied in a precise and principled way,” Mullen said, because the contemporary battlefield is “in the minds of the people.” That’s the first time a chairman has embraced the concept of “population-centric” warfare, a departure from the “enemy-centric” focus of doctrines like Powell’s, with its focus on applying “overwhelming force” to vanquish an adversary. Mullen also implicitly departed from Powell’s conception that war should be conducted with minimal “interference” from civilian policymakers by arguing that the current threats the U.S. faces require an “iterative” process, requiring “near constant reassessment and adjustment.” He said victory in contemporary warfare would feel “a lot less like a knock-out punch and a lot more like recovering from a long illness.”

Mullen is no stranger to offering broad reconsiderations of American strategy. Before becoming chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — the president’s senior military adviser — in 2007, Mullen was the nation’s highest-ranking Naval officer, and in 2006 he embraced a concept called the “thousand ship navy,” a way of thinking about global security partnerships. Mullen defined the idea as “a global maritime partnership that unites maritime forces, port operators, commercial shippers, and international, governmental and nongovernmental agencies to address mutual concerns” in an October 2006 op-ed in the Honolulu Advertiser. Similarly, using the handle @thejointstaff, Mullen might be the senior military leadership’s most prolific Twitter user.

Some of the counterinsurgents whom Mullen has embraced have grappled with how to interpret Mullen’s speech. Andrew Exum, author of the popular blog Abu Muqawama, tweeted, “Is this speech by Adm. Mullen a big deal or nothing particularly earth-shattering?” Robert Haddick, one of the editors of the influential Small Wars Journal blog, declared Mullen’s speech to have buried the Powell Doctrine by presuming “low-level warfare is an enduring fact of life.” Other bloggers have dissected whether it’s even fair to characterize the speech as a “Mullen Doctrine.”

If it’s not the Mullen Doctrine yet — “That’s your guys’ judgment,” Baker said — it might form the basis for one. Baker said that he would encourage his boss to expand the speech and develop its ideas for a longer essay in one of the major foreign-policy journals. “He felt like he had something to say here,” Baker added, “so he went out and said it.”

I don’t know if you saw ‘Meet The Press’ this morning, but a general you may have heard of named David Petraeus — he’s the commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East and South Asia and is the most distinguished Army general since Colin Powell — graced your television. He was asked about whether the U.S. ought to torture Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, the deputy commander of the Taliban, recently captured in Pakistan. “I have always been on record, in fact since 2003, with the concept of living our values,” Petraeus replied. Every time the U.S. took what he called “expedient measures” around the Geneva Conventions, those deviations just “turned around and bitten us on our backside.” The effect of torture at Abu Ghraib is “non-biodegradable,” he continued, and boasted that as commander of the 101st Airborne in Iraq, he ordered his men to ignore any instruction to use techniques outside the Army Field Manual on Interrogations. Besides, the non-torture techniques that manual has long instructed? “That works,” he said. “That is our experience.”

But hey. You’re a former deputy assistant secretary of state! You obviously know better than the man who implemented the surge in Iraq. Why don’t you enlighten Gen. Petraeus about all the glories of torture? And since you consider “enhanced interrogation” so necessary to secure the country, perhaps there’s a full-page ad you’ll take out in a major newspaper?

Cordially,
Spencer

“In the almost 17 years since the ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ legislation was passed, attitudes and circumstances have changed,” General Powell said in a statement issued by his office. He added: “I fully support the new approach presented to the Senate Armed Services Committee this week by Secretary of Defense Gates and Admiral Mullen.”

Powell was one of the leading forces behind the 1993 legislation that came to be codified as “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” For Powell to change his mind on the issue is a serious boost to the law’s repeal.

Via John Aravosis.

Colin Powell served as Secretary of State during a time of swift and far-reaching change, both for our nation and the world. His tenure began just a few weeks into the new millennium. Nine months later, the September 11th attacks occurred. In the days and weeks that followed, Secretary Powell provided a calm, steady, and hopeful voice as Americans sought to understand the threats we faced and the uncertain future that lay ahead.

In fact, on the day of the attacks, Secretary Powell was in Lima, Peru, attending a special session of the Organization of American States to adopt the Inter-American Democratic Charter, a critical instrument for strengthening public institutions and helping democracy deliver real improvements to people’s lives. When he heard that the planes had hit the Towers, he told his staff that they’d be returning to the United States immediately – and then he returned to the session to cast our nation’s vote in favor of the charter.

Guess what she didn’t mention.

Well, now, you make the call! A coalition of development workers and other foreign-policy practitioners known as the Modernizing Foreign Assistance Network is turning to the fans to decide, as if this were a rap battle or dance-off. In a poll up on the MFAN Website, anyone can vote for a slate of potential administrators, stretching from former Secretary of State Colin Powell to ex-Nebraska Sen. (and leading Obamacon) Chuck Hagel. The current runaway favorite? Dark-horse Gayle Smith, the National Security Council’s senior director for relief, stabilization and development.

Of course, this is a crowdsourced poll, not a presidential nomination or a Senate confirmation hearing. But for USAID, all else has already failed, so why not?

Video courtesy of Obama’s Quagmire, after I tweeted I couldn’t find YouTube clips of Kennedy on Iraq.

