By William Fisher
This week, a Florida jury is set to hear opening arguments in a trial that has come to be known as “Padilla Lite” – because it lacks the most serious charges made the government when it spectacularly announced the arrest of Jose Padilla for conspiring with al Qaeda operatives to plant radiological ''dirty bombs'' and to blow up apartment buildings in major US cities.
In June 2002, then Attorney General John Ashcroft interrupted a visit to Moscow to hold a widely publicized press conference to announce the arrest at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport of the US citizen, who was soon designated by President George W. Bush as an enemy combatant.
The Brooklyn-born Puerto Rican, who lived in the Ft. Lauderdale area, had converted to Islam a few years earlier. He was arrested by the FBI in May 2002 after returning from Pakistan. Padilla, then 31, spent the next three years locked up in military custody in a South Carolina naval brig without charges or access to lawyers. In late 2005, he was abruptly transferred to a civilian jail on the eve of a Supreme Court habeas corpus hearing that would have compelled the government to present evidence to justify his continued detention.
A former juvenile offender, Padilla converted to Islam as part of an effort to straighten out his life, say family members and friends. His mosque in Fort Lauderdale sponsored his travel, he is said to have told friends, relatives and FBI agents who interviewed him in 2002.
Following his transfer from the navy brig, Padilla, along with two co-defendants, computer programmer Adham Amin Hassoun and Detroit school administrator Kifah Wael Jayyousi, were indicted for conspiring to ''murder, kidnap and maim'' people overseas and to provide ''material support'' for terrorist activity.
Gone were the “dirty bomb” allegations against Padilla, potentially incriminating testimony from al Qaeda members detained at the US naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and Padilla's originally alleged meeting with a top
al Qaeda commander. The jury will also not be hearing anything Padilla may have told his captors during his three-year incarceration nor of his treatment during that period. Federal rules of evidence exclude material obtained before a suspect is formally charged; Padilla was not charged until he became part of the civilian justice system.
Testimony of this kind is not part of the indictment against Padilla because its admission would have opened the door for defense attorneys to challenge the credibility of prosecution witnesses, possible torture tactics, and disclosure of national security secrets.
The evidence the government will present to a dozen Miami-Dade County jurors will be in support of allegations the defendants were part of a US-based mission to carry out ''violent jihad'' overseas, including the ''Mujahideen Data Form'' Padilla is alleged to have submitted in preparation for training with al Qaeda in Afghanistan.
The government’s case is based largely on hundreds of wiretapped phone conversations between Padilla and his co-defendants. Seven of these taped phone calls contain recordings of Padilla’s voice.
Each of the defendants faces life in prison if convicted. To obtain a guilty verdict, prosecutors will have to convince the jury that each defendant participated in at least one act to further the conspiracy of providing material support for Islamic extremists overseas. Padilla's alleged recruitment by his co-defendants, and his alleged al Qaeda application, might be sufficient to obtain a conviction. The three defendants have pleaded not guilty.
However, the initial “dirty bomb” charge has not vanished completely. It was lodged against one of Padilla’s alleged accomplices, an Ethiopian-born Guantanamo detainee, who is not part of the Miami trial and who has not yet been scheduled for trial by a military tribunal at GITMO.
And the original “dirty bomb” allegation against Padilla is a key reason jury selection took more than a month and became so contentious. Many prospective jurors said they had heard of Padilla and some connection with the purported al-Qaida plot to detonate a radioactive "dirty bomb." Others had strong opinions about Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism that they said would make it difficult or impossible for them to be fair.
The seven men and five women jury -- five blacks, four whites and three Hispanics -- was chosen from an original jury pool of 300. Prosecutors charged that the defense was trying to exclude white and Hispanic men, who are considered more likely to convict. The defense accused the government of trying to exclude blacks, because studies have shown they frequently view criminal prosecutions with greater skepticism. The main jury includes no Muslims; the alternate juror of Egyptian descent said she was born to a Muslim family but did not practice Islam.
The indictment -- a summary of evidence gathered mostly from phone wiretaps of what the government characterizes as “coded” conversations involving Hassoun and other suspected conspirators -- paints a picture of an alleged North American cell involved in Muslim charities, an Islamic newsletter and jihad recruitment. But it cites no specific acts of violence by Padilla or other recruits.
The presiding federal judge, Marcia Cooke, has warned the prosecution team to limit references to Usama bin Laden, declaring that the Padilla case has no connection to him or his masterminding of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. She also cautioned prospective jurors that the Miami indictment has nothing to do with the ''dirty bomber'' charge.
She has also excluded from evidence a seven-page summary prepared by the government, which it says is based on classified statements by Padilla and other alleged al Qaeda detainees. The summary says Padilla admitted attending the hajj pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia in March 2000, when he met an al Qaeda recruiter and became interested in going to Afghanistan. It also says he admitted that ''he attended the al Qaeda-affiliated al Farouq training camp in Afghanistan in September-October 2000 under the name Abdullah al Espani.''
There, Padilla is said to have admitted receiving training in weaponry, explosives and communications. The government summary says that, about a year later, Padilla acknowledged meeting with senior al Qaeda associate Abu Zubaydah for the first time at the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. During a second meeting, Padilla is alleged to have said he and an accomplice, an Ethiopian later identified as Binyam Ahmed Muhammad, “presented to Abu Zubaydah plans for an operation in which they would travel to the United States to detonate a nuclear bomb they learned to make on the Internet.''
The summary says Zubaydah ''was skeptical of the idea,'' but still sent him and his partner to Pakistan to present it to Khalid Sheik Mohammed, al Qaeda's
operations chief. It claims that Padilla and his partner met with Mohammed in March 2002 in Karachi, where Padilla presented the dirty bomb plan.
Padilla said the al Qaeda commander thought ''the idea was a little too
complicated.'' He suggested that Padilla blow up apartment buildings in New York City, Washington, D.C., and Florida, according to the government’s summary.
It alleges that ''Padilla now admits that he accepted the mission,'' and a month later, left Pakistan for Egypt, and later flew to Chicago's O'Hare International Airport, where the FBI arrested him. Authorities say he was carrying $10,526 he allegedly received from al Qaeda for his apartment-bombing mission, according to the summary.
However, jurors will hear none of this because the indictment does not accuse Padilla or his co-defendants with any of these alleged crimes.
Given the original sensational allegations and the worldwide publicity they attracted, some legal experts think the Padilla trial is bound to be something of an anti-climax.
According to University of Miami law Professor Stephen Vladeck, who had filed a Supreme Court brief challenging Padilla's detention. “For what was supposed to be this grand, central case in the government's war on terror, this is going out with much more of a whimper than a bang.''
Robert Chesney, a specialist in national security law at Wake Forest University,
termed the prosecution pragmatic, analogous to “going after Al Capone on
tax evasion.”
But a spokesperson for Human Rights First, a legal advocacy group, says this will never be an ordinary, pragmatic prosecution. “If Jose Padilla were from Day 1 just charged and tried, then maybe,” she said. “But this is a case that comes after three and a half years of the most gross deprivation of human rights that we’ve seen in this country for a long time.”
She also noted that the government has reserved the option, should its case fail, of returning Mr. Padilla to military custody. This “casts a shadow” over the current prosecution, she says.
Saturday, May 12, 2007
Friday, May 11, 2007
CONSUMER PROTECTION NOMINEE JOINS LONG LINE OF FLAWED BUSH APPOINTEES
By William Fisher
The nomination of a long-time manufacturers’ lobbyist to head the nation’s consumer safety watchdog agency is not only igniting fierce opposition from public interest groups, but is sparking a reexamination of the Bush Administration’s five-year history of appointing senior officials many regard as “cronies” who were inefficient, inexperienced and, in some cases, forced to resign under pressure or convicted of crimes.
According to a report released by Public Citizen, Michael Baroody, President Bush’s nominee to chair the Consumer Products Safety Commission, was the top lobbyist for the country’s most powerful industry trade association when the group supported weakening guidelines for reporting information about dangerous products.
The report charged that the “requirements that the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) and its allies sought to weaken had been responsible for more than 80 percent of the fines issued by the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) over the past decade. NAM’s members and its coalition partners were responsible for paying more than half of those fines.”
The CPSC is tasked with protecting the public – and especially children – from serious injury or death and monitors more than 15,000 types of consumer products. Reports about product hazards are mandated by the Consumer Product Safety Act, one of the key laws governing the CPSC’s role in protecting consumer safety.
Public Citizen says that with Baroody serving as its executive director for lobbying efforts, NAM supported a move to weaken agency protocols that dictate when companies – including NAM members – must immediately report information about potentially hazardous product defects. The changes NAM successfully pressed for could affect the agency’s ability to issue timely decisions to recall dangerous products.
“As head of the CPSC, Baroody would be in charge of administering the weakened disclosure guidance his industry association sought, presenting a serious and unavoidable conflict of interest,” said Public Citizen President Joan Claybrook. “Under his authority, consumer and public safety would be at risk, while the companies he represented for years would save millions in future fines.”
Public Citizen’s analysis shows that weakening the rules had enormous financial benefits for NAM and its manufacturer members at the expense of consumer safety. Alleged violations of reporting guidelines were responsible for about $32.9 million of $39.6 million in civil fines collected by the CPSC since 1997. NAM members and affiliates accounted for more than half of those payments, totaling $18 million. Five of those companies alone paid a combined $10 million for allegedly violating reporting guidelines.
“While Baroody was at its helm, NAM had a record of unrelenting hostility to the safety of consumers, including small children,” said Laura MacCleery, director of Public Citizen’s Congress Watch division. “Baroody should not be confirmed to lead a safety agency that has such a vital role in protecting American families.”
The Baroody nomination has rekindled charges of serious ethics breaches, conflicts of interest, inefficiency, cronyism, and a number of criminal convictions among Bush political appointees since the election of 2000.
The public is by now familiar with the more high profile cases. The departure of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. The conviction of Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff, Scooter Libby, for lying to a federal grand jury in connection with the leaking of a CIA operative's identity. The conviction of David Safavian, head of all government procurement at the Office of Management and Budget, for lying to ethics officials and Senate investigators about his ties to lobbyist Jack Abramoff. The resignation of neoconservative leader Richard Perle, one of the architects of the Iraq invasion, who stepped down as Chairman of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board amid conflict-of-interest charges. The firing of Michael Brown, the FEMA director whose performance before, during and after Hurricane Katrina became a national scandal. And, most recently, the resignation of Monica Goodling, the Bush administration official believed to have played a pivotal role in the current contretemps over sacked prosecutors, after she invoked her Fifth Amendment right not to testify to Congress.
Less well-known to the public is the catalog of indictments or guilty pleas by lower-level Executive Branch political appointees. Here are some of them, originally compiled by Nick Turse of TPM Muckraker (www.tpmmuckraker.com), and added to by readers.
Steven Griles, Deputy Secretary at the Interior Department, who resigned and subsequently pled guilty to lying about his ties to convicted super-lobbyist Jack Abramoff.
Dusty Foggo, CIA Executive Director, who was indicted following accusations of corruption in connection to the Duke Cunningham scandal.
Claude Allen, Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy, who pled guilty to shoplifting from Target stores.
Larry Franklin, a DOD intelligence officer, who pled guilty to passing secrets to Israel.
Roger Stillwell, a desk officer at the Interior Department, who pled guilty to failing to report Redskins tickets and free dinners from Jack Abramoff.
Frank Figueroa, a senior official in the Department of Homeland Security, and former head of anti-sex-crime Operation Predator, who pled no contest to exposing himself to 16-year-old girl in Florida mall.
Darleen Druyun, a senior contracting official for the Air Force, who pled guilty and was sentenced to nine months in prison for her role in the Boeing tanker lease scandal.
John Korsmo, chairman of the Federal Housing Finance Board, who pled guilty to lying to the Senate and an inspector general about his role in a fundraiser for a friend's congressional campaign.
P. Trey Sunderland III, Chief of Geriatric Psychiatry at the National Institute of Mental Health, who admitted to a criminal conflict of interest charge for failing to report $300,000 received from Pfizer, Inc., a pharmaceutical company.
Still others have resigned in the face of pending charges or after investigations had been completed. These include:
Carl Truscott, Director of the Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives Bureau, who resigned after a report by the Justice Department's Inspector General found he wasted tens of thousands of dollars on luxuries, wasted millions on whimsical management decisions and violated ethics rules by ordering employees to help his nephew with a high school video project.
Joseph Schmitz, the Defense Department’s Inspector General, who resigned amid charges he personally intervened to protect top political appointees.
Susan Ralston, a White House assistant, who resigned amidst revelations she had accepted thousands of dollars in gifts from lobbyist Abramoff without compensating him, counter to White House ethics rules.
Kenneth Tomlinson, Chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and a member of the Broadcasting Board of Governors, who resigned after the release of an inspector general’s report concluding he had broken laws in spending CPB money to hire politically connected consultants to search for "bias" without consulting the board. At BBG, a separate investigation found he was running a "horse racing operation" out of his office, and continuing to hire politically-wired individuals to do "consulting" work for him.
George Deutsch, a NASA press aide, who resigned amid allegations he prevented the agency's top climate scientist from speaking publicly about global warming.
James Roche, Secretary of the Air Force, who resigned in the wake of the Boeing tanker lease scandal, after it was revealed he had pushed for Boeing to win a $23 billion contract.
Marvin Sambur, the top contracting executive at the Air Force – Darleen Druyun's boss -- who resigned in the wake of the Boeing scandal, though further investigations cleared him of wrongdoing.
Philip Cooney, Chief of Staff for the White House Council on Environmental Quality, and a former oil industry lawyer with no scientific expertise, who resigned after it was revealed he had watered down reports on global warming.
Thomas Scully, Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, who resigned following an investigation by the HHS Inspector General found he had pressured the agency's actuary to underestimate the full cost of the Medicare reform bill by approximately $100 billion until after Congress passed the bill into law.
Michelle Larson Korsmo, Deputy Chief of Staff at the Department of Labor, who resigned about two weeks before news broke that she and her husband were the targets of a criminal probe.
David Smith, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Fish, Wildlife, and Parks at the Interior Department, who resigned after shooting a buffalo and accepting its remains as an illegal gratuity.
Sean Tunis, Chief Medical Officer at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, who left after the State of Maryland suspended his medical license because he faked documentation relating to his medical education.
Julie MacDonald, the Interior Department’s Assistant Secretary of Fish, Wildlife and Parks, who resigned after an Inspector General investigation concluded that she used her position to squelch protection of endangered species.
Janet Rehnquist, the daughter of the late Chief Justice William Rehnquist, who resigned as Inspector General of the Health and Human Services Department after Congress began investigating her decision to delay an audit of Florida's pension fund at the request of Gov. Jeb Bush's office.
Robert E. Coughlin II, Deputy Chief of Staff for the DOJ’s criminal division, who resigned after coming under scrutiny in the Department’s expanding investigation of convicted super-lobbyist Jack Abramoff.
Lester Crawford, who resigned as a commissioner of the US Food and Drug Administration and pleaded guilty to charges of "conflict of interest and false reporting of information about stocks he owned in food, beverage and medical device companies he was in charge of regulating.”
Army Secretary Francis Harvey, the Army's top civilian official, who resigned in the wake of the ongoing controversy about poor outpatient care of injured soldiers at Walter Reid Army Medical Center.
The nominations of a number of other Bush loyalists were withdrawn because of scandal or political opposition. For example:
Harriet Myers, a longtime Bush friend, who the president nominated to be an Associate Justice on the Supreme Court, but later was forced to withdraw because of opposition from the religious right.
Bernard Kerik, nominated on the recommendation of former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani to head the Department of Homeland Security, who withdrew his nomination amidst a host of corruption allegations.
Timothy Flanigan, nominated to be Deputy Attorney General, who withdrew his nomination after revelations that he had worked closely with lobbyist Jack Abramoff when he was General Counsel for Corporate and International Law at Tyco, an Abramoff client.
Linda Chavez, nominated to become Secretary of Labor, who withdrew her nomination because of revelations that an illegal immigrant lived in her home and worked for her.
A number of other Bush nominees made it through the Senate confirmation process but remain under scrutiny by Congress because of lack of experience or ideologically-driven views.
One such is Ellen Sauerbrey, now head of the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration, the office that coordinates the American response to migration problems caused by war and natural disasters and works with international groups on population and reproductive-health issues.
Sauerbrey’s resume includes no experience in any of these areas. She ran Bush's 2000 presidential campaign in Maryland, and twice ran for governor of that state.
Another is Julie Myers, head of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), whose nomination was criticized by several ICE supervisors and agents who said she was "unqualified" because she never held a law-enforcement management position. Myers leads the largest investigative component of the Department of Homeland Security and the second largest investigative agency in the federal government, with more than 15,000 employees and an annual budget of nearly $5 billion. Her uncle is retired Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, formerly chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
A third is J. Dorrance Smith, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs. Smith, a former ABC News producer and the former media adviser to Coalition Provisional Authority Ambassador L. Paul Bremer, was confirmed by the Senate months after President Bush used a recess appointment to install him in the job. Objections were raised about a column he wrote for the Wall Street Journal in which he suggested that US television networks engaged in “collaboration” with terrorists by airing Arab news reports on al Qaeda.
