Three high-profile incidents in recent weeks have led senior Washington officials to claim national security in the United States is being undermined by people who don’t understand the need to keep secret certain information about how the nation defends itself.

Yet the gravest threat to national security may have nothing to do with the Washington Post’s “Top Secret America” series, the whistleblower site Wikileaks or a dozen Russians working inside the country clandestinely as spies. The biggest risk we face of sensitive information falling into the wrong hands may come from an unpleasant combination of the intelligence community itself and the male libido.

By now you’ve likely heard all about the beautiful femme fatale, Anna Chapman, one of several Russian nationals nabbed recently after a long FBI investigation and deported back home in exchange for four prisoners being held by Moscow under espionage charges. Among them it was Chapman who became a web phenomenon and inspired endless news stories when photos surfaced depicting her good looks.

In recent days you may also have learned about another alleged Russian spy, Anna Fermanova, accused by authorities of trying to smuggle night-vision devices out of the country. With the two women serving as tabloid distractions, there’s less of a chance you’re familiar with the name Robin Sage. She’s largely been overlooked but may tell a deeper story about the vulnerability of our intelligence apparatus.

A Facebook profile set up for the 25-year-old Sage contained similarly tempting photos. She claimed to be an MIT grad who worked as a “cyber threat analyst” at the Navy’s Network Warfare Command. One image featured her in a sexy bikini and thigh-high socks, while in another she gazed directly at the camera with a clear, exotic face and sensual eyes.

Within just a few weeks time, she gathered 300 friends and connections online ranging from military personnel and security specialists to workers at defense contractors and intelligence agencies. At LinkedIn, she became connected to men who worked for a secret office that operates spy satellites and others serving the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Sage's ties included an intelligence official in the Marine Corps and top executives at the defense contractors Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman. She was invited to dinner and to apply for jobs. One asked that she speak at a security conference, and a NASA researcher sought her insight on a technical paper.

“Almost all were seasoned security professionals. But Robin Sage did not exist,” wrote the Washington Times in one of the few mainstream stories done about her. A security consultant named Thomas Ryan created the fictional Robin Sage to show that with the rise of social-networking sites, it could become relatively easy to penetrate defense and intelligence circles. The photos used for Sage’s profile, it turns out, were pulled from a website of amateur pornography.

To be fair, while Sage made a large number of connections, the FBI and CIA did not appear to be fooled. Across the Internet, multiple people figured out quickly that Robin Sage was bogus. Others she made contact with were initially skeptical and took simple steps to confirm Sage’s legitimacy before learning she wasn't legitimate at all.

Still, “no central place was established for people to warn others about the scam, and tweets or other commentary questioning her authenticity didn’t stop others from connecting with her,” the Times reported. A Defense Department spokesman argued that any access to the web and e-mail services poses a threat, not just social-networking sites. “We should address the behavior, not abandon the tool.”

Cues from her online presence should nonetheless have discouraged the remaining intel and security professionals from rushing to become her friend. The job title “cyber threat analyst” doesn’t exist at the Naval Network Warfare Command, and the 10 years of experience she listed would have made Sage a teenager when she joined the workforce. Simple Google searches show that “Robin Sage” is the name of a special-forces military exercise.

According to the Times:

One soldier uploaded a picture of himself taken on patrol in Afghanistan containing embedded data revealing his exact location. A contractor with the [National Reconnaissance Office] who connected with her had misconfigured his profile so that it revealed answers to the security questions on his personal e-mail account. ‘This person had a critical role in the intelligence community,’ Ryan said. ‘He was connected to key people in other agencies.’ … [M]any other connections also inadvertently exposed personal data, including their home addresses and photos of their families. … [Ryan] added that he was surprised about the success of the effort, especially given that Ms. Sage’s profile was bristling with what should have been red flags.

In an interview with Computerworld, Ryan attributed the influence of Robin Sage to the fact that “she was an attractive girl. It definitely had to do with looks.” Of all the connections Sage made, 82 percent of them were with men.