[E]ven when the interrogation team had reported to Cheney’s office that their detainee “was compliant” (meaning the team recommended no more torture), the VP’s office ordered them to continue the enhanced methods. The detainee had not revealed any al-Qa’ida-Baghdad contacts yet. This ceased only after Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, under waterboarding in Egypt, “revealed” such contacts. Of course later we learned that al-Libi revealed these contacts only to get the torture to stop.

Did Wilkerson mean to say that? And what was the genesis of that “investigation,” anyway? I caught up with Wilkerson via email.

["Investigation" is] just a term I use.  Probably more appropriate to say “research”, as I am an academic now.

In 2004, just before the Abu Ghraib photos were plastered over the country, Secretary Powell walked in to my office and told me the photos were going to be revealed and to find out what had happened.  He said that Will Taft, his Legal Advisor, was working on the legal aspects and he wanted me to work on the political aspects as well as how we got to where we were–a chronology and such.  From that point on, I have been “investigating”.  I have not ceased.

Wilkerson didn’t specify a timeline for the torture of al-Libi, but he did write that manufacturing the “smoking gun” was the context for the Bush administration’s top-level deliberations in “April and May of 2002″ about adopting an “enhanced interrogation” program for use on Abu Zubaydah, then the senior-most al-Qaeda captive in CIA custody. Al-Libi, however, was in CIA custody at the end of 2001 and rendered to Egypt for torture in or around January 2002. Thomas Joscelyn did some inferential reading at the Weekly Standard’s blog to refute Wilkerson:

Wilkerson’s facts do not add up. Al Libi’s original testimony regarding Iraq-al Qaeda links occurred months before Wilkerson says waterboarding was used to get this admission out of him. We know this because the DIA filed a report saying that it did not trust al Libi’s testimony regarding the training of al Qaeda operatives in Iraq in February 2002 -– two months before Wilkerson says the Bush administration authorized the Egyptians to use harsh interrogation methods on al Libi.

So, when Wilkerson writes that “the [Bush] administration authorized [the] harsh interrogation [of al Libi] in April and May of 2002” and al Libi “had not revealed any al Qa’ida-Baghdad contacts” until then, he is clearly wrong. Al Libi, according to the DIA, first discussed this putative tie between the Iraqi regime and al Qaeda before Wilkerson says that harsh interrogation techniques were authorized by Vice President Cheney.

As Joscelyn writes, the DIA indeed filed a February 2002 notice indicating distrust for al-Libi’s claims about Iraq assisting al-Qaeda’s efforts to acquire weapons of mass destruction. “It is more likely that this individual is intentionally misleading the debriefers,” a DIA report known as DITSUM #044-02 reads. “Ibn al-Shaykh [al-Libi] has been undergoing debriefs for several weeks and may describing [sic] scenarios to the debriefers that he knows will retain their interest.” Yet al-Libi’s dubious information made its way into the intelligence bloodstream, all the way up to Colin Powell’s since-discredited 2003 speech to the United Nations justifying the invasion — the first draft of which had a big assist from Cheney’s office, including then-chief of staff Scooter Libby. In March 2004, after the invasion, the CIA withdrew its support for al-Libi’s claims.

Joscelyn wrote, “It is doubtful that any part of Wilkerson’s story is true.” I asked Wilkerson if he wished to respond.

If their account is the accurate one, explain to me why Tenet and McLaughlin [then the director and deputy director of the CIA] came to Secretary Powell in February 2003–yes, 2003–with the information about al-Libi as if it were fresh as the morning dew. Powell was ready to throw out almost everything Tenet had given him on the contacts of Baghdad with terrorists, particularly al-Qa’ida. Suddenly, on 1 Feb, there was the shocking revelation of a high-level al-Qa’ida operative who had just revealed significant contacts between al-Qa’ida and Baghdad. Powell changed his mind and that information went into his presentation to the [United Nations Security Council] on 5 Feb 2003. We were never told of the DIA dissent.

And what about the timeline — or suggested timeline — in the original post?

I am basing my conclusions on the fact that DCI Tenet and DDCI McLaughlin presented the information about al-Libi to Secretary Powell in Feb 2003 and not in Feb 2002.  The strong impression was that the interrogation had just occurred or, at a minimum, that Tenet had just received the information (otherwise, why wouldn’t they have given it to Powell much earlier, say when he first expressed concerns over the terrorist links some days earlier?).

I have no idea when the Egyptians waterboarded al-Libi other than what Tenet and McLauglin implied in their presentation to Powell–which, incidentally, was quite effective on him.

Who says the Egyptians tortured al-Libi in Feb 2002?   I’m prepared to modify my views if that can be proved.  But not by much because that is a minor part of my position.

“I promised the president of the United States that if I was fortunate enough to be able to be honored with this position, what I’d present him with is the very best intelligence and I would provide it straight to him whether he wants to hear it or not,” Panetta said. “If by chance someone goes out and strays from that position, [or] indicates something that is contrary to the position that I have stated, I would not only bring it to the attention of that individual, I would bring it to the attention of the president of the United States.”

You can’t have “a group of yes-people around you,” Panetta continued. “The truth is something that sometimes depends on a particular perspective, but you’ve got to have a series of perspectives … Dissent is something I would encourage.”