Many of the Bush Administration’s younger appointees were recruited from right-wing Christian universities, such as Patrick Henry College, whose mission is “to prepare Christian men and women who will lead our nation and shape our culture with timeless biblical values and fidelity to the spirit of the American founding.” Others have come from Liberty University, the Christian liberal arts university founded as Lynchburg Baptist College in 1971 by televangelist Jerry Falwell.
Liberty’s law school is the alma mater of Monica Goodling, the DOJ’s White House liaison officer, who recently resigned rather than testify to Congress about her role in the firing of US attorneys. A long line of Patrick Henry graduates have found their way to internships and permanent positions in the Bush Administration, including some in the office of Karl Rove, the president’s chief political advisor.
Paul Bonicelli, a former Patrick Henry dean, is now the number two official supervising democracy-promotion programs at the US Agency for International Development.
But not all Bush appointees have been happy campers. A number have resigned. For example, John J. DiIulio Jr., the first director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, who quit his post after only seven months on the job, and David Kuo, his deputy, who left saying that “there was minimal senior White House commitment to the faith-based agenda" and that there never really was great concern over what he called "the ‘poor people stuff’."
DiIulio told Esquire Magazine, "There is no precedent in any modern White House for what is going on in this one: a complete lack of a policy apparatus. What you've got is everything -- and I mean everything -- being run by the political arm. It's the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis." He also decried "a virtual absence as yet of any policy accomplishments that might, to a fair-minded nonpartisan, count as the flesh on the bones of so-called compassionate conservatism."
The invasion of Iraq also triggered the resignations of a number of officials who disagreed with the Bush Administration’s war policies. Among them were career Foreign Service Officers like John Brown, now a Senior Fellow at the University of Southern California Center on Public Diplomacy, and Mary A. (Ann) Wright, who now writes about US foreign policy and lectures at universities.
But the current controversy related to the forced resignations of nine US attorneys promises to add fuel to the fire caused by what many Administration-watchers describe as the most inept, ideological and politically-driven presidencies in recent US history.
Virtually every American administration has had its share of scandal. The presidencies of Warren G. Harding and Ulysses S. Grant were destroyed by the appointment of corrupt or unqualified officials.
Woodrow Wilson got rid of his attorney general, James McReynolds, by appointing him to the Supreme Court; McReynolds was a reactionary who hated his fellow Justices, Louis Brandeis and Benjamin Cardozo, for being Jewish, and is remembered as one of the worst Justices in it's history.
Dwight D. Eisenhower had to fire his top aide, Sherman Adams, for accepting a Vicuna coat from a government contractor.
One of John F. Kennedy’s assistant secretaries in the commerce Department was fired for violating the Hatch Act by soliciting campaign contributions from government employees.
Jimmy Carter appointed Bert Lance as head of his Office of Management and Budget, but Lance was forced to resign six months later amid allegations of mismanagement and corruption when Lance was Chairman of the Board of Calhoun National Bank of Calhoun, Georgia.
Lyndon B. Johnson appointed a Defense Secretary, Robert McNamara, who was a serial liar on conditions in Vietnam.
Ronald Reagan had Col. Oliver North, Adm. John Pointdexter and Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger in the lead roles of Iran-Contra.
Richard Nixon appointed the arrogant sycophants whose amoral hubris resulted in Watergate.
And Bill Clinton appointed many Arkansas cronies, including Webster Hubbell as his Deputy Attorney General, only to have him assert his Fifth Amendment right not to testify before Congress, but later plead guilty to several felony charges relating to illegal billing in the Whitewater affair.
But critics of the Bush Administration assert that its “appointments deficit” extends wider and deeper than that of any other modern presidency. They contend that, of the 3,000-plus political jobs a president can offer, an exponentially larger proportion of Bush appointees lack the specialized experience they require, are managerially inept and ideologically-driven, have contempt for career civil servants, and regularly sacrifice good governance ethics for personal gain or to curry favor among Bush supporters, especially the Religious Right.
The nomination of a long-time manufacturers’ lobbyist to head the nation’s consumer safety watchdog agency is not only igniting fierce opposition from public interest groups, but is sparking a reexamination of the Bush Administration’s five-year history of appointing senior officials many regard as “cronies” who were inefficient, inexperienced and, in some cases, forced to resign under pressure or convicted of crimes.
According to a report released by Public Citizen, Michael Baroody, President Bush’s nominee to chair the Consumer Products Safety Commission, was the top lobbyist for the country’s most powerful industry trade association when the group supported weakening guidelines for reporting information about dangerous products.
The report charged that the “requirements that the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) and its allies sought to weaken had been responsible for more than 80 percent of the fines issued by the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) over the past decade. NAM’s members and its coalition partners were responsible for paying more than half of those fines.”
The CPSC is tasked with protecting the public – and especially children – from serious injury or death and monitors more than 15,000 types of consumer products. Reports about product hazards are mandated by the Consumer Product Safety Act, one of the key laws governing the CPSC’s role in protecting consumer safety.
Public Citizen says that with Baroody serving as its executive director for lobbying efforts, NAM supported a move to weaken agency protocols that dictate when companies – including NAM members – must immediately report information about potentially hazardous product defects. The changes NAM successfully pressed for could affect the agency’s ability to issue timely decisions to recall dangerous products.
“As head of the CPSC, Baroody would be in charge of administering the weakened disclosure guidance his industry association sought, presenting a serious and unavoidable conflict of interest,” said Public Citizen President Joan Claybrook. “Under his authority, consumer and public safety would be at risk, while the companies he represented for years would save millions in future fines.”
Public Citizen’s analysis shows that weakening the rules had enormous financial benefits for NAM and its manufacturer members at the expense of consumer safety. Alleged violations of reporting guidelines were responsible for about $32.9 million of $39.6 million in civil fines collected by the CPSC since 1997. NAM members and affiliates accounted for more than half of those payments, totaling $18 million. Five of those companies alone paid a combined $10 million for allegedly violating reporting guidelines.
“While Baroody was at its helm, NAM had a record of unrelenting hostility to the safety of consumers, including small children,” said Laura MacCleery, director of Public Citizen’s Congress Watch division. “Baroody should not be confirmed to lead a safety agency that has such a vital role in protecting American families.”
The Baroody nomination has rekindled charges of serious ethics breaches, conflicts of interest, inefficiency, cronyism, and a number of criminal convictions among Bush political appointees since the election of 2000.
The public is by now familiar with the more high profile cases. The departure of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. The conviction of Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff, Scooter Libby, for lying to a federal grand jury in connection with the leaking of a CIA operative's identity. The conviction of David Safavian, head of all government procurement at the Office of Management and Budget, for lying to ethics officials and Senate investigators about his ties to lobbyist Jack Abramoff. The resignation of neoconservative leader Richard Perle, one of the architects of the Iraq invasion, who stepped down as Chairman of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board amid conflict-of-interest charges. The firing of Michael Brown, the FEMA director whose performance before, during and after Hurricane Katrina became a national scandal. And, most recently, the resignation of Monica Goodling, the Bush administration official believed to have played a pivotal role in the current contretemps over sacked prosecutors, after she invoked her Fifth Amendment right not to testify to Congress.
Less well-known to the public is the catalog of indictments or guilty pleas by lower-level Executive Branch political appointees. Here are some of them, originally compiled by Nick Turse of TPM Muckraker (www.tpmmuckraker.com), and added to by readers.
Steven Griles, Deputy Secretary at the Interior Department, who resigned and subsequently pled guilty to lying about his ties to convicted super-lobbyist Jack Abramoff.
Dusty Foggo, CIA Executive Director, who was indicted following accusations of corruption in connection to the Duke Cunningham scandal.
Claude Allen, Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy, who pled guilty to shoplifting from Target stores.
Larry Franklin, a DOD intelligence officer, who pled guilty to passing secrets to Israel.
Roger Stillwell, a desk officer at the Interior Department, who pled guilty to failing to report Redskins tickets and free dinners from Jack Abramoff.
Frank Figueroa, a senior official in the Department of Homeland Security, and former head of anti-sex-crime Operation Predator, who pled no contest to exposing himself to 16-year-old girl in Florida mall.
Darleen Druyun, a senior contracting official for the Air Force, who pled guilty and was sentenced to nine months in prison for her role in the Boeing tanker lease scandal.
John Korsmo, chairman of the Federal Housing Finance Board, who pled guilty to lying to the Senate and an inspector general about his role in a fundraiser for a friend's congressional campaign.
P. Trey Sunderland III, Chief of Geriatric Psychiatry at the National Institute of Mental Health, who admitted to a criminal conflict of interest charge for failing to report $300,000 received from Pfizer, Inc., a pharmaceutical company.
Still others have resigned in the face of pending charges or after investigations had been completed. These include:
Carl Truscott, Director of the Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives Bureau, who resigned after a report by the Justice Department's Inspector General found he wasted tens of thousands of dollars on luxuries, wasted millions on whimsical management decisions and violated ethics rules by ordering employees to help his nephew with a high school video project.
Joseph Schmitz, the Defense Department’s Inspector General, who resigned amid charges he personally intervened to protect top political appointees.
Susan Ralston, a White House assistant, who resigned amidst revelations she had accepted thousands of dollars in gifts from lobbyist Abramoff without compensating him, counter to White House ethics rules.
Kenneth Tomlinson, Chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and a member of the Broadcasting Board of Governors, who resigned after the release of an inspector general’s report concluding he had broken laws in spending CPB money to hire politically connected consultants to search for "bias" without consulting the board. At BBG, a separate investigation found he was running a "horse racing operation" out of his office, and continuing to hire politically-wired individuals to do "consulting" work for him.
George Deutsch, a NASA press aide, who resigned amid allegations he prevented the agency's top climate scientist from speaking publicly about global warming.
James Roche, Secretary of the Air Force, who resigned in the wake of the Boeing tanker lease scandal, after it was revealed he had pushed for Boeing to win a $23 billion contract.
Marvin Sambur, the top contracting executive at the Air Force – Darleen Druyun's boss -- who resigned in the wake of the Boeing scandal, though further investigations cleared him of wrongdoing.
Philip Cooney, Chief of Staff for the White House Council on Environmental Quality, and a former oil industry lawyer with no scientific expertise, who resigned after it was revealed he had watered down reports on global warming.
Thomas Scully, Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, who resigned following an investigation by the HHS Inspector General found he had pressured the agency's actuary to underestimate the full cost of the Medicare reform bill by approximately $100 billion until after Congress passed the bill into law.
Michelle Larson Korsmo, Deputy Chief of Staff at the Department of Labor, who resigned about two weeks before news broke that she and her husband were the targets of a criminal probe.
David Smith, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Fish, Wildlife, and Parks at the Interior Department, who resigned after shooting a buffalo and accepting its remains as an illegal gratuity.
Sean Tunis, Chief Medical Officer at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, who left after the State of Maryland suspended his medical license because he faked documentation relating to his medical education.
Julie MacDonald, the Interior Department’s Assistant Secretary of Fish, Wildlife and Parks, who resigned after an Inspector General investigation concluded that she used her position to squelch protection of endangered species.
Janet Rehnquist, the daughter of the late Chief Justice William Rehnquist, who resigned as Inspector General of the Health and Human Services Department after Congress began investigating her decision to delay an audit of Florida's pension fund at the request of Gov. Jeb Bush's office.
Robert E. Coughlin II, Deputy Chief of Staff for the DOJ’s criminal division, who resigned after coming under scrutiny in the Department’s expanding investigation of convicted super-lobbyist Jack Abramoff.
Lester Crawford, who resigned as a commissioner of the US Food and Drug Administration and pleaded guilty to charges of "conflict of interest and false reporting of information about stocks he owned in food, beverage and medical device companies he was in charge of regulating.”
Army Secretary Francis Harvey, the Army's top civilian official, who resigned in the wake of the ongoing controversy about poor outpatient care of injured soldiers at Walter Reid Army Medical Center.
The nominations of a number of other Bush loyalists were withdrawn because of scandal or political opposition. For example:
Harriet Myers, a longtime Bush friend, who the president nominated to be an Associate Justice on the Supreme Court, but later was forced to withdraw because of opposition from the religious right.
Bernard Kerik, nominated on the recommendation of former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani to head the Department of Homeland Security, who withdrew his nomination amidst a host of corruption allegations.
Timothy Flanigan, nominated to be Deputy Attorney General, who withdrew his nomination after revelations that he had worked closely with lobbyist Jack Abramoff when he was General Counsel for Corporate and International Law at Tyco, an Abramoff client.
Linda Chavez, nominated to become Secretary of Labor, who withdrew her nomination because of revelations that an illegal immigrant lived in her home and worked for her.
A number of other Bush nominees made it through the Senate confirmation process but remain under scrutiny by Congress because of lack of experience or ideologically-driven views.
One such is Ellen Sauerbrey, now head of the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration, the office that coordinates the American response to migration problems caused by war and natural disasters and works with international groups on population and reproductive-health issues.
Sauerbrey’s resume includes no experience in any of these areas. She ran Bush's 2000 presidential campaign in Maryland, and twice ran for governor of that state.
Another is Julie Myers, head of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), whose nomination was criticized by several ICE supervisors and agents who said she was "unqualified" because she never held a law-enforcement management position. Myers leads the largest investigative component of the Department of Homeland Security and the second largest investigative agency in the federal government, with more than 15,000 employees and an annual budget of nearly $5 billion. Her uncle is retired Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, formerly chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
A third is J. Dorrance Smith, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs. Smith, a former ABC News producer and the former media adviser to Coalition Provisional Authority Ambassador L. Paul Bremer, was confirmed by the Senate months after President Bush used a recess appointment to install him in the job. Objections were raised about a column he wrote for the Wall Street Journal in which he suggested that US television networks engaged in “collaboration” with terrorists by airing Arab news reports on al Qaeda.
Many of the Bush Administration’s younger appointees were recruited from right-wing Christian universities, such as Patrick Henry College, whose mission is “to prepare Christian men and women who will lead our nation and shape our culture with timeless biblical values and fidelity to the spirit of the American founding.” Others have come from Liberty University, the Christian liberal arts university founded as Lynchburg Baptist College in 1971 by televangelist Jerry Falwell.
Liberty’s law school is the alma mater of Monica Goodling, the DOJ’s White House liaison officer, who recently resigned rather than testify to Congress about her role in the firing of US attorneys. A long line of Patrick Henry graduates have found their way to internships and permanent positions in the Bush Administration, including some in the office of Karl Rove, the president’s chief political advisor.
Paul Bonicelli, a former Patrick Henry dean, is now the number two official supervising democracy-promotion programs at the US Agency for International Development.
But not all Bush appointees have been happy campers. A number have resigned. For example, John J. DiIulio Jr., the first director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, who quit his post after only seven months on the job, and David Kuo, his deputy, who left saying that “there was minimal senior White House commitment to the faith-based agenda" and that there never really was great concern over what he called "the ‘poor people stuff’."
DiIulio told Esquire Magazine, "There is no precedent in any modern White House for what is going on in this one: a complete lack of a policy apparatus. What you've got is everything -- and I mean everything -- being run by the political arm. It's the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis." He also decried "a virtual absence as yet of any policy accomplishments that might, to a fair-minded nonpartisan, count as the flesh on the bones of so-called compassionate conservatism."
The invasion of Iraq also triggered the resignations of a number of officials who disagreed with the Bush Administration’s war policies. Among them were career Foreign Service Officers like John Brown, now a Senior Fellow at the University of Southern California Center on Public Diplomacy, and Mary A. (Ann) Wright, who now writes about US foreign policy and lectures at universities.
But the current controversy related to the forced resignations of nine US attorneys promises to add fuel to the fire caused by what many Administration-watchers describe as the most inept, ideological and politically-driven presidencies in recent US history.
Virtually every American administration has had its share of scandal. The presidencies of Warren G. Harding and Ulysses S. Grant were destroyed by the appointment of corrupt or unqualified officials.
Woodrow Wilson got rid of his attorney general, James McReynolds, by appointing him to the Supreme Court; McReynolds was a reactionary who hated his fellow Justices, Louis Brandeis and Benjamin Cardozo, for being Jewish, and is remembered as one of the worst Justices in it's history.
Dwight D. Eisenhower had to fire his top aide, Sherman Adams, for accepting a Vicuna coat from a government contractor.
One of John F. Kennedy’s assistant secretaries in the commerce Department was fired for violating the Hatch Act by soliciting campaign contributions from government employees.
Jimmy Carter appointed Bert Lance as head of his Office of Management and Budget, but Lance was forced to resign six months later amid allegations of mismanagement and corruption when Lance was Chairman of the Board of Calhoun National Bank of Calhoun, Georgia.
Lyndon B. Johnson appointed a Defense Secretary, Robert McNamara, who was a serial liar on conditions in Vietnam.
Ronald Reagan had Col. Oliver North, Adm. John Pointdexter and Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger in the lead roles of Iran-Contra.
Richard Nixon appointed the arrogant sycophants whose amoral hubris resulted in Watergate.
And Bill Clinton appointed many Arkansas cronies, including Webster Hubbell as his Deputy Attorney General, only to have him assert his Fifth Amendment right not to testify before Congress, but later plead guilty to several felony charges relating to illegal billing in the Whitewater affair.
But critics of the Bush Administration assert that its “appointments deficit” extends wider and deeper than that of any other modern presidency. They contend that, of the 3,000-plus political jobs a president can offer, an exponentially larger proportion of Bush appointees lack the specialized experience they require, are managerially inept and ideologically-driven, have contempt for career civil servants, and regularly sacrifice good governance ethics for personal gain or to curry favor among Bush supporters, especially the Religious Right.