So how did the social-networking sites react? Ryan said Facebook shut down Sage’s profile and barred him from using the site again, while LinkedIn deleted her account. By then the damage was done, and Ryan planned to present his findings at a security conference this summer. Robin Sage wasn’t scheduled to attend.

Here at Elevated Risk, we can’t help but wonder now if the FBI had to quietly dissuade colleagues in the intelligence and security communities from befriending Anna Chapman as their investigation of the Russian spy ring was underway.

Flickr image courtesy hebedesign

The cost to American taxpayers of fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has surpassed $1 trillion, but after adjusting for inflation, World War II continues to reach a far higher price at more than $4 trillion. A new report from the Congressional Research Service warns against too closely comparing armed conflicts the United States has engaged in, but it’s nonetheless a useful exercise to consider how the global war on terror figures into the nation’s history.

The price tag of more recent wars from the latter half of the 20th century don’t come close to matching post-9/11 engagements, including Korea, Vietnam and the Persian Gulf wars. The second Iraq War alone launched by George W. Bush has cost $46 billion more than Vietnam, according to the CRS report. As far as length of time goes, the Afghan War this year became the longest running in U.S. history.

There are some things to consider when looking at the charts Elevated Risk has created below using the CRS numbers. One significant problem when looking at such costs may be that war-fighting technology is much more sophisticated and costly today. The Excalibur XM982 – a 155mm GPS-guided “fire-and-forget” projectile designed for the Army and Marine Corps – is perhaps a little smarter and pricier than your average Civil War cannon.

It’s also important to note the size of the U.S. economy in the 19th century compared to today. The War of 1812 in constant dollars, i.e. adjusted for inflation, cost about $1.6 billion. But after measuring it as a percentage of the nation’s economic output, i.e. gross domestic product, in terms of the resources it consumed, the total comes to $300 billion today, which seems to go further in illustrating its impact. That’s why we chose to separately include the research service’s GDP figures. Staffers there, however, did not include GDP numbers for the Confederate side of the Civil War or the American Revolution, so they’re not contained in our chart.

Additionally, prior to the Vietnam War, the Department of Defense didn’t attempt to calculate the actual cost of conflict beyond what amounts are normally appropriated by Congress for the day-to-day recruiting, paying, outfitting and training of personnel needed to maintain the nation's military forces. In other words, we're better now at understanding the price of defense during wartime as opposed to peacetime.

And finally, the report notes that tallied costs cover military operations and not things that are more peripheral in nature or may accrue over time, such as assistance to allies, interest paid on money burrowed to finance wars and benefits afforded to veterans. Have a look at the CRS report yourself for more on these issues.

Profile of the Excalibur projectile from the U.S. Army’s 2010 Weapon Systems handbook. Click to enlarge
CRS on the cost of military operations

A recent ad campaign aimed at gaining Midwestern senators support for US climate change legislation has backfired in Brazil. The ad by the National Farmers Union and Avoided Deforestation Partners, an alliance of major environmental organizations and utilities, advocates for farm state senators to support U.S. emission limits by offering an incentive: the ability of companies to purchase emission offsets in the form of standing tropical forests, which sequester the potent greenhouse gas carbon dioxide. Thus, the coalition argued, the land would not be cleared for the cultivation of soybeans and other crops that compete with US agriculture. A report accompanying the ad, called “Farms here, Forests there” claims that US farmers could gain up to $221 billion between 2012 and 2030 from less foreign competition.

The report states “the expansion of pasture and plantation to previously forested land in nations such as Brazil, Argentina, Indonesia and Malaysia has contributed to these countries becoming lead producers and exporters of these commodities."

“If the forests are conserved,” the report states, “the land will not be converted to pasture or plantation…. [and] we can expect to see reduced production from these [tropical forest] countries as a result of restricted land use and higher production costs.”

A video created by Avoided Deforestation Partners goes further: “Did you know that saving forests can save American consumers billons…Did you know that saving forests can protect American jobs?" The video concludes: “No new technology is necessary, no new systems need to be invented."

