E-mail a friendSen. Jim Webb
airdate October 15, 2007
Elected in '06 as Virginia's junior senator, Jim Webb is a highly-decorated Vietnam veteran and was the first Naval Academy graduate in history to serve in the military and then become Secretary of the Navy. Webb is also a best-selling author and previously worked as a Hollywood screenwriter-producer, winning an Emmy for his coverage of U.S. Marines in Beirut. In '04, he was embedded with the U.S. military in Afghanistan. His committee assignments include Foreign Relations, Armed Services and Veterans Affairs.
Sen. Jim Webb
Tavis: I'm pleased to welcome Virginia Senator Jim Webb to this program. His appointment to the Senate Armed Services Committee was a natural fit for this decorated former Marine platoon commander and former Navy secretary under President Ronald Reagan. He's also enjoyed a successful career as a writer and filmmaker. He joins us tonight from Capitol Hill. Senator Webb, nice to have you on the program.
Sen. Jim Webb: Nice to be with you, Tavis.
Tavis: Let me start by asking what's in the news so much of late, these contractor abuses. You're on the Armed Services Committee, tell me what you know and where we are in investigating what did, did not happen, who did what, when, and where?
Webb: Well, actually, I've been talking about this for several years. We're in a totally different situation than we've been in at any time over our history in terms of how much we have to rely on independent contractors. I think the ratio from Gulf War I was 50 soldiers for every contractor. We're now in a situation in Iraq where we've got 180,000 contractors and 160,000 soldiers. We've got them driving convoys, we've got them putting food on your plates in the mess hall, got them doing the laundry, and most discouragingly we have them actually as security people guarding bases and escorting people around, and that's where we've had the problem with Blackwater.
We've never been in this situation before, where we've got people out with their own weapons, under their own rules of engagement, without being liable to anybody in the law out there. And I'm glad that they're finally starting to put them under scrutiny.
Tavis: Why is this the case? What happened somewhere along the way that allowed us to find ourselves in need of so many independent contractors?
Webb: Well, a couple of things came together on this. The first was that we put end-strength restrictions on the different military. In other words, you can only have so many people on active duty in the military, by the budgetary process, and the other is that they totally underestimated what they were going to need in Iraq, and they started going to these independent contractors.
And let's face it, if you're a soldier or a Marine who has the skills, you can stay in the Army or the Marine Corps and make $30,000, maybe. Or you can go over with these guys and make basically six times as much to do pretty much the same job. So they were able to do this fast. Part of this also was political favoritism in a lot of the larger contracts, and it's a way for the Congress not to have to grow the end-strengths of the military. It's kind of a way around how normally you're going to be doing this kind of business.
Tavis: So what's going to happen here? Put another way, from your perspective, what should happen here as we move through these investigations? What's the end game here?
Webb: A couple of things. First is I introduced a bill with Senator McCaskill of Missouri which we just got passed. They've been trying for five years to get something like this passed, and we just got it passed before this last break where we're going to put a commission in place modeled after what Harry Truman did in World War II where we're going to get accountability on fraud, waste, abuse, and also the disciplinary environment, as long as we can get this thing also agreed-upon by the House of Representatives, and I think we're going to.
So we're going to have a period of two years where we're going to look at these contracts. The people who have done a good job, fine, they're not going to be bothered by this. But the people who have either conducted themselves fraudulently or outside the bounds of normal law were going to have some accountability.
But number two, in the long term, what we have to do is get back to the situation where American military people are the ones who are carrying the weapons if we're in these foreign environments. We shouldn't have mercenaries out on the streets doing the kinds of things that Blackwater's been doing. We should not be doing that, and when you look at how Blackwater was formed, there was an awful lot of political favoritism in this.
More than a half a billion dollars of contracts that weren't even properly competed that went to someone who was close to the Republican Party, and I think they deserve more scrutiny.
Tavis: One or two other quick questions about Iraq before I move on to talk about some other issues that you've been working on. I'd be remiss by not asking you, as a decorated war veteran and now a member of the Senate, what your sense is on when, where, and how we ought to be exiting Iraq?
Webb: Well, I was one of the first people to warn about going into Iraq. I wrote an article in "The Washington Post" more than five years ago this month basically saying if we went in, they didn't have an exit strategy because they didn't intend to leave. At the same time, I come from a family that has pretty much always served when there's a war.
My son was a Marine in Iraq; he's still in the Marine Corps right now. So I've been able to look at this whole thing from the bottom up - he's a corporal - from the bottom up through the whole experience. And we need to get a strong, diplomatic package into place, regional diplomacy, and we need to get our troops out of there. We don't need any combat troops in Iraq looking down the long term.
It is negative to how the United States should be able to operate in the region. It doesn't help us strategically at all, and I've been pushing this for three years, we're continuing to push it, and only when this administration will step up, or a new administration will step up and do the right kind of diplomacy can we get out of there, but that's what we've got to do.
Tavis: So let me shift gears here, because everybody wants to or is, in fact, talking about Iraq. I want to switch to a subject that doesn't get as much conversation, as much traction in the media as I think it ought to get, and you've been out front courageously on this issue, having hearings about overhauling sentencing guidelines, sentencing policies. Tell me about your work in that regard, and what you've been doing on the Hill.
Webb: Well, this is an issue that I just happen to feel very strongly about, and you know how it goes in the political process. Whenever you talk about crime, if you start talking about too many people being in jail they say you're soft on crime, etc. But actually, I go back to my time in the Marine Corps, believe it or not, when I look at what's happening now, and it's in this sense - that you have to have a system, you have to have discipline in your country at some level.
You have to have laws, but they have to be fair. And we're in a situation right now where we have more people in jail than any other country. Twenty-five years ago, as a journalist, I got inside the Japanese prison system. I spent a month over there. At that time, they had 40,000 people in jail - a country half our size.
We had 780,000 people in jail and we were way up then. Now we got 2.2 million people in jail in this country, and the system has tilted into a place where it's a national disgrace, quite frankly. You know the racial disparities here, they are enormous. We've seen statistics on this. And also we've got a problem with the drug laws, where very minor offenses now are causing people to end up in jail.
And so I made a vow last year when I was on the campaign trail that I was going to focus on this, and it's not the thing you get a lot of hurrahs on, by the way, when you're campaigning. But I feel very strongly about it, and so we were able to put together a hearing on the Joint Economic Committee to try to look at the overall costs.
There's the human cost, the cost for building prisons, the cost in lost opportunities when people go through the system, and this is a long-term project, but I'm going to stay on it.
Tavis: Your hearings notwithstanding, to your earlier point, how do you get traction on an issue like this, given that we do live in a society where you get labeled as soft on crime if you stop talking about this kind of issue.
Webb: Well, the first thing that you have to do is raise the awareness of the public about what's really happening, because when I've seen some of the stuff that you've written about, and that you said. You know how devastating this is in the African American community, but there are a lot of people in other areas where they don't quite see it the same way, and they need to.
They need to see how it goes to issues of fairness in this country, it goes to issues of productivity, and just as a little side note here, there was a statement made by a White House adviser a while back talking about how family structure is probably the most important things in terms of success, but when you see the repetitive effect of this type of incarceration on families, you can see how you're perpetuating the negative results without even getting into all these other stereotypes.
So we're going to stay on top of it. I don't think anybody can accuse me of being soft on other areas, and it's something that goes directly to the notions of fairness in our country.
Tavis: Well, we'll continue to follow these hearings and the work that you're doing on it, and come back to it as often as we need to with regard to doing something about overhauling the prison sentencing guidelines [unintelligible] in our country. Senator James Webb, Democrat of Virginia. Senator, nice to have you on the program, sir.
Webb: Nice to be with you.
Tavis: My pleasure.
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