The Center for Public Integrity

The Obama administration has quietly arranged for thousands of chemical protective suits and related items to be sent to Jordan and Turkey and is pressing the military forces there to take principal responsibility for safeguarding Syrian chemical weapons sites if the country’s lethal nerve agents suddenly become vulnerable to theft and misuse, Western and Middle Eastern officials say.

As part of their preparations for such an event, Western governments have started training the Jordanians and Turks to use the chemical gear and detection equipment, so they have the capability to protect the Syrian nerve agent depots if needed – at least for a short time, U.S. and Western officials say.

Washington has decided moreover that the best course of action in the aftermath of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s fall would be to get the nerve agents out of the country as quickly as possible, and so it has begun discussions not only with Jordan and Turkey, but also with Iraq and Russia in an effort to chart the potential withdrawal of the arsenal and its destruction elsewhere.

Using allied forces from Syria’s periphery as the most likely “first-responders” to a weapons-of-mass-destruction emergency is regarded in Washington as a way to avoid putting substantial U.S. troops into the region if the special Syrian military forces now safeguarding the weapons leave their posts. A Syrian withdrawal might otherwise render the weapons vulnerable to capture and use by Hezbollah or other anti-U.S. or anti-Israeli militant groups, U.S. officials fear.

This article is based on conversations about international planning for the disposition of the Syrian stockpile with a half dozen U.S. and foreign officials who have direct knowledge of the matter but declined to be named due to the political and security sensitivities surrounding their work. They said the Western planning, while not yet complete, is further along than officials have publicly disclosed.

The multinational NATO force in Afghanistan has declared that it spent more than $200 million to buy fuel for the Afghan Army in 2010 and 2011, but cannot locate any documents to substantiate the expense or show precisely where the money went, according to a special report by a government watchdog on Dec. 20.

As a result, the U.S. government is unable to “account for $201 million” worth of fuel purchases, said Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) John Sopko, in a letter alerting two members of Congress to the missing documentation.

The letter is a follow-up to a warning by Sopko in September that coalition force personnel in Afghanistan had improperly shredded fuel purchase records that covered a five-year period, blocking the ability of auditors to assess how much fuel was actually used by the Afghani army and how much might have been lost or stolen.

Since then, many of the relevant records were found, but a deeper investigation by Sopko’s team failed to find those it is complaining about now.

In his report to the chairman and ranking minority member of the House Oversight and Government Reform subcommittee on national security and foreign operations, Sopko said he had found “no evidence that the document shredding was related to criminal activity.” But he noted that the shredding began within days after the U.S. military’s Central Command specifically ordered managers “not to destroy or dispose of financial records.”

Sopko said his staff interviewed more than a dozen current and former contracting officials and found two that admitted to doing the shredding with the aim of enhancing “efficiency [and] saving physical storage space.” They claimed it was authorized, and said they scanned the documents into a computer first, but said they could not recall where the scans were stored.

The deaths of four Americans in Benghazi on Sept. 11, including the U.S. ambassador to Libya, stemmed from systemic shortcomings in the State Department’s handling of diplomatic security, according to an independent review ordered by the department and published this week.

These included a failure by the department to anticipate the gravity of the security threat, and a failure to have adequate forces in place or in a position to rush to the Benghazi mission during the attack that unfolded during Amb. Chris Steven’s visit there.

But they also stemmed from some fairly prosaic failures at the mission itself, according to a less-noticed portion of the department’s report. The attack unfolded quickly, but it was a surprise to those inside partly because an additional set of surveillance cameras “remained in boxes uninstalled” and a camera in the guard booth at the main gate “was inoperable on the day of the attacks, a repair which also awaited the arrival of a technical team.”

Also, the review board concluded that diplomatic security officials failed to anticipate the possibility that those at the mission could be put at risk from smoke, even though fires are ubiquitous when military ordnance explodes, as it often does in conflict and post-conflict locales. “The lack of fire safety equipment severely impacted the Ambassador’s and [security guard] Sean Smith’s ability to escape,” the panel said.

At a Senate Foreign Relations committee hearing on Dec. 20, Deputy Secretary of State Thomas R. Nides promised that the department was “realigning resources in our 2013 budget request to address physical vulnerabilities and reinforce structures wherever needed, and to reduce the risks from fire.” Three State Department officials were reassigned and one was retired in the wake of the review panel’s harsh conclusions.

The National Rifle Association is keeping silent in response to calls for gun control measures in the wake of the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. Yet the massive trail of political money spent by the group shows the potent force any proposals for new restrictions will likely face when the anger and dismay over Sandy Hook recedes.

