Reps. Mac Thornberry, Adam Smith Lead House Push For More Foreign Military Training; Leahy Amendment Targeted: Sequestration, Continuing Resolution, and snow be damned; the House Armed Services Committee met this morning to wrestle with long-term strategy. In a hearing not only overshadowed but outright interrupted by the House's desperate effort to band-aid the budget crisis, top HASC leaders from both parties argued for expanding the military's authorities to work with foreign forces -- including those accused of violating human rights.
Republican Mac Thornberry, the HASC vice-chairman, held his own hearing last month specifically on expanding training authorities (click here for Thornberry's exclusive interview with AOL Defense). Today, however, it was the committee's ranking Democrat, Adam Smith, who took the lead.
Smith started off by explicitly questioning the landmark Leahy Amendment, named for the Vermont Senator who introduced it in 1997 to restrict US aid to abusive security forces abroad -- historically a cherished Democratic goal. Originally targeted at counter-drug aid to Colombia, the law in its current form applies to all US military and law enforcement assistance worldwide. It includes a requirement for (as one official summary puts it) "human rights vetting for all units and individual members receiving.. training or assistance" -- a policy Special Operations Command (SOCOM) chief Adm. William McRaven boiled down to "poison person, poison unit."
"At first blush, that makes perfect sense," Smith said. "[But] the irony of the Leahy amendment is it forces you out at, perhaps, the time when you're needed most.... Certainly, this was a difficulty in Mali where you weren't allowed to train as much as you would have liked."