The advertising campaign aimed to win support from conservative legislators for the inclusion of rainforest protection in US domestic climate legislation. Here in Brazil, however, it went seriously wrong. The ad landed in the middle of a debate in the Brazilian Congress, which is considering a proposal by the government to loosen restrictions on the development of the Amazon.

A coalition of major Brazilian environmental NGOs repudiated the claim that protecting the world’s forests would benefit US agriculture. The coalition, including the Instituto Socioambiental, Conservation International-Brazil, WWF-Brasil, Fundação SOS Mata Atlântica and Greenpeace-Brazil, charged that the Avoided Deforestation Partners' argument "ignores the Brazilian reality." According to data compiled by the University of São Paulo, Brazil has at least 61 million hectares (roughly 150 million acres) of low-productivity land, which “can be quickly converted into areas of agricultural expansion” without intrusions into the nation’s forests. "We could double our production of food without having to bring down new forest and still recovering those areas where reforestation is done needed for their potential to provide ecosystem services," it said. The statement also denounced use of the report by deforestation advocates in Brazil to support their assertion that preservationists were playing into the hands of foreign agricultural interests.

US environmental groups that are members of Avoided Deforestation Partners—including The Nature Conservancy, Conservation International, The National Wildlife Federation and the Environmental Defense Fund—later distanced themselves from the report, saying it “is based on the assumption, totally unfounded, that deforestation in tropical countries can be easily interrupted, and its conclusions are therefore also unrealistic."

The groups also cited “several scientific studies [that] show that to reduce deforestation it is necessary to increase the competitiveness of agricultural production outside the forest frontier. Large tropical countries have large under-utilized rural areas where agriculture could be increased without increasing deforestation." The statement came out a month after the report was released, right when then the debate was heating up in Brazil.

Hurriedly, AD Partners responded with a new report that claimed Brazil would actually benefit from forests protection, estimating that its gross revenues from a policy designed to link forest protection to global strategies against climate change—known as REDD (Reduced Emissions from Degradation and Deforestation)—could amount to as much as $306 billion by 2030.

But the harm had already been done. The news about the report came out in Brazil right in the middle of a heated debate in the Brazilian Congress about the revision of the National Forests Code, which would weaken existing forest protections. At the end of June a congressman from Mato Grosso, a soy producing state, Jorge Yanai, cited the report to discredit Brazilian environmentalists, asserting that they were actually driven toward conservation by foreign interests seeking to restrict Brazilian development.

His proposals include, among other things, an amnesty on anyone guilty of illegal logging before July 2008 and permission for small properties not to keep what's known as the legal reserve—the amount of forest on a farm or settlement that must be protected.

The current law obliges all farms to preserve legal reserves in different percentages according to the region. In the Amazon, for instance, legal reserves must occupy 80 percent of the land; in the cerrado (a Brazilian type of savannah), the legal reserve is 35 percent of the land; and in forests elsewhere in the country, 20 percent. The word that small farms won’t have such an obligation has already reportedly led farmers to split their properties into smaller units. The proposed changes to the Forest Code also include a reduction in the width of land to be preserved alongside water courses—from 30 meters to 15.

In early July, the proposed weakening of the rules governing forest protections was passed by a key committee in the Lower House. The bill is expected to be voted on by both the Brazilian House and Senate in the fall—but not until after the presidential elections in October.

Before the revised report from Avoided Deforestation Partners was published, Glenn Hurowitz, the Washington Director of Avoided Deforestation Partners, told me that the study had been misinterpreted. “The report didn't analyze the impact on Brazil, and it's unfortunate that it has been interpreted that way."

Brazilian environmental NGOs claim, however, that the original report's intention was too clear to be misunderstood. They claim it was based not only on a false assumption, but also on two misunderstandings by the US lobby group.

AD Partners believed that to convince US farmers to preserve forests you have to say they will benefit economically at the expense of competitors. This generated a dichotomy that no environmental groups in Brazil would embrace.

The other mistake, they say, was to assume that nobody else outside the US would care. While within the US, environmental and news organizations generally praised the report’s conclusions, outside the US it was seen as an outrage. It’s something nobody at the US lobby group had thought about—that the report would have an impact on countries with tropical forests. Thus far, it seems to have had a negative impact on Brazilian’s own struggle to conserve its forests.