Since President Barack Obama took office, the NRA has spent millions to lobby Congress on gun legislation and bankroll the campaigns of supportive candidates. From 2009 through the first three quarters of 2012, the NRA spent more than $8.5 million to lobby on gun bills, according to mandated federal lobby disclosure records, most often to block proposed limits on weapons and ammunition access or support efforts to expand the right to carry concealed weapons in public. Direct federal lobbying accounts for only a small portion of the association’s total spending to influence state and federal gun policy; according the NRA’s 2010 tax return, it spent more than $20 million on “legislative action” that year. Much of the recent legislation on concealed weapons, in particular, has been at the state level.

Although federal lobbying disclosure records do not include itemized NRA spending on each bill, documents show that the association took sides on a number of initiatives, including a 2011 bill introduced by Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.) that would have banned magazines holding more than 10 rounds of ammunition. Both Adam Lanza, the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooter, and Jacob Roberts, the masked gunman who killed two at an Oregon mall shooting earlier this month, carried high-capacity clips and civilian versions of the military M-16. Lautenberg has pledged to reintroduce the bill, which languished in committee during the 2012 session.

The U.S. intelligence community has confirmed in a new report that global power in the future will not be marked by the deployment of large military force or arsenals of nuclear weapons, two measures of American power that still have a large following in Washington.

In a new report entitled “Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds”, the National Intelligence Council said global power in that year will be reflected instead by a mix of factors, including the state of technology, health, education, and governance as well as GDP (the size of the national economy), population size, and military spending.

And by 2030, countries in Asia will have surpassed the United States in many of these power metrics, meaning that “the ‘unipolar moment’ is over and Pax Americana – the era of American ascendancy in international politics that began in 1945 – is fast winding down,” the report said. “There will not be any hegemonic power” in 18 years but instead a collection of “networks and coalitions” in which Asian nations and rising economic powers such as India, Brazil, Colombia, Indonesia, Nigeria, South Africa and Turkey will take part.

This may not seem revolutionary, but it contravenes some rhetoric that surrounded the presidential campaign, which still animates those wedded to a nostalgic model of American predominance in global affairs. The days of primacy are over, says the council, which held meetings with scholars and experts in 10 states and 20 countries, and drew on studies by national laboratories and advice from Silicon Valley entrepreneurs.

Predominance is an ambition Americans cannot expect to see fulfilled, and certainly not by doing more of what we do now, says the report, prepared by an analytic unit of the White House’s Director of National Intelligence.

Officials in central Indianapolis thought deeply a few years back about what equipment they needed to defend against a local attack involving weapons of mass destruction, such as chemical arms or a nuclear bomb, and their answer was (ba dum, ba dum) a hovercraft!

Luckily, the city didn’t even have to foot the$69,000 bill. The funds instead came from a Federal Emergency Management Agency program known as the Urban Area Security Initiative, which has so far spent more than $7 billion trying to make about five dozen of America’s cities safe from the threat of terrorism.

When officials in Louisiana calculated how they could best deal with the terrorism threat in their own backyard, their answer in part was – yes, really – a teleprompter and a lapel microphone, again purchased with funds from the FEMA initiative. Similarly, Oxnard-Thousand Oaks officials in California deliberated and decided to buy new fins and snorkels for their dive team.

But the City of Clovis in that state was even more creative: They used a $250,000 FEMA grant to buy an armored vehicle known as the BearCat, which wound up being used to patrol at an Easter egg hunt and other public events.

Some of the urban security funds were undoubtedly carefully spent. But a report last week by Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) highlighted the highly unusual spending choices listed above and accused FEMA of extraordinarily weak oversight. FEMA and the department in which it sits, Homeland Security, have failed either to carefully assess which cities need help or to examine which of its grants have been properly used, Coburn said.

The Obama administration is moving forward with plans to modify the Medicare payment system for radiological isotopes used in diagnostic procedures despite concerns that the change would not do enough to end health care providers’ reliance on bomb-grade uranium.

Effective Jan. 1, hospitals and other medical facilities will be entitled to an additional $10 in government reimbursement for every diagnostic procedure they conduct on Medicare patients using isotopes not derived from highly enriched uranium.

The Health and Human Services Department proposed the change in July, and it has been viewed favorably by nonproliferation advocates who want to see the United States weaned off of isotopes produced with material that could be used to make a nuclear weapon if it fell into the wrong hands.

Health care industry officials, however, have argued the administration underestimates how much more it will cost to switch to producing isotopes without HEU material. The extra $10 per procedure is not likely cover the cost increase passed on health care providers, and will therefore not be enough to persuade hospitals and other medical facilities to make the switch, industry officials argued in September comments to the HHS Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

In a passage buried within a 357-page notice published in the Federal Register last month, CMS officials acknowledged the additional payment might not be a great incentive. They argued, though, that they are merely looking to compensate providers who switch to non-HEU sources, not give them motivation to do so.