Even before the most recent overthrow, the House National Security Subcommittee was looking into contracts in the region, which is renowned for its corruption. Now, the subcommittee has undertaken a full-fledged investigation, focused on the contracts at Manas Transit Center in Kyrgyzstan, while the Department of Defense moves to open up bidding on the suspect contracts.

“Let’s be honest: At many times throughout our history, the United States has closely dealt with unsavory regimes in order to achieve more pressing policy or strategic objectives,” Rep. John Tierney, D-Mass., said in his opening remarks at the investigation’s first hearing in April. “The United States will have to work hard to restore our credibility in (the Kyrgyz’­) eyes, beginning with transparency regarding U.S. fuel contracts at Manas.”

The F.B.I. collaborated with the Kyrgyz government on an investigation in 2005, when accusations that the son of then-president Askar Akayev was improperly benefiting from U.S. fuel contracts. That FBI report was never made public, but an independent investigator for the Kyrgyz told The New York Timesthat he suspected the new president, Kurmanbek Bakiyev, simply took over the same business model, installing his son, Maksim Bakiyev, as the beneficiary.

Now, the anti-corruption interim government led by Roza Otunbayeva is opening its own investigation, focused on six subcontractors allegedly controlled by Maksim Bakiyev.

“Whatever the Pentagon’s policy of buying warlords in Afghanistan, the state of Kyrgyzstan demands more respect,” Edil Baisalov, chief of staff for the interim lead, told ­The Times in April. “The government of Kyrgyzstan will not be bought and sold. We are above that.”

The closely linked companies at the center of the allegations are Red Star and Mina Corp., which provide enormous amounts of Russian jet fuel to power U.S. troops in Afghanistan. Together, the companies have received more than $1 billion for fuel sales over the past six years.

The fact that companies’ director of operations, Charles “Chuck” Squires, is a retired Army lieutenant colonel and former defense attaché to the U.S. embassy in Bishkek raises some eyebrows. Except in the case where a presidential directive makes an exemption for national security concerns, military contracts are subject to the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, the law that outlaws bribery in U.S. business transactions overseas.

“If this were a commercial setting, an investigator would probably start by studying whether there really is an arm’s-length relationship between Red Star and Pentagon contractors,” Scott Horton, an expert on accountability in military contracts, said in his written testimony to the House committee. “If not, an investigator might quickly conclude that it is a shell interposed to provide a buffer between the procurement officers and companies controlled by the president’s family.”

The hearing witnesses consistently hit the refrain that the U.S. embassy delegation was unnecessarily close with the Bakiyev regime. The essential question is whether this was a State Department blunder, or if it was part of a larger policy of currying favor with the regime to ensure the future of the Manas air base.

In February 2009, in what was widely seen as a quid pro quo, Bakiyev announced plans to close the Manas base on the same day that Russian President Putin announced $2.15 billion in aid to the country. Later, Bakiyev flipped when the U.S. agreed to pay $17 million more in annual rent for the base.

Earlier this month, the Department of Defense moved to open up bidding on the contracts to the Manas base. Meanwhile, the United States and Kyrgyzstan have been in intense negotiations over taxes on fuel being imported to the base.

In impoverished Kyrgyzstan, the U.S. air base and its connected contracts make an easy whipping boy for disgruntled citizens whose country was ranked 128 out of 149 for corruption by World Audit in 2009.

But in business environments like that of Kyrgyzstan, it may well be that only countries connected to political elite will be in a position to meet U.S. needs.

“Allegations like these are an inevitable by-product of working in this part of the world, where corruption is just the way business is done,” said Martha Brill Olcott, an expert on the region for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “The question is, were these contracts illegal, or were they simply unethical? There are only a few places you can get oil from – you’ve got to have a refinery – and it’s predictable that the bigger companies, the ones with elite connections, are going to be the ones that can get the best deal for the U.S. government.”

Though the department has been tight-lipped about the report’s contents, contributors anticipate the first U.S. ranking will be favorable. But some say such good news would reflect a bias in this notoriously political document.