Natalia Viana is an independent journalist based in Sao Paulo, Brazil. She writes for The Guardian and The Independent (UK), as well as several Brazilian publications, and as a reporter for PBS Frontline. She recently published a three-part series on the debate over forest preservation and U.S. policy in Brazil on the Brazilian internet magazine Opera Mundi.

Last month, Elevated Risk wrote about a batch of documents we’d obtained from the New York State Office of Homeland Security using open-government laws. They showed that in some cases, public safety equipment purchased with the hundreds of millions of dollars New York has received in federal homeland security grants since Sept. 11 went unused for long lengths of time.

The discovery came as New York’s congressional delegation and local leaders from the Big Apple again complained that they were being shortchanged by Washington after news surfaced that the Obama administration would be cutting back on transit and port security cash.

A combined $144 million would still be pouring into the area from the two programs (state and local communities are eligible for a dizzying array of other related grants). The Bush administration endured similar outcry when grant award totals were announced each year, and one segment of the country would inevitably feel scorned after receiving less than another.

Every county board, hospital, sheriff, police department, fire chief, jail administrator, paramedic and city council has an explanation for why they deserve more in grants funds, with the exception of a small New York town Elevated Risk pointed to July 9 located 300 miles from the big city that actually turned down a grant.

At the time of our earlier post on the NYC metro area, some records appeared to be missing from those handed over, so we followed up with state officials and asked that the rest be provided. The documents showed up last week and describe additional instances in which security devices purchased with preparedness money were not deployed, at least according to what officials themselves described in the records. The state homeland security office is responsible for seeing to it that federal anti-terrorism and readiness cash is properly managed in New York.

The records show that Pace University purchased three portable metal detectors in 2006, but when state authorities showed up more than two years later to check on the equipment, one of them still sat in its original packaging. School officials promised in response that they would press the detector into service, the documents state.

Then in the summer of 2008, according to another report, state monitors arrived at the New York Downtown Hospital to examine a card-access system funded with grants from 2005. Local grant recipients have up to three years and sometimes more to purchase equipment after the money’s actually been awarded. So the card-access system wasn’t installed until December of 2007.

But according to the report, it was “not operational” several months after that. State officials were told it needed to be wired into the Fire Department of New York, but apparently, that did not happen right away.

As state overseers put it in bureaucratic fashion: “The inability of New York Downtown Hospital to utilize items purchased under the grant leads to non-compliance of the contract. Non-compliance with contract requirements can result in disallowances and can negatively impact future funding opportunities.”

Not every local government in New York is pleased with how the state is handling its oversight responsibilities that include making site visits. State monitors reviewed $325,000 worth of grant expenditures made by Chemung County in southwestern New York State and complained in a report about relatively minor issues with record-keeping. The county bought communications equipment, a van, a thermal-imaging camera and a ballistics blanket designed to limit the impact of blasts. Chemung officials responded tersely to the state’s findings:

Perhaps the [state Office of Homeland Security] should consider developing and performing a risk analysis when determining how best to use public funds in monitoring the use of other public funds. It seems the resources used in monitoring Chemung County’s purchase of four items could have been better spent in more high-risk areas.

New York OHS

Stock.xchng image courtesy of clemmesen

Asbestos is a known carcinogen, banned or restricted in 52 countries, but lobbyists and trade associations have kept the business alive by promoting its use in the developing world. A nine-month investigation by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and the BBC was published this week by the Center for Public Integrity.

The ICIJ investigation, "Dangers in the Dust," has "tracked nearly $100 million in public and private money spent by these groups since the mid-1980s in three countries alone — Canada, India and Brazil — to keep asbestos in commerce. Their strategy, critics say, is one borrowed from the tobacco industry: create doubt, contest litigation, and delay regulation."

Stories take a closer look at the amount of asbestos production and/or use in India, Brazil, the U.S., Russia, Mexico, and China, and examine marketing campaigns that promote asbestos use and efforts to ban the substance. An interactive map defines the nations that are top asbestos producers, exporters, and consumers around the world.