Tuesday, May 08, 2007
SPECIAL COUNSEL DUBBED WASHINGTON’S 'INSPECTOR CLOUSEAU'
By William Fisher
Public interest groups and anonymous whistleblowers are charging that Scott Bloch, head of the Office of Special Counsel (OSC), has irreconcilable conflicts of interest in his much-trumpeted investigations of Karl Rove’s missing emails and the firing of a US Attorney, and are calling on the top White House lawyer to force Bloch to recuse himself.
In a letter to White House Counsel Fred Fielding, an attorney representing Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), the Project On Government Oversight (POGO), and the unnamed whistleblowers, wrote:
“Multiple conflicts of interest will result if Mr. Bloch continues to lead an investigation of high level officials in the White House while he himself is being investigated, essentially at the direction of the White House.”
Lawyer Debra S. Katz wrote Fielding that, “On the hand, the pending charges against Mr. Mr. Bloch supply him with an incentive to whitewash violations of the law in the hopes of currying favor. On the other hand, were he to make findings of violations, his findings would be viewed as an act of retribution and/or coercion to prevent the President from taking appropriate action against him, which he would surely portray as retaliation. If Mr. Bloch’s investigation of White House officials is still underway when (the Office of Personnel Management) completes its own investigation of Mr. Bloch…the White House will be put in the position of having to make a decision about Mr. Bloch’s continued tenure, while it is itself being investigated by Mr. Bloch.”
Since 2005, Bloch has been under investigation by the Inspector General of the White House Office of Personnel Management (OPM), at the behest of the President’s Office of Management and Budget. OPM’s investigation centers on charges that Bloch retaliated against whistleblowers who complained they were being transferred out of Washington for political reasons because they disagreed with Bloch’s policies. That investigation is reportedly reaching its final stages.
As that process plodded forward, Bloch announced his plans to investigate the White House by combining several unrelated high-profile investigations, including the firing of US Attorneys, missing Karl Rove emails and political briefings of General Services Administration managers, in violation of the Hatch Act.
Jeff Ruch, Executive Director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) told Truthout, "Scott Bloch gives opportunism a bad name."
PEER is among a number of public interest groups calling for the abolition of Bloch’s office, which is up for congressional reauthorization this year.
Bloch’s proposed investigation has prompted protests both inside and outside the OSC. These have been based on issues including:
· The OSC likely does not have jurisdiction over a complaint filed by recently fired US Attorney David Iglesias (a complaint solicited by Bloch) alleging discrimination on the basis of his service in the Navy Reserve.
· Presidential appointees who have been confirmed by the Senate are not entitled to claim statutory protection against decisions regarding their continued tenure.
· There are separation of powers questions about applying statutes to block a presidential prerogative to remove his own appointees.
· OSC has only a qualified subpoena power and lacks the authority to enforce its subpoenas in court. If a party simply refuses to comply, OSC must obtain the consent of the General Counsel of the Merits Systems Protection Board, headed by a Bush-appointee, who would then be charged with bringing an enforcement action.
· The legal basis for an OSC investigation into emails from White House staff sent on Republican National Committee accounts, as well as OSC’s power to order surrender of the missing missives, is unclear.
“It makes no sense for Scott Bloch to investigate the White House while the White House investigates Bloch,” stated PEER’s Ruch, noting that Bloch has told allies that the White House has twice asked him to resign. Bloch, who is in the midst of a fixed five-year term, can only be removed for cause.
"Bloch should recuse himself from this case and hand the matter over to an outside entity, such as the relevant Inspectors General or Congress,” Ruch said.
He added, ““Scott Bloch brings the investigative acumen of an Inspector Clouseau to a very complicated and delicate matter.”
“It is not that Bloch has lacked the opportunities to conduct complex investigations since every virtually whistleblower in town goes to the OSC, but Bloch has ignored them all. It is only when a probe serves his political agenda that he latches onto it as if it were the last helicopter leaving Saigon, ” says POGO Director of Investigations Beth Daley said, “What we have here is a mutual investigation society. This is the bureaucratic equivalent of a mouse trying to swallow an elephant. The OSC has no standing to conduct the investigation and Scott Bloch cannot possibly investigate the White House while it is investigating him.”
The Administration’s investigation of Bloch comes as a result of a complaint filed by his own staff members and whistleblower groups alleging a host of misconduct charges against Bloch. One part of that complaint concerns Bloch’s improper interference with the handling of Hatch Act cases, the statute that Bloch is now invoking as the basis for looking at White House political briefings.
Bloch’s proposed investigation follows allegations that the Justice Department fired eight US Attorneys for political reasons, that White House officials including Bush political advisor Karl Rove violated the Presidential Records Act by using an email account of the Republican National Committee and failing to archive these communications, and that Bush appointees delivered politically-charged briefings to employees of the General Services Administration (GSA), thus violating the Hatch Act.
Bloch contends that one of the fired US Attorneys, David Iglesias, suffered discriminatory treatment because of his 45-day absence for military service.
The US Office of Special Counsel is an independent federal investigative and prosecutorial agency. Its basic authorities come from three federal statutes, the Civil Service Reform Act, the Whistleblower Protection Act, and the Hatch Act.
Its mission is to safeguard the merit system by protecting federal employees and applicants from prohibited personnel practices, especially reprisal for whistleblowing. It is intended to provide a secure channel for federal workers -- except those in the FBI and intelligence agencies -- to disclose information about various workplace improprieties, including a violation of law, rule or regulation, gross mismanagement and waste of funds, abuse of authority, or a substantial danger to public health or safety.
OSC has about 110 employees, about 40 percent of them licensed attorneys. Like public defenders, OSC’s attorneys are paid by the government to act in the interests of federal employees who seek their protection.
President Bush nominated Bloch for his five-year term in 2003. He was unanimously confirmed by the US Senate. From 2001-2003, Bloch served as Associate Director and then Deputy Director and Counsel to the Task Force for Faith-based and Community Initiatives at the Department of Justice. Before joining the Bush Administration, he was a partner in a Lawrence, Kansas, law firm.
The complaint against Bloch alleges he discriminated against OSC employees by imposing illegal gag orders, cronyism, and retaliation in forcing employee relocations and the resignations of one-fifth of OSC headquarters legal and investigative staff.
Bloch insists that the ‘forced removals’ were part of a reorganization that sent 12 career OSC employees to new assignments in other cities “to improve performance, not punish any employees.”
The OPM Inspector General’s investigation is the third probe into Bloch’s operation after less than two years in office. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) and a US Senate subcommittee both have ongoing investigations into mass dismissal of hundreds of whistleblower cases, crony hires, and Bloch’s targeting of gay employees for removal while refusing to investigate cases involving discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.
The allegation was made by in 2005 by PEER, which said figures released by Bloch reveal that in the previous year OSC dismissed or otherwise disposed of 600 whistleblower disclosures where civil servants have reported waste, fraud, threats to public safety and violations of law, and “made 470 claims of retaliation disappear”.
Ruch says, “The 600 disclosure cases that Bloch has admitted were dismissed are all instances where civil servants came forward to report waste, fraud and abuse, yet OSC decided that there was no need to investigate.”
He added, “Dismissing all 600 cases and deciding that not one deserved investigation (because, in the words of the OSC spokesperson they were all ("minor matters or issues previously investigated") stretches credulity.”
“Bloch has yet to announce a single case where he has ordered an investigation into the employee’s charges”, PEER charges. The organization says, “in not one of these cases did Bloch’s office affirmatively represent a whistleblower to obtain relief before the civil service court system”, called the Merit Systems Protection Board.
PEER says, “In order to speed dismissals, Bloch instituted a rule forbidding his staff from contacting a whistleblower if their disclosure was deemed incomplete or ambiguous. Instead, OSC would simply dismiss the matter. As a result, hundreds of whistleblowers never had a chance to justify why their cases had merit.”
And Melanie Sloan, executive director of another public interest organization, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, said of Bloch, “Having transformed OSC into a virtual black hole for legitimate complaints of retaliation, Bloch is decidedly not the right person to tackle the issues of misconduct and illegality that surround top White House officials. There is a serious question as to whether Bloch will just provide cover for an administration that has been covering for him.”
Public interest groups and anonymous whistleblowers are charging that Scott Bloch, head of the Office of Special Counsel (OSC), has irreconcilable conflicts of interest in his much-trumpeted investigations of Karl Rove’s missing emails and the firing of a US Attorney, and are calling on the top White House lawyer to force Bloch to recuse himself.
In a letter to White House Counsel Fred Fielding, an attorney representing Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), the Project On Government Oversight (POGO), and the unnamed whistleblowers, wrote:
“Multiple conflicts of interest will result if Mr. Bloch continues to lead an investigation of high level officials in the White House while he himself is being investigated, essentially at the direction of the White House.”
Lawyer Debra S. Katz wrote Fielding that, “On the hand, the pending charges against Mr. Mr. Bloch supply him with an incentive to whitewash violations of the law in the hopes of currying favor. On the other hand, were he to make findings of violations, his findings would be viewed as an act of retribution and/or coercion to prevent the President from taking appropriate action against him, which he would surely portray as retaliation. If Mr. Bloch’s investigation of White House officials is still underway when (the Office of Personnel Management) completes its own investigation of Mr. Bloch…the White House will be put in the position of having to make a decision about Mr. Bloch’s continued tenure, while it is itself being investigated by Mr. Bloch.”
Since 2005, Bloch has been under investigation by the Inspector General of the White House Office of Personnel Management (OPM), at the behest of the President’s Office of Management and Budget. OPM’s investigation centers on charges that Bloch retaliated against whistleblowers who complained they were being transferred out of Washington for political reasons because they disagreed with Bloch’s policies. That investigation is reportedly reaching its final stages.
As that process plodded forward, Bloch announced his plans to investigate the White House by combining several unrelated high-profile investigations, including the firing of US Attorneys, missing Karl Rove emails and political briefings of General Services Administration managers, in violation of the Hatch Act.
Jeff Ruch, Executive Director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) told Truthout, "Scott Bloch gives opportunism a bad name."
PEER is among a number of public interest groups calling for the abolition of Bloch’s office, which is up for congressional reauthorization this year.
Bloch’s proposed investigation has prompted protests both inside and outside the OSC. These have been based on issues including:
· The OSC likely does not have jurisdiction over a complaint filed by recently fired US Attorney David Iglesias (a complaint solicited by Bloch) alleging discrimination on the basis of his service in the Navy Reserve.
· Presidential appointees who have been confirmed by the Senate are not entitled to claim statutory protection against decisions regarding their continued tenure.
· There are separation of powers questions about applying statutes to block a presidential prerogative to remove his own appointees.
· OSC has only a qualified subpoena power and lacks the authority to enforce its subpoenas in court. If a party simply refuses to comply, OSC must obtain the consent of the General Counsel of the Merits Systems Protection Board, headed by a Bush-appointee, who would then be charged with bringing an enforcement action.
· The legal basis for an OSC investigation into emails from White House staff sent on Republican National Committee accounts, as well as OSC’s power to order surrender of the missing missives, is unclear.
“It makes no sense for Scott Bloch to investigate the White House while the White House investigates Bloch,” stated PEER’s Ruch, noting that Bloch has told allies that the White House has twice asked him to resign. Bloch, who is in the midst of a fixed five-year term, can only be removed for cause.
"Bloch should recuse himself from this case and hand the matter over to an outside entity, such as the relevant Inspectors General or Congress,” Ruch said.
He added, ““Scott Bloch brings the investigative acumen of an Inspector Clouseau to a very complicated and delicate matter.”
“It is not that Bloch has lacked the opportunities to conduct complex investigations since every virtually whistleblower in town goes to the OSC, but Bloch has ignored them all. It is only when a probe serves his political agenda that he latches onto it as if it were the last helicopter leaving Saigon, ” says POGO Director of Investigations Beth Daley said, “What we have here is a mutual investigation society. This is the bureaucratic equivalent of a mouse trying to swallow an elephant. The OSC has no standing to conduct the investigation and Scott Bloch cannot possibly investigate the White House while it is investigating him.”
The Administration’s investigation of Bloch comes as a result of a complaint filed by his own staff members and whistleblower groups alleging a host of misconduct charges against Bloch. One part of that complaint concerns Bloch’s improper interference with the handling of Hatch Act cases, the statute that Bloch is now invoking as the basis for looking at White House political briefings.
Bloch’s proposed investigation follows allegations that the Justice Department fired eight US Attorneys for political reasons, that White House officials including Bush political advisor Karl Rove violated the Presidential Records Act by using an email account of the Republican National Committee and failing to archive these communications, and that Bush appointees delivered politically-charged briefings to employees of the General Services Administration (GSA), thus violating the Hatch Act.
Bloch contends that one of the fired US Attorneys, David Iglesias, suffered discriminatory treatment because of his 45-day absence for military service.
The US Office of Special Counsel is an independent federal investigative and prosecutorial agency. Its basic authorities come from three federal statutes, the Civil Service Reform Act, the Whistleblower Protection Act, and the Hatch Act.
Its mission is to safeguard the merit system by protecting federal employees and applicants from prohibited personnel practices, especially reprisal for whistleblowing. It is intended to provide a secure channel for federal workers -- except those in the FBI and intelligence agencies -- to disclose information about various workplace improprieties, including a violation of law, rule or regulation, gross mismanagement and waste of funds, abuse of authority, or a substantial danger to public health or safety.
OSC has about 110 employees, about 40 percent of them licensed attorneys. Like public defenders, OSC’s attorneys are paid by the government to act in the interests of federal employees who seek their protection.
President Bush nominated Bloch for his five-year term in 2003. He was unanimously confirmed by the US Senate. From 2001-2003, Bloch served as Associate Director and then Deputy Director and Counsel to the Task Force for Faith-based and Community Initiatives at the Department of Justice. Before joining the Bush Administration, he was a partner in a Lawrence, Kansas, law firm.
The complaint against Bloch alleges he discriminated against OSC employees by imposing illegal gag orders, cronyism, and retaliation in forcing employee relocations and the resignations of one-fifth of OSC headquarters legal and investigative staff.
Bloch insists that the ‘forced removals’ were part of a reorganization that sent 12 career OSC employees to new assignments in other cities “to improve performance, not punish any employees.”
The OPM Inspector General’s investigation is the third probe into Bloch’s operation after less than two years in office. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) and a US Senate subcommittee both have ongoing investigations into mass dismissal of hundreds of whistleblower cases, crony hires, and Bloch’s targeting of gay employees for removal while refusing to investigate cases involving discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.
The allegation was made by in 2005 by PEER, which said figures released by Bloch reveal that in the previous year OSC dismissed or otherwise disposed of 600 whistleblower disclosures where civil servants have reported waste, fraud, threats to public safety and violations of law, and “made 470 claims of retaliation disappear”.
Ruch says, “The 600 disclosure cases that Bloch has admitted were dismissed are all instances where civil servants came forward to report waste, fraud and abuse, yet OSC decided that there was no need to investigate.”
He added, “Dismissing all 600 cases and deciding that not one deserved investigation (because, in the words of the OSC spokesperson they were all ("minor matters or issues previously investigated") stretches credulity.”
“Bloch has yet to announce a single case where he has ordered an investigation into the employee’s charges”, PEER charges. The organization says, “in not one of these cases did Bloch’s office affirmatively represent a whistleblower to obtain relief before the civil service court system”, called the Merit Systems Protection Board.
PEER says, “In order to speed dismissals, Bloch instituted a rule forbidding his staff from contacting a whistleblower if their disclosure was deemed incomplete or ambiguous. Instead, OSC would simply dismiss the matter. As a result, hundreds of whistleblowers never had a chance to justify why their cases had merit.”
And Melanie Sloan, executive director of another public interest organization, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, said of Bloch, “Having transformed OSC into a virtual black hole for legitimate complaints of retaliation, Bloch is decidedly not the right person to tackle the issues of misconduct and illegality that surround top White House officials. There is a serious question as to whether Bloch will just provide cover for an administration that has been covering for him.”
Friday, May 04, 2007
POWELL RESIGNATION SPURS NEW DOUBTS ABOUT US PUBLIC DIPLOMACY
By William Fisher
The departure of one of the few Bush Administration appointees with “some ‘native’ familiarity” with the Middle East – coupled with release of a new survey revealing growing doubts among Americans about their country’s reputation in the rest of the world – is triggering yet another round of criticism of US public diplomacy efforts.
Dina Habib Powell, the highest-ranking Arab-American in the Bush Administration, is resigning from her post at the State Department to join Goldman Sachs Group, a leading Wall Street investment house.
As assistant secretary of state for educational and cultural affairs and deputy to Undersecretary of State Karen P. Hughes, Powell played a major role in the administration's efforts to improve America’s reputation in the face of the wave of anti-Americanism in the Arab triggered by the US invasion of Iraq. Her parents emigrated from Egypt and settled in Texas when Powell was four years old and could not speak English.
At the same time, a just-released survey commissioned by Business for Diplomatic Action (BDA), reported that “substantial majorities of Americans express concern about our nation's declining global reputation and believe it is more important than ever for Americans to repair relationships and build new bridges with the rest of the world.”
