Category Archives: defense policy

An Excerpt

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…from a VA Office of the Inspector General report.

We substantiated the second allegation that pending ES [Enrollment System] records included entries for individuals reported to be deceased. As of September 2014, more than 307,000 pending ES records, or about 35 percent of all pending records, were for individuals reported as deceased by the Social Security Administration. However, due to data limitations, we could not determine specifically how many pending ES records represent veterans who applied for health care benefits. These conditions occurred because the enrollment program did not effectively define, collect, and manage enrollment data. In addition, VHA lacked adequate procedures to identify date of death information and implement necessary updates to the individual’s status. Unless VHA officials establish effective procedures to identify deceased individuals and accurately update their status, ES will continue to provide unreliable information on the status of applications for veterans seeking enrollment in the VA health care system.

Not only is the VA not trying to take care of our vets—307,000 of them died waiting to get treatment—they’re not even troubling themselves to keep records.

We substantiated the third allegation that employees incorrectly marked unprocessed applications as completed and possibly deleted 10,000 or more transactions from the Workload Reporting and Productivity (WRAP) tool over the past 5 years.

They do, though, go to the effort of covering up their non-performance (I hesitate to say “failure to perform;” that would suggest they’re trying).

And there’s this insulting bit of vapidity from the Under Secretary for Health in response to the IG’s report (the whole letter is at Appendix D of the report at the link. It doesn’t get any better).

We regret the inconvenience and potential hardship place on applicants for health care and we are working hard to restore Veterans’ confidence and trust in VA’s systems and staff. We have and will continue to take timely and appropriate steps to improve our services to ensure we meet the expectations of those whom we have the honor of serving.

Yeah, dying while on the VA’s who gives a patootie wait list is such a potentially inconvenient hardship.

Since the VA doesn’t care, we should honor their lack of interest. Disband the VA, and use the budget dollars that would have gone to the VA in any particular year as vouchers for our veterans which they can find, in that year, their own quality care and decent hospitals.

Clinton’s Emails

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State released 7,000 more of Hilary Clinton’s emails, those…documents…transmitted via her private, unprotected email server. One hundred fifty of them contained classified information.

State Department spokesman Mark Toner said the emails in question were “subsequently upgraded” to classified. He stressed that none of the emails was considered classified at the time.

This is so utterly disingenuous as to be outright lies. The material in the emails were not “subsequently upgraded” to classified; they were only marked classified after the fact. The material was classified all along.

[S]ome of the information on Clinton’s server was inherently classified. Fox’s analysts cited a memo transmitting information provided by foreign diplomats about Sudan peace talks.

As Shannen Coffin explained, because such information is substantive and comes from foreign diplomats, it is “born classified.”

Information from other sources also is born classified. Recall the first set of emails discovered to be classified (if unmarked as such): they passed along information derived from Talent Keyhole programs.

There are two things about this. All the folks sending, receiving, and reading those emails—TO, FROM, CC, and BCC senders and receivers (and relayers—that’s one reason why the email headers (available only in the electronic copies) are so important), every single one of them—knew or should have known that the material was classified, regardless of their markings. All the folks sending, receiving, or reading those emails should have squawked to the classification authorities of the sender’s office and of State, and to the Security facilities of both offices, about the security violations those emails represented, both by their lack of markings and by their existence on an unclassified, unprotected server.

The other thing is that the mere transmission of such information via unsecured means, or the mere retention of them, however briefly, on unsecured media, is a felony, whether or not the information was properly marked. Everyone in that sequence of transmittal—TO, FROM, CC, and BCC senders and receivers and relayers—who did not so report committed a felony.

Every single one.

Border Walls

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There are lots of reasons for objecting to a wall running the length of our southern border (and I’ll elide the reasons for supporting one for the purposes of this post), but the reasons posited by the National Journal aren’t on that list.

[T]he more difficult it becomes to cross the border, the more likely undocumented migrants are to turn to smugglers for help getting across….

It’s not a perfect solution so we shouldn’t bother trying it at all? Aside from that bit of foolishness, the question of coyotes is a wholly unrelated question that needs to be addressed regardless of the measures we take to tighten security at our borders.

[N]o barrier will ever be high enough or secure enough to completely halt attempts to cross the border illegally.

It’s not a perfect solution so we shouldn’t bother trying it at all?

Research shows an uptick in migrant deaths at the border in the years following efforts by the US to tighten security and construct fences to keep undocumented immigrants out.

It’s not a perfect solution so we shouldn’t bother trying it at all? The source of immigration is a wholly unrelated question that needs to be addressed regardless of the measures we take to tighten security at our borders. We should be working with the source countries to get them to/force them to improve their domestic situation so as to reduce the incentives their citizens have to leave in the first place.

In the long run, that’s cheaper than efforts to control—in isolation—illegal immigration at our border, and it’s more prosperous by making those citizens freer in their home countries and making them better markets for our goods and services.

Another Clinton Lie

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Hillary Clinton’s campaign said Wednesday that emails on the private server she used when she was secretary of state contained material that is now classified, the clearest explanation thus far of an issue that has roiled her bid for the presidency.

At the same time, the campaign sought to play down the disclosure by saying the material had been retroactively classified out of an abundance of caution by US intelligence agencies.

“She was at worst a passive recipient of unwitting information that subsequently became deemed as classified,” said Brian Fallon, a spokesman for Mrs Clinton’s campaign.

This, of course is…nonsense. The material was classified at its inception, and the documents carrying the material was thereby classified at the documents’ creation. They were only marked classified after the fact, and after the material had been recognized—by others—as having been mishandled.

That the material had been being mishandled was well known to Clinton. She has said before that she understands the rules and requirements of handling classified material. That’s what makes her claims above, through her campaign, outright lies.

It’s Not a Mystery

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Except to Steve Chapman, writing in Real Clear Politics.

It’s a mystery why, after allegedly tricking us into giving them everything they wanted, the Iranians would be so eager to evade these easy terms.

Iran’s leadership wants nuclear weapons, and they’ll do what they need to do to get them: talk interminably about a “deal” that purports to restrict their access, for a time, and then disregard the terms of the deal in order to continue their development and building efforts apace. This just isn’t that hard to understand.

Let’s consider the threat of cheating. One complaint is that the accord allows Iran to delay inspections of some sites for up to 24 days or more, making it easy to clean them up before the inspectors arrive. In fact, it wouldn’t be easy, because nuclear materials linger—not for weeks, but for centuries.

Back in 2003, when it was suspected of conducting forbidden nuclear experiments at one facility, Iran blocked International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) monitors for more than six months. But when inspectors finally got in, they were able to detect telltale residues.

Couple things about this. In no particular order, the materials linger when they’re not cleaned up. Apparently Chapman thinks the Iranians are so stupid they learned nothing over the last dozen years from their less-than-effective cleanup efforts and being caught out.

From that incident those dozen years ago, no consequences ensued from the IAEA’s discovery. There’s little reason to believe a different outcome to any cheating today.

And, what Chapman carefully elided: the Iranians cheated then. Along those lines:

We don’t have to prove guilt. Iran has to prove innocence.

No, they don’t. They don’t have to do anything; they can continue their activities unaltered by any discovery of cheating. Never mind that no consequence can ensue from the cheating until it has been demonstrated that Iran has failed its proof.

But take the worst-case scenario. Suppose Iran commits a violation and our partners devise some ingenious way to block sanctions. Then what? The US would still have the ultimate recourse: military action.

Indeed. But what Chapman ignored is that the longer the delay on taking that ultimate recourse, the more expensive and the more chancy of success it will get.