>> View the full project online.

Criminal immigration enforcement by the federal government is steadily growing under the Obama administration and has reached the highest levels seen during the presidency of George Bush, despite fewer people living illegally in the United States.

The latest numbers contrast with now-frequent statements being made by elected officials in Texas, Arizona and elsewhere who say the Obama White House does not want to enforce security on the nation’s border with Mexico.

There were nearly 15,000 criminal immigration cases referred for prosecution by Customs and Border Protection during March and April of this year, the most since a similar period in 2008 when more than 16,000 cases were referred. The Department of Homeland Security’s other major investigative agency, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, reported a larger number of new criminal prosecutions during the same two-month window than any other since its establishment in 2005. The total was 4,145.

The new look at this year’s cases comes from researchers at Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, which specializes in federal law enforcement statistics. TRAC obtained the data from the Justice Department through a Freedom of Information Act request.

Federal immigration enforcement began to rise starting around early 2008 during the Bush administration after authorities made progress in implementing the Secure Border Initiative, first unveiled by former homeland security chief Michael Chertoff in late 2005 when protests over illegal immigration grew to a fever pitch.

The program called for deploying thousands of new border patrol agents and investigators, lining the southwest boundary with hundreds of millions of dollars in electronic surveillance equipment, beefing up work site enforcement and detaining suspected immigration violators rather than letting them go until a scheduled deportation hearing could occur.

TRAC’s figures show that while prosecution referrals made by CBP began to dip over time on Obama’s watch, they turned around at the beginning of this year and started an upward trend. The chart above depicts this pattern since November. The month-to-month reporting of ICE cases, meanwhile, is erratic by comparison but nonetheless shows a similar hike that started around January and ultimately led to the two-month, record-breaking high.

In a story about TRAC’s new analysis, the Associated Press pointed to statistics from the Department of Homeland Security showing that as of January 2009, about one million fewer illegal immigrations (10.8 million total estimated) were residing in the country compared to a 2007 peak. Deportations have nonetheless climbed to new levels and stayed there during the Obama administration, more than doubling from 186,000 in 2007 to 388,000 last year.

Immigration enforcement cases also continue to clog the federal docket, jumping even in U.S. court districts not located near the southwest border with Mexico, according to TRAC. New cases in non-border districts climbed over 50 percent between February and April of this year to 1,148, while the rate nationwide during that time went up 42 percent.

Figures in chart courtesy of the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University.

The union that represents Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers said that a probe apparently seeking to identify the source of leaked internal documents detailing arrest quotas has unfairly targeted a suspected agent, the Washington Post reported.

The American Federation of Government Employees Council 118, which represents ICE officers, accuses the agency of initiating a "witch hunt" that tried to link the agent and the Post reporter, Spencer Hsu, both of whom have Asian surnames. The union declined to name the ICE agent.

In collaboration with the Center for Investigative Reporting, the Post published in March documents and emails from ICE officials that outlined arrest quotas, which the agency has since distanced itself from.

The published story provoked an immediate response from ICE Director John Morton, who insisted the agency doesn't utilize quotas.

Immigration advocates also criticized the agency for the arrest quotas, which Morton had previously said the agency had ended. Some even called for Morton's resignation or termination.

In fact, the Post ran its story about the leak probe along with a profile of Morton, in which he said calls for his resignation were "just part of the territory."

As for the probe, "ICE leaders got caught doing something they shouldn't have been doing, and now they want revenge and are targeting their own employees," AFGE Council 118 President Chris Crane said in the statement.

An ICE spokesman told the Post that the agency's senior leadership did not request or pursue the investigation, but declined further comment on who might have launched the probe.

Magnified image of Bacillus Anthracis (Anthrax) courtesy Janice Haney Carr – Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Another multibillion-dollar program developed during the Bush administration to help fight the war on terror is being seriously dialed back as critics in Washington raise questions about its effectiveness in readying the country for potential biological assaults.