The survey of 1,000 likely voters conducted for BDA by Zogby International last month found that 76 percent are concerned about America's global reputation, 74 percent believe the US is viewed negatively by people in other countries, and 66 percent of voters say U.S. relations with the rest of the world are on the wrong track.
Against this background, Truthout interviewed University of Southern California Center on Public Diplomacy Senior Fellow John Brown, the former State Department official who compiles the daily “Public Diplomacy Press and Blog Review.” (http://uscpublicdiplomacy.com/index.php/newsroom/johnbrown_detail/070502_pdprb/). In 2003, Brown resigned after more than 20 years as a Foreign Service Officer as a protest against the invasion of Iraq.
Here are some of his views on the state of US public diplomacy.
TRUTHOUT: You have written about Karen Hughes and what she calls her “diplomacy of deeds,” (http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/04/09/411/). “Her focus on deeds suggests that she is not, at heart, interested in the US establishing a dialogue with the world, perhaps the most important function of America’s public diplomacy, which is meant to complement and enrich its traditional diplomacy. If she is not interested in a dialogue with the world, what happened to her ideas about “listening tours?”
BROWN: The listening tours, like so many “new initiatives”, seem to have vanished from Ms. Hughes’ priorities. Perhaps she has the illusion of thinking that she is now sufficiently familiar with the Middle East, certainly an area that cannot be understood by a quickie “listening tour,” but by years of study and travel (not to speak of language study). Interestingly, the one person on Hughes’ staff with some “native” familiarity with the area -- Assistant Secretary of State for Educational and Cultural Affairs Dina Powell, who was born in Egypt -- has decided to leave the State Department to work on Wall Street.
No matter how much she travels overseas, Ms. Hughes’s true focus all along has been US domestic politics. As her breathless autobiography, “Ten Minutes from Normal”, suggests, she sees life as a perpetual political campaign. Indeed, her so-called “diplomacy of deeds” -- which ostensibly is meant to win foreigners over by charitable acts such as handing out sewing machines, which Ms Hughes, the spin-stress par excellence, did when she was in the Philippines -- is at heart an effort to reassure Americans of how good, kind and compassionate we are toward the rest of the world under the Bush administration.
What Karen is really telling us -- through the US media coverage she makes sure her “deeds” obtain – is that, no matter what bad things these awful terrorists (the outside world) say about us, we are God’s chosen people because of our generosity. And don’t forget to support Bush and vote Republican.
As Ms. Hughes herself wrote, in her usual saccharine style, in The Washington Times (December 20, 2006): “At this time of year, when people are called on to care for the hungry, sick and abandoned, Americans should know we are giving the gift of hope to thousands of people whose names we will never know. And I will continue to advocate we do even more, because the diplomacy of deeds serves our own national interests and the people of every nation.”
TRUTHOUT: Given the increasingly negative attitudes toward US foreign policy, as revealed by repeated opinion surveys, is there anything positive that any PD czarina could do to positively influence world opinion? If so what?
BROWN: Speaking of deeds, what the Bush administration should do to influence world public opinion positively is to change drastically its foreign policy. GITMO should be closed. Real efforts to end the war in Iraq diplomatically should be undertaken. The ill-conceived anti-missile missile project in Eastern Europe should be dropped. Far more Iraqi refugees should be admitted to the United States. The term “war on terror” should be abandoned. The list goes on and on.
Most of the world does not “hate” America as a country or civilization. People overseas view us with mixed feelings. They admire some aspects of the United States, and others are not as attractive to them. I would suggest that at the top of what foreigners dislike (if not, in many cases, despise) about the US is the Bush administration and its disastrous foreign policy, which even Americans now realize has done enormous damage to international understanding. George W. Bush is a confirmation of foreigners’ worst feelings about the United States and its role in the world.
TRUTHOUT: What can you tell our readers about how our embassy people around the world view Ms. Hushes and our PD efforts?
BROWN: As you know, I left the Foreign Service in March 2003 in opposition to Mr. Bush’s war plans against Iraq, so I may not be the best source on how our embassy staff around the world currently views Ms. Hughes. I am, however, still in contact with diplomats who practice and have practiced public diplomacy, and what I can say is that many are greatly disturbed not only by Bush’s foreign policy, but by the scarcity of resources available for public diplomacy.
Hughes may talk on and on about how important public diplomacy is, but her “diplomacy of deeds” does not seem to extend to getting adequate funding to carry out essential public diplomacy programs ranging from educational exchanges to radio broadcasts.
Let me also note that Ms. Hughes was a member of the White House Iraq Group (WHIG) (http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=White_House_Iraq_Group)that led the campaign to convince the American people to go to war with Iraq. It would be interesting to know more about Hughes’ role in this secretive propaganda operation. She owes it to the American people -- and the world -- to disclose the truth about this. (http://www.commondreams.org/views05/1019-23.htm).
In a related development came the results of the survey commissioned by Business for Diplomatic Action (BDA), an organization of multinational American companies working to improve the standing of America in the world by engaging the private sector in public diplomacy efforts.
"When you have results at the 70 percent or 75 percent level, that's about as close to a universal consensus as you're going to get," said Keith Reinhard, BDA’s founder and chairman.
"Americans are saying that our relationship with the rest of the world is broken but they see a way out." Six in ten of those surveyed say it is "more important than ever for Americans to reach out and build new bridges to people from other countries and cultures" -- as opposed to three in ten who say Americans must "build fences around our country to keep out illegal immigrants, terrorists and
foreigners in general."
The survey found that “An overwhelming majority of voters (69 percent) identified three changes that will have a major impact on the current situation: changing the way the US government conducts public diplomacy; placing more emphasis on social studies and world history courses in American schools; and changing U.S. foreign policy.”
Other actions favored by majorities: expanding international exchange programs, encouraging Americans to learn foreign languages, and getting US corporations involved in public diplomacy.
The poll was conducted for BDA by Zogby International. Most of its findings appear to present a mirror image of the attitudes of foreigners toward the US.
Dina Powell, 33, joined the State Department from the White House, where she directed the presidential personnel office. Before assuming her post at State
two years ago, she advised Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on staffing her team at Foggy Bottom.
According to The Washington Post, Powell is expected to become a managing director of Goldman Sachs, one of the world’s leading investment banking organizations. She will become director of global corporate engagement, a newly created position, and will oversee the firm's charitable activities and serve as Goldman's principal liaison to philanthropic and nongovernmental organizations.
"I'm really sorry to lose her. She is fantastic," Rice told The Post. "She had so many ideas. There are people who have ideas but can't execute them. She really executed them."
Rice lauded Powell's creation of public-private partnerships, which brought corporations together with the government to assist other countries, such as in Lebanon. The US-Lebanon partnership, formed after the Israeli-Hezbollah war last summer that stirred anger against the US, is led by a group of corporate executives who traveled to Lebanon with Powell to promote initiatives to create jobs and rebuild homes.
Despite the tense relationship between the US and Iran, Powell is also credited with resurrecting people-to-people exchanges with the Islamic Republic, bringing Iranian medical doctors to the United States and sending a US wrestling team to Iran.
The Post reported that in her White House role, Powell made recommendations on hiring and was one of four individuals -- the others were President Bush, Vice President Cheney and political adviser Karl Rove – who knew whether a candidate was being accepted for one of the 4,000 jobs filled by the White House.
Rice told The Post that Powell "won't be replaceable" but Hughes is looking at potential candidates. "There is a lot now in place," she said. "For the next 18 months it is now a matter of institutionalizing it."
John Brown was a senior member of the Foreign Service who served in the State Department for more than 20 years, primarily in Eastern Europe and Russia. On March 10, 2003, he submitted his letter of resignation http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0312-11.htm to then Secretary of State Colin Powell, saying, “I cannot in good conscience support President Bush's war plans against Iraq.”
Brown’s letter said, “The president has failed to explain clearly why our brave men and women in uniform should be ready to sacrifice their lives in a war on Iraq at this time; to lay out the full ramifications of this war, including the extent of innocent civilian casualties; to specify the economic costs of the war for ordinary Americans; to clarify how the war would help rid the world of terror; (and) to take international public opinion against the war into serious consideration.
He wrote, “Throughout the globe the United States is becoming associated with the unjustified use of force. The president's disregard for views in other nations, borne out by his neglect of public diplomacy, is giving birth to an anti-American century.”
Brown’s Public Diplomacy daily roundup is available free on request to JohnBrown30@hotmail.com
The departure of one of the few Bush Administration appointees with “some ‘native’ familiarity” with the Middle East – coupled with release of a new survey revealing growing doubts among Americans about their country’s reputation in the rest of the world – is triggering yet another round of criticism of US public diplomacy efforts.
Dina Habib Powell, the highest-ranking Arab-American in the Bush Administration, is resigning from her post at the State Department to join Goldman Sachs Group, a leading Wall Street investment house.
As assistant secretary of state for educational and cultural affairs and deputy to Undersecretary of State Karen P. Hughes, Powell played a major role in the administration's efforts to improve America’s reputation in the face of the wave of anti-Americanism in the Arab triggered by the US invasion of Iraq. Her parents emigrated from Egypt and settled in Texas when Powell was four years old and could not speak English.
At the same time, a just-released survey commissioned by Business for Diplomatic Action (BDA), reported that “substantial majorities of Americans express concern about our nation's declining global reputation and believe it is more important than ever for Americans to repair relationships and build new bridges with the rest of the world.”
The survey of 1,000 likely voters conducted for BDA by Zogby International last month found that 76 percent are concerned about America's global reputation, 74 percent believe the US is viewed negatively by people in other countries, and 66 percent of voters say U.S. relations with the rest of the world are on the wrong track.
Against this background, Truthout interviewed University of Southern California Center on Public Diplomacy Senior Fellow John Brown, the former State Department official who compiles the daily “Public Diplomacy Press and Blog Review.” (http://uscpublicdiplomacy.com/index.php/newsroom/johnbrown_detail/070502_pdprb/). In 2003, Brown resigned after more than 20 years as a Foreign Service Officer as a protest against the invasion of Iraq.
Here are some of his views on the state of US public diplomacy.
TRUTHOUT: You have written about Karen Hughes and what she calls her “diplomacy of deeds,” (http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/04/09/411/). “Her focus on deeds suggests that she is not, at heart, interested in the US establishing a dialogue with the world, perhaps the most important function of America’s public diplomacy, which is meant to complement and enrich its traditional diplomacy. If she is not interested in a dialogue with the world, what happened to her ideas about “listening tours?”
BROWN: The listening tours, like so many “new initiatives”, seem to have vanished from Ms. Hughes’ priorities. Perhaps she has the illusion of thinking that she is now sufficiently familiar with the Middle East, certainly an area that cannot be understood by a quickie “listening tour,” but by years of study and travel (not to speak of language study). Interestingly, the one person on Hughes’ staff with some “native” familiarity with the area -- Assistant Secretary of State for Educational and Cultural Affairs Dina Powell, who was born in Egypt -- has decided to leave the State Department to work on Wall Street.
No matter how much she travels overseas, Ms. Hughes’s true focus all along has been US domestic politics. As her breathless autobiography, “Ten Minutes from Normal”, suggests, she sees life as a perpetual political campaign. Indeed, her so-called “diplomacy of deeds” -- which ostensibly is meant to win foreigners over by charitable acts such as handing out sewing machines, which Ms Hughes, the spin-stress par excellence, did when she was in the Philippines -- is at heart an effort to reassure Americans of how good, kind and compassionate we are toward the rest of the world under the Bush administration.
What Karen is really telling us -- through the US media coverage she makes sure her “deeds” obtain – is that, no matter what bad things these awful terrorists (the outside world) say about us, we are God’s chosen people because of our generosity. And don’t forget to support Bush and vote Republican.
As Ms. Hughes herself wrote, in her usual saccharine style, in The Washington Times (December 20, 2006): “At this time of year, when people are called on to care for the hungry, sick and abandoned, Americans should know we are giving the gift of hope to thousands of people whose names we will never know. And I will continue to advocate we do even more, because the diplomacy of deeds serves our own national interests and the people of every nation.”
TRUTHOUT: Given the increasingly negative attitudes toward US foreign policy, as revealed by repeated opinion surveys, is there anything positive that any PD czarina could do to positively influence world opinion? If so what?
BROWN: Speaking of deeds, what the Bush administration should do to influence world public opinion positively is to change drastically its foreign policy. GITMO should be closed. Real efforts to end the war in Iraq diplomatically should be undertaken. The ill-conceived anti-missile missile project in Eastern Europe should be dropped. Far more Iraqi refugees should be admitted to the United States. The term “war on terror” should be abandoned. The list goes on and on.
Most of the world does not “hate” America as a country or civilization. People overseas view us with mixed feelings. They admire some aspects of the United States, and others are not as attractive to them. I would suggest that at the top of what foreigners dislike (if not, in many cases, despise) about the US is the Bush administration and its disastrous foreign policy, which even Americans now realize has done enormous damage to international understanding. George W. Bush is a confirmation of foreigners’ worst feelings about the United States and its role in the world.
TRUTHOUT: What can you tell our readers about how our embassy people around the world view Ms. Hushes and our PD efforts?
BROWN: As you know, I left the Foreign Service in March 2003 in opposition to Mr. Bush’s war plans against Iraq, so I may not be the best source on how our embassy staff around the world currently views Ms. Hughes. I am, however, still in contact with diplomats who practice and have practiced public diplomacy, and what I can say is that many are greatly disturbed not only by Bush’s foreign policy, but by the scarcity of resources available for public diplomacy.
Hughes may talk on and on about how important public diplomacy is, but her “diplomacy of deeds” does not seem to extend to getting adequate funding to carry out essential public diplomacy programs ranging from educational exchanges to radio broadcasts.
Let me also note that Ms. Hughes was a member of the White House Iraq Group (WHIG) (http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=White_House_Iraq_Group)that led the campaign to convince the American people to go to war with Iraq. It would be interesting to know more about Hughes’ role in this secretive propaganda operation. She owes it to the American people -- and the world -- to disclose the truth about this. (http://www.commondreams.org/views05/1019-23.htm).
In a related development came the results of the survey commissioned by Business for Diplomatic Action (BDA), an organization of multinational American companies working to improve the standing of America in the world by engaging the private sector in public diplomacy efforts.
"When you have results at the 70 percent or 75 percent level, that's about as close to a universal consensus as you're going to get," said Keith Reinhard, BDA’s founder and chairman.
"Americans are saying that our relationship with the rest of the world is broken but they see a way out." Six in ten of those surveyed say it is "more important than ever for Americans to reach out and build new bridges to people from other countries and cultures" -- as opposed to three in ten who say Americans must "build fences around our country to keep out illegal immigrants, terrorists and
foreigners in general."
The survey found that “An overwhelming majority of voters (69 percent) identified three changes that will have a major impact on the current situation: changing the way the US government conducts public diplomacy; placing more emphasis on social studies and world history courses in American schools; and changing U.S. foreign policy.”
Other actions favored by majorities: expanding international exchange programs, encouraging Americans to learn foreign languages, and getting US corporations involved in public diplomacy.
The poll was conducted for BDA by Zogby International. Most of its findings appear to present a mirror image of the attitudes of foreigners toward the US.
Dina Powell, 33, joined the State Department from the White House, where she directed the presidential personnel office. Before assuming her post at State
two years ago, she advised Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on staffing her team at Foggy Bottom.
According to The Washington Post, Powell is expected to become a managing director of Goldman Sachs, one of the world’s leading investment banking organizations. She will become director of global corporate engagement, a newly created position, and will oversee the firm's charitable activities and serve as Goldman's principal liaison to philanthropic and nongovernmental organizations.
"I'm really sorry to lose her. She is fantastic," Rice told The Post. "She had so many ideas. There are people who have ideas but can't execute them. She really executed them."
Rice lauded Powell's creation of public-private partnerships, which brought corporations together with the government to assist other countries, such as in Lebanon. The US-Lebanon partnership, formed after the Israeli-Hezbollah war last summer that stirred anger against the US, is led by a group of corporate executives who traveled to Lebanon with Powell to promote initiatives to create jobs and rebuild homes.
Despite the tense relationship between the US and Iran, Powell is also credited with resurrecting people-to-people exchanges with the Islamic Republic, bringing Iranian medical doctors to the United States and sending a US wrestling team to Iran.
The Post reported that in her White House role, Powell made recommendations on hiring and was one of four individuals -- the others were President Bush, Vice President Cheney and political adviser Karl Rove – who knew whether a candidate was being accepted for one of the 4,000 jobs filled by the White House.
Rice told The Post that Powell "won't be replaceable" but Hughes is looking at potential candidates. "There is a lot now in place," she said. "For the next 18 months it is now a matter of institutionalizing it."
John Brown was a senior member of the Foreign Service who served in the State Department for more than 20 years, primarily in Eastern Europe and Russia. On March 10, 2003, he submitted his letter of resignation http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0312-11.htm to then Secretary of State Colin Powell, saying, “I cannot in good conscience support President Bush's war plans against Iraq.”
Brown’s letter said, “The president has failed to explain clearly why our brave men and women in uniform should be ready to sacrifice their lives in a war on Iraq at this time; to lay out the full ramifications of this war, including the extent of innocent civilian casualties; to specify the economic costs of the war for ordinary Americans; to clarify how the war would help rid the world of terror; (and) to take international public opinion against the war into serious consideration.
