Your job or your blog, er op-ed

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Newsweek’s Declassified blog had an item on December 3 about a top Congressional Research Service (CRS) official who was “fired from his job after publishing a newspaper op-ed criticizing the Obama administration's recent decision about bringing Guantánamo detainees to trial.”

The blog post says in part:

“But another CRS official (who asked not to be identified because of the issue's sensitivity) confirms Davis's firing and says it reflects persistent tensions between Mulhollan and some members of his staff over how far they can go in making public comments or publishing articles that might prove controversial with members of Congress. Another CRS researcher got into a similar dispute and was transferred to another job after publishing a newspaper op-ed criticizing congressional oversight of the Iraq War, the official notes.”

"The director has a paranoid fear that somebody somewhere is going to say something" that draws criticism from members of Congress, says the CRS official. "The director is very strict about us giving out our personal views or taking a position on issues."

I have the links below on the items that reportedly got Morris Davis canned:

Here is Morris Davis’ November 10, 2009 op-ed in the Wall Street Journal: Justice and Guantanamo Bay.

Read his WaPo letter to the editor here on Michael Mukasey for publicly criticizing Holder for trying any detainees at all in federal court.

Neither piece mentions his association with the CRS. Read the rest of Top Congressional Researcher on Afghanistan Fired here.

If the director indeed has a healthy “paranoid fear that somebody somewhere is going to say something--" well, hey! don’t you think that’s a rather nice coincidence? Maybe he ought to have a powwow with the folks in Foggy Bottom responsible for the disappearance of Madam le Consul’s blog. Maybe they can share their “best practices” on transparency and open.gov without attracting too much media attention?

And if they're smart – let's say they are, they could sweep it all under the “matters of official concern” rug, so no insider would even dare blog or speak about it above that nice Madison rug. Then everybody can sleep snug as a bug at night.

Related Items:

• Declassified Blog: Top Congressional Researcher on Afghanistan Fired
• Secrecy News: CRS Fires a Division Chief

Western Sahara: A fight over independence

Lobbying Expenses: Algeria - $416,000; Morocco - $3.4 million

The following is excerpted from Opening the Window on Foreign Lobbying by Anupama Narayanswamy and Luke Rosiak, Sunlight Foundation and Jennifer LaFleur, ProPublica. Reprinted here under Creative Commons.

The Western Sahara [14] is an inhospitable patch of desert about the size of Colorado on Africa’s Atlantic coast, with a population of about 400,000, a GDP of only $900 million, and an economy based on nomadic herding, fishing and phosphorous mining. It is also one of the last colonies in the world — Morocco [15] annexed it a few years after Spain granted it independence in 1975 — and the subject of 34 U.N. Security Council resolutions on the territory since 1999.

In late 2007 and 2008, the desert region was a top priority for Morocco’s hired lobbyists. At issue was Western Sahara’s autonomy, but the story also shows how, in a foreign lobbying arms race, the side with the biggest arsenal can come out on top.

The government of Morocco sought the support of Congress in this lengthy territorial dispute. The region has long demanded independence. An indigenous insurgent group, the Polisario Front [16], waged a guerrilla war against the Moroccan military until the United Nations brokered a cease-fire in 1991.

Part of the terms of that deal included holding a referendum to determine the territory’s final status, but no vote has been held. In 2007, Morocco issued a proposal to grant Western Sahara autonomy within sovereign Morocco. The U.S. initially welcomed the proposal, and direct talks began between Morocco and the Polisario with the involvement of Algeria, which supports self-determination for the Sahrawi tribes from the area.

Toby Moffett, a lobbyist for Morocco who served as a Democratic congressman from Connecticut in the 1970s and ’80s, wrote an op-ed for the April 8, 2007, edition of The Los Angeles Times, explaining how he presented Morocco’s position to an unnamed member of Congress: “Morocco has a good story to tell,” he wrote. “It believes that the long-standing dispute with Algeria and the rebel Polisario group over the Western Sahara must be resolved.

“We tell the congresswoman and her staff that the region is becoming a possible Al Qaeda training area,” he wrote. “Algeria and the Polisario recently hired lobbyists, too, so we’ll have our hands full.”

