George Zornick | The Nation

An Iraq veteran holds his son during a ceremony to dedicate his family’s new house in Jacksonville, North Carolina. (Courtesy of the US Marine Corps/Wikimedia.)

There are a number of ways for policy makers to sensibly address the glaring needs of post–September 11 veterans, who are suffering from a true crisis of post-traumatic stress disorder, unemployment and suicide. Congress can increase funding for the Department of Veterans Affairs, extending job training and unemployment insurance that veterans’ receive, increasing tuition support, and so on.

But there are deeper problems that are much more difficult to solve—the damaged mentality, perhaps, of a country that is essentially indifferent to the traumas of the thousands of citizens sent to fight and die over the past decade.

To that end, Representatives Jim McDermott and Walter Jones have introduced a bill that would create one of the more fascinating Congressional commissions in recent history: the Commission on America and Its Veterans.

They describe it as an effort to “heal the psychic wounds of war”—a kind of truth-and-reconciliation effort to bridge the gap between a battered combat force and the now-indifferent citizenry that ordered them to fight.

“The United States has waged wars, but not all are involved in fighting those wars, and the United States needs to be more deeply and regularly connected with members and their experiences in war and returning from war,” the preamble to HR 1492 reads. “The [n]ation needs a whole-of-society approach to improving the veteran’s position in society.”

McDermott and Jones gathered in a small room on Capitol Hill last week to announce their proposal, to a small crowd that contained relatively few reporters—except the ones at the podium. Sebastian Junger, the documentarian behind Restrepo, which told the story of a platoon serving in Afghanistan, was on hand, along with Karl Marlantes, a Vietnam veteran who wrote the book What It Is Like to Go to War.

Junger and Marlantes have been working with McDermott to help formulate the commission, and tried to describe what the group envisions during last week’s press conference.

“We’re going to try to change the consciousness of this country. It’s not about dollars, it’s not about whether the war was right or wrong, it’s about: does this nation actually share the burden of the killing?” Marlantes said.

“The whole nation builds the rifle—pays the taxes, puts it together, and decides through its representative body how that rifle will be used. The veteran is the person who pulls the trigger,” he said. “But what happens is that when the veteran comes home, it’s like the veteran was the only one that did the killing. We’ve got to change that attitude. They wonder why veterans feel alienated. If there’s an unconscious feeling on the part of the country that, ‘Well, you did it’—that’s going to go a long way to making that veteran’s healing way more difficult.”

The commission would have a few general goals: first, it would hold meetings across the country to kick off a dialogue between post–September 11 veterans and their communities, where the vets would tell their stories and try to share their burden.

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It would also push for a national day of remembrance when the war in Afghanistan finally ends, for veterans of both that conflict and the war in Iraq. “We cannot end twelve years of war without marking it. It’s sort of like, well, is it business as usual to go to war?” Marlantes said. “No, it should not be business as usual. So when we’re done with it, we need to have a solemn way of marking it.”

There would be eighteen members of the commission, appointed by leaders of both parties from the House and Senate.

The legislation says the members cannot be employees of the federal government—and Junger wants to think outside the box. “We think there should be a psychologist on the commission. There should be maybe a poet. Poets know how to turn life into words so that everyone can understand,” he said last week. “Maybe there should be an anthropologist. I mean, imagine, a formal cross-cultural study about how cultures throughout the world have dealt with combat trauma.” He also recommended that members of the clergy be part of the commission, including a Sioux shaman he knows.

“We’re trying to be both effective and creative at the same time,” Junger said. “When people go to war, that means that you are going to kill other people. And right or wrong, it causes an enormous moral burden on anybody—on everybody. The community shares that burden in an organic culture. In this culture, it doesn’t.”

Throughout the press conference last week, all parties involved stressed that it would be a nonpartisan commission that wouldn’t focus on whether the post–September 11 wars have been wrong or right.

That’s a stark contrast to what, for example, former Representative Dennis Kucinich repeatedly proposed: a truth-and-reconciliation effort of a different sort, wherein the political process that led to needless combat was thoroughly interrogated, and the political leaders behind it punished.

But Junger—who opposed the Iraq War—stressed that he believed that for this particular effort to succeed in truly integrating recent veterans into society, it had to step outside politics.

He related the story of a recent veteran he knew that was struggling with having accidentally killed innocent civilians during combat. The soldier told Junger he would try to work through his burden with friends, but that left-wing friends would respond with disgust: “You killed civilians, that’s on you.” Right-wing friends would tell him to brush it off: “You did your job, you did your duty, thank you.”