He wrote, “Throughout the globe the United States is becoming associated with the unjustified use of force. The president's disregard for views in other nations, borne out by his neglect of public diplomacy, is giving birth to an anti-American century.”
Brown’s Public Diplomacy daily roundup is available free on request to JohnBrown30@hotmail.com
Thursday, May 03, 2007
MAJOR PUSHBACK AGAINST DOJ MOVE TO LIMIT GITMO LAWYERS
By William Fisher
A Justice Department proposal to limit lawyers’ access to the nearly 400 detainees at Guantanamo Bay is drawing sharp criticism from much of the legal community in the US.
In a court filing, the DOJ claimed that the lawyers’ use of mail to communicate with their clients had “enabled detainees’ counsel to cause unrest on the base by informing detainees about terrorist attacks.” The mail system has been “misused” to inform detainees about military operations in Iraq, activities of terrorist leaders, efforts to fight terrorism, a Hezbollah attack on Israel, and abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison, the department said in the filing.
The DOJ is seeking to narrow the definition of “legal mail” and set a three-visit limit on face-to-face meetings once a detainee agrees at an initial meeting to let a lawyer represent him.
The Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit is expected to hear arguments on the proposal on May 15.
"Creating a legal black hole where rights are denied is as un-American as it is illegal," said Anthony Romero, of the American Civil Liberties Union.
And Mary Shaw of Amnesty International USA told Truthout, “The right to a fair trial is one of the universally applicable principles recognized in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, to which the U.S. is a signatory. The U.S. took a huge step away from this standard with the Military Commissions Act of 2006. And now the proposal to limit attorneys' access to their clients at Guantanamo Bay will further hinder detainees' right to full equality under the law.”
“How a person is treated when accused of a crime provides a concrete demonstration of how far a state respects human rights. Amnesty International strongly urges the Congress and the Bush administration take immediate steps to restore our traditional American values of justice, rule of law, and human dignity. Otherwise the ‘war on terror’ is merely a war on rights,” she said.
Lawyers are predicting more suicides and despair at Guantanamo if the Justice Department prevails. They point out that lawyers are virtually the only contact inmates have with the outside world. If their visits are limited, detainee
desperation will deepen and more will try to kill themselves, they say.
On June 10, 2006, two Saudi detainees and one Yemeni hanged themselves with sheets, the first and only suicides since the 2002 opening of the detention center that now holds about 380 inmates.
Clive Stafford Smith, an attorney for several Guantanamo detainees, said
curtailing lawyer visits would likely lead more prisoners to attempt suicide.
"The level of depression is soaring, I am afraid," he said.
He added that many detainees are kept in isolation in small cells with no natural light. With no prison sentence having been pronounced — except for one Australian detainee — the detainees do not know when they will get out, if ever. Many have been there for more than five years.
Attorney Stephen Oleskey, who represents six Algerians, said more suicides are
"a real risk" if the court restricts lawyer-client contacts.
"I've seen firsthand the mental conditions of my clients deteriorate in isolation," Oleskey said. "And I think the impact of further restrictions would be dramatic."
Many human rights and legal authorities view the DOJ move to restrict attorney access as an attempt to seal the facility from critics. "If we cannot come in, the only news getting out of here will be the government's carefully crafted version," said one of them.
They say it is the attorneys who provide the world with information about hunger strikes, solitary confinement and other details about the detainees. Journalists can visit but are barred by the military from interviewing detainees. The Red Cross, which occasionally visits, keeps its findings confidential.
But military commanders at Guantanamo and the Justice Department have always viewed the lawyers with suspicion. Navy Commander Jeffrey Gordon, a Pentagon spokesman, told the Associated Press the military has been giving broad lawyer access to many detainees — even though they are accused of having al-Qaida or Taliban links and the United States is still at war.
Barry M. Kamin, president of the New York City Bar, called the assertions
"astonishing and disingenuous" in a letter to U.S. Attorney General Alberto
Gonzales.
The president of the group asked Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales to abandon the Justice Department proposal to limit lawyers’ access.
In his letter to Mr. Gonzales, the bar association’s president said, “This is an astonishing and disingenuous assertion.”
“Blaming counsel for the hunger strikes and other unrest is a continuation of a
disreputable and unwarranted smear campaign against counsel,” the letter said.
The 137-year-old New York City Bar, with more than 23,000 members, is one of the oldest and largest lawyers’ organizations in the country. It says the Bush administration is trying to evade responsibility for problems at the Guantánamo Bay prison by falsely blaming defense lawyers.
The American Bar Association has also criticized the DOJ move to place "arbitrary restrictions concerning the number of times and the ways that lawyers may confer with their clients in Guantanamo." ABA President Karen J. Mathis said such practices at Guantanamo or in a court "would threaten competent representation without at all advancing national security."
Meanwhile, a number of US senators have vowed to restore to foreign terrorism suspects the right to challenge their imprisonment. They say Congress made an historic blunder by stripping them of that right last year. Hundreds of suspected al Qaeda and Taliban members held at Guantanamo could be affected.
Last year's Congress, with a Republican majority, passed the Military Commissions Act (MCA), which sets specific rules for US military tribunals. It included a ban on non-citizens labeled "enemy combatants" from using "habeas corpus" petitions to challenge the legality of their detention in court, asserting that military panels at Guantanamo were a substitute for court review.
The new law was hurriedly passed in the aftermath of a Supreme Court decision striking down the Bush Administration’s position because it lacked legislative authority from Congress.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat, warned, "This new law means that any of these people can be detained forever without any ability to challenge their detention in federal court, or anywhere else, simply on the government's say-so that they are awaiting determination as to whether they are enemy combatants," he said.
"This is wrong. It is unconstitutional. It is un-American," Leahy said in testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee, which would share jurisdiction on changing the law.
A Defense Department lawyer and some committee Republicans said the law should be allowed to work and be examined by US courts before Congress acts again.
Thus far, there have been no trials and only two prisoners charged under the MCA. An Australian detainee, David Hicks, pled guilty to a charge of aiding and abetting terrorists and was given a seven-year sentence with all but nine months suspended. A prisoner for almost five years, Hicks will serve his sentence in Australia, and is barred from talking to the media for a year.
Another group of what the Bush Administration characterizes as “high value” detainees has been sent to Guantanamo from secret prisons, whose existence President Bush admitted for the first time in announcing the transfers. It is believed these “black site” facilities were run by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and located in former Soviet bloc countries in Eastern Europe as well as some in the Middle East.
But whether any of these defendants will come to trial remains an open question because at least some of the evidence against them may have been obtained using “cruel and inhumane” treatment, which is prohibited under the Geneva Conventions.
Sen. Leahy, along with the ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee, Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, has introduced legislation to restore habeas corpus right to detainees. With the help of Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin, "I hope we can fix this serious and corrosive problem by this summer," Leahy said.
Levin, a Michigan Democrat, agreed. "We have an obligation to act now to establish a process that we can defend."
Similar legislation has also been introduced by Sen. Chris Dodd, a Connecticut Democrat and candidate for his party’s nomination for the presidency in the 2008 election.
The writ of habeas corpus – a Latin phrase meaning "you have the body" - has been a centerpiece of Anglo-American jurisprudence since it was first developed over 300 years ago in Britain. It gives defendants the right to have their imprisonment reviewed by a court.
In a related development, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat, has introduced legislation to close the military prison at Guantánamo.
Guantánamo Bay has become a lightning rod for international condemnation," Feinstein said. "Rather than make the United States safer, the image projected by this facility puts us at greater risk," she said.
Feinstein's bill would require the DOD to close the Guantánamo Bay prison 100 days after the bill's enactment. Feinstein laid out several options as to where the detainees would go.
They could be transferred to civilian or military prisons in the US and charged before civilian courts or military tribunals, or they could be handed over to international tribunals authorized to try them.
Detainees cleared for release would be sent either to their home countries or, if those countries have a history of prisoner torture, to third-party countries that e agree to take them.
Feinstein said she opposes releasing any terrorists, but adds that the US would be better served holding them elsewhere.
"Conducting trials elsewhere, either in the US or before internationally recognized tribunals, will give these proceedings a credibility that they would not likely have if they were conducted at Guantánamo Bay," Feinstein said.
In 2002, former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld referred to Guantanamo prisoners as "the worst of the worst." In June 2005, he said, "If you think of the people down there, these are people, all of whom were captured on a battlefield. They're terrorists, trainers, bomb makers, recruiters, financiers, (Osama bin Laden's) bodyguards, would-be suicide bombers, probably the 20th 9/11 hijacker."
Other Bush Administration officials have been equally certain. For example, now retired Air Force Gen. Richard Myers, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said, "They were so vicious, if given the chance they would gnaw through the hydraulic lines of a C-17 while they were being flown to Cuba."
Nevertheless, of the approximately 760 prisoners brought to Guantanamo since 2002, the Pentagon reports that the military has now released all but approximately 385. Some were released to their home countries and imprisoned or freed. Others have been accepted by third countries.
But reliable evidence shows that, of the original number, many were not captured on the battlefields of Afghanistan, but kidnapped off the streets of Europe and various locations in the Middle East, and many others were "sold" to US authorities in Afghanistan and Pakistan for bounties. It has also become clear that others were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Last year, the United Nations called on the US to close Guantánamo, opposing the Bush administration's claims that suspected terrorists were not entitled to treatment prescribed by the Geneva Conventions or the habeas corpus right to challenge the legality of their detentions.
More recently, President Bush has also said he would like to close Guantanamo if alternative arrangements can be made for the prisoners. The government says it is working hard to find countries willing to accept released prisoners, but is finding most of them either reluctant or unacceptable.
A Justice Department proposal to limit lawyers’ access to the nearly 400 detainees at Guantanamo Bay is drawing sharp criticism from much of the legal community in the US.
In a court filing, the DOJ claimed that the lawyers’ use of mail to communicate with their clients had “enabled detainees’ counsel to cause unrest on the base by informing detainees about terrorist attacks.” The mail system has been “misused” to inform detainees about military operations in Iraq, activities of terrorist leaders, efforts to fight terrorism, a Hezbollah attack on Israel, and abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison, the department said in the filing.
The DOJ is seeking to narrow the definition of “legal mail” and set a three-visit limit on face-to-face meetings once a detainee agrees at an initial meeting to let a lawyer represent him.
The Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit is expected to hear arguments on the proposal on May 15.
"Creating a legal black hole where rights are denied is as un-American as it is illegal," said Anthony Romero, of the American Civil Liberties Union.
And Mary Shaw of Amnesty International USA told Truthout, “The right to a fair trial is one of the universally applicable principles recognized in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, to which the U.S. is a signatory. The U.S. took a huge step away from this standard with the Military Commissions Act of 2006. And now the proposal to limit attorneys' access to their clients at Guantanamo Bay will further hinder detainees' right to full equality under the law.”
“How a person is treated when accused of a crime provides a concrete demonstration of how far a state respects human rights. Amnesty International strongly urges the Congress and the Bush administration take immediate steps to restore our traditional American values of justice, rule of law, and human dignity. Otherwise the ‘war on terror’ is merely a war on rights,” she said.
Lawyers are predicting more suicides and despair at Guantanamo if the Justice Department prevails. They point out that lawyers are virtually the only contact inmates have with the outside world. If their visits are limited, detainee
desperation will deepen and more will try to kill themselves, they say.
On June 10, 2006, two Saudi detainees and one Yemeni hanged themselves with sheets, the first and only suicides since the 2002 opening of the detention center that now holds about 380 inmates.
Clive Stafford Smith, an attorney for several Guantanamo detainees, said
curtailing lawyer visits would likely lead more prisoners to attempt suicide.
"The level of depression is soaring, I am afraid," he said.
He added that many detainees are kept in isolation in small cells with no natural light. With no prison sentence having been pronounced — except for one Australian detainee — the detainees do not know when they will get out, if ever. Many have been there for more than five years.
Attorney Stephen Oleskey, who represents six Algerians, said more suicides are
"a real risk" if the court restricts lawyer-client contacts.
"I've seen firsthand the mental conditions of my clients deteriorate in isolation," Oleskey said. "And I think the impact of further restrictions would be dramatic."
Many human rights and legal authorities view the DOJ move to restrict attorney access as an attempt to seal the facility from critics. "If we cannot come in, the only news getting out of here will be the government's carefully crafted version," said one of them.
They say it is the attorneys who provide the world with information about hunger strikes, solitary confinement and other details about the detainees. Journalists can visit but are barred by the military from interviewing detainees. The Red Cross, which occasionally visits, keeps its findings confidential.
But military commanders at Guantanamo and the Justice Department have always viewed the lawyers with suspicion. Navy Commander Jeffrey Gordon, a Pentagon spokesman, told the Associated Press the military has been giving broad lawyer access to many detainees — even though they are accused of having al-Qaida or Taliban links and the United States is still at war.
Barry M. Kamin, president of the New York City Bar, called the assertions
"astonishing and disingenuous" in a letter to U.S. Attorney General Alberto
Gonzales.
The president of the group asked Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales to abandon the Justice Department proposal to limit lawyers’ access.
In his letter to Mr. Gonzales, the bar association’s president said, “This is an astonishing and disingenuous assertion.”
“Blaming counsel for the hunger strikes and other unrest is a continuation of a
disreputable and unwarranted smear campaign against counsel,” the letter said.
The 137-year-old New York City Bar, with more than 23,000 members, is one of the oldest and largest lawyers’ organizations in the country. It says the Bush administration is trying to evade responsibility for problems at the Guantánamo Bay prison by falsely blaming defense lawyers.
The American Bar Association has also criticized the DOJ move to place "arbitrary restrictions concerning the number of times and the ways that lawyers may confer with their clients in Guantanamo." ABA President Karen J. Mathis said such practices at Guantanamo or in a court "would threaten competent representation without at all advancing national security."
Meanwhile, a number of US senators have vowed to restore to foreign terrorism suspects the right to challenge their imprisonment. They say Congress made an historic blunder by stripping them of that right last year. Hundreds of suspected al Qaeda and Taliban members held at Guantanamo could be affected.
Last year's Congress, with a Republican majority, passed the Military Commissions Act (MCA), which sets specific rules for US military tribunals. It included a ban on non-citizens labeled "enemy combatants" from using "habeas corpus" petitions to challenge the legality of their detention in court, asserting that military panels at Guantanamo were a substitute for court review.
The new law was hurriedly passed in the aftermath of a Supreme Court decision striking down the Bush Administration’s position because it lacked legislative authority from Congress.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat, warned, "This new law means that any of these people can be detained forever without any ability to challenge their detention in federal court, or anywhere else, simply on the government's say-so that they are awaiting determination as to whether they are enemy combatants," he said.
"This is wrong. It is unconstitutional. It is un-American," Leahy said in testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee, which would share jurisdiction on changing the law.
A Defense Department lawyer and some committee Republicans said the law should be allowed to work and be examined by US courts before Congress acts again.
Thus far, there have been no trials and only two prisoners charged under the MCA. An Australian detainee, David Hicks, pled guilty to a charge of aiding and abetting terrorists and was given a seven-year sentence with all but nine months suspended. A prisoner for almost five years, Hicks will serve his sentence in Australia, and is barred from talking to the media for a year.
Another group of what the Bush Administration characterizes as “high value” detainees has been sent to Guantanamo from secret prisons, whose existence President Bush admitted for the first time in announcing the transfers. It is believed these “black site” facilities were run by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and located in former Soviet bloc countries in Eastern Europe as well as some in the Middle East.
But whether any of these defendants will come to trial remains an open question because at least some of the evidence against them may have been obtained using “cruel and inhumane” treatment, which is prohibited under the Geneva Conventions.
Sen. Leahy, along with the ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee, Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, has introduced legislation to restore habeas corpus right to detainees. With the help of Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin, "I hope we can fix this serious and corrosive problem by this summer," Leahy said.
Levin, a Michigan Democrat, agreed. "We have an obligation to act now to establish a process that we can defend."
Similar legislation has also been introduced by Sen. Chris Dodd, a Connecticut Democrat and candidate for his party’s nomination for the presidency in the 2008 election.
The writ of habeas corpus – a Latin phrase meaning "you have the body" - has been a centerpiece of Anglo-American jurisprudence since it was first developed over 300 years ago in Britain. It gives defendants the right to have their imprisonment reviewed by a court.
In a related development, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat, has introduced legislation to close the military prison at Guantánamo.
Guantánamo Bay has become a lightning rod for international condemnation," Feinstein said. "Rather than make the United States safer, the image projected by this facility puts us at greater risk," she said.
Feinstein's bill would require the DOD to close the Guantánamo Bay prison 100 days after the bill's enactment. Feinstein laid out several options as to where the detainees would go.
They could be transferred to civilian or military prisons in the US and charged before civilian courts or military tribunals, or they could be handed over to international tribunals authorized to try them.
Detainees cleared for release would be sent either to their home countries or, if those countries have a history of prisoner torture, to third-party countries that e agree to take them.
Feinstein said she opposes releasing any terrorists, but adds that the US would be better served holding them elsewhere.
"Conducting trials elsewhere, either in the US or before internationally recognized tribunals, will give these proceedings a credibility that they would not likely have if they were conducted at Guantánamo Bay," Feinstein said.
