Jittery in Baghdad, and Not Feeling Any Safer

By Al Kamen
Monday, March 12, 2007

The State Department and other government agencies are having trouble filling great, career-enhancing jobs in Baghdad as part of the new Iraq reconstruction push. Many agency employees are hesitant to sign up for these new "provincial reconstruction teams" because they think they might be killed. Iraqi Embassy employees have been increasingly jittery about working for foreigners.

An announcement last month at the Agency for International Development probably didn't help things. The memo followed a Feb. 16 statement from Administrator Randall Tobias that he "was greatly saddened to confirm the death of a valued member of the USAID mission in Baghdad." The "loyal and respected foreign national employee . . . was shot and killed earlier this week by an unknown assailant," Tobias said.

The announcement caused an uproar, we were told; employees wanted more details. Internal buzz was that the man was shot leaving his home on the way to work, which would indicate it was a targeted killing -- as opposed to something like last month's shooting at a checkpoint, in which a World Bank employee was wounded. AID folks were most upset because officials didn't disclose the dead man's name.

"The name is being withheld," a Feb. 28 "general notice" explained, "for an Operations Security (OPSEC) precaution to protect the mission's FSN staff and the deceased FSN's family." (Unclear how this works. If it was a targeted killing, then the bad guys probably know his family's name.)

Well, the shooting occurred before the deployment of additional U.S. troops began. Things should be even safer now. So sign up for those provincial reconstruction teams.

Panel Chairman Diagnoses USAID's 'Tycoonitis'

Speaking of AID, Tobias was skewered at a hearing Thursday by House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Tom Lantos (D-Calif.).

"I call this 'tycoonitis,' " Lantos said: "People who come from the top of the corporate ladder" -- Tobias came from Eli Lilly -- "who consider congressional suggestions, requests for information and participation in decision-making as intruding on their turf."

Lantos said Tobias's "task" as the first director of foreign assistance "was to reshape -- carefully, delicately -- and to bring order to our country's tangled thicket of assistance efforts overseas. Instead, it appears to many members of this committee, you took to it with a Weedwacker. And the results are predictably unfortunate."

"Weedwacker"?

Get Your Pardon Bets in Soon

Wednesday's the deadline to enter the In the Loop Pardon Scooter Contest -- to guess when President Bush will pardon former Cheney aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby. Send your entry -- one date only: month, day and year -- to: intheloop@washpost.com.

Hearings Will Unite Democrats and Republicans

Kumbaya moments on the Hill! Republicans and Democrats, sitting together, holding hands in the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs.

Chairman Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.) and ranking Republican Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) wrote to lawmakers Friday to tell them that during hearings, "we will no longer sit with the Democrats on one side of the . . . dais and the Republicans on the other. We will have Democrats and Republicans sitting next to each other in assigned seats by seniority."

This is being done, they said, "in the interests of expressing the nonpartisanship of our committee and at the suggestion" of Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), a new member who, it turns out, would sit at the end of the dais under either configuration.

In a news release, Lieberman and Collins said Americans are sick of partisanship and gridlock: "They want us to work together and get things done. So, as a start, instead of sitting on opposite sides of the room like a house divided, we want the American people to see us sitting side by side."

The move will at least put Sens. Pete Domenici (R-N.M.) and Barack Obama (D-Ill.) next to each other so they can trade stories of their similar backgrounds. And it will allow Lieberman a chance to sit next to Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), the Senate's Henny Youngman.

What's next: Team colors? A chore wheel? Well, if the new arrangement doesn't work out, at least it will be easier this way to sucker punch your opponent. After all, familiarity . . .

Smoke Together, Vote Together?

As usual, House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) has a better idea on how to reduce partisan enmity. Boehner, a longtime smoker who can't light up in the smoke-free, GOP Capitol Hill Club, has been puffing away with the D's at the National Democratic Club, where smoking is allowed.

Lobbyist Tom Jolly, a longtime member at the Democratic watering hole, predicted that Boehner would become a fixture at the club, our colleague Mary Ann Akers reports at http://www.washingtonpost.com/thesleuth.

Jolly said he is "one member who is delighted to have him as our guest," and he recalled years ago how two Republicans, Rep. Ed Derwinski of Illinois and Sen. Steve Symms of Idaho, used to drop by.

"Democrats and Republicans who drink together after work get along a lot better than those who don't," Jolly said.

Senator, Governor Hire Lawyers

Lawyer up! Domenici, who acknowledged he called a now-ousted New Mexico federal prosecutor to ask about a corruption probe of Democrats, has hired Lee Blalack, lawyer to jailed former congressman Randy "Duke" Cunningham (R-Calif.), according to wire service reports.

And Nevada Gov. Jim Gibbons, who's looking at a federal investigation into whether he improperly accepted gifts or payments, has hired Abbe Lowell, who worked for jailed lobbyist Jack Abramoff.