Rep. David Obey, a Democrat from Wisconsin and chair of the House Appropriations Committee, wanted to curtail the possibility of massive teacher layoffs and he did so by pulling $2 billion out of reserves set up to finance pandemic flu preparedness and bioterrorism research. Accounts facing the axe include Project BioShield, created in 2004 to guarantee demand for medical treatments developed by the drug industry.

Pharmaceutical companies say that beyond government incentive, there isn’t a sufficient enough market to research and develop countermeasures for rare diseases or deadly agents like smallpox, anthrax, botulism and radiation. So Congress passed the Project Bioshield Act after former President Bush first proposed it during a State of the Union speech in 2003.

Lawmakers set aside a whopping $5.6 billion through 2013 as part of the act for battling biological apocalypse. The homeland security secretary could commit to buying new medicines up to eight years before a manufacturer might otherwise be able to deliver them, in the process reducing investment risks for companies, according to the Congressional Research Service (reports here, here and here). The government under the act could also acquire treatments before they had received approval and licensing from federal regulatory agencies.

But a White House spokesman told the Los Angeles Times this month that Project BioShield has “not provided a robust pipeline of medical countermeasures.” The spokesman insisted that Obama administration officials weren’t ignoring the threat but instead are looking at other research opportunities and methods for quickly distributing life-saving drugs in the event of an emergency.

In the meantime, plenty of money from Project Bioshield has already been committed to large contracts with drug producers. According to CRS reports, the government so far in recent years has signed deals worth at least $2.1 billion for tens of millions of medical doses. The list includes more than 29 million doses of anthrax vaccinations and treatments worth $1.1 billion, plus over $500 million for 20 million doses of a new smallpox vaccine.

Those figures don’t, however, include one colossal $879 million contract signed in late 2004 with VaxGen, Inc., a biotech firm headquartered near San Francisco, for 75 million doses of an anthrax vaccine. That agreement was ultimately terminated after the company “failed to meet a contract milestone,” as the research service lightly puts it.

There’s a little more to the story. Investigators at the Government Accountability Office found that VaxGen “accepted the contract despite significant risks,” among them a lack of needed technical expertise. It was also excessively optimistic to believe VaxGen could deliver 25 million doses of the vaccine in just two years as the government wanted, something that “would have been unrealistic even for a large manufacturer,” the GAO concluded in a 2007 report.

Officials at VaxGen knew their chances of success were limited and the contract came long before other critical vaccine development projects were expected to be completed by the company. As for why the government rushed into such a large investment, authorities “felt a sense of urgency to demonstrate to the public that a new, improved vaccine was coming.”

Advocates of greater bio-preparedness nonetheless condemned the recent blow to Project BioShield, including Bush’s former bioterrorism advisor, Robert Kadlec. They warn of a biological blindside that could take the lives of 400,000 Americans and do hundreds of billions in damage to the nation’s economy.

“It is incomprehensible to think that an administration and a Congress that is fighting terrorists in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen – some of whom are trying to obtain and use biological weapons against the U.S. – would eliminate monies dedicated to make us better prepared,” Kadlec told the Times.

Former senators Jim Talent (R-Mo.) and Bob Graham (D-Fla.) wrote a letter to the White House July 12 arguing that a betrayal of the initiative “will drive a stake through the heart of America’s fledgling biodefense efforts.” According to the letter: “It was designed to be an iron-clad pledge by the U.S. government to the private sector – if you take the financial risks to research and develop these medical countermeasures, we guarantee the money will be available to purchase them.”

But skeptics of Project Bioshield had their own reactions.

A senior fellow at Globalsecurity.org, George Smith, dismissed the Graham-Talent activist duo as a “mouthpiece” of the biodefense industry. Smith told blogger Steven Aftergood from the Federation of American Scientists that the project hinges on extreme scenarios, and even inside the world of pharmaceutical research and development, the money would be better spent on something else. “The country needs more antibiotics to fight infectious bacterial diseases magnitudes more than it needs anything BioShield could theoretically furnish,” Smith said.