The soldier, according to Junger, was deeply frustrated by both responses. “Why won’t anyone have an adult conversation with me about what war is about? It’s their war,” he told Junger. “They asked us to fight it, and we did it as well as we could. Why are they pretending it’s our war? We were just there.”

Read George Zornick on Benghazi whistleblower Gregory Hicks.

Serious, public explorations of the United States’ drone policy are uncommon in Washington, to say the least—but on Wednesday the Congressional Progressive Caucus held a hearing on Capitol Hill that was remarkable for its breadth and critical approach to current policy. The thrust of the hearing was to ask the administration to both limit the scope of its drone strike policy and be transparent about what it is doing.

Here are four of the most compelling bits of testimony from the proceeding:

(1) In the video above, Yemeni human rights activist Baraa Shiban spoke directly to the very real toll drone strikes are taking in his country. He said:

Another reason strikes are more damaging than the US realizes is that, while the US may not be acknowledging or discussing dead civilians, Yemenis are.…

The farmers from Sabool showed us videos of people pulling charred bodies from the wreckage. They were scarcely recognizable. But besides the horror of it all, one thing struck me about the footage I watched. In it, you could see many Yemeni farmers gathered around the carnage filming exactly the same thing.

This is how stories of US injustice percolate through Yemen. Terrible images like those I saw can take on a life of their own. US aid reaches these areas rarely, if ever.… This is not a pointless popularity contest for America. Every lethal mistake the US makes is kerosene for an insurgency. And it all comes at a critical time for Yemen.

(2) Adam Baron, a freelance journalist based in Yemen, expanded on how civilian casualties from drone strikes are providing a useful recruitment tool for extremist groups, and drew on his reporting there:

For the civilians under the crossfire, anxieties provoked by fears of another ‘mistake’, continue to fuel distrust and resentment against the US and Yemeni governments, rather than against AQAP. In some areas, AQAP has managed to reap the benefits from such sentiments. The situation in al-Baydah is particularly telling. In a recent military offensive, swaths of tribesmen in the area opted to fight the government on the side of Al Qaeda, rather than cooperate with US forces to push the militants out.

“Some tribesmen are fighting the army even more than Al Qaeda is,” a contact from the area told me at the nascence of the winter military push. “People are angry about drone strikes and condemn foreign intervention. Al Qaeda has really been able to build popular sympathy.”

(3) Naureen Shah, the acting director of the Columbia Law School Human Rights clinic, addressed in her testimony the importance of establishing routine investigations of civilian casualties from drone strikes—both to comply with international law but also to dignify the concerns of local communities. She stressed these investigations must be public and transparent:

Moreover, established systems to investigate war crimes and serious violations of the laws of war would build legitimacy into the Administration’s position that drone strikes are conducted in compliance with international humanitarian law. Adequate investigation systems would address some of the concerns of cooperating governments and help allay the international community’s concerns.

Secret or unacknowledged investigations would likely be insufficient to address the moral dimensions I have identified. Secret investigations cannot provide dignity and a sense of justice to communities impacted by drone strikes. Secret investigations do not provide answer to widely publicized reports of particular cases of civilian casualties from drone strikes, which cause the United States to lose credibility on the world stage and appear deaf to criticism. Whereas the results of investigations can ordinarily be aggregated and systematically analyzed to determine the validity of pre-strike estimates and intelligence, secret investigations may not serve this function.

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(4) Eight members of Congress entered into testimony a letter they sent President Barack Obama, demanding further clarification of the legal justifications behind drone strikes. It read, in part:

The information from the Justice Department meme leaked on February 4, 2013, in the context of an increasing devolution of accountability, transparency and Constitutional protections in US counterterrorism operations, leaves us deeply concerned about what appears to constitute overly broad authority language….

These are vague legal boundaries that raise the risk of the executive branch authorizing the deaths of American civilians otherwise protected by the Constitution and appear to effectively vitiate due process of law without meaningful oversight or accountability….

As you state in your recent State of the Union address, “we must enlist our values in the fight.” We ask, therefore, that you follow through with your commitment to engage with Congress to ensure that the ways in which we target, detain, prosecute, and kill suspected terrorist are consistent with the commands of our Constitution, including our system of checks and balances.

We strongly urge you to release the documents requested in this letter for the reasons articulated above.