In 2002, former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld referred to Guantanamo prisoners as "the worst of the worst." In June 2005, he said, "If you think of the people down there, these are people, all of whom were captured on a battlefield. They're terrorists, trainers, bomb makers, recruiters, financiers, (Osama bin Laden's) bodyguards, would-be suicide bombers, probably the 20th 9/11 hijacker."
Other Bush Administration officials have been equally certain. For example, now retired Air Force Gen. Richard Myers, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said, "They were so vicious, if given the chance they would gnaw through the hydraulic lines of a C-17 while they were being flown to Cuba."
Nevertheless, of the approximately 760 prisoners brought to Guantanamo since 2002, the Pentagon reports that the military has now released all but approximately 385. Some were released to their home countries and imprisoned or freed. Others have been accepted by third countries.
But reliable evidence shows that, of the original number, many were not captured on the battlefields of Afghanistan, but kidnapped off the streets of Europe and various locations in the Middle East, and many others were "sold" to US authorities in Afghanistan and Pakistan for bounties. It has also become clear that others were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Last year, the United Nations called on the US to close Guantánamo, opposing the Bush administration's claims that suspected terrorists were not entitled to treatment prescribed by the Geneva Conventions or the habeas corpus right to challenge the legality of their detentions.
More recently, President Bush has also said he would like to close Guantanamo if alternative arrangements can be made for the prisoners. The government says it is working hard to find countries willing to accept released prisoners, but is finding most of them either reluctant or unacceptable.
Tuesday, May 01, 2007
CORRUPTION, SHODDY WORK, MISMANAGEMENT, CRIPPLE IRAQ RECONSTRUCTION
By William Fisher
Evidence of widespread corruption, shoddy work, and poor management, has called into question the claims of the Bush Administration that sabotage by insurgents is responsible for the failure of its multi-billion dollar Iraq reconstruction effort.
The new and growing body of evidence comes from the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR) (www.sigir.mil), the Government Accountability Office (GAO) (www.gao.gov), the investigative arm of Congress, and CorpWatch, (www.corpwatch.org), a non-partisan not-for-profit monitoring organization.
The head of SIGIR, Stuart Bowen, reports that his agency sampled eight projects that the Administration had touted as successes, and found that seven were no longer operating because of plumbing and electrical failures, lack of proper maintenance, apparent looting and expensive equipment never used.
The GAO tells Congress Iraqi government institutions are undeveloped and confront significant challenges in staffing a competent, non-partisan civil service, effectively fighting corruption, using modern technology; and managing resources effectively.
And CorpWatch reports that smugglers are suspected of diverting billions of dollars worth of crude oil onto tankers because the oil metering system that is supposed monitor how much crude flows into and out of (oil terminals) has not worked since the March 2003 US invasion of Iraq.
With all of the approximately $30 billion in US reconstruction money now spent, future projects will become largely the responsibility of the Iraqi government. But, SIGIR’s April 23 report to Congress, says, “The Iraqi government has had difficulty operating and sustaining the aging oil infrastructure, maintaining the new and rehabilitated power generation facilities, and developing and sustaining the logistics systems for the Ministries of Defense and Interior.”
“Iraqi government institutions are undeveloped and confront significant challenges in staffing a competent, non-partisan civil service; effectively fighting corruption; using modern technology; and managing resources effectively,” says the report.
The GAO agrees. It tells Congress, “Iraqi capacity and commitment to manage and fund reconstruction and security efforts remains limited. Since 2003, the United States has obligated about $29 billion to help Iraq rebuild its infrastructure and develop Iraqi security forces to stabilize the country. However, key goals have not been met. The Iraqi government has not sustained reconstruction and security efforts, in part because Iraqi government institutions are undeveloped and lack needed management and human resource skills according to U.S. officials.
GAO adds, “The inability of the Iraqi government to spend its 2006 capital budget also increases the uncertainty that it can sustain the rebuilding effort.”
The Bush Administration, usually under pressure from federal inspectors or press accounts, has reluctantly acknowledged that some of its reconstruction projects have been abandoned, delayed or poorly constructed. But the most recent inspections by the Inspector General reveal for first time the failure of projects officially declared successes.
Examples include:
· The Baghdad International Airport, where $11.8 million was spent on new electrical generators, but $8.6 million worth is no longer functioning.
· A maternity hospital in the northern city of Erbil, where a newly built water purification system is not functioning and an expensive incinerator for medical waste is padlocked and medical waste including syringes, used bandages, and empty drug vials are clogging the sewage system and probably contaminating the water system.
· At the same hospital, a system for distributing oxygen has been ignored by the medical staff, which told inspectors they distrusted the sophisticated new equipment and had gone back to using tried-and-true oxygen tanks — which are stored unsafely throughout the building.
· Expensive generators are missing from the Camp Ur military base, having been hauled off to another post. Also at Camp Ur, three modular buildings constructed at a cost of $1.8 million were dismantled and removed with no explanation given.
· Barracks renovated for enlisted soldiers are already in disrepair just a year after being handed over to the Iraqi Army. Electrical wiring is pieced together to accommodate retrofitted lights and appliances that were not in the original design. Newly installed fixtures, hardware and appliances have been pilfered or abused. A number of electrical generation systems were not adequately maintained and were inoperable at the time of the SIGIR's inspections. Leaks from the upstairs floor had damaged floor tiles and ceilings on the ground floors. An inadequate design, combined with low-quality fixtures and poor workmanship, made the facilities too fragile for the volume of use they experienced. The problem was compounded by poor maintenance and abuse by the tenants.
SIGIR acknowledged that the eight projects it inspected did not represent a full statistical measure of the thousands of projects in the American rebuilding program. But inspectors said their findings raised serious new concerns about the effort.
The projects visited by SIGIR teams were located throughout Iraq. The agency’s inspections were limited to a small sampling because many locations were considered too dangerous for inspectors to visit.
The reconstruction effort was originally touted to be almost as high a priority as the military “surge” to stabilize Iraq, allow the government to function and business to flourish, and promote good will toward the US.
But “These first inspections indicate that the concerns that we and others have had about the Iraqis sustaining our investments in these projects are valid,” SIGIR’s Bowen told the New York Times. Bowen said that because he suspected that completed projects were not being maintained, he had ordered his inspectors to undertake a wider program of returning to examine projects that had been completed for at least six months, a phase known as “sustainment.”
The American reconstruction program has been repeatedly criticized for not including in its rebuilding budget enough of the costs for spare parts, training, stronger construction and other elements that would enable projects continue to function once they have been built.
The new reports provide support for that position: Bowen says the Iraqis appear to share responsibility for the latest problems, which surfaced after the US turned the projects over to the Iraqi government. Still, the new findings show that the enormous American investment in the reconstruction program is at risk, Bowen said.
The United States has spent billions of dollars rebuilding the infrastructure and developing Iraqi security forces. However, the Iraqi government has had difficulty operating and sustaining the aging oil infrastructure, maintaining the new and rehabilitated power generation facilities, and developing and sustaining the logistics systems for the Ministries of Defense and Interior. Neither ministry is considered self-sufficient in logistics, command and control, or intelligence.
As a result:
Iraq's oil production and exports have consistently fallen below their respective program goals. In 2006, oil production averaged 2.1 million barrels per day, compared with the U.S. goal of 3.0 million barrels per day. The Ministry of Oil has had difficulty operating and maintaining the refineries. According to U.S. officials, Iraq lacks qualified staff and expertise at the field, plant, and ministry level, as well as an effective inventory control system for spare parts.
In 2006, electrical output reached 4,317 megawatts of peak generation per day, falling short of the U.S. goal of 6,000 megawatts. Prewar electrical output averaged 4,200 megawatts per day. Production also was outpaced by increasing demand, which has averaged about 8,210 megawatts per day. The Iraqi government has had difficulty sustaining the existing facilities. Problems include lack of training, inadequate spare parts, and an ineffective asset management and parts inventory system. Moreover, plants are sometimes operated beyond their recommended limits, resulting in longer downtimes for maintenance.
Although the US-led coalition plans to begin turning over certain support functions to Iraqi ministerial control in the spring of 2007, it is unlikely that the Ministry of Defense will achieve complete self-sufficiency in logistics, command and control, or intelligence before mid-2008, the Special IG reported.
The Ministry of Interior, which also receives critical support from the coalition, is also not self-sufficient in logistics, command and control, or intelligence. Because the ministry is unable to provide maintenance for vehicles of the national police, the coalition has let several contracts to train Iraqi mechanics, provide spare parts to contractors, and repair police vehicles. In addition, the ministry is not able to self-sufficiently operate or maintain its communications networks.
Furthermore, according to the SIGIR report, the coalition estimates that, if the security environment in Baghdad improves, the ministry's intelligence organization will be self-sufficient by mid-2008. However, if this self-sufficiency depends on improved security, there may be cause for concern, given that the average total attacks per day have increased, rising from about 70 per day in January 2006 to a record high of about 180 per day in October 2006.
SIGIR reports that the Iraqi civil service remains hampered by inadequately trained or unskilled staff whose political and sectarian loyalties jeopardize the ministries' ability to provide basic services and build credibility among Iraqi citizens. Government ministries and their budgets are being used as sources of power for political parties with ministry positions staffed with party cronies as
rewards for political loyalty.
According to US officials, patronage leads to staff instability as many are replaced when the government changes or a new minister is named. Some Iraqi ministries, including the Ministries of Interior, Agriculture, Health, Transportation, and Tourism, are led by ministers whose allegiance is to political parties hostile to US goals. These ministers use their positions to pursue partisan agendas that conflict with the goal of building a government that represents all ethnic groups. US officials have expressed reservations about working in some of these ministries, noting that the effectiveness of programs is hampered by the presence of unresponsive or anti-US officials.
Corruption in Iraq is reportedly widespread – as it tends to be throughout the Middle East -- and also poses a major challenge to building an effective Iraqi government.
Says SIGIR: “Corruption jeopardizes future flows of needed international assistance and reportedly undermines the government's ability to make effective use of current reconstruction assistance.”
According to US government and World Bank reports, there are several reasons for corruption in Iraq. These include an ineffective banking system that leaves the government dependent on cash transactions; nontransparent, obsolete ministry procurement systems; and ineffective, inadequately resourced accountability institutions, such as the ministries' inspectors general.
GAO and SIGIR are both working with Iraq's accountability organizations -- the Board of Supreme Audit, Commission on Public Integrity, and inspectors general of the ministries -- to strengthen their capabilities.
The Iraqi Government has budgeted some $10 billion for reconstruction projects, but Iraqi ministries lack adequate information technology and have difficulty managing their resources, according to US officials and an international assessment. This further contributed to the corruption problem.
For example, US officials said that the Ministry of Interior relies on manual processes such as hand-written ledgers and a cash-based payroll system that has resulted in Iraqi police leaving their posts to deliver cash to their families. US officials also estimated that 20 to 30 percent of the Ministry of Interior personnel are "ghost employees" -- nonexistent staff paid salaries that are collected by other officials.
Unclear budgeting and procurement rules have affected Iraq's efforts to spend capital budgets effectively and efficiently, according, to US officials. The inability to spend the money raises serious questions for the government, which has to demonstrate to skeptical citizens that it can improve basic services and make a difference in their daily lives. The US government has launched a series of
initiatives in conjunction with other donors to address this issue and improve the Iraqi government's budget execution.
As of August 2006, the government of Iraq had spent, on average, only eight percent of its annual capital goods budget and 14 percent of its annual capital projects budget. Some of the weakest spending occurs at the Ministry of Oil, which relies on damaged and outdated infrastructure to produce the oil that provides nearly all of the country's revenues.
The Ministry of Oil's $3.5 billion 2006 capital project's budget targeted key enhancements to the country's oil production, distribution, and export facilities. However, as of August 2006, the ministry had spent less than one percent of these budgeted funds.
Moreover, the key ministries of Interior and Defense have multiple rules and regulations. The lack of procurement and budgeting rules creates opportunities for corruption and mismanagement.
The Pentagon’s (DOD) contracting policies and practices share significantly in the failure of reconstruction efforts. According to the GAO, DOD relies heavily on contractors for reconstruction projects and faces significant management and oversight challenges. For example, military commanders and senior DOD officials do not have visibility over contractors; this prevents DOD from knowing the extent to which it is relying on contractors for support in Iraq. DOD also lacks clear and comprehensive guidance and leadership for managing and overseeing contractors. Key contracting issues -- including unclear requirements and failure to reach agreement on key terms and conditions in a timely manner -- have prevented DOD from achieving successful acquisition outcomes. Finally, DOD does not have a sufficient number of oversight personnel to ensure that the contracts that are in place are carried out efficiently and according to the contract requirements, and military commanders and contract oversight personnel do not receive sufficient training to effectively manage contracts and contractors in Iraq.
GAO’s December 2006 review of DOD's use of contractors in Iraq found that DOD's limited visibility unnecessarily increased contracting costs to the government and introduced unnecessary risk.
It said, “Without visibility over where contractors are deployed and what government support they are entitled to, costs to the government may increase. For example, at a contractor accountability task force meeting we attended in 2006, an Army Material Command official stated that an Army official estimated that about $43 million is lost each year on free meals provided to contractor employees at deployed locations who also receive a per diem food allowance.”
Also, the GAO reports, “when senior military leaders began to develop a base consolidation plan, officials were unable to determine how many contractors were deployed and therefore ran the risk of over-or under-building the capacity of the consolidated bases.”
Meanwhile, Pratap Chatterjee of CorpWatch has raised the question, “How much crude oil is Iraq actually exporting?” He says, “Nobody really knows how much is potentially being stolen by corrupt officials because the contractors in charge of fixing the meters have yet to calibrate them, four years after the invasion.”
Chatterjee has recently reported that “Heavily armed soldiers spend their days at two oil terminals scanning the horizon looking for suicide bombers and stray fishing boats, while “right under their noses, smugglers are suspected to be diverting an estimated billions of dollars worth of crude onto tankers because the oil metering system that is supposed monitor how much crude flows into and out of (the oil terminals) has not worked since the March 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq.
The two offshore terminals -- Al Basra Oil Terminal (ABOT) and the smaller Khawr Al Amaya Oil Terminal (KAAOT) deliver some 1.6 million barrels of crude oil, at least 85 percent of Iraq's output, to buyers from all over the world.
Chatterjee reports, “Officials blame the four-year delay in repairing the relatively simple system on ‘security problems’. Others point to the failed efforts of the two US companies hired to repair the southern oil fields, fix the two terminals, and the meters: Halliburton of Houston, Texas, and Parsons of Pasadena, California.
He reports, “Rumors are rife among suspicious Iraqis about the failure to measure the oil flow. A May 2006 study of oil production and export figures by Platt's Oilgram News, an industry magazine, showed that up to $3 billion a year is unaccounted for.
"Iraqi oil is regularly smuggled out of the country in many different ways," an oil merchant in Amman told The Nation magazine last month, Chatterjee says.
"Emir al-Hakim, the head of the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq is spending all his time in Basra selling oil as if it were his own. People there call him Uday al-Hakim, meaning he is behaving the same way Uday Saddam Hussein was acting.
The smuggling and black market operations bear striking parallels to Saddam Hussein's tactics for circumventing the UN embargo. Saddam was accused of selling some $5.7 billion worth of petroleum products on the black market over the six years of the Oil-for-Food program while United Nations inspectors turned a blind eye. Today, his successors stand accused of similar abuses, Chatterjee reports.
He adds, “Iraq sits on 115 billion barrels of proven oil reserves, the third largest in the world (behind Saudi Arabia and Canada). From a society that once used its oil revenue to create a social welfare state that provided education, health care and social services, the country has plummeted into the ranks of the poorest countries of the world. Economists call this the ‘resource curse’. Those blessed with non-renewable resources often benefit the least, because a few wealthy people control the resources, or war prevents almost anyone from the benefiting.”
Chatterjee points out that US contractors have played a key role in the repair and upgrading of Iraq's oil infrastructure and expected the industry to pay for reconstruction. “In January 2004, under project Restore Iraqi Oil II (RIO II), the Bush administration contracted with Halliburton to fix southern Iraq's oil fields and with Parsons to handle the northern fields. The two companies were supposed to be supervised by yet another contractor, New Jersey-based Foster Wheeler.”
Halliburton and Parsons have long histories in Iraq, going back more than 40 years. Brown & Root, which is now part of Halliburton, began work in Iraq in 1961, while Parsons dipped into Iraq's oil sector in the 1950s. Foster Wheeler dates its work in Iraq to the 1930s.
But, Chatterjee reports, “With billions of dollars to spend and extensive experience with oil infrastructure and Iraqi ports, Halliburton and Parsons seem unable to deal with the routine problem of broken meters at the Southern Iraq terminals. The kinds of meters they were supposed to repair or replace at ABOT are commonly found at hundreds of similar sites around the world. Because they are custom-built, shipped, then assembled and calibrated on site, the process can take up to a year. But the problem has persisted for four years.”
He adds, “After the 2003 invasion, the meters appear to have been turned off and there have since been no reliable estimates of how much crude has been shipped from the southern oil fields.”
"I would say probably between 200,000 and 500,000 barrels a day is probably unaccounted for in Iraq," Chatterjee reports, quoting Mikel Morris, who worked for the Iraq Reconstruction Management Organization (IRMO) at the US embassy in Baghdad.
Neither US officials nor contractors have provided good reasons why, four years into the US occupation, the meters have not been calibrated, repaired, or replaced, Chatterjee says.