Obey’s move is the biggest setback yet for Project Bioshield, but Washington had already been tinkering with the account, thus demonstrating a lack of surefootedness about the program’s direction. Congress first yanked more than $400 million out of the initiative in 2009, placing much of the money into an advanced biodefense research and development authority controlled by the Department of Health and Human Services. Lawmakers programmed another portion specifically for pandemic influenza preparedness and response.

Then later in the year over $600 million was removed for similar purposes, and account balances for Bioshield on top of that were shifted to health and human services from the Department of Homeland Security.

The Project BioShield Act did more than just entice industry with a mammoth set-aside of taxpayer dollars. Another provision allows unapproved treatments to be released to the public in the event of an emergency, and so far it’s been used several times, including for certain antiviral drugs given to young children suffering from last year’s swine flu outbreak. The list of products includes Tamiflu, respirators and diagnostic kits needed to help identify the disease.

A proposed spending authorization bill for the Department of Homeland Security would implement one of the remaining recommendations made by the 9/11 Commission that Congress has virtually ignored until now.

More than 100 committees and subcommittees in Congress today exercise jurisdiction over DHS, the nation’s newest sprawling bureaucracy, and lawmakers are reluctant to give up any political turf they may have as a result, even if it could lead to clearer and more efficient direction for the department.

Elevated Risk in recent months has described the annual homeland security appropriations bill as the latest home for tens of millions of dollars in unregulated earmarks policymakers secure for their constituents back home. Legislators are apparently just as eager to make certain those same constituents see them on C-SPAN leading hearings on the nation’s security.

But members of the 9/11 Commission have long complained about the complex tangle of congressional oversight that results in senior DHS officials spending much of their time in testimony before Congress rather than working on actual tasks that enhance emergency preparedness and defenses against terrorism. Department officials attended nearly 400 hearings over a recent two-year period and provided more than 5,000 briefings to congressional staffers and their bosses.

Our colleagues at the Center for Public Integrity last year published a lengthy story on the problem reporting that congressional leaders caved to pressure from powerful committee chairs seeking to maintain fiefdoms that gave them a say in as much about federal government policy and spending as possible.

By comparison, CPI found, the similarly sized Department of Veterans Affairs testified at half the number of hearings in front of just two committees and gave around 400 briefings during the same time frame.

The latest reform effort could lead to a nasty dispute, however. One former Republican staffer for the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, Michael Bopp, recalled for CPI an earlier attempt at streamlining homeland security oversight that devolved into “by far the ugliest and lowest point of my career on the Hill.”

A resolution by the Senate majority and minority whips would have handed the reigns largely over to governmental affairs where Republican Susan Collins of Maine and Independent Joe Lieberman of Connecticut had already positioned themselves as loud voices on issues related to homeland security. Their panel did eventually become known as the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

Under the past proposal, some influence would have nonetheless been left behind for the finance and commerce committees, such as limited control of the Customs Service, the Transportation Security Administration and the Coast Guard. But procedural maneuvering showed that wasn’t enough, according to CPI:

The resolution was on the floor, and the ranking member of the finance committee, Sen. Max Baucus, a Democrat of Montana, was offering an amendment to take back still more DHS customs functions. By the time Bopp had rushed to the floor, the amendment had passed. One of [Kentucky Republican Mitch] McConnell’s aids apologized to him saying it was too late to do anything about it. Once the Baucus amendment passed, the flood gates flew open, and it was clear that neither [Nevada Democrat Harry] Reid nor McConnell would go the mat for their plan. Collins and Lieberman, then ranking Democrat for governmental affairs, took to the floor to argue for streamlining jurisdiction – keeping hold of their new turf – but over the next two days, a parade of testy committee leaders used amendments to take back jurisdiction they would have relinquished under the resolution’s original terms. Their sense, as [Alaska Republican Ted] Stevens put it: ‘We didn’t need the 9/11 Commission to tell us what to do.'

No amount of shaming from the commission or editorials in major newspapers have changed that attitude so far. Text in the latest bill, a larger measure that authorizes appropriations for the Department of Homeland Security’s 2011 fiscal year, points to a 2008 New York Times editorial calling the failure to act “a comedy that invites fresh tragedy unless congressional leaders finally resolve to streamline down to a few dedicated panels.” Former homeland security chief Michael Chertoff once called it “the single most important step Congress can take to improve operational effectiveness” at the department.