“From what I’ve seen, we should be on the watch list,” said Nathan Wilson, CEO of Project Meridian Foundation, an organization that trains officials in how to deal with human trafficking.  “I’m not expecting the annual report to reflect the true situation.­” ­

The annual report has been around since the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000, a result of then First Lady Hillary Clinton shining a light onto the global issue during  the 1990s, when the transnational crime is believed to have grown exponentially.

Trafficked humans often start their journeys in a consensual arrangement where they pay to get smuggled into the United States, but often end up working for years in jobs where they are exploited or even beaten,  imprisoned and sexually abused.

The State Department has ranked a growing number of countries ­in their efforts to prevent and address human trafficking. Information in the report comes from law enforcement officials, non-governmental organizations and state and local governments. The report then categorizes 175 countries into tiers.

• Tier 1 countries meet the minimum requirements outlined in the TVPA.
• Tier 2, generally the largest category, includes countries making some effort to combat human trafficking, but are not meeting all TVPA requirements.
• Tier 2 Watch List countries have major trafficking problems or have had a recent backslide on prevention efforts.
• Tier 3 countries have a long way to go in their efforts to combat human trafficking.

Thousands – conservatively estimated at 14,500 to 17,500 – of foreigners are trafficked into the United States every year. Yet, up until this point, the global report has addressed the problem in the U.S. by attaching the Department of Justice’s report as an addendum. The U.S. was left out of the ranking system, thus making a direct and similar comparison to other countries impossible.

Labor Trafficking:

Conjuring notions of a foreign land, sex and children, experts agree that human trafficking remains generally misunderstood in the U.S. Half of human trafficking cases do not explicitly involve sex, and many people assume that because the U.S. has robust law enforcement and social services available, victims will have a way out, Austin said.

“It’s psychological,” she said, explaining that many victims feel helpless and unable to break free of captivity even if they are not physically forced to stay. “People may have options, but they don’t think they do.”

Two recent cases presented at the Department of Justice’s 2010 National Conference on Human Trafficking demonstrated the nature of the half of U.S. trafficking cases that fall in the labor category.

They’re as ubiquitous ­ as hotel cleaning and nannying, and as American as South Dakota and Texas.

U.S. v. Farrell and U.S. v. Nanji both cast U.S. trafficking as a modern form of forced labor thrust upon unsuspecting people and perpetuated by ignorance of rights and mounting fabricated debt, experts explained.

Human trafficking in the U.S. is less about the stereotype of duping and kidnapping and more about coercion, said Ambassador Luis CdeBaca of the State Department’s Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons in his opening remarks at the conference.

In the Farrell’s case, a husband and wife operated a South Dakota Comfort Inn behind what Michael Frank, trial attorney for the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division Criminal Section, called a “cloak of legitimacy.” Frank described a situation that looked fine on the surface – a large corporation where the defendants called Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents asking the workers to be removed.

But beneath the surface of happy employees and copies of paychecks. officials found a sordid operation where Filipino workers felt so entrapped by false debt that they returned to their payless jobs even after leaving the country.

“They feared for their lives,” Frank said.

But after the recent trial and sentencing, the trafficking victims are living happily in the U.S.,  Frank said, and Mr. and Mrs. Farrell are serving sentences of 5 and 3 years.

Unlike the case against the Farrells, only one Nigerian woman was involved in U.S. v. Nanji. Trial attorney Susan French’s defendant was a Nigerian mother held captive by a Texa_s couple who forced her to care for their children for eight years, seven days a week, sending what totaled around $300 back home to Nigeria.

The defendant put up with the children sleeping in her room, separation from her own children and rape, but eventually forced sodomy was too much for her, French said.

The Nanji­s were found guilty on all accounts and are awaiting sentencing.

From a public health and human rights standpoint, this is a national security issue, CdeBaca said.

Experts expect that ranking U.S. efforts to prevent and deal with cases such as these will legitimize the issue of trafficking in the U.S. and expose the weaknesses in the system.