Today no government officials have been able to establish conclusively whether oil is being smuggled or not. Even the future of the oil metering remains unclear. The report issued by SIGIR in January 2007 notes that repair and rehabilitation work at ABOT was scheduled to be finished by May 2007, but "it is unclear whether this project will be completed” because the funding could be cut.
Evidence of widespread corruption, shoddy work, and poor management, has called into question the claims of the Bush Administration that sabotage by insurgents is responsible for the failure of its multi-billion dollar Iraq reconstruction effort.
The new and growing body of evidence comes from the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR) (www.sigir.mil), the Government Accountability Office (GAO) (www.gao.gov), the investigative arm of Congress, and CorpWatch, (www.corpwatch.org), a non-partisan not-for-profit monitoring organization.
The head of SIGIR, Stuart Bowen, reports that his agency sampled eight projects that the Administration had touted as successes, and found that seven were no longer operating because of plumbing and electrical failures, lack of proper maintenance, apparent looting and expensive equipment never used.
The GAO tells Congress Iraqi government institutions are undeveloped and confront significant challenges in staffing a competent, non-partisan civil service, effectively fighting corruption, using modern technology; and managing resources effectively.
And CorpWatch reports that smugglers are suspected of diverting billions of dollars worth of crude oil onto tankers because the oil metering system that is supposed monitor how much crude flows into and out of (oil terminals) has not worked since the March 2003 US invasion of Iraq.
With all of the approximately $30 billion in US reconstruction money now spent, future projects will become largely the responsibility of the Iraqi government. But, SIGIR’s April 23 report to Congress, says, “The Iraqi government has had difficulty operating and sustaining the aging oil infrastructure, maintaining the new and rehabilitated power generation facilities, and developing and sustaining the logistics systems for the Ministries of Defense and Interior.”
“Iraqi government institutions are undeveloped and confront significant challenges in staffing a competent, non-partisan civil service; effectively fighting corruption; using modern technology; and managing resources effectively,” says the report.
The GAO agrees. It tells Congress, “Iraqi capacity and commitment to manage and fund reconstruction and security efforts remains limited. Since 2003, the United States has obligated about $29 billion to help Iraq rebuild its infrastructure and develop Iraqi security forces to stabilize the country. However, key goals have not been met. The Iraqi government has not sustained reconstruction and security efforts, in part because Iraqi government institutions are undeveloped and lack needed management and human resource skills according to U.S. officials.
GAO adds, “The inability of the Iraqi government to spend its 2006 capital budget also increases the uncertainty that it can sustain the rebuilding effort.”
The Bush Administration, usually under pressure from federal inspectors or press accounts, has reluctantly acknowledged that some of its reconstruction projects have been abandoned, delayed or poorly constructed. But the most recent inspections by the Inspector General reveal for first time the failure of projects officially declared successes.
Examples include:
· The Baghdad International Airport, where $11.8 million was spent on new electrical generators, but $8.6 million worth is no longer functioning.
· A maternity hospital in the northern city of Erbil, where a newly built water purification system is not functioning and an expensive incinerator for medical waste is padlocked and medical waste including syringes, used bandages, and empty drug vials are clogging the sewage system and probably contaminating the water system.
· At the same hospital, a system for distributing oxygen has been ignored by the medical staff, which told inspectors they distrusted the sophisticated new equipment and had gone back to using tried-and-true oxygen tanks — which are stored unsafely throughout the building.
· Expensive generators are missing from the Camp Ur military base, having been hauled off to another post. Also at Camp Ur, three modular buildings constructed at a cost of $1.8 million were dismantled and removed with no explanation given.
· Barracks renovated for enlisted soldiers are already in disrepair just a year after being handed over to the Iraqi Army. Electrical wiring is pieced together to accommodate retrofitted lights and appliances that were not in the original design. Newly installed fixtures, hardware and appliances have been pilfered or abused. A number of electrical generation systems were not adequately maintained and were inoperable at the time of the SIGIR's inspections. Leaks from the upstairs floor had damaged floor tiles and ceilings on the ground floors. An inadequate design, combined with low-quality fixtures and poor workmanship, made the facilities too fragile for the volume of use they experienced. The problem was compounded by poor maintenance and abuse by the tenants.
SIGIR acknowledged that the eight projects it inspected did not represent a full statistical measure of the thousands of projects in the American rebuilding program. But inspectors said their findings raised serious new concerns about the effort.
The projects visited by SIGIR teams were located throughout Iraq. The agency’s inspections were limited to a small sampling because many locations were considered too dangerous for inspectors to visit.
The reconstruction effort was originally touted to be almost as high a priority as the military “surge” to stabilize Iraq, allow the government to function and business to flourish, and promote good will toward the US.
But “These first inspections indicate that the concerns that we and others have had about the Iraqis sustaining our investments in these projects are valid,” SIGIR’s Bowen told the New York Times. Bowen said that because he suspected that completed projects were not being maintained, he had ordered his inspectors to undertake a wider program of returning to examine projects that had been completed for at least six months, a phase known as “sustainment.”
The American reconstruction program has been repeatedly criticized for not including in its rebuilding budget enough of the costs for spare parts, training, stronger construction and other elements that would enable projects continue to function once they have been built.
The new reports provide support for that position: Bowen says the Iraqis appear to share responsibility for the latest problems, which surfaced after the US turned the projects over to the Iraqi government. Still, the new findings show that the enormous American investment in the reconstruction program is at risk, Bowen said.
The United States has spent billions of dollars rebuilding the infrastructure and developing Iraqi security forces. However, the Iraqi government has had difficulty operating and sustaining the aging oil infrastructure, maintaining the new and rehabilitated power generation facilities, and developing and sustaining the logistics systems for the Ministries of Defense and Interior. Neither ministry is considered self-sufficient in logistics, command and control, or intelligence.
As a result:
Iraq's oil production and exports have consistently fallen below their respective program goals. In 2006, oil production averaged 2.1 million barrels per day, compared with the U.S. goal of 3.0 million barrels per day. The Ministry of Oil has had difficulty operating and maintaining the refineries. According to U.S. officials, Iraq lacks qualified staff and expertise at the field, plant, and ministry level, as well as an effective inventory control system for spare parts.
In 2006, electrical output reached 4,317 megawatts of peak generation per day, falling short of the U.S. goal of 6,000 megawatts. Prewar electrical output averaged 4,200 megawatts per day. Production also was outpaced by increasing demand, which has averaged about 8,210 megawatts per day. The Iraqi government has had difficulty sustaining the existing facilities. Problems include lack of training, inadequate spare parts, and an ineffective asset management and parts inventory system. Moreover, plants are sometimes operated beyond their recommended limits, resulting in longer downtimes for maintenance.
Although the US-led coalition plans to begin turning over certain support functions to Iraqi ministerial control in the spring of 2007, it is unlikely that the Ministry of Defense will achieve complete self-sufficiency in logistics, command and control, or intelligence before mid-2008, the Special IG reported.
The Ministry of Interior, which also receives critical support from the coalition, is also not self-sufficient in logistics, command and control, or intelligence. Because the ministry is unable to provide maintenance for vehicles of the national police, the coalition has let several contracts to train Iraqi mechanics, provide spare parts to contractors, and repair police vehicles. In addition, the ministry is not able to self-sufficiently operate or maintain its communications networks.
Furthermore, according to the SIGIR report, the coalition estimates that, if the security environment in Baghdad improves, the ministry's intelligence organization will be self-sufficient by mid-2008. However, if this self-sufficiency depends on improved security, there may be cause for concern, given that the average total attacks per day have increased, rising from about 70 per day in January 2006 to a record high of about 180 per day in October 2006.
SIGIR reports that the Iraqi civil service remains hampered by inadequately trained or unskilled staff whose political and sectarian loyalties jeopardize the ministries' ability to provide basic services and build credibility among Iraqi citizens. Government ministries and their budgets are being used as sources of power for political parties with ministry positions staffed with party cronies as
rewards for political loyalty.
According to US officials, patronage leads to staff instability as many are replaced when the government changes or a new minister is named. Some Iraqi ministries, including the Ministries of Interior, Agriculture, Health, Transportation, and Tourism, are led by ministers whose allegiance is to political parties hostile to US goals. These ministers use their positions to pursue partisan agendas that conflict with the goal of building a government that represents all ethnic groups. US officials have expressed reservations about working in some of these ministries, noting that the effectiveness of programs is hampered by the presence of unresponsive or anti-US officials.
Corruption in Iraq is reportedly widespread – as it tends to be throughout the Middle East -- and also poses a major challenge to building an effective Iraqi government.
Says SIGIR: “Corruption jeopardizes future flows of needed international assistance and reportedly undermines the government's ability to make effective use of current reconstruction assistance.”
According to US government and World Bank reports, there are several reasons for corruption in Iraq. These include an ineffective banking system that leaves the government dependent on cash transactions; nontransparent, obsolete ministry procurement systems; and ineffective, inadequately resourced accountability institutions, such as the ministries' inspectors general.
GAO and SIGIR are both working with Iraq's accountability organizations -- the Board of Supreme Audit, Commission on Public Integrity, and inspectors general of the ministries -- to strengthen their capabilities.
The Iraqi Government has budgeted some $10 billion for reconstruction projects, but Iraqi ministries lack adequate information technology and have difficulty managing their resources, according to US officials and an international assessment. This further contributed to the corruption problem.
For example, US officials said that the Ministry of Interior relies on manual processes such as hand-written ledgers and a cash-based payroll system that has resulted in Iraqi police leaving their posts to deliver cash to their families. US officials also estimated that 20 to 30 percent of the Ministry of Interior personnel are "ghost employees" -- nonexistent staff paid salaries that are collected by other officials.
Unclear budgeting and procurement rules have affected Iraq's efforts to spend capital budgets effectively and efficiently, according, to US officials. The inability to spend the money raises serious questions for the government, which has to demonstrate to skeptical citizens that it can improve basic services and make a difference in their daily lives. The US government has launched a series of
initiatives in conjunction with other donors to address this issue and improve the Iraqi government's budget execution.
As of August 2006, the government of Iraq had spent, on average, only eight percent of its annual capital goods budget and 14 percent of its annual capital projects budget. Some of the weakest spending occurs at the Ministry of Oil, which relies on damaged and outdated infrastructure to produce the oil that provides nearly all of the country's revenues.
The Ministry of Oil's $3.5 billion 2006 capital project's budget targeted key enhancements to the country's oil production, distribution, and export facilities. However, as of August 2006, the ministry had spent less than one percent of these budgeted funds.
Moreover, the key ministries of Interior and Defense have multiple rules and regulations. The lack of procurement and budgeting rules creates opportunities for corruption and mismanagement.
The Pentagon’s (DOD) contracting policies and practices share significantly in the failure of reconstruction efforts. According to the GAO, DOD relies heavily on contractors for reconstruction projects and faces significant management and oversight challenges. For example, military commanders and senior DOD officials do not have visibility over contractors; this prevents DOD from knowing the extent to which it is relying on contractors for support in Iraq. DOD also lacks clear and comprehensive guidance and leadership for managing and overseeing contractors. Key contracting issues -- including unclear requirements and failure to reach agreement on key terms and conditions in a timely manner -- have prevented DOD from achieving successful acquisition outcomes. Finally, DOD does not have a sufficient number of oversight personnel to ensure that the contracts that are in place are carried out efficiently and according to the contract requirements, and military commanders and contract oversight personnel do not receive sufficient training to effectively manage contracts and contractors in Iraq.
GAO’s December 2006 review of DOD's use of contractors in Iraq found that DOD's limited visibility unnecessarily increased contracting costs to the government and introduced unnecessary risk.
It said, “Without visibility over where contractors are deployed and what government support they are entitled to, costs to the government may increase. For example, at a contractor accountability task force meeting we attended in 2006, an Army Material Command official stated that an Army official estimated that about $43 million is lost each year on free meals provided to contractor employees at deployed locations who also receive a per diem food allowance.”
Also, the GAO reports, “when senior military leaders began to develop a base consolidation plan, officials were unable to determine how many contractors were deployed and therefore ran the risk of over-or under-building the capacity of the consolidated bases.”
Meanwhile, Pratap Chatterjee of CorpWatch has raised the question, “How much crude oil is Iraq actually exporting?” He says, “Nobody really knows how much is potentially being stolen by corrupt officials because the contractors in charge of fixing the meters have yet to calibrate them, four years after the invasion.”
Chatterjee has recently reported that “Heavily armed soldiers spend their days at two oil terminals scanning the horizon looking for suicide bombers and stray fishing boats, while “right under their noses, smugglers are suspected to be diverting an estimated billions of dollars worth of crude onto tankers because the oil metering system that is supposed monitor how much crude flows into and out of (the oil terminals) has not worked since the March 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq.
The two offshore terminals -- Al Basra Oil Terminal (ABOT) and the smaller Khawr Al Amaya Oil Terminal (KAAOT) deliver some 1.6 million barrels of crude oil, at least 85 percent of Iraq's output, to buyers from all over the world.
Chatterjee reports, “Officials blame the four-year delay in repairing the relatively simple system on ‘security problems’. Others point to the failed efforts of the two US companies hired to repair the southern oil fields, fix the two terminals, and the meters: Halliburton of Houston, Texas, and Parsons of Pasadena, California.
He reports, “Rumors are rife among suspicious Iraqis about the failure to measure the oil flow. A May 2006 study of oil production and export figures by Platt's Oilgram News, an industry magazine, showed that up to $3 billion a year is unaccounted for.
"Iraqi oil is regularly smuggled out of the country in many different ways," an oil merchant in Amman told The Nation magazine last month, Chatterjee says.
"Emir al-Hakim, the head of the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq is spending all his time in Basra selling oil as if it were his own. People there call him Uday al-Hakim, meaning he is behaving the same way Uday Saddam Hussein was acting.
The smuggling and black market operations bear striking parallels to Saddam Hussein's tactics for circumventing the UN embargo. Saddam was accused of selling some $5.7 billion worth of petroleum products on the black market over the six years of the Oil-for-Food program while United Nations inspectors turned a blind eye. Today, his successors stand accused of similar abuses, Chatterjee reports.
He adds, “Iraq sits on 115 billion barrels of proven oil reserves, the third largest in the world (behind Saudi Arabia and Canada). From a society that once used its oil revenue to create a social welfare state that provided education, health care and social services, the country has plummeted into the ranks of the poorest countries of the world. Economists call this the ‘resource curse’. Those blessed with non-renewable resources often benefit the least, because a few wealthy people control the resources, or war prevents almost anyone from the benefiting.”
Chatterjee points out that US contractors have played a key role in the repair and upgrading of Iraq's oil infrastructure and expected the industry to pay for reconstruction. “In January 2004, under project Restore Iraqi Oil II (RIO II), the Bush administration contracted with Halliburton to fix southern Iraq's oil fields and with Parsons to handle the northern fields. The two companies were supposed to be supervised by yet another contractor, New Jersey-based Foster Wheeler.”
Halliburton and Parsons have long histories in Iraq, going back more than 40 years. Brown & Root, which is now part of Halliburton, began work in Iraq in 1961, while Parsons dipped into Iraq's oil sector in the 1950s. Foster Wheeler dates its work in Iraq to the 1930s.
But, Chatterjee reports, “With billions of dollars to spend and extensive experience with oil infrastructure and Iraqi ports, Halliburton and Parsons seem unable to deal with the routine problem of broken meters at the Southern Iraq terminals. The kinds of meters they were supposed to repair or replace at ABOT are commonly found at hundreds of similar sites around the world. Because they are custom-built, shipped, then assembled and calibrated on site, the process can take up to a year. But the problem has persisted for four years.”
He adds, “After the 2003 invasion, the meters appear to have been turned off and there have since been no reliable estimates of how much crude has been shipped from the southern oil fields.”
"I would say probably between 200,000 and 500,000 barrels a day is probably unaccounted for in Iraq," Chatterjee reports, quoting Mikel Morris, who worked for the Iraq Reconstruction Management Organization (IRMO) at the US embassy in Baghdad.
Neither US officials nor contractors have provided good reasons why, four years into the US occupation, the meters have not been calibrated, repaired, or replaced, Chatterjee says.
Today no government officials have been able to establish conclusively whether oil is being smuggled or not. Even the future of the oil metering remains unclear. The report issued by SIGIR in January 2007 notes that repair and rehabilitation work at ABOT was scheduled to be finished by May 2007, but "it is unclear whether this project will be completed” because the funding could be cut.
Friday, April 27, 2007
PENTAGON BACK-PEDALS AS ADVOCACY GROUPS CRITICIZE CITIZENSHIP DELAYS, ETHNIC PROFILING
By William Fisher
As a new report charged that the US Department of Homeland Security is illegally delaying the citizenship applications of thousands of immigrants by profiling Muslims and subjecting them to indefinite security checks, a major Arab-American advocacy group launched a campaign to end a controversial post-9/11 program it says discriminates against Muslim visitors to the US and, in a surprise move, the Pentagon itself announced it wants to close a domestic terrorism spying venture that has drawn heated criticism from civil and humans rights advocates.
The Pentagon program, known as TALON -- Threat and Local Observation Notice -- has been attacked by civil and human rights organizations for collecting information on peaceful activists inside the United States.
According to a Pentagon spokesman, the new undersecretary of defense for intelligence, James Clapper, found “disappointing results” during a review of the TALON database.