Read George Zornick on the GOP’s Working Families Act—and why it’s a hoax to attract women voters.

Representative Mel Watt (D-NC) addresses the Democratic National Convention in 2012. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite.)

This afternoon President Obama will introduce his choice to head the Federal Housing Finance Agency—Representative Mel Watt from North Carolina, a twenty-year veteran of Congress and member of the powerful House Financial Services Committee.

FHFA Director may not seem like a sexy appointment, but the agency has a monumental impact. It controls Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored enterprises that own 60 percent of US mortgages. With thousands of foreclosures taking place every week, FHFA is in a position to send a lifeline to many of these distressed homeowners.

For months, the White House, state attorneys general and liberal activists groups have been demanding that the FHFA write down the principal of underwater mortgages held by Fannie and Freddie—in other words, reduce the amount people owe on mortgages that are worth more than their homes. Analysts estimate as many as 500,000 homeowners could benefit from FHFA principal reduction, which could provide an additional boost to the flagging economy.

Acting FHFA Director Edward DeMarco briefly flirted with the idea, but then refused to do it. So activists launched a “Dump DeMarco” campaign, urging Obama to replace the acting director with someone who supports principal reduction.

On that score, Watt is a good choice. He has repeatedly supported the idea of principal reduction and would presumably undertake it at FHFA.

Key reformers in Congress are thus applauding his selection this morning. Senator Elizabeth Warren called Watt an “excellent choice” with a “long record as a champion for working families.” Representative Keith Ellison, chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, tweeted he was “thrilled that homeowners will finally have an advocate leading FHFA.” The CPC has relentlessly called for DeMarco to be fired and replaced with someone who favors principal reduction.

Watt’s record has some serious blotches, however. His North Carolina district includes the headquarters of Bank of America, and commercial banks are the number-one contributor to Watt’s political coffers over his career. Bank of America is second among individual career contributors.

FHFA has quite a bit of business that overlaps with big banks—in fact, late last year the agency sued several large financial institutions, including Bank of America, for concealing the low value of mortgage-backed securities and contaminating the books of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

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Watt’s transition from a member of Congress that benefits from Bank of America’s largesse to one of the bank’s chief executive branch antagonists naturally troubles some advocates. (Watt’s office would not comment to The Nation about his appointment.)

Most progressive activists, however, are still backing his nomination. “I don’t think we’ll be counted as his loudest cheerleader, but you can’t fall off the floor with where are now. DeMarco is a problem. I think Mel Watt is a solution,” said Bart Naylor, financial policy advocate for Public Citizen.

“Obviously Public Citizen wishes there wasn’t any money involved at all from vested interests. That’s not where we are now, that’s not what we have with Mel Watt,” Naylor said. “Fortunately as FHFA director, he’s not going to take campaign contributions. While he no doubt will be meeting with JP Morgan and Bank of America, those meetings will neither be preceded nor succeeded by campaign contributions.”

Progressive angst about Watt’s ties with the commercial banking industry, and Bank of America in particular, probably won’t appear on congressional roll calls—with Elizabeth Warren backing his nomination, it’s unlikely there’s a senator willing to tack left of her on the nomination. Warren has been a visible proponent of FHFA write-downs for a long time.

Republican opposition is another story, however. The GOP has already blocked one of Obama’s nominees for FHFA Director: Joseph Smith, the North Carolina banking commissioner. Smith had relatively unknown views compared to Watt, who has a long history of backing principal reduction. Senator Bob Corker, a member of the Senate Banking Committee, wasted no time this morning blasting Watt’s nomination.

This is a real problem for homeowners that might be helped by FHFA principal reduction. Even in the best-case scenario, Watt probably wouldn’t be confirmed for several months, if he is confirmed at all.

Consequently, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman is pushing for Obama to take immediate action. Schneiderman’s theory, per a memo his office prepared last month, is that Obama has the legal power to dump DeMarco right away, since he is only an acting director.

Obama couldn’t pick Watt to serve as acting director in this scenario. Federal law says it would have to be one of DeMarco’s three deputies, one of whom might be more inclined to enact principal reduction.

There’s no guarantee the courts would uphold this move, as there are ongoing legal questions about similar White House maneuvers to staff the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the National Labor Relations Board. Schneiderman’s memo cites some legal precedence for the switch, like a 1996 DC Circuit case involving a holdover on the Board of the National Credit Union Association.

But the idea for now is to get a new director in place and get the principal reductions moving as soon as possible.

