The bill to extend payroll tax cuts and extend unemployment benefits is part of the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2012, H.R. 3671, a $1 trillion dollar omnibus spending bill that funds several federal government departments, including Defense and Homeland Security.

The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday that “the House voted Tuesday to scuttle a deal brokered in the Senate to extend the payroll-tax holiday and federal unemployment insurance for two months.”

The Journal adds that the “vote leaves Congress at a familiar impasse, just days after a final deal seemed to be in sight. Senate leaders reached an agreement late last week to extend for two months the payroll-tax cut, federal unemployment benefits and a measure to reimburse doctors for treating Medicare patients.”

The 2012 Appropriations Act includes funding that raises the number of immigration detention beds to about 34,000.

The final Fiscal Year 2012 Appropriations 1,200-page bill package includes “a total of $39.6 billion in regular discretionary funding for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) – a decrease of $2 billion below last year’s level and $4 billion below the President’s request.”

According to a detailed summary (.pdf), “the bill provides $5.9 billion for [Immigrations and Customs Enforcement], which is $50 million more than last year’s level. This includes funding for 34,000 detention beds – the largest detention capacity in ICE’s history – and increases in immigration enforcement activities.”

Residents of Pembroke Pines and the town of Southwest Ranches are opposed to the federally funded and privately managed detention center set to be built in South Florida.

The 2012 Appropriations Act also includes $11.7 billion for U.S. Customs and Border Protection, “an increase of $362 million over last year’s level.”

Photo: An Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer (ice.gov)

If either of those scenarios takes place, press secretary George Little said, “we would be looking at, in all likelihood, the smallest Army and Marine Corps in decades, the smallest tactical Air Force since [the branch] was established and the smallest Navy in nearly 100 years.”

George Little

Automatic cuts to the Defense Department would take place, through the 2011 Budget Control Act’s sequestration mechanism, if the Committee members don’t offer a plan to reduce the deficit by Nov. 24. The cuts would also take place if the whole of Congress fails to adopt a plan by the Committee in December.

For the Defense Department, that means another $500 billion from defense spending over 10 years, on top of $350 billion in cuts already identified over the same period.

The department has been looking at hundreds of millions of dollars in budget cuts and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has been adamant, Little said, that moving to sequestration would be a “devastating” scenario for the nation’s security.

The secretary “has reiterated time and time again that we don’t have to choose between our fiscal security and our national security,” Little said, “but if we go to sequestration, we would very well have to make that choice.

Little said that $1 trillion in cuts would make it necessary for the Pentagon to break faith in some areas — including jobs and salary benefits — with those in uniform who are serving the nation.

“In a time of war,” he said, “that’s unacceptable.”

At the Pentagon, internal analysis shows that sequestration also would have a profound impact on the U.S. industrial base, he added, by threatening many of the 3.8 million military and civilian jobs that the sector represents.

“We’re not talking about just military jobs, we’re also talking about jobs in the private sector that support the innovation and creativity and capabilities that we need to keep America strong,” he said.

Moving to sequestration and the additional budget cuts it would require, department officials believe “would potentially add 1 percent to the national unemployment rate,” Little said.

Panetta, he added, has made Congress aware of the consequences of such deep defense cuts.

“We want to make it very clear [to everyone] that sequestration is a red line that this government should not cross,” Little said.

The DREAM Act — reintroduced this year by Durbin — would grant people who entered the U.S. illegally before the age of 16 conditional permanent resident status for a period of six years, after which they would be eligible to become legal permanent residents if they obtain at least an associate-level college degree or serve in the military for two years. #

In his opening statement, DREAM Act opponent Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, said he sympathized with DREAM Act-eligible youth who did not violate U.S. immigration law, but he said the bill offers eligibility to people convicted of misdemeanors such as driving under the influence, burglary and drug possession. Cornyn added that this version of the DREAM Act has weak anti-immigration fraud provisions. #

Durbin countered by saying that the bill is for youth with strong moral standings and that it provides up to five years in prison for immigration fraud. #

The opening statement from Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., summarized the three points later echoed by other supporters: #

1. The DREAM Act comports with the rule of law and accountability.
2. The DREAM Act clarifies a distinction between a young person who lives in another country, comes to the U.S. with a student visa and then has a path to citizenship, and a young undocumented immigrant raised and educated in the U.S. who has no such path. “This distinction makes no sense,” Schumer said.
3. The DREAM Act does not give legal status to all young people — only to those who stay out of trouble and obtain a higher degree or serve in the military.