Clapper "has assessed the results of the TALON program and does not believe they merit continuing the program as currently constituted, particularly in light of
its image in Congress and the media," Ryder said.
The Pentagon acknowledged last year that part of the information collected in the database "either should have been purged, or was data that was not appropriate for reporting in that system."
The TALON program began in 2003 to track suspects with possible links to terrorists as part of the post-9/11 "war on terror."
But information leaked to news reporters revealed that the Pentagon was collecting information on peace activists and monitoring anti-war protests across the country.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) last year filed several Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests seeking to uncover the identities of peace groups being spied on by the Pentagon.
The filing was on behalf of several national groups and seven Florida-based peace activist groups, including Florida members of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), a Quaker religious-based peace group.
"We found there were any number of things with respect to that program where there were data that was maintained in a database where they probably should have not been maintained there," said Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates reportedly has not yet made a formal decision to shut down the program.
TALON has also attracted the wrath of influential members of Congress. For example, Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, says, "There are ways to protect defense facilities and military personnel without this kind of overreaching." He lauded the Pentagon's will to put an end to the program.
"Talon was another costly, controversial and poorly focused venture that did not make us any safer," Leahy said.
"Without clear rules and close oversight, databases like this can easily be abused to violate the public's constitutional and privacy rights," he added.
At the same time, a new report from the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice (CHRGJ) at the New York University School of Law charges that the US government is illegally delaying the naturalization applications of thousands of immigrants by profiling individuals it perceives to be Muslim and documents the impact of expanded security checks on the lives of those experiencing citizenship delays, often for years.
The report -- “Americans on Hold: Profiling, Citizenship, and the War on Terror” – analyzes these delays and their impact within an international human rights framework, and offers specific policy recommendations to help end discrimination in access to citizenship and other human rights violations.
“Citizenship delays are not just bureaucratic inconveniences; they are the result of discriminatory, ineffective, and undemocratic policies that violate fundamental human rights,” said Prof. Smita Narula, CHRGJ’s Faculty Director.
In the name of fighting a ‘war on terror,’ the government is breaking up families, engendering fear and insecurity, and disenfranchising entire communities,” he says.
The report contends that since the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001, “US immigration policy has been heavily influenced by counter-terorism eforts. The government has folded immigration bodies into national security institutions and has institutionalized a policy of discrimination against immigrants perceived to be Muslim on the basis of their name, race, religion, ethnicity, or national origin.”
It says, “Increased security checks in the citizenship application process, manifested in a substantial expansion of FBI name check procedures, have illegally delayed the processing of applications from Muslim, Arab, Middle Eastern, and South Asian men.”
The result, the report says, is that “Thousands of immigrants have chosen the United States as their new home; they abide by U.S. laws, pay U.S. taxes, contribute to our nation’s economy, and strengthen its multi-cultural foundations. They have passed every test, and fulfilled every requirement related to the naturalization process, but continue to wait for security clearance on their application. In response to repeated inquiries to immigration authorities, applicants are simply told that their applicationis pending security clearance.
The organization quotes one applicant as saying, “They only have two words for us: ‘security check.’ That’s it.” Another is quoted as recounting, “I have been to Federal Plaza (ten times), and the supervisor there told me, ‘It could be one day or it can be 99 years.’
The report alleges that individuals experiencing citizenship delays are unable to file visa petitions for their immediate relatives, are greatly hindered in their ability to travel to see sick relatives, and often endure restrictions on their ability to work or receive life-saving benefits.
Federal law requires US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), now part of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), to grant or deny citizenship within 120 days of an applicant’s examination. USCIS has also set a policy goal of processing applications within six months from the time of filing.
But the CHRGJ report says that DHS data “reveals that more than two-thirds of the over 2.2 million applications filed since April 1, 2001 were not processed within 180 days; more than 776,000 applicants had been waiting for more than a year; approximately 158,000 applicants had been waiting for more than two years; while approximately 41,000 had been waiting for three years or more.”
According to the Citizenship and Immigration Services Ombudsman, prolonged name checks “significantly delay adjudication of immigration benefits for many applicants, hinder backlog reduction efforts, and rarely, if ever, achieve their intended national security objectives,” the report says.
Jayne Huckerby, CHRGJ’s Research Director, says, “Discriminatory profiling is illegal under international law and is a poor substitute for real intelligence work.
Taking years to identify individuals who are security threats does not make us safer. Ensuring timely and good faith completions of background checks will help the US advance its national security goals.”
Huckerby adds, “As a State party to the International Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights the U.S. is obligated to ensure non-discrimination in access to citizenship as well as other human rights. A number of expert human rights bodies have affirmed that the “war on terror” cannot be invoked to deny non-citizens’ rights.”
She points out that profiling affects a number of human rights, including the right to liberty of movement, the right to profess and practice religion, and the right to non-discrimination in access to public health and social services.
“Profiled immigrants may be stopped, delayed, detained, and subjected to extended and unnerving security checks while traveling. Prior to September 11,2001 the list of individuals suspected of terrorism and banned from air travel contained only 16 names; as of October 2006, the “no-fly” list contained 44,000 names. Airport officials are reportedly required to stop anyone with a “Muslim name” and name-check that individual against the list. Airport computers throw up red flags even when names are merely similar to those found on the list,” the CHRGJ report charges.
“Muslim immigrants or those perceived to be Muslims (such as members of the Sikh community) have also altered their physical appearance for fear of being profiled. Many immigrants have curtailed the extent to which they pray or worship publicly, and some have even changed their names – the very hallmark of their religious and cultural identity. Delays also affect the ability of naturalization applicants to receive life saving benefits, and inurn their aces to healthcare and food.”
Meanwhile, other advocacy groups are demanding an end to what they describe as DHS-sponsored anti-Muslim programs. One of them is known as NSEERS -- the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System.
For example, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) has launched an advertising campaign called, "End the Shame of NSEERS." Its objective is “to shed light on the continuing problems faced by thousands of individuals as a result of the discriminatory and poorly constructed and implemented ‘Special Registration Program’."
ADC’s ads are appearing this month in the Arab American News, the largest and oldest Arab American newspaper in the United States, Washington Monthly Magazine, and the program of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights 2007 Hubert H. Humphrey Civil Rights Awards Dinner.
In the ads, ADC calls on President George W. Bush, DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff, and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to terminate the NSEERS program and address its negative residual effects.
Launched by the Department of Justice in late 2002, and later transferred to the newly organized Department of Homeland Security, NSEERS requires male visitors to voluntarily comply with the program. But ADC says, “Failure to adequately publicize the program and to train immigration officers sufficiently led to poor implementation of NSEERS. Thousands of men who were required to register failed to do so many, no doubt, due to lack of notice, and are now vulnerable to NSEERS penalties.”
The organization charges that “Hundreds of individuals who had voluntarily appeared to register at Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) offices around the country were arrested and detained without reasonable justification.”
The program was initially portrayed as an anti-terrorism measure that required male visitors to the US (from 25 Arab and Muslim countries, and North Korea) to be fingerprinted, photographed, and questioned by immigration officers. At the time, INS officials acknowledged they were ill prepared to carry out this special call in registration and acknowledged numerous shortcomings. However, despite DHS’s suspension of a few requirements in 2004, there were and still are criminal and civil penalties associated with failure to comply with NSEERS, including arrest, detention, monetary fines and/or removal from the United States.
INS was renamed and became part of the Department of Homeland Security upon its founding after the passage of the Homeland Security Act of 2002.
Civil liberties organizations have said that NSEERS was so poorly conceived and badly managed that it created chaos and fear. Trust between the immigrant community and law enforcement was severely strained, and in the end, there was no evidence that any terrorists were apprehended as a result of the effort.
ADC has noted that “Approximately 84,000 Arabs and Muslims registered voluntarily and subsequently about 14,000 were subjected to deportation hearings for voluntarily complying with the program. Yet, no registrants were charged with terrorism. In December 2004, the NSEERS program was modified by DHS, but many elements remain and are subject to abuse including: departure registration; registration at ports of entry; as well as the potential for the re-initiation of the call-in phase.”
The organization says, “It seems clear that NSEERS has become just another tool used in immigration enforcement and law enforcement in general, which raises serious constitutional issues as the program clearly discriminates on the basis of national origin.”
ADC adds that several members of Congress, including key members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and numerous civil libertarians and immigrants rights advocates, have taken issue with the constitutional legality of NSEERS discrimination based on national origin.
As a new report charged that the US Department of Homeland Security is illegally delaying the citizenship applications of thousands of immigrants by profiling Muslims and subjecting them to indefinite security checks, a major Arab-American advocacy group launched a campaign to end a controversial post-9/11 program it says discriminates against Muslim visitors to the US and, in a surprise move, the Pentagon itself announced it wants to close a domestic terrorism spying venture that has drawn heated criticism from civil and humans rights advocates.
The Pentagon program, known as TALON -- Threat and Local Observation Notice -- has been attacked by civil and human rights organizations for collecting information on peaceful activists inside the United States.
According to a Pentagon spokesman, the new undersecretary of defense for intelligence, James Clapper, found “disappointing results” during a review of the TALON database.
Clapper "has assessed the results of the TALON program and does not believe they merit continuing the program as currently constituted, particularly in light of
its image in Congress and the media," Ryder said.
The Pentagon acknowledged last year that part of the information collected in the database "either should have been purged, or was data that was not appropriate for reporting in that system."
The TALON program began in 2003 to track suspects with possible links to terrorists as part of the post-9/11 "war on terror."
But information leaked to news reporters revealed that the Pentagon was collecting information on peace activists and monitoring anti-war protests across the country.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) last year filed several Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests seeking to uncover the identities of peace groups being spied on by the Pentagon.
The filing was on behalf of several national groups and seven Florida-based peace activist groups, including Florida members of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), a Quaker religious-based peace group.
"We found there were any number of things with respect to that program where there were data that was maintained in a database where they probably should have not been maintained there," said Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates reportedly has not yet made a formal decision to shut down the program.
TALON has also attracted the wrath of influential members of Congress. For example, Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, says, "There are ways to protect defense facilities and military personnel without this kind of overreaching." He lauded the Pentagon's will to put an end to the program.
"Talon was another costly, controversial and poorly focused venture that did not make us any safer," Leahy said.
"Without clear rules and close oversight, databases like this can easily be abused to violate the public's constitutional and privacy rights," he added.
At the same time, a new report from the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice (CHRGJ) at the New York University School of Law charges that the US government is illegally delaying the naturalization applications of thousands of immigrants by profiling individuals it perceives to be Muslim and documents the impact of expanded security checks on the lives of those experiencing citizenship delays, often for years.
The report -- “Americans on Hold: Profiling, Citizenship, and the War on Terror” – analyzes these delays and their impact within an international human rights framework, and offers specific policy recommendations to help end discrimination in access to citizenship and other human rights violations.
“Citizenship delays are not just bureaucratic inconveniences; they are the result of discriminatory, ineffective, and undemocratic policies that violate fundamental human rights,” said Prof. Smita Narula, CHRGJ’s Faculty Director.
In the name of fighting a ‘war on terror,’ the government is breaking up families, engendering fear and insecurity, and disenfranchising entire communities,” he says.
The report contends that since the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001, “US immigration policy has been heavily influenced by counter-terorism eforts. The government has folded immigration bodies into national security institutions and has institutionalized a policy of discrimination against immigrants perceived to be Muslim on the basis of their name, race, religion, ethnicity, or national origin.”
It says, “Increased security checks in the citizenship application process, manifested in a substantial expansion of FBI name check procedures, have illegally delayed the processing of applications from Muslim, Arab, Middle Eastern, and South Asian men.”
The result, the report says, is that “Thousands of immigrants have chosen the United States as their new home; they abide by U.S. laws, pay U.S. taxes, contribute to our nation’s economy, and strengthen its multi-cultural foundations. They have passed every test, and fulfilled every requirement related to the naturalization process, but continue to wait for security clearance on their application. In response to repeated inquiries to immigration authorities, applicants are simply told that their applicationis pending security clearance.
The organization quotes one applicant as saying, “They only have two words for us: ‘security check.’ That’s it.” Another is quoted as recounting, “I have been to Federal Plaza (ten times), and the supervisor there told me, ‘It could be one day or it can be 99 years.’
The report alleges that individuals experiencing citizenship delays are unable to file visa petitions for their immediate relatives, are greatly hindered in their ability to travel to see sick relatives, and often endure restrictions on their ability to work or receive life-saving benefits.
Federal law requires US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), now part of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), to grant or deny citizenship within 120 days of an applicant’s examination. USCIS has also set a policy goal of processing applications within six months from the time of filing.
But the CHRGJ report says that DHS data “reveals that more than two-thirds of the over 2.2 million applications filed since April 1, 2001 were not processed within 180 days; more than 776,000 applicants had been waiting for more than a year; approximately 158,000 applicants had been waiting for more than two years; while approximately 41,000 had been waiting for three years or more.”
According to the Citizenship and Immigration Services Ombudsman, prolonged name checks “significantly delay adjudication of immigration benefits for many applicants, hinder backlog reduction efforts, and rarely, if ever, achieve their intended national security objectives,” the report says.
Jayne Huckerby, CHRGJ’s Research Director, says, “Discriminatory profiling is illegal under international law and is a poor substitute for real intelligence work.
Taking years to identify individuals who are security threats does not make us safer. Ensuring timely and good faith completions of background checks will help the US advance its national security goals.”
Huckerby adds, “As a State party to the International Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights the U.S. is obligated to ensure non-discrimination in access to citizenship as well as other human rights. A number of expert human rights bodies have affirmed that the “war on terror” cannot be invoked to deny non-citizens’ rights.”
She points out that profiling affects a number of human rights, including the right to liberty of movement, the right to profess and practice religion, and the right to non-discrimination in access to public health and social services.
“Profiled immigrants may be stopped, delayed, detained, and subjected to extended and unnerving security checks while traveling. Prior to September 11,2001 the list of individuals suspected of terrorism and banned from air travel contained only 16 names; as of October 2006, the “no-fly” list contained 44,000 names. Airport officials are reportedly required to stop anyone with a “Muslim name” and name-check that individual against the list. Airport computers throw up red flags even when names are merely similar to those found on the list,” the CHRGJ report charges.
“Muslim immigrants or those perceived to be Muslims (such as members of the Sikh community) have also altered their physical appearance for fear of being profiled. Many immigrants have curtailed the extent to which they pray or worship publicly, and some have even changed their names – the very hallmark of their religious and cultural identity. Delays also affect the ability of naturalization applicants to receive life saving benefits, and inurn their aces to healthcare and food.”
Meanwhile, other advocacy groups are demanding an end to what they describe as DHS-sponsored anti-Muslim programs. One of them is known as NSEERS -- the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System.
For example, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) has launched an advertising campaign called, "End the Shame of NSEERS." Its objective is “to shed light on the continuing problems faced by thousands of individuals as a result of the discriminatory and poorly constructed and implemented ‘Special Registration Program’."
ADC’s ads are appearing this month in the Arab American News, the largest and oldest Arab American newspaper in the United States, Washington Monthly Magazine, and the program of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights 2007 Hubert H. Humphrey Civil Rights Awards Dinner.
In the ads, ADC calls on President George W. Bush, DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff, and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to terminate the NSEERS program and address its negative residual effects.
Launched by the Department of Justice in late 2002, and later transferred to the newly organized Department of Homeland Security, NSEERS requires male visitors to voluntarily comply with the program. But ADC says, “Failure to adequately publicize the program and to train immigration officers sufficiently led to poor implementation of NSEERS. Thousands of men who were required to register failed to do so many, no doubt, due to lack of notice, and are now vulnerable to NSEERS penalties.”
The organization charges that “Hundreds of individuals who had voluntarily appeared to register at Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) offices around the country were arrested and detained without reasonable justification.”
The program was initially portrayed as an anti-terrorism measure that required male visitors to the US (from 25 Arab and Muslim countries, and North Korea) to be fingerprinted, photographed, and questioned by immigration officers. At the time, INS officials acknowledged they were ill prepared to carry out this special call in registration and acknowledged numerous shortcomings. However, despite DHS’s suspension of a few requirements in 2004, there were and still are criminal and civil penalties associated with failure to comply with NSEERS, including arrest, detention, monetary fines and/or removal from the United States.
INS was renamed and became part of the Department of Homeland Security upon its founding after the passage of the Homeland Security Act of 2002.
Civil liberties organizations have said that NSEERS was so poorly conceived and badly managed that it created chaos and fear. Trust between the immigrant community and law enforcement was severely strained, and in the end, there was no evidence that any terrorists were apprehended as a result of the effort.
ADC has noted that “Approximately 84,000 Arabs and Muslims registered voluntarily and subsequently about 14,000 were subjected to deportation hearings for voluntarily complying with the program. Yet, no registrants were charged with terrorism. In December 2004, the NSEERS program was modified by DHS, but many elements remain and are subject to abuse including: departure registration; registration at ports of entry; as well as the potential for the re-initiation of the call-in phase.”
The organization says, “It seems clear that NSEERS has become just another tool used in immigration enforcement and law enforcement in general, which raises serious constitutional issues as the program clearly discriminates on the basis of national origin.”
ADC adds that several members of Congress, including key members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and numerous civil libertarians and immigrants rights advocates, have taken issue with the constitutional legality of NSEERS discrimination based on national origin.
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