“This nomination is a good first step, but struggling homeowners cannot afford to wait for the Senate to complete the confirmation process,” Schneiderman said in a statement this morning. “The President should use his legal authority to replace Edward DeMarco with a new acting director who will start the effort to put FHFA on the side of working families immediately.”

Federal regulators failed on several fronts with the fertilizer plant that exploded in Texas, and now the Senate has taken a good first step by beginning a formal investigation, George Zornick writes.

Volunteers fill bags for a school lunch program at the Cleveland Foodbank. (AP Photo/Amy Sancetta.)

Lost in the shuffle of last year’s big fiscal cliff deal was the deal that didn’t happen on a new farm bill.

One of the major points of contention was funding for food stamps through the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program, run by the US Department of Agriculture. Republicans in the House proposed steep cuts: $16.5 billion over the next decade, which would eliminate food assistance to as many as 3 million low-income Americans. The Senate countered with a farm bill cutting $4.5 billion from SNAP over the same time period.

There was simply no deal to be had on the farm bill, and so Congress passed a simple extension until September 30. Now Congress has to start over—all prior versions of the farm are dead, since there’s a new Congress.

And this time around Republicans are only going to increase, not moderate, their demands for steep food stamp cuts. Representative Frank Lucas, the chair of the House Agriculture Committee, told the Capital Press this weekend that the new House farm bill will mandate $20 billion in SNAP cuts over the next ten years.

Democratic leadership in the House is already blasting Lucas’s proposal. “SNAP doesn’t just offer much-needed support to vulnerable Americans, it provides a significant boost to the economy, nearly doubling the return of every dollar we put into it,” Drew Hammill, communications director for House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, told The Nation. “Just when you think you’ve seen the extent of [the House GOP’s] misguided priorities, they strike at the ability of millions of low-income children, the elderly and American families to put food on the table.”

There’s going to be a lot of blowback to Lucas’s proposal—not only from Democrats, particularly in urban areas, but from some Republicans, particularly in the Midwest, who know that cutting food stamps depresses food sales, which in turn hurts farmers.

Some other Republicans, like Senator Thad Cochran of Mississippi, oppose the cuts because so many people in their state rely on nutrition assistance. “I come from a state where we have higher-percentage participation [than the national average],” Cochran said last year. “I have never had to apologize in Mississippi for supporting it,” he said, referring to food stamps.

But, as is so often the case in recent years, it’s a hardcore group of conservatives in the House that are roiling debate over an issue that used to be mainly non-controversial, and pulling it to the right. The backdrop here is that Representative Paul Ryan’s most recent budget, like the ones before it, demanded food stamp cuts that make Lucas’s plan look as if it was crafted by Mother Teresa.

Ryan’s 2013 budget blueprint calls for $135 billion in food stamp cuts over the next ten years, with $125 billion coming in the first five years. That would toss up to 13 million people from the program.

Boehner has openly acknowledged that hardcore conservatives who found Lucas’s cuts too timid were a primary reason the House couldn’t pass a farm bill last year.

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“The current situation that we face is we’ve got people who believe there’s not enough reform in the farm bill that came out of (the House Agriculture) committee,” Boehner said last September, when he announced the House wouldn’t try to pass a final farm bill. “We’ve got others who believe that there’s too much reform in the bill that came out of the committee.” (Read “reform” as “cuts” here, a good rule of thumb for most Washington budget debates.)

But to be clear—Washington should, if anything, be debating an expansion of food stamp benefits. Research shows that for every federal dollar spent on food assistance programs, there is $1.84 in economic benefit.

And the conservative rationale for cutting the program is based on faulty assumptions. Ever since 2009, conservatives have been railing against the rapid expansion of the SNAP program as if it was a policy choice by Obama. (Recall Newt Gingrich’s endless invocations of the “food stamp president” during the 2012 GOP primary.)

But food stamp usage increased as a natural function of the steep recession, which created a lot more people who were eligible for the program. (In fact, Republican counties are responsible for most of the food stamp growth.) Republican demands to enact deep SNAP cuts, while crudely punitive to the millions of low-income Americans who depend on food stamps, are also unnecessary. Spending on SNAP will decrease significantly over the next ten years all by itself as the economy recovers, as this chart from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities shows:

But Lucas’s proposal makes clear the Republicans will still use the current peak to try to enact deep cuts. There’s no doubt that a ferocious battle is looming.

Read George Zornick on Congress's gun control reform failure and where we go from here.