“It is significant that United States is including itself in the ranking. Other people might say it’s just a gesture or symbolic, but it shows we are willing to look at ourselves critically – showing others that we are holding ourselves to the same standards,” Andrea Austin, spokeswoman for Polaris Project said.

Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have called the fight a priority, and both Democrats and Republicans have proposed beefed-up security measures on the U.S. side of the border. Most recently, Obama announced plans to send 1,200 National Guard troops to the southwest border.

Congress has appropriated about $1.3 billion in anti-crime and drug funding for Mexico through the Merida Initiative, a multi-year program launched in 2007 that also targets criminal organizations in Central America and the Caribbean.

But the militarization of the fight against drug cartels on the Mexican side of the border, and U.S. support of the effort, has raised red flags in some quarters over escalating violence as well as human rights violations and corruption in the Mexican military and justice system.

At a U.S. Senate subcommittee hearing on drug enforcement and the rule of law May 18, Jose Miguel Vivanco, executive director of the Americas Division of Human Rights Watch, criticized the human rights record of the Mexican military and the lack of accountability for human rights violators. Calderon has relied heavily on the military in his effort to quell the drug cartels.

“Too often local leaders respond to public demands to get tough on crime by condoning abusive practices that not only undermine the rule of law by violating basic rights but also fail to curb crime,” Vivanco said.

In the three years since Calderon launched a military crackdown on drug cartels, about 22,700 people have been killed in drug-related violence.

Beyond the violence, Vivanco’s testimony pointed to alleged abuses by the military, including rape and killings, as well as at least 100 people who claimed to have been arbitrarily detained and then tortured to obtain false confessions since 2009.

Vivanco said that last year Congress should not have given Mexico the 15% of its funding under the Merida legislation that is conditional on fulfillment of human rights requirements. A State Department report to Congress highlighted some issues, including lack of transparency in the military justice system, but found that Mexico had met the four human rights conditions.

Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., chairmen of the subcommittee, was also the sole senator in attendance at the hearing, as his colleagues were occupied with debating Wall Street reform. Durbin called the fight against drug cartels a priority but said the United States has a responsibility to see that its aid does not fuel human rights abuses.

“The military in Mexico in many instances operates with virtual impunity, resulting in limited success in stemming drug violence and human rights abuses that rival and surpass often the corruption of the law enforcement system they were sent to replace,” he said.

Officials from the State Department and Department of Justice testified that Mexico has made significant reforms. The Calderon administration has taken steps to remove suspect law enforcement officials, customs officials and judges and to reform and modernize its judicial system, with U.S. assistance.

David T. Johnson, Assistant Secretary of State for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, wrote in his testimony that institutional reforms in Mexico are a work in progress.

“The strategy that the U.S. Government is pursuing with the Government of Mexico is an effective, long-term program, not a temporary ‘quick fix’,” he wrote.

As the drug war continues in Mexico, it’s a debate that will likely be played out many times.

Most often, the pundits discuss a nominee’s gender, upbringing, legal background, political alignment and previous cases.  One’s stance on national security issues doesn’t always get a lot of attention.  But now that the United States  is engaged in two wars, it is incredibly important, argues UC-Berkeley law professor John Yoo, to consider a nominee’s stance on national security.  In a recent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, Yoo—a controversial former Justice Department official—wrote that Justice Stevens had a tendency to undermine military authority in wartime, and was on a “crusade to overturn the executive branch’s terrorism policies.”  Yoo said that in 1943, Stevens (then a Navy intelligence officer) raised “humanitarian concerns” when FDR commanded the Navy to shoot down a plane carrying Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the planner of the attack in Pearl Harbor.  What then, Yoo asked, does Stevens think of the U.S. “raining missiles down” on Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen?