And the 9/11 Commission said in its final report that restructuring oversight may be among the most essential and challenging of its recommendations. “Few things are more difficult to change in Washington than congressional committee jurisdiction and prerogatives. To a member, these assignments are almost as important as the map of his or her congressional district. The American people may have to insist that these changes occur, or they may well not happen.”

More recently at a May hearing of the House Homeland Security Committee, former politicians Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, who led the historic commission, criticized the still-splintered oversight configuration and said “the jurisdictional melee among the scores of congressional committees has led to conflicting and contradictory tasks and mandates for DHS. Without taking serious action, we fear this unworkable system could make the country less safe.”

So how would reform work now? Elevated Risk placed calls to the office of New York GOP Congressman Pete King, sponsor of H.R. 5590, seeking comment on whether his office expected fierce resistance. A spokesman didn’t get back to us before deadline. The text of the bill says only that the House speaker “shall consider” the 9/11 Commission’s recommendations and to the “extent feasible” minimize the impact of including multiple committees in the debate over homeland security.

A graphic put together by the House Homeland Security Committee’s Republican staff illustrates the total number of panels that share jurisdiction over homeland security issues. Click image to enlarge.

Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky introduces a resolution in 2004 to reduce the vast array of committees that wield influence over DHS. The resolution was ultimately weakened as individual lawmakers like Democratic Sen. Max Baukus of Montana sought to keep from losing clout in their committees. Video courtesy of C-SPAN.

Flickr image by Rob Shenk

One of Colombia’s foremost journalists, Hollman Morris, has been denied a visa by the U.S. State Department to pursue a year as a Nieman fellow at Harvard University.

The visa denial comes after several years of highly critical reporting on the ties of Colombian President Alvaro Uribe's administration to right-wing paramilitary squads. He and his brother, Juan Pablo, a producer, created a television show, Contravia, which airs on Bogota’s independent television channel. CIR interviewed them last year by Skype from their studio in Bogota about their reporting, in which over the course of several years they revealed the largely untold story of massacres and human rights abuses by the paramilitaries. Partly as a result of Morris’ reporting, one-third of the members of Colombia’s Congress has been under investigation for having financial ties to the paramilitary units.

In February, Morris discovered he was under surveillance by Colombia’s intelligence service, the DAS—a revelation that spurred an independent prosecutor’s ongoing investigation. The unearthed DAS documents have been collected and published by the Center for International Policy. At least a dozen DAS agents are now awaiting trial for the illegal surveillance, according to the Associated Press.

In March last year, attorneys with the Committee for a Free Press in Colombia publicly complained to the Inter American Press Association of the Organization of American States about the government’s harassment of Morris and other journalists. The OAS followed with a statement highly critical of the government’s threats against Morris and other journalists.

Morris has been widely recognized for his work—including by the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas. CIR helped him obtain an invitation to the Global Investigative Journalism Network conference in Geneva last April, but he was prevented from traveling to Switzerland at that time due to the eruption of the Icelandic volcano.

The outgoing Uribe administration has accused Morris of being part of the “intellectual bloc” of the left-wing FARC guerrillas, who have been on the other side of the Colombian civil war for much of the past two decades. President George W. Bush placed the FARC on the U.S. terrorist list, which empowers the government to deny those on the list travel to the United States as well as other privileges. The Uribe administration’s charges against Morris are based on having found email correspondence between Morris and a FARC commander suggesting that Morris played an intermediary role in trying to negotiate the release of former Colombian presidential candidate Ingrid Bettencourt. The government also accuses him of being inexplicably present at a FARC redoubt where the guerrillas turned four hostages over to the Colombian military. Morris denies all the charges. He told CIR that he was present at the hostage release on a journalistic assignment for the Latin American History Channel.

Just over a week after Morris was informed of the visa denial, he was honored at the Universidead Javieriena, one of Colombia’s leading universities for his journalistic courage in the face of death threats and government harassment.

Watch the CIR interview with the Morris brothers: