on the Republican appointees, especially Bush's? That is, are they there to blur and obfuscate, intending to protect the favored Bushite contractors, or are they of sufficient character and experience to do an honest job? Is not Booz Allen, for example, (Zakheim is President of Booz Allen Hamilton) going to be one of the contractors being investigated?

This is the guy who was the comptroller of the Department of Defense when that 3 trillion dollars went missing. Also known on the inside for retiring perfectly good equipment which subsequently disappeared. Look him up on the internet. It will blow you away.

Since this is a bipartisan commission president Bush got to appoint someone. That person is Dov Zakheim who was at the center of the contracting scandal at the Pentagon since he was comptroller of the Department of Defense during the disappearance of massive amounts of funds. I believe he also had some other procurement positions within the Pentagon before that.

Recently on the Jon Stewart show Webb called the neocons Trotsyites (Zakheim is one, in fact, according to my research his grandfather was a Bolshevik), and Webb said they were responsible for the invasion of Iraq. Prior to acquiring his position at the Pentagon Dov Zakheim along with persons such as Rumsfeld, Cheney, Perle, Kagan, Wolfowitz, etc., was a co-author of the PNAC documents which called for another "Pearl Harbor type of event" to forward their agenda in the Middle East.

I would say Bush's appointment of Zakheim to this commission is similar to the appointment of Monsanto executives to head the FDA in order to prevent proper testing of Monsanto's gentically modified foods. (Happened under Clinton, but similar appoinments were made under Bush)

This appoinment can also been seen as a way for the Bush admin to give Webb the finger for outing them on national TV. Now Webb has to have the fox on the committee investigating the hen house.  

Some of these people have long been suspected of being at the center of the corruption themselves. Also, doesn't Webb know yet that Bush has put a gag order on investigating corruption in Iraq? I should say he has prohibited certain persons in the government from testifying.

Now that Obama has caved on the Telcom immunity this country is looking more and more Orwellian.

It needs to be added that this legislation was one of the numerous pieces of legislation that Czar Bush has signed with an expressed intention to ignore....he has issued one of his "signing statements" relating to all of this, indictating that he is above this law and will not cooperate in its enforcement.  That Separation of Powers stuff is such an annoyance to the insane G.W. Bush....who the heck thought of those annoyances to what should be his unbridled power???

For a discussion of these signing statements for those who don't know about them, read this:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22...

and

this: http://www.coherentbabble.com/...

While Barack Obama has often quoted Martin Luther King, Jr.'s warning about "The Fierce Urgency of Now"...Jim Webb and others are presently  LIVING  that statement as we anxiously await for Obama to dethrone the present administration.  What Richard Nixon did was child's play compared to the challenges to a free society we are now facing.

I sent an email to Webb yesterday, asking for an explanation as to why he became a co-sponsor of a John Warner off-shore oil drilling bill -- within days of Obama coming out against off-shore oil drilling.

I hope others will do the same thing.  

Among the military services, Navy has for a long time had the best Acquistion (contracting) top-level management, rules and post-award oversight in DoD. But the only selection of anyone with any background remotely relating to the core contracting abuse is Acting Assistant Secretary of the Army(Acquistion, Logistics and Technology) Dean Popps, appointed to the comission by House Minority Leader Boehner ! Incredible !!

How could a Commission made up of appointees with no real knowledge of the complex contracting rules, regulations and competitive bidding requirements mandated by those regulations carrying the force of law possibly assess the problems and produce recommends ? Even if the commission calls currently employed top level contract technical and regulation enforcement experts, without an equally experienced and knowledgeable person on the commission it will be difficult for them to assess the testimony.

My former employer, Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command (SPAWARSYSCOM), was the premier Engineering, Acquistion and Technology agency in DoD when Jim Webb was Secretary of the Navy, in part because of their strict enforcement of Navy Regulations, with great emphasis on mandatory competitive bidding. One the greatest problems that the commission is to assess and correct is the failure of acquisition/contracting agencies to develop meaningful technical specifications included in the Request for Proposal (RFP). Many of those grossly inadequate RFPs and accompanying tech. specs essential to meaningful proposal evaluation were written by contractors rather than government engineers and management experts. And it has been common practice for contractors to be members of proposal evaluation panels that determine which companies are awarded the contracts. Both DoD and Navy regulations contain strict prohibitions against contractor RFP preparation and proposal evaluations. Army regs. mostly follow the higher level DoD regs., but Army and especially Air Force acquisition commands have not always been as diligent as Navy in enforcement of DoD and their own Military Service regs.

And of course one of the most important aspects of the contracting process is post-award technical, management and financial oversight. This phase of the contracting process is an inherently government function, but it is all too common for acquisition agencies to hire contractors to oversee the perfomance of other contractors, leaving government engineers/managers in the untenable position of having to authorize payment under the contract terms entirely on the basis of the oversight contractors' recommendations. One of the top tier comission recommendations should be legislation that returns the these inherently government functions to the government and prohibitions against outsourcing those government functions. But with no commission member with requisite background, it will be exceedingly difficult for them to accomplish the essential task.

One last point about Navy regs. that include mandatory competition: My former employer SPAWARSYSCOM, at Crystal City when Jim Webb was SECNAV and now in San Diego, created a Competition Advocate department whose primary function was and still is to enforce competitive contracting regulations. When I was a SPAWARSYSCOM, employee those of us who prepared contract RFPs were required to submit our RFPs to the Competition Advocate before they went to Legal Counsel and then to the Contracting Officer for his/her final review and release for proposal evaluation.

All of these vitally important details will require extensive experience and knowledge of the process if the comission is to reach meaningful conclusions and recommendations. But not even the Congressional majority has seen fit to appoint a single person with that level of knowledge and experience. Therefore who the commission calls as expert witnesses, the specific questions they ask and resulting testimony will be crucial to the success of the commission's work. At least from his experience as SECNAV Jim Webb knows who to call and what statements to make and questions to ask.

                        T.C.

One member of the commission (Dov Zakheim) was signatory to the PNAC agreement! This group helped plan the invasion of Iraq! We're talking about the Wolfowitz, Perle, Feith, Cheney, Rumsfeld bunch. This is outrageous! Jim Webb means well, but in this area he is obviously green as grass.

Webb has even called the PNAC group Trotskyites, and done so on national TV. Maybe he just doesn't know Dov was part of the group.  

Obama needs to move to center on drilling, not on Telcom immunity. Although there may be concerns about the impact to coastal tourist businesses in states like California and Virginia, there are safe methods for drilling in Alaska. Right now there is a pipeline which goes across the Denali fault line in Alaska. In 2002 there was a magnitude 7.9 earthquake and the pipeline was not damaged. There was no oil spill. The technology involves creating a pipeline which is mounted on supports and has teflon joints which allow the pipes to lengthen and shorten without opening a leak. There are also ways to turn off the oil flow at various places along the line. Scientists constantly monitor the posibility of earthquake and predicted this one. The line was turned off and there was no break in the pipes. There are photos to prove it. Report on the earthquake from the Alaska Department of Natural Resources Division of Geological and Geophysicals Surveys. The performance of the pipeline is recorded. If you go to this link and scroll down you will se a picture of the pipeline.

http://www.dggs.dnr.state.ak.u...

There is a summary of safe drilling techniques by Rod Combellick here:

http://www.geotimes.org/nov06/...

We could take advantage of some of the oil and natural gas in Alaska while developing renewable energy sources.

It would benefit the Democrats to compromise less on Civil Liberties and compromise more on some of their scientific dogma.