terrorism

Aafia Siddiqui was missing for five years and reappeared in Afghanistan in 2008.

In May 2009, Petra Bartosiewicz received the first H.D. Lloyd Investigative Fund grant for her report on the case of Aafia Siddiqui, a Pakistani neuroscientist who vanished from her hometown of Karachi in 2003 along with her three children. At the time Siddiqui went missing, she was suspected by U.S. law enforcement of being an Al Qaeda operative, and the prevailing belief, at least among Pakistanis, was that she was "disappeared" by the U.S. in connection with the global war on terrorism. Then in August 2008 Siddiqui reappeared in Afghanistan, and her story grew stranger still. "The Intelligence Factory: How America Makes Its Enemies Disappear," Bartosiewicz's investigation of Siddiqui's case and the phenomenon in which hundreds of individuals who have gone missing in Pakistan since the attacks of September 11, 2001, appears in the November 2009 issue of Harper's Magazine. Her reporting on the Siddiqui case will be part of her forthcoming book on terrorism trials in the U.S., "The Best Terrorists We Could Find," to be published by Nation Books in 2010.

This began as an essay about "how I got the story" of Aafia Siddiqui, but despite many months of reporting, I never really did "get" the story. I have no definitive answer as to where Siddiqui was during her five missing years, or who, if anyone, picked her up, or who held her, or how she ended up in Afghanistan, where she was finally captured. But I realized along the way there was another story to tell.

"The Intelligence Factory" examines how our system for apprehending terrorists has created an infinite demand for "intelligence," which comes largely from detainees like Siddiqui. While the United States has devoted great energy to apprehending and interrogating these detainees, there are few mechanisms to determine the veracity of the intelligence being generated. The role of "intelligence" goes to the heart of a fundamental dilemma in tracking terrorism in that in almost every case the crime hasn't happened yet. Law enforcement is looking for someone who hasn't done the deed—they haven't blown up a building, they haven't hijacked a commercial airliner, they haven't killed anyone. The danger then is that what the criminal justice system must deal with is not the subject's alleged actions, but their suspected intentions.

I've covered terrorism trials in the U.S. for the past five years and Siddiqui's case, like so many others, is at first glance a straightforward crime story. She is charged with attempted murder for shooting at a group of U.S. soldiers and FBI agents while in custody in Afghanistan. But the criminal charges elide more daunting questions. Where was she during her five missing years? Where were her children? Is she the fearsome extremist portrayed in much of the media—the Al Qaeda mom—or a woman caught in a series of far more complicated but ultimately less nefarious circumstances?

The answers make all the difference in understanding her intentions and thereby framing the criminal case in which she is now embroiled. Mind-reading, needless to say, is not supposed to be the purview of our courts. From the start I knew there was almost no chance I would interview Siddiqui herself, even though by the time I began my reporting she'd been transported to the U.S. to face indictment in a New York federal court. The Justice Department rarely allows journalists to interview defendants before trial, but even if they had, I doubt Siddiqui would have spoken with me.

In the weeks after her arrival in New York she was disoriented and in pain from a gunshot wound she'd received in Afghanistan. She didn't want to speak to her defense attorneys, let alone a reporter, she didn't want to appear in court, and she was deteriorating mentally, seeing apparitions in her jail cell.

So the mystery I tried to solve was why Siddiqui went missing in the first place, and this is how I came to investigate the business of intelligence gathering.

In Siddiqui's case, as in so many others, getting to the root of the evidence against a defendant is additionally hindered, if not made impossible, by the fact that most former and current intelligence officials will only speak to reporters off the record or on background. Unnamed sources, by virtue of shielding their identity, can feed a reporter spin and misinformation with greater impunity, and in stories involving "intelligence information," there is a greater chance this information will land unvetted in the public sphere, and readers will not know whether they are reading the truth or whether some hidden agenda is being played out.

The use of unnamed sources is a bad trend in journalism in general, one that has been exacerbated by journalists themselves, who, generally for expediency, acquiesce to it. There is a small circle of former intelligence officers willing to speak openly to the press, who are invoked repeatedly and liberally by the media (I challenge anyone to find a major national security related book in which ex-CIA officer Vince Cannistraro is not cited), and while these individuals certainly have expertise worth sharing, the pool of information about the inner workings of the intelligence community is inevitably far shallower than the coterie of talkative ex-intel officers would make it appear. Moreover, it's become standard that government officials, including, bizarrely, those who work in the public affairs offices of the various law enforcement and intelligence branches, insist their interviews are off the record or on background.

The CIA press officer I spoke to for the Siddiqui story, George Little, was actually startled when in the middle of our one brief conversation, after we covered a series of entirely benign factchecking questions, he asked me if we were on the record. When I said yes, he quickly ended the phone call. It was against this backdrop that I had to weigh the government's initial assertions about Siddiqui—that she was an Al Qaeda operative, that she was a potential suicide bomber, that she'd been on the run for five years, that she'd married Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's nephew. To try to get some sense of context for Siddiqui's life, I traveled to Pakistan this spring to meet with her family, who after years of being questioned by intelligence and law enforcement officials were understandably paranoid about speaking with a journalist. Siddiqui's sister was convinced from the start I was employed by the CIA, and I don't believe I was ever able to persuade her otherwise.

But over six weeks of reporting in Karachi, Lahore and Islamabad, I came to see that no matter what Siddiqui might have done, her life at the time she vanished was in turmoil and could not have helped but influence her actions. In the space of a single year she went through a bitter divorce, witnessed the death of her father, and gave birth to her third child—alone. I did not leave Pakistan with all the answers I sought, but the trip made apparent the greater political context in which her disappearance played out.

As I expected, Pakistan on the ground is far different than the mostly violent images that dominate the U.S. media, in part because the heightened risk is commonplace enough that it has become an accepted fact of life. While I was in Lahore the visiting Sri Lankan cricket team was ambushed by a team of masked gunman in the middle of the workday, but by sunset traffic had resumed to its normal flow at the shooting site.

The one place I wanted to travel to but was unable was Ghazni, Afghanistan, the scene of Siddiqui's arrest in August 2008. Ghazni is about 150 miles south of Kabul, and the highway joining the two cities is among the most dangerous stretches in Afghanistan. Journalists braver than I have made it to Ghazni by land, but the only marginally safe way is by air, which would have required hitching a ride with a United Nations transport during one of its regular runs. There had been a number of kidnappings of foreign journalists around the time I wanted to travel, so I hired a local reporter in Ghazni to conduct a series of video interviews with police officials and residents who witnessed Siddiqui's arrest. But as with so many other aspects of this story, the completely divergent accounts, in this case from individuals who were actual witnesses to the event, brought little clarity.

The best chance for definitive answers about what transpired in Ghazni will likely come at Siddiqui's trial, now scheduled for January 2010. It is unlikely, however, that the bigger mysteries surrounding her disappearance will be resolved to any satisfaction. Nor will the trial address one of the most troubling aspects of Siddiqui's story—the two youngest of her three children, Mariam and Suleiman, remain missing. Suleiman, born in Karachi and just six months old when he vanished with his mother, is suspected to be dead. Mariam, now eleven years old, was born in the U.S., making her both a citizen and a minor, and meriting an investigation by our government.

When I asked the State Department to comment on whether any effort was being made to locate her, the response was "no comment." Then, because of Siddiqui's pending trial I was referred to the Justice Department. When I called the Justice Department to ask about Mariam, I was informed that her disappearance has nothing to do with the criminal case and that they would have no comment either.

It's likely that much more than the whereabouts of a child will remain a mystery.

Petra Bartosiewicz is a journalist living in Brooklyn, New York. You can reach her at www.petrabart.com. Her original article was published in Harper's Magazine in November: "The Intelligence Factory: How America Makes its Enemies Disappear." Bartosiewicz also wrote an opinion piece that appeared in the LA Times.

Police watch protestors at the 2008 Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota.

The Republican National Convention was scheduled to begin Sept. 1 in St. Paul last year. With just days left on Aug. 26, a pair of videographers from New York who film street protests wandered around downtown Minneapolis lost and looking for a Greyhound station where a friend from Chicago was arriving. After finally retrieving her, they lugged a pile of heavy gear onto a city bus headed for the northwest section of the city to a house they planned to stay at for the night.

The tired trio climbed off the bus well past midnight near a busy corridor of cargo trains. Two police cars showed up and flooded them with search beams. The officers, saying they were investigating auto burglaries in the area, began searching their packs. They discovered pamphlets handed out by the Welcoming Committee and became alarmed. "It was like they'd found Al-Qaeda or something," Vladimir Teichberg, one of the filmmakers on the scene, recalls.

Cameras, phones, laptops, notebooks and cash were taken away. Each was questioned individually in the squad cars. Their IDs came up clean. The group made sure, for the record, to deny consent to the searches before demanding itemized receipts of everything confiscated. None were given, nor was anyone charged with a crime. "This is your case number. Call tomorrow," the officers said. They rushed to the house and began contacting lawyers.

The officers later sought approval for a warrant to examine all the electronic equipment they'd taken. The case was assigned to Minneapolis police Sgt. Thomas Stiller, who attempted to establish that the group had committed a "gross misdemeanor" by trespassing on the railroad property. That would mean a violation of the Minnesota Anti-Terrorism Act of 2002, which forbids anyone from nearing a "critical public service facility" without permission. Employees of such facilities are even empowered to carry out arrests of trespassers under the post-Sept. 11 state law.

The next day after the three were stopped, they held a press conference with legal aid volunteers and denounced the incident to reporters. Under pressure, the Minneapolis Police Department finally called to say they could have their possessions back, but batteries on the laptops were run down and film on an analog camera was exposed. They've since filed a lawsuit alleging civil rights violations.

Raid at a theater

Three days later during the weekend before the convention, multiple federal and local law enforcement agencies undertook a more coordinated drive against protesters they would later describe in court records as "disruption mode." Their list of targets started with a fading brick building known as the Smith Theater, located across the Mississippi River from St. Paul's Xcel Center where the convention would be held. According to their intelligence, activists from around the country were gathering there. About 70 people had convened inside.

On the evening of Aug. 29, the Ramsey County Sheriff's Office, the St. Paul Police Department and the FBI raced up to the theater in cars and screeched to a stop. The group inside suddenly heard a loud commotion as sheriff's deputies burst into the theater yelling "Police! Get on the floor! Get on the floor!" leveling rifles and side arms at the crowd. The authorities sealed off the area around the building and everyone was zip-cuffed. They then demanded that the activists consent to having photographs taken and show their IDs if they wanted to leave.

Police walked through the theater looking for explosives, sticks and poles, chicken wire, roofing tar, spray paint, hollowed-out puppets, "urine and feces" they believed would be hurled during protests, and virtually every type of electronics possible, including X-boxes and iPods, all listed in a warrant signed by a judge. They breezed past a grand staircase that led to an adjacent screening room where people were watching movies and instead of using the steps to reach them counted to three before knocking down a nearby door with a battering ram.

But the raid by its end didn't net a weapons cache as the warrant described. There was a traffic barrel with an anarchist symbol on it, two flares, one slingshot, "glass jar with unknown substance" and maps with entrances to the city allegedly color-coded to assist in blockading downtown St. Paul. The findings were enough for police to justify seizing laptops and cell phones, cameras, supplies for making banners and signs, bus-route maps handed out to visitors from out-of-town, piles of political pamphlets and other items. No one in the building was arrested during the raid.

Activist Garrett Fitzgerald, 26, was watching the front door of the theater when the raid occurred and didn't get to his home south of downtown Minneapolis until 4 or 5 a.m. after police let everyone go. He set the alarm for 8 a.m., but before it went off, Fitzgerald heard the back door being broken down and the sound of police filling the house with commands — "Get on the floor! On your stomach!"

He was frightened and thought, "Well, I'd sure like to be wearing pants when they come in." Fitzgerald dressed quickly and called a legal aid number before setting the live phone nearby as he lay down on the floor. They didn't answer and police hung it up after crashing through his bedroom door with a battering ram. "Put your hands behind your back!" they shouted, Fitzgerald said in interviews.

Police proceeded to seize items from his house that Fitzgerald said could be found anywhere — jars of staples, a hatchet, spray paint, wire cutters and a hacksaw. But they also found 37 caltrops, steel points that can be placed in the street to deflate tires, according to court records.

Monica Bicking, 24, and Eryn Trimmer, 23, who also lived at the house with Fitzgerald, were arrested along with him and taken to a jail. Police from departments across the Twin Cities joined by the FBI carried out two more raids at homes that morning in Minneapolis and discovered "throwing-style knives in a bag," a lock-picking kit, U-locks for the alleged tactic of attaching protesters to immovable objects, and light bulbs, which police claim can be filled with paint and other chemicals to be thrown.

Eight people total were arrested in the days to come, police charging them with "conspiracy to riot in the furtherance of terrorism," criminal enhancements contained in the Minnesota Anti-Terrorism Act and used for the first time during the Republican National Convention. Seven months later, after the global media presence dissipated, Ramsey County Attorney Susan Gaertner dropped the terrorism accusations, complaining that they "complicated" the case. Today the RNC 8, as supporters have dubbed them, face charges of conspiring to riot and damage property.

Followed by undercover agents

RNC 8 defendant Garrett Fitzgerald, who's out on bail, wasn't shocked by his arrest, believing police commonly pursue political activists with undue haste. Infiltration of his group the Welcoming Committee had never been out of the realm of possibility. But police this time had gone to the extreme. Preemptive raids. Months of spying. Terrorism charges.

Paid undercover informants had followed him and the other activists to protest planning meetings around the country for months and were alleging in charging papers that Fitzgerald had discussed ways to disable police cars, puncture their gas tanks and use carpeting nails as road spikes. They described him as "present" during workshops where attendees proposed "kidnapping delegates," "capturing federal buildings" and "sabotaging the Xcel Center."

Lawyers have encouraged the group not to answer too many prying questions about specific claims made by informants. But the RNC 8 and their supporters have disputed implications that old tires and bricks found by police were going to be used for starting noxious fires and shattering windows. They're also pointing to statements made in jest to informants that were then earnestly reported to police handlers as obvious plans for destruction.

"People need to be very wary of trusting these informants' accounts of things," said Fitzgerald. "Ramsey County filed the complaints. It's their job to make the very best case they can, not necessarily to get the truth."

It's difficult to tell how much of the material collected was going to be used for furthering terrorism and rioting, such as ninja foot spikes and throwing-style knives. A memo from the Minnesota Joint Analysis Center – one of many intelligence-oriented fusion center established by local police with homeland security grants after Sept. 11 – admits many of the items police should look for are everyday objects like bottled water, first-aid supplies, computers and pamphlets. The center doesn't offer meaningful advice for how police can establish probable cause and conclude reliably that something will be used for "illegal direct action" activities and thus be seized or photographed.

Tony Bouza is a former Minneapolis police chief whose own wife of 50 years was arrested during an anti-war protest in 1983 when he headed the department. He hasn't hesitated in the past to criticize law enforcement decision-making, but on the issue of preemptive raids, Bouza called them "brilliant."

"They secured search warrants. They secured evidence. If they turned up innocent people, then I would be critical," he said. "I thought the aggressive police tactics [in advance of the convention] were well carried out. I don't subscribe to the notion that these were baseless raids of innocent people."

Police claims challenged

But other "intelligence-led policing" that occurred on Aug. 30 as the final countdown to the Republican convention began challenges the legitimacy of police claims.

Around 1 p.m. that day, a dozen St. Paul police officers rushed toward a duplex west of the city dressed in black and armed with pistols and rifles. Michael Whalen, a waiter at the North Star Hotel for 30 years where the city's business and political elite frequently dine, saw the curious spectacle of police running past his window as he sat in the living room. More were coming through the yard.

The officers asked to be allowed in the house but didn't have a warrant and were told no. So they waited for two hours until a judge approved one detaining all those who tried to leave before then. Whalen started calling newspapers and TV stations as the incident turned into a circus with media filling the neighbor's yard angling for a view.

"This is what we're going to do," an officer said to the 10 or so people inside after the warrant arrived. "We're going to search you, handcuff you, take you into the back yard, and then we're going to search the house." Each of the occupants was photographed after being sat down.

Whalen was dumbstruck. Sure people knew him as a noisy supporter of Irish independence and a radical on other issues. But his nephew dates the mayor's daughter, and Whalen's old roommate was once a top DFL official. Judges and mayoral candidates had attended events supporting the reunification of Ireland that he helped organize. "I've never been afraid of what I do politically," he said.

Police, it turned out, had told the judge that a local bookstore Whalen helped run called Arise! was co-owned by Sara Jane Olson, a Vietnam-era political activist, sympathizer with the Symbionese Liberation Army and fugitive of more than 20 years who lived under an assumed name as a community volunteer and doctor's wife in St. Paul. When finally arrested in June of 1999, she served seven years in prison and was released recently for her alleged role in planting bombs under Los Angeles police cars and a bank robbery stemming from the mid-1970s.