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, who testified in favor of the DREAM Act, said passage is the smart thing to do for economic prosperity, military readiness and support for law enforcement efforts. #

Napolitano explained (.pdf) that the Department of Homeland Security has focused on identifying criminal aliens and border security. She said that the DREAM Act supports these priorities because it makes no sense to spend law enforcement dollars on youth who do not pose a public safety or national security threat. #

Referring to a recently issued Immigration and Customs Enforcement memo, Durbin asked Napolitano how Homeland Security would implement measures to make sure DREAM Act-eligible youth are not deported. Napolitano responded that her department is designing a process to identify people caught in the deportation process who are not removable. #

Napolitano responded to Durbin and Cornyn’s questions about people who have been accused or convicted of misdemeanors, saying that an ICE officer has to look at the totality of an applicant’s behavior. She said that the DREAM Act has stricter criteria than the regular naturalization process in how it deals with these cases. #

Dr. Clifford Stanley, undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness, testified that the Department of Defense strongly supports the DREAM Act, which would expand the pool of quality recruits for the armed forces. #

In his written statement (.pdf) Stanley said that about 2.1 million aliens currently in the U.S. would meet the age and residency requirements of the DREAM Act, but because of the stringent and numerous requirements, a much number would eventually apply and qualify for the DREAM Act’s conditional status. #

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan spoke about the impact the DREAM Act would have on the U.S. economy, saying that without the DREAM Act, a generation will not develop its full potential. He also said that DREAM Act-eligible students would help fill many of the spots the U.S. will need in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics fields.#

Duncan added in his written statement (.pdf) that passage of the DREAM Act supports economic prosperity, pointing to a UCLA study. #

Lt. Colonel Margaret Stock, a retired member of the U.S. Army Reserves and an immigration attorney, quoted the Council on Foreign Relations’ Independent Task Force on U.S. Immigration Policy (co-chaired by former Gov. Jeb Bush) when endorsing the DREAM Act: “The DREAM Act is no amnesty. It offers to young people who had no responsibility for their parents’ initial decision to bring them into the United States the opportunity to earn their way to remain here.” #

The last witness, Dr. Steven Camarota, director of research for the Center for Immigration Studies, said in his statement (.pdf) that the current version of the DREAM Act has several problems. In his testimony, he highlighted four: #

1. Cost: With the two years of college required by the DREAM Act, the rise in undocumented students would increase costs at public schools for taxpayers.
2. Legalizing current undocumented immigrants would encourage more illegal migration. As potential solutions, he suggested strengthening E-Verify, Secure Communities and Section 287(g) immigration-enforcement programs.
3. The DREAM Act is an invitation to fraud. The current version of the bill does not have a clear list of required documents.
4. People convicted of certain misdemeanors would remain eligible for the DREAM Act.

The selection of two outsiders — Petraeus has no experience in the realm of pure intelligence work, while Panetta hasn’t had military experience, other than tangentially in his two years as CIA director, since his discharge from the Army in 1966 — to fill the posts may seem an odd choice. The two men’s backgrounds, however, may provide clues as to why each was chosen for the job.

Petraeus’s popularity, spanning both party lines and the civilian-military divide (at least among members of the public who know who he is), is sure to be an asset in the position, as it has been in his capacity as the head of military operations in Afghanistan. More pointedly, Wired’s Spencer Ackerman theorizes that Petraeus’s endorsement of unmanned drone strikes and special operations raids like those undertaken in Afghanistan and Pakistan hews closely to the Obama administration’s preferred methods of using the CIA in counterterror efforts, with drone strikes and shadow operations.