Indeed, records show the Algerian government’s lobbyists had 36 contacts with members of Congress and staff promoting self-determination for the people of Western Sahara. The Algerians paid a modest $416,000 in lobbying fees.

By comparison, lobbyists for the government of Morocco had 305 contacts with members of Congress and their staff. Morocco paid $3.4 million in lobbying expenses — putting it among the top foreign government spenders for FARA filings in the period.

The intense campaign won converts. A bipartisan group of some 173 House members signed on to a statement supporting Morocco’s offer of autonomy for the region without formal independence. President Bush also expressed support [17] for Morocco’s plan in summer of 2008. And this April, 229 representatives sent a letter to President Obama urging him to back Morocco.

Until Obama reversed Bush’s stance [18] last month, Morocco’s investment worked.

* * *

The Foreign Lobbyist Influence Tracker is a joint project of ProPublica and the Sunlight Foundation. It digitizes information that representatives of foreign governments, political parties and government-controlled entities must disclose to the U.S. Justice Department when they seek to influence U.S. policy. Filings under the Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA) provide details on how lobbyists interact with government officials than those required by the Lobbying Disclosure Act; they contain information on efforts by foreign governments and organizations to influence U.S. policy on trade, taxation, foreign aid, appropriations, human rights and national security.

You may query the database by member of Congress contacted, country, client or lobbying firm. You can also search by "contact issues" as reported by lobbyists.

Read more on Western Sahara here.

$4.2 million to dispute a single word

Image from ProPublica

Foreign Lobbyist Influence Tracker, a joint project of ProPublica and the Sunlight Foundation, digitizes information that representatives of foreign governments, political parties and government-controlled entities must disclose to the U.S. Justice Department when they seek to influence U.S. policy. Filings under the Foreign Agent Registration Act provide more details on how lobbyists interact with government officials than those required by the Lobbying Disclosure Act; they contain information on efforts by foreign governments and organizations to influence U.S. policy on trade, taxation, foreign aid, appropriations, human rights and national security.

You may query the database by member of Congress contacted, country, client or lobbying firm. You can also search by "contact issues" as reported by lobbyists. Here are some sample queries: "Robert Wexler", "Tax", and "Executive Office of Dubai."

With the roll out of the influence tracker database, ProPublica also published two accompanying articles Adding it up: The Top Players in Foreign Agent Lobbying and Opening the Window on Foreign Lobbying. The latter by Anupama Narayanswamy and Luke Rosiak, Sunlight Foundation and Jennifer LaFleur, ProPublica. The following is excerpted from that piece (reprinted under Creative Commons):

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$4.2 million to dispute a single word

Perhaps no player in the field shows the influence of foreign agents as much as Robert Livingston, the powerful ex-appropriations chairman who was in line to be House Speaker before a scandal derailed him. His firm, Livingston Group [6], reported the highest number of contacts with government officials, and Livingston was the second-biggest political giver among lobbyists for foreign agents, listing more than $99,000 in campaign contributions, most of which went to members of Congress. His clients — including the governments of Azerbaijan, Egypt, Libya and the Republic of Congo and the Bank of the Netherlands Antilles — showered his firm with $5 million in fees, the third-highest total among all firms that reported during the period.

Also among them was one country with a longstanding image problem: Turkey. From 1915 to 1923, as many as 1.5 million Armenians perished, many at the hands of the Ottoman government, but a precise description of the events has been an extraordinarily sensitive subject in Turkey. The issue also has risen regularly in Congress, thanks in part to American-Armenian groups that have pushed for government affirmation [7] that the killings amounted to genocide.

In October 2007, with elderly Armenian survivors from the era in attendance, the House Committee on Foreign Affairs approved a resolution [8] that would do just that. The next step would be a vote before the entire House, something Turkey wanted desperately to avoid. On more than any other issue, Turkey, which has a U.S.-led war in Iraq on its border, is seeking help in a longstanding effort to join the European Union.

The genocide question split U.S. leaders. All eight living former secretaries of state at the time sent a letter warning Congress that offending Turkey could have serious diplomatic consequences for the United States. Both Barack Obama and his chief opponent for the Democratic presidential nomination, Hillary Rodham Clinton, were in the Senate; Clinton backed a resolution recognizing the genocide, and Obama made it a campaign pledge.

Turkey’s lobbyists made contact with the executive branch 100 times in a coordinated effort to persuade congressional leaders to squash the resolution. The Livingston Group worked Congress. The firm’s lobbyists contacted the office of Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., author of the resolution, four times on Oct. 4 to arrange a meeting with Turkish Ambassador Nabi Sensoy. A few weeks later, Sensoy was withdrawn in protest of the House’s consideration of the measure.

Turkey didn’t lobby just Congress — the country hired foreign agents to promote the cause with people outside the administration, too. Noam Neusner, who served as a speechwriter for President George W. Bush, worked the powerful Jewish lobby, meeting with an array of groups including the influential American Israeli Public Affairs Committee [9] a combined 96 times to persuade them to oppose the resolution, FARA records show. Turkey was the first Muslim country to recognize Israel, and relations have been generally positive; but in the end, AIPAC supported the resolution.

On Oct. 26, 2007, some sponsors of the resolution backed off a full floor vote, and the legislation never advanced. FARA records quantify the effort Turkey’s lobbyists put into the issue: 673 contacts in a single month, and more than 2,200 in the filings overall — the most of any country.

In all, records show, Turkey spent $4.2 million to mobilize its lobbyists to influence a resolution that hinged on the single word -- genocide. Some $1.9 million of that went to DLA Piper [10], a top-50 U.S. law firm that operates globally and has taken on such high-profile cases as the defense of imprisoned Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi in Myanmar. The dispute demonstrates the power of labels — and the lengths to which a country will go to protect its world image.

CRS Reports on WikiLeaks Now

This came from Jennifer LaFleur of ProPublica on February 10, 2009: WikiLeaks Publishes CRS Reports; Gov’t Still Doesn’t. Reprinted here under creative commons license.

In making many of its decisions, Congress relies on hundreds of analysts to study issues from stimulus spending [1] to alternative fuel vehicles [2] to human cloning [3].

But the department that does those analyses, the Congressional Research Service, does not make the hundreds reports it generates each year available to the public. (But the public does pay: The CRS's annual budget is about $100 million.)

Many of those reports [4] have just been made available to the public via the pro-transparency site WikiLeaks [5], which has posted 6,780 CRS reports. The folks at WikiLeaks won't say how they got the reports: "As for getting, everyone wants to know which member of Congress or their staff is our source. Naturally we can't talk about that," a WikiLeaks staffer told us in an e-mail.

WikiLeaks says its collection does not include older reports that are available only on paper.

CRS can't offer up the reports because they are required by statute to make its reports available only to members of Congress. According to an April 2007 memo [6] (PDF) from CRS director Daniel Mulhollan, CRS lacks the "authority to make its products available to anyone other than the Congress of the United States."

"Needless to say, I don't find the arguments persuasive," said Stephen Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists. "The CRS' sister congressional organization, the Government Accountability Office [7], publishes new reports online each day without any detrimental effect. But the decision to publish is for Congress to make, not CRS."

Aftergood's organization, FAS, has its own archive [8] of CRS reports dealing with national security, intelligence and foreign relations.

Others have published the reports too: The University of North Texas Libraries has an extensive CRS collection [9] as does the Thurgood Marshall Law Library at the University of Maryland School of Law. And OpenCRS [10], a project of the Center for Democracy and Technology, has a directory to CRS collections around the country. One of the few natural outlets that doesn't offer CRS reports: the U.S. government.

Just in time for an early Valentine's Day gift for nerdy wonks all around!!

WikiLeaks in its editorial titled Change you can download dated February 8, 2009 says that “the 6,780 reports, current as of this month, comprise over 127,000 pages of material on some of the most contentious issues in the nation, from the U.S. relationship with Israel to the financial collapse. Nearly 2,300 of the reports were updated in the last 12 months, while the oldest report goes back to 1990. The release represents the total output of the Congressional Research Service (CRS) electronically available to Congressional offices. The CRS is Congress's analytical agency and has a budget in excess of $100M per year.”

The State Department also has a collection of CRS reports and issue briefs available here. The CRS reports in WikiLeaks are available here.