The affidavit supporting the search warrant also claimed that 21 heavy packages were delivered to Whalen's home and that a postal carrier questioned by police could only lift them two at a time. An FBI agent learned from a "reliable source" that the packages contained weapons intended to be used at the convention. A St. Paul police officer assigned to the area's Joint Terrorism Task Force told the judge they were conducting surveillance on Whalen's house when he allegedly climbed into a Chevy Cobalt to leave. They attempted to pull the car over and the driver fled briefly before being stopped, according to the affidavit.

But the St. Paul Police Department's own later report of the incident, obtained by the Center for Investigative Reporting, contradicts the sworn affidavit and says that Whalen himself was not in the car. The document further states that the Cobalt was pulled over after the warrant was served, not before.

No dangerous arsenal was discovered in the duplex and no one was arrested, including Whalen. The boxes a reliable source alleged were full of deadly weapons turned out to contain pamphlets that offered advice on how to convert to a vegetarian diet and belonged to someone who rented a room in the house. The roommate earned $17 an hour handing them out on college campuses around the Midwest.

"That application for a search warrant was ridiculous," said Eileen Clancy, a founder of I-Witness Video based in New York who was in the home that day. "We were not involved even in organizing demonstrations, not that there's anything wrong with that."

Whalen's had little to no contact with Olson since she withdrew from Arise! in 1995. He has filed suit over the incident.

Searching a bus

Raids continued elsewhere that day.

At around 5 in the afternoon six miles west of Whalen's home, two bike patrol officers from the Minneapolis Police Department learned about a green bus located in a parking lot downtown with a group of people gathered around loading supplies. Police had been told to be on the lookout for feces and urine that protesters might attempt to throw during clashes on the street, or devices that could be used to link demonstrators together making it more difficult for them to be removed.

According to one fusion center document, arriving demonstrators will likely have "limited financial resources," which should make it "difficult for these groups to restock their logistical support system" if protest materials are taken away by police. "History has shown that violent demonstrators collect and stockpile items at various locations to be used to further their cause at these types of events. … Anything that seems out of place for its location could indicate the stockpiling of supplies to be used against first responders."

As they watched, the officers noticed two five-gallon buckets near the rear entrance of the bus. Because the sun shined through them, the pair could see irregular-shaped mounds inside the pails that didn't appear to be entirely liquid. One container lid fell off and suddenly they could smell an odor coming from the area of the bus resembling human feces, according to a police report. There was a large amount of PVC pipe and plywood stacked in the back of the bus, and someone also loaded in an animal kennel. They must be planning some type of direct action, the officers thought, so the two contacted a lieutenant to relay their fear, police documents state.

The bus pulled out of the parking lot, and Stan Wilson sat in the driver's seat, his wife Delyla helping to navigate as they made their way toward St. Paul for an event there. With their daughter, the family of permaculture enthusiasts travels the United States teaching sustainable living techniques.

At around 6:30 police lights flashed behind the bus. At least two more cars were waiting for them when they pulled over on a highway exit. Soon several law-enforcement vehicles crammed the road's shoulder, including an unmarked black suburban, and around two-dozen officers were on scene from Ramsey County, St. Paul, Minneapolis, the highway patrol and a local university.

"Everybody off the bus now," one officer ordered.

Stan Wilson asked why they were pulled over. But none of the explanations were quite clear, according to the couple.

What Delyla and Stan Wilson couldn't have known at the time was that local authorities had contacted a fusion center in Montana where the bus was registered. Police there possessed information that the Wilsons were affiliated with Earth First!, a group that at times has advocated radical methods for ending environmental degradation. The Montana center then supplied a "full report" on the "suspects," according to a partially redacted document the Center for Investigative Reporting obtained.

But it doesn't indicate whether there was reasonable suspicion to believe any crime had occurred involving the bus or what details fusion center analysts from Montana included in their shared report.

Delyla Wilson freely admits being involved with Earth First! years ago. She served five days in jail and two years probation after splattering animal entrails on a top agriculture official in 1997 to protest hundreds of bison being killed near Yellowstone National Park. She hasn't been charged with any crime since.

Police decided to tow the bus off the highway. A case report says they did so "after officers received information relating to illegal activity that this vehicle was involved in." But no one was arrested or charged in connection to the incident.

The Wilsons were allowed to keep the five-gallon buckets, which didn't contain feces and urine, but rather chicken feed. As for the other supplies police considered potentially dangerous, the family had piping and scrap lumber onboard for random building projects and heavy-gauge fencing to enclose their birds.

The city of Minneapolis concluded later that the bus contained numerous mechanical violations. But on Sept. 2 of convention week, officials relinquished it after receiving a wave of angry phone calls supportive of the family and lifted all fines for the alleged vehicle infractions. A city spokesman, Matt Laible, said the bus was released because the Wilsons had agreed to address "brake issues."

Delyla Wilson disputes even that claim. "The city attorney's office called, apologized for the mistake, and told us we could have the bus back free and clear without fear of being harassed or the bus being re-impounded," she said. "When, and if, we made the repairs was up to us."

The Wilsons were abandoned on the road that day, the last officer telling them it's illegal to stand on a freeway exit as he sped away, the family claims. Minnesota's fusion center described in documents the role it played in receiving the shared information on the Wilsons from Montana. But center director Michael Bosacker would only say that any data his team requests from other jurisdictions must be linked to an active probe in which police have reasonable suspicion a crime occurred or is about to occur.

"I'm an old-time cop. I worked investigations and I know a lot of veteran investigators [who] wouldn't even share with the guy sitting next to them," he said in defense of intelligence-led policing. "That's the extreme other side of this thing. If they don't even share within their own agency, how are you going to get them to share outside, which could benefit more than one department in getting a handle on a real crime problem? We have to figure out how to do that."

'Huge mistake'

Chuck Samuelson, executive director of the ACLU affiliate in Minnesota, counters that police wanted to frustrate protest groups through sweeps and other means in order to tactically outnumber them on the streets during the convention.

"These fusion centers are a huge mistake policy-wise. This is bad, bad juju. It is a refutation of our ideals as a republic," Samuelson said. "Michael Bosacker is a nice guy. None of these guys are evil. That's what makes it so banal, which makes it so scary to me. If this guy was a drooling Bull Connor [the Civil Rights-era Klansman and belligerent police official from Alabama], it'd be easy. People would be enraged and we'd shut it down."

On Aug. 31 following the day of area-wide raids, the police disruption of protesters continued. An informant reported to a case agent from the FBI's Domestic Terrorism Squad that a trailer rented by demonstrators from Texas contained 35 shields fashioned out of highway barrels that they planned to use in confrontations with law enforcement.

St. Paul police investigator David Langfellow of the Joint Terrorism Task Force notified his commander that he'd found the trailer on Woodbridge Street northwest of downtown. Instead of instructing Langfellow to seek a warrant, the commander told him to "disrupt the trailer" and "deal with it," in part because local law enforcement had decided they were in disruption mode and not investigative mode. So Langfellow broke into the trailer and seized the contents, which included helmets, plastic shields, a medic bag and "batons that looked like cut-off shovel handles," according to court records.

A federal judge later ruled that the search was illegal and remarked in a telling footnote on the notion of police preemption, "the law does not recognize a distinction between disruption mode and investigation mode. … Law enforcement is required at all times to comply with the Constitution regardless of whether it is seeking to disrupt potentially unlawful activities or to investigate crimes for later prosecution."

By the convention's end, Ramsey County prosecutors had charged just 14 people out of the hundreds of demonstrators arrested with felonies. The remaining 800 or so were mostly held for unlawful assembly, disorderly conduct, obstructing traffic and other misdemeanors before being released. Three felony cases were eventually dismissed due to insufficient evidence, another seven resulted in guilty pleas or jury convictions for criminal property damage and the rest are pending.

Ramsey County Sheriff Bob Fletcher held a press conference weeks after the RNC at the same time a public meeting was convened to hear citizen comments on the police handling of demonstrators. He reportedly pasted the walls of a room with booking sheets of people arrested during the convention's first turbulent day and declared that a majority were not from Minnesota. The town could have been destroyed after nightfall without a confrontational police response, he insisted.

Several requests for an interview with Fletcher were denied, and the St. Paul Police Department wouldn't answer detailed questions in an e-mail or follow-up requests for comment. More than two-thirds of the misdemeanor arrests that took place during the convention have since been declined or dismissed due to lack of evidence and other reasons, including more than three-dozen cases brought against journalists.

Peter Erlinder, a St. Paul attorney representing one of the RNC 8, said the behavior of law enforcement created a "chilling effect" for future protests. "It's clear," Erlinder said, "that there was a conscious effort to carry out surveillance and penetration and to infiltrate all of the groups that had any idea of expressing their opinions in St. Paul."

This account is based on in-depth interviews, news stories and an extensive examination of police reports, available court records and other public and government documents, including memos obtained from the Minnesota Joint Analysis Center through the state's open-records laws.

This story is part of a collaborative project by the Center for Public Integrity and CIR examining the effectiveness of America’s homeland security efforts. Support for this partnership project is provided by the Open Society Institute.

More from this investigation:

Assessing RNC Police Tactics, Part 1 of 2

Assessing RNC Police Tactics, Part 2 of 2

Greetings from St. Paul [video]

A Legacy of Spying

Fighting Crime with Computers in Minnesota

Are Things Any Different in Denver?

A screenshot from the amateur video produced by the RNC Welcoming Committee.

The spying began late in the summer of 2007, after police in St. Paul discovered an amateur video online. It showed youths dressed in black, their faces covered with dark bandanas, tossing home-made fire bombs and seeming to prepare for an assault.

The group called itself the "RNC Welcoming Committee."

For authorities in St. Paul, the whole thing seemed like serious business. The city was deep in preparations for the Republican National Convention, scheduled to take place in September of 2008. Security was their paramount concern, and nothing worse than a terrorist attack could happen during the four-day event.

In the year leading up to the convention, police would spend countless hours working to identify those behind the video and others who might be planning to disrupt the Republican Party’s nominating bash. They would draw on a new domestic intelligence infrastructure and take unprecedented advantage of laws expanded after 9/11 that give police more intrusive authorities to halt potential subversives and terrorists before they attack.

But far from yielding major revelations, some police work prior to and during the RNC resulted in a series of missteps, poor judgments, heavy-handed tactics and inappropriate detentions, according to interviews and a review of official documents obtained by the Center for Investigative Reporting.

Critics say many of the police actions were unconstitutional and a judge called one seizure illegal after the fact. Law enforcement officials a year later continue to defend their handling of the convention, arguing it was the only way to keep extremist hoodlums from disrupting the RNC and prevent violent incidents.

Their coordinated security operations, known generally as intelligence-led policing, have become common in cities across the country. A growing number of law enforcement agencies are linking their computer networks together in a national, classified data system that enables the extraordinary mining and sharing of police intelligence, while also adopting spy methods to gather information.

In contrast to Bush administration officials who wanted to limit how much the federal government spent sustaining such state and local homeland security initiatives, President Obama's proposed budget for 2010 asked that $260 million from existing antiterrorism grants be used to pay for thousands of new intelligence analyst positions.

The results of St. Paul's campaign against political protesters raises serious questions about whether police are properly trained to use their new authorities for good effect.

Police deployed infiltrators to report on political groups, tapped into information exchanges to examine data about people who were not accused of any crimes and conducted questionable searches based on intelligence.

One document revealed that a federally funded "fusion center" in Minnesota carried out "over 1,000 hours of support to intelligence operations" and "disseminated approximately 17 RNC situation reports to over 1,300 law enforcement recipients."

Elsewhere, fusion centers in Iowa, Tennessee, Oregon and South Dakota supplied Minnesota authorities with driver's license photos and criminal history records on people perceived as suspicious in connection with the Republican convention.

By the convention's end, more than 800 people had been arrested, including eight who were charged with "conspiracy to riot in the furtherance of terrorism." But a majority of the charges, including several treated as serious, were later dropped or downgraded after prosecutors had a chance to review the police allegations and activity.

Actors on a video

Police in St. Paul set off on the wrong foot when they saw potential terrorism in the online video.

The actors did look dressed for street demonstrations. In one scene, a woman wields bolt cutters as if preparing to tear down a steel fence. Then she is shown standing outside a small Navy recruiting station with a bowling ball in her hands labeled "Revolutionary Anarchist Bowling League," a reference to political activists in the 1980s who gained modest notoriety by shattering the windows of an enlistment storefront in response to Ronald Reagan's plans for invading Nicaragua with U.S. troops. Someone else in the video appears to throw rocks at people dressed as police officers attempting to control a riot.

"We're getting ready," the film says ominously. "What are you doing?"