Panetta, meanwhile, got the CIA post to begin with in part because of his success steering President Bill Clinton’s Office of Management and Budget through the fat years of the mid-‘90s. Panetta later became Clinton’s chief of staff. His experience with budgets — he also headed up the House Budget Committee for years prior to leaving the world of elected office for Clintonian pastures — could be a sign that the administration is looking for a numbers man to justify bloated defense spending. Until the administration officially confirms its picks, however, it won’t be forthcoming with explanations for its choices.

The news hasn’t inspired a uniformly optimistic reaction from intelligence or defense insiders. Ackerman reports in Wired that Heather Hurlburt, executive director of the left-leaning National Security Network, contends that Panetta, at least, will be entering a no-win situation once he takes over the Defense Department:

“He’ll never live up to what building wants or has come to expect,” Hurlburt says of Panetta. “Gates tried to prepare them that this is coming, and cushion the building for what’s coming, but that’s not tenable. It’s an unenviable task.”

The response from the right has been similarly lukewarm:

[H]e’s generating cautious, first-blush optimism from defense watchers, even among the administration’s political opponents. “Safe choice,” says James Jay Carafano of the conservative Heritage Foundation, which has accused Gates and Obama of cutting defense too deeply. With both Petraeus and Panetta, “no one is going to question whether they are qualified.” Even Gates’ predecessor, Donald Rumsfeld, no fan of Obama, tweeted that Panetta and Petraeus are “outstanding leaders.”

Ackerman does not mention, however, that Rumsfeld’s tweet on Panetta and Petraeus was qualified by a followup:

…5 DCIs 5 US ambs & 7 mil cdrs in Afg over 7 yrs: No matter how capable the individual, musical chairs makes it impossible to find footing

Rumsfeld’s un-self-conscious criticism of the U.S.’s handling of the war in Afghanistan comes despite his role as the U.S. Defense secretary during the initial invasion, as well as the invasion of Iraq.

Responding to the ACLU’s Freedom of Information Act request of “records relating to the use of unmanned aerial vehicles – commonly known as ‘drones’ – for the purpose of targeting and killing individuals since September 11, 2001,” which was submitted July 2010, the Department of Defense told Jonathan Manes of the ACLU’s National Security Project that while this department does possess documents estimating the number of civilian casualties that result from operations involving military aircraft, it does not distinguish between weapons platforms.

“The only documents that address estimates of civilian casualties related to drone strikes are individual battle damage assessments evaluating each military aircraft mission, which the ACLU and DoD have agreed are outside the scope of documents to be processed in this litigation,” writes Mark H. Herrington, the DoD’s associate deputy general counsel.

The letter is dated Dec. 30, 2010, but ACLU spokesperson Molly Kaplan said the department held on to the letter for months, “apparently by mistake,” and it did not make it to the ACLU’s desk until last Friday.

Herrington further writes:

“In July 2010, the Department of Defense (DoD) informed the ACLU that all records related to this section of the request are classified and not maintained in a format that allows searching without significant cost. However, in light of ACLU’s insistence that civilian casualty information was of particular interest, DoD agreed to conduct 40 hours of searching for estimates of civilian casualties caused by such strikes, after which the parties would discuss whether additional searches would be undertaken.

DoD’s search confirmed that DoD does not create or maintain documents to compile estimates of civilian casualties related to drone strikes separately from estimates related to other weapons systems.”

Last year the civil liberties organization sued DoD after it would not fill its FOIA request on unmanned drones used to target killings overseas. The ACLU wanted to know when, where and against whom drone strikes can be authorized, as well as the number and rate of civilian casualties. Generally, the ACLU wanted the government to clarify the legal basis for using unmanned drones.

“It is remarkable that the Defense Department does not compile data about the total number of civilian casualties inflicted by unmanned drones – a new and controversial technology,” said Manes in a press statement. “The public must have accurate information about civilian casualties in drone strikes in order to assess the ethical, legal and strategic concerns that these weapons raise.”

According to the ACLU, the CIA, for its part, has entirely refused to respond to a request for information about the drone strikes in Pakistan.

Because the government has not been much help coming forward with this information, independent organizations and other media have attempted to pick up the slack. Last October, the Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict (CIVIC) released a report that concluded that innocent civilians in northwest Pakistan were being killed by both U.S. drone strikes and the ground and aerial attacks from the Pakistani military, as well as local militants.

The report found that in 2009, an estimated 2,300 civilians were killed in terror attacks alone and noted that “there is no governmental or military mechanism that systematically and publicly investigates or collects data on civilian casualties.” The group also discovered that the Pakistani government runs several compensation programs and suggested that drone victims be included in one of these programs.

On Thursday, CIVIC released a statement calling on the DoD and the CIA to “count and compensate civilians harmed by U.S. drones,” in light of the ACLU’s reveal.

“The US has a duty to know where it has caused civilian harm, including whether it was caused by close air support or unmanned aerial vehicles,” said Sarah Holewinski, CIVIC’s executive director, in the statement. “Let’s say civilian casualties skyrocket. Why the spike? How can the problem be fixed? Without good data, the US is operating with blinders on. After ten years at war, the US should know better.”

The New America Foundation is another organization that has attempted to quantify the civilian casualties of U.S. drone attacks in Pakistan, compiling data and information since 2004 from sources such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, the Associated Press and the BBC and English-language newspapers and media in Pakistan, such as The Daily Times, Dawn, The Express Tribune and Geo TV.

Thus far, NAF has found that the 233 reported drone strikes in northwest Pakistan — including 20 in 2011 – have killed between 1,411 and 2,247 people, of whom about 1,134 to 1,810 have been described as militants. According to the organization: “The true non-militant fatality rate since 2004 according to our analysis is approximately 21 percent. In 2010, it was more like six percent.”

NAF has also created a map with estimated locations of each drone strike.

The letter is addressed to Energy Secretary Steven Chu, Commerce Secretary Gary Locke, Defense Secretary Robert Gates and United States Trade Representative Ron Kirk.

Markey asks whether the administration has determined whether China is in fact blocking rare earth mineral exports to the United States (China has denied the reports) and what implications a a shortage of the minerals would have on national security and clean energy technology. Rare earth minerals are used in key military communications and smart bomb technology as well as in wind turbines and hybrid vehicles.

Markey also said he was planning on having a hearing on the issue.

For background on the rare earth mineral issue, see the following posts:
Obama Administration Says It Will Investigate China’s Green Tech Trade Policies
China Dismisses U.S. Investigation of Its Green Tech Trade Policies as Midterm Politicking
Report: China Blocking Rare Earth Mineral Shipments to U.S.
DOD Near Completion of Report on Military’s Use of Rare Earth Minerals

Here’s the letter, via The Hill.

Yesterday, The New York Times reported that China is blocking shipments of rare earth minerals to the United States. Though China has said the report is false, it still underscores U.S. vulnerability to Chinese trade decisions. This all comes as the Obama administration is investigating China’s green technology trade policies. U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk is looking into a lengthy petition by the United Steelworkers that accuses China of violating World Trade Organization rules by unfairly subsidizing exports of clean energy technology and controlling its rare earth minerals supplies.

Rare earth minerals, or rare earth elements, are essential components of scores of important products, including wind turbines, hybrid vehicles and cell phones. China has worked over the last two decades to develop its rare earth minerals, and now much of the world is dependent on the country for the vital resources. China currently produces 97 percent of the world’s rare earth minerals.

Rare earth minerals are also components of key technologies used by the military, including in communications equipment and smart bombs. But the U.S. military has never undertaken a comprehensive inventory of how reliant it is on rare earth minerals. The survey is now finished, and is currently being reviewed by key military officials, DOD spokeswoman Cheryl Irwin said.

Christine Parthemore, a fellow at the Center for New American Security, said the DOD review was essential because the U.S. military has very little sense of how much it relies on rare earth minerals.

“In defense equipment, because stuff is manufactured by the private sector, and [the private sector] is not involved in the end-use of these products. … There’s sort of a detachment of information that happens,” Parthemore said, explaining that the U.S. military is often not privy to suppliers’ use of rare earth minerals because it is considered proprietary information.

But Mother Jones points out, the defense authorization bill has about 3,500 other provisions — many of them important changes to the agenda for the Department of Defense.

It’s worth reading the full list, but here are a few notable provisions:

Revamping US Military and Foreign Policy

• No permanent military bases in Afghanistan.
• Report on long-term costs of Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom.
• National Military Strategic Plan to Counter Iran.

Anti-Corruption

• Standards and certification for private security contractors.
• Inclusion of bribery in disclosure requirements of the Federal awardee performance and integrity information system.

Environmental Progress

• Report identifying hybrid or electric propulsion systems and other fuel-saving technologies for incorporation into tactical motor vehicles.

Senators said they will have to eventually pass the bill — it just may be in a lame duck session. The Senate has passed a defense authorization bill for the past 48 years.

“We have to proceed to consider the defense authorization bill, because our military needs it,” Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) said yesterday. “We need it for authorization of critical military equipment for our troops to fight on our behalf. … We’ve got to take this bill up, it’s our national responsibility.”

It’s unlikely Harry Reid would again attempt to attach the DREAM Act to the bill, but the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell amendment will be an issue in the future. It was added by the Senate Armed Services Committee and is already a part of the defense authorization bill.

That does not mean the repeal would kill the bill in the future, though. Under different debate rules, Republicans could offer an amendment striking the repeal from the defense authorization bill. And it could find additional support: Some Republicans, such as Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) have said they would vote in support of the repeal, even though they voted to filibuster the bill moving to the Senate floor yesterday.

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.”

Michele Flournoy, left, created the Office for Rule of Law and International Humanitarian Policy, which is led by Rosa Brooks. (ZUMA, Bloggerama)

For the first time, the Department of Defense has established an office to guide policy on emerging non-traditional military activities like compliance with the rule of law, humanitarian emergencies and human rights. It’s a bureaucratic change that effectively frames international legitimacy as a security issue, a reflection of the legacy of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars among some policymakers. And the office’s first test may be its perspective on the thorny questions surrounding how the department handles al-Qaeda and Taliban detainees.

[Security1] Announced within the Pentagon in late May, the Office for Rule of Law and International Humanitarian Policy is being led by Rosa Brooks, a senior adviser to Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Michele Flournoy and a former director of Georgetown Law School’s Human Rights Center. It endeavors to ensure that the broad strategic aims of the Obama administration regarding adherence to a rules-based international order don’t get lost in the pressures of military contingencies. It will also advise senior Pentagon officials on their contributions to interagency planning and White House requests for advice on rule-of-law compliance, and will work with Congress and non-governmental organizations focusing on its host of issues.

The office — created by Flournoy with support from Defense Secretary Robert Gates and run by a staff that will eventually number 20 people — reflects a recent recognition that the legitimacy of the U.S. military in combat plays its own battlefield role, especially in conflicts like Afghanistan, where perceptions by civilians about whether to support America’s allies or its adversaries are considered decisive. “The counterinsurgency and counterterrorism doctrine has really moved in the direction of saying that these issues are not luxuries,” Brooks explained in a Monday interview at the Pentagon. “These issues are absolutely central to achieving our military objectives in a counterinsurgency or a counterterrorism environment, where the name of the game is ‘Do you have credibility? Do you have legitimacy? Are you building the structures that support long-term stability?’”

Many of the office’s emerging responsibilities will center on entrenching respect for the rule of law and human rights as a core focus within the Defense Department. Previously, Pentagon officials who worked on those issues were spread throughout the policy directorate, in bureaus as disparate as Counternarcotics and Detainee Affairs, a reflection of the secondary — Brooks called it “ad hoc” — treatment the department has traditionally provided to humanitarian concerns. Karen Greenberg, the director of New York University’s Center on Law and Security, said the office needs to “restore the notion that the rule of law is there on the table no matter what.” Matthew Waxman, a deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs at the end of the Bush administration, added that “sometimes important strategic issues can fall into bureaucratic seams, and redrawing parts of the organizational map can help address that.”

That contrasts with the previous administration’s perspective that human rights and the rule of law were impediments to effective military operations. President Bush famously judged in 2002 that al-Qaeda and Taliban detainees ought to be treated humanely “to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity.”

While building a staff and a budget means that Brooks anticipates the office’s agenda will take shape over the next several months, she said some early priority “areas to look at” include the Defense Department’s security assistance and training for partner militaries — to ensure it “not inadvertently undermin[e]” the U.S. interest in promoting the rule of law — and the effectiveness of department support to judicial systems.

Developing broader policy guidance to protect civilians during combat is another likely focus for the office, Brooks said, citing Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s guidance to his troops in Afghanistan about the need to secure civilian support for NATO military operations. “Reducing civilian casualties supports achieving military objectives,” Brooks said. “If the population is furious at you because bombs keep falling on schools, it’s harder to achieve your objectives.” She added that the propriety of “a global directive of that sort” required further study, but anticipated that any such study would have “potential consequences” for crafting military doctrine on protecting civilians.

“The goal would be to see if we need to make changes,” Brooks said, stressing that her agenda is still preliminary. “It’s a moral goal, and it is a tactical and strategic goal, to minimize civilian casualties. Are we doing it as effectively as we could? Do we have the systems in place, the doctrine in place, the training in place, to do as well as we could, while recognizing that doctrine, training, et cetera matters?”

In some cases, like U.S. compliance with treaty obligations, Brooks said she expects her office to serve in a supporting role to other agencies, while taking the lead on issues where the military has the greatest stake. “The State Department can’t determine whether DOD needs to revise its doctrine to better protect civilians,” she said.

Some human-rights advocates greeted the establishment of the new office with optimism. “To the extent the Pentagon is engaging directly with foreign governments, having a human rights voice in that room is extremely important, so the U.S. speaks with a single voice,” said Tom Malinowski of Human Rights Watch. “You don’t want the State Department coming in one day with a broad policy agenda [including] respect for human rights and humanitarian principles and the Pentagon coming in the next day talking about basing rights without the two being coordinated.”

Greenberg said the big test for the office will be its ability to help influence the emerging shape of detainee policy. Administration officials and congressional leaders have discussed the creation of frameworks for indefinite detention without charge, an idea that found its way into the National Security Strategy under the rubric of creating an “approach that can be sustained by future Administrations, with support from both political parties and all three branches of government.” Malinowski cautioned against viewing detainee policy as a crucible for the new office, but said he hopes the office can “guard against the tendency of the Pentagon as an institution to reflexively defend the expanded powers that it received in the last administration.”

Brooks said that her office “will work very closely” with Col. William Lietzau, the deputy assistant secretary for detainee affairs, but did not specify any programmatic agenda. “Bill Lietzau is someone who’s already attuned to those issues anyway, so those are the kinds of conversations that we’re always having,” Brooks said, concerning how to “make sure that as we try to work through these thorny inherited detainee issues that we’re doing it in a way that buttresses our broad commitments to rule-of-law norms.”

“And it’s not easy on those issues,” she added. “The briar patch we started out with has been a tough one to get ourselves out of without sustaining a lot of little scratches.”

Waxman wrestled with those issues while he ran detainee policy for the Rumsfeld Pentagon. He hailed Brooks’ office as a step toward integrating law and strategy. “Often those issues are thought of as separate spheres: The lawyers in the general counsel’s office and the military judge advocates say what the legal bounds are and the policy advisers and military planners and operators decide within those bounds what the strategy is,” Waxman said. “That’s too simplistic and risks missing the many ways in which the two operate in tandem, and this new office looks like it’s intended to help ensure they do so effectively. For example, the United States may have a strategic interest in abiding by certain standards, because we want to promote those standards abroad among foreign forces or because it’s believed to strengthen counterinsurgency efforts to win hearts and minds.”

Brooks herself will continue to wear several hats in the Pentagon. In addition to becoming the first deputy assistant secretary of defense for Rule of Law and International Humanitarian Policy, she’ll remain Flournoy’s senior adviser and helm the policy directorate’s Global Strategic Engagement Team. “Rosa is an excellent person to do this job,” Malinowski said. “I’m happy to hear the position has been created and happy to hear she’s filling it.”