After 9/11, the Bush administration expanded presidential powers to reach into matters of national security.  Critics of this expansion of power, ranging from academics to Supreme Court justices, thought Bush’s actions were unconstitutional and even illegal.  Through an executive order, the Bush administration approved a “terrorist surveillance program,” which authorized the National Security Agency to monitor communication (phone calls, e-mails, Web browsing, text messaging) between parties believed to be beyond U.S. borders, without a warrants, as part of foreign intelligence collection.  The issue of “indefinite detention” has been controversial, and some groups, like the American Civil Liberties Union, believe the Patriot Act allows for such detention, which has been utilized in the military detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Yoo wrote that President Barack Obama “cannot keep his promise to the American people to fight al Qaeda with all of the tools at the presidency’s disposal if he appoints a justice who will continue to obstruct and second-guess the decisions of our military and intelligence officials.”

A National Public Radio piece broadcast right after Stevens’ retirement announcement said “the decisions Stevens is likely to be remembered for most are those he authored on national security and presidential power.”  Two notable cases are the Hamdan 5-3 decision in 2006, which challenged Bush’s plan for military tribunals at Guantanamo, since they would break the Geneva Conventions, and the 2004 Rasul decision, which allowed detainees at Guantanamo to challenge their detainment in federal court.  (Legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin said Rasul was the first time a president lost a major civil-liberties case in the Supreme Court during wartime.)  These two Supreme Court decisions forced a redefinition of the Bush administration’s Guantanamo policy.

And both of these decisions also had “profound implications for the limits of presidential power,” according to NPR.  Stephen Vladeck, a law professor at American University who served on the legal team that successfully challenged Bush’s policies in Hamdan, agreed.  He said history will look back at these verdicts as some of Justice Stevens’ most important contributions to American law, in part because since he “reaffirm[ed] the role of the courts during crisis times” and directly impacted operations at Guantanamo and in the Bush administration’s war on terror.

Robert F. Turner, co-founder of the University of Virginia’s Center for National Security Law and a former chair of the American Bar Association’s Standing Committee on Law and National Security, acknowledged that Yoo “gets criticism from a lot of people about his views of presidential power,’’ including opinions he rendered while a policy lawyer in the administration of President George W. Bush that gave virtually unlimited authority to the president as commander in chief.

But he criticized Yoo as being “irresponsible,” for suggesting that judges are obstacles to our military operations.  If anything, Vladeck said, the judges are mandated by the Constitution to serve as checks on the administrative and legislative branches of government.

“What John Yoo calls an obstacle, I call a separation of powers,” Vladeck said, describing the High Court’s checks on executive power as an “inescapable reality of our judicial system.”

It’s especially important for the justices to assert their opinions “on issues where public sentiment is against them,” said Vladeck, adding that national security may be one such issue, but it’s not a reason to cherry-pick a justice who will be friendly and “unobstructive” to Obama’s national security agenda.

As for whether one’s national security stance will—or even should—play an role in Obama’s nomination process, Vladeck said that it’s fair to question any judicial nominee (at any level) about his view of “the separation of powers in any case, including ones that implicate national security.”  But, he said he would draw a clear distinction between that and asking what the nominee thinks America’s stance on national security should be.

Turner, however, said certain powers given to the president, specifically regarding foreign affairs “are to be unchecked” and, as Chief Justice John Marshall said, that the courts have no right to second-guess these decisions.  He added that, though the Supreme Court likely would not approve of Yoo’s opinion, it is “a reasonable view” with a “strong case in both practice and in text.”  Turner referred to the 1944 case in which the Court upheld Japanese detention camps, even though thousands of Japanese—many of whom were American citizens—were interned simply for being Japanese and for spreading fear and vulnerability among a paranoid American populace.

Vladeck said that Yoo’s “kind of sentiment is deeply troubling,” and that a Supreme Court justice ought to possess independent thought regarding myriad political issues—which is why they are appointed for life terms to dictate the law of the land.

Turner admits that if it were his call, “I would not appoint a justice who I thought would be soft on national security…and on the other hand, I wouldn’t want someone who thinks civil liberties don’t count.”  He said that beyond a justice’s background, religion and gender, you want people who are “relatively moderate, intelligent, honorable, whom you can rely on to do the right thing.”  He said that of the names that have been tossed around as potential nominees, “most of these names strike me as being in that category.”  And that’s regardless of their opinions on national security.