Ramsey County Sheriff Bob Fletcher and his team would cite the video among other things in later warrant affidavits as a basis for his probe into the Welcoming Committee when police stormed the group's headquarters just before the convention began as thousands of reporters and more Republican delegates converged on St. Paul.

But court affidavits ignored something crucial. The Molotov cocktail in the video is phony and lands in a barbecue grill lighting charcoals ablaze as an outdoor chef smiles thankfully. The bolt cutters are passed to another individual beyond the fence who uses them harmlessly as hedge clippers. The bowling ball rolls past the Navy recruiting station and into a group of pins assembled on the sidewalk. A youngster, 4 or 5 years old at most, is the only one seen throwing rocks in the video and they strike the ground rather than the actors.

The film was a juvenile satire of popular anarchist imagery, but police allowed their fear and enthusiasm for fighting terrorism to prevail. Within days of the video's release on the Internet, Fletcher, alongside other law enforcement agencies, launched what became a $300,000 investigation into the RNC Welcoming Committee and other protest groups. Authorities later told a judge the film depicted "significant property damage" and "violence toward law enforcement."

They said it provided reasonable suspicion that the RNC Welcoming Committee was conspiring to destroy property, create civil disorder, wreak havoc with bombs and engage in "unlawful assembly," all for the purposes of undermining the Republican National Convention.

But there wasn't a consensus about the threat among officials in St. Paul and Minneapolis, or the need to conduct an open-ended intelligence effort. Police even quarreled over how many protesters would arrive. One document predicted 100,000 demonstrators planned to show up. Fletcher wrote to the St. Paul Police Department that inside the throngs there could be as many as 3,000 "anarchist-affiliated protesters." The actual number was close to 10,000 total demonstrators, a fraction of them thugs intent on creating real trouble.

Expanded program

The proponents of intelligence-led policing won out despite disagreement. In the months leading to the convention, police expanded their program.

According to documents obtained by the Center for Investigative Reporting from Minnesota's fusion center, police from the Twin Cities asked their partners in the law enforcement community to collect information on where protesters were camping or renting land, snap photographs of their belongings and, if possible, seize supplies that might be used for "illegal direct actions."

"One of their goals will be to attempt to create images of law enforcement personnel engaging them so they can claim brutality and violations of their civil rights," a memo from the Minneapolis Police Department states about protesters. "They will likely attempt to use such incidents as a basis for future law suits against the city of Minneapolis." The list of logistical items these direct-action groups might accumulate includes food that will "be as organic as possible," and when they arrive their preferred method of transportation could be "older, low-value" bicycles.

Police in Minnesota downplay the reach of its fusion center. "Data mining doesn't make any sense," said center director and career police investigator Michael Bosacker in an interview with the Center for Investigative Reporting. "For us to just pick a person and start looking at him – unless it's part of a case and raises suspicion of a crime – doesn't make any sense. We don't have the personnel to do that. We don't have the time to do that."

Instead the Minnesota Joint Analysis Center relied on "intelligence analysts" to disseminate memos to other law enforcement agencies advising them on what authorities anticipated would occur during the convention and how to respond.

Fletcher's office, meanwhile, began a surveillance campaign of the Welcoming Committee, taking hundreds of photographs of political organizers, many of whom were not ultimately charged with anything illegal. Informants joined the group and fed police confidential but unverified information that became the basis of eventual search warrants and criminal charges.

They attended multiple protest planning meetings, including one in Lake Geneva, Minn., where attendees allegedly used water bottles as mock Molotov cocktails to practice throwing at vehicles and buildings. "Numerous" informants, according to police claims, told authorities of another meeting in Wisconsin where activists reviewed military training manuals and discussed slamming into lines of police with shields.

Two of the informants were women who worked for Fletcher's department, one as a narcotics officer and the other as a jail guard. A third young man built like a high school wrestler with close-cropped hair was hired as an informant by Fletcher and later began working as a jail guard for the sheriff.

A fourth informant, Twin Cities resident Andrew Darst, reportedly provided information to the FBI but threatened to derail the government's campaign against protesters when after the RNC he was arrested in an unrelated case. A local judge found him guilty of assault in March after he kicked down the door of a home in pursuit of his wife who was attending a party inside.

Efforts against planned protests grew — the FBI directed additional informants as far away as Texas to spy on those heading to St. Paul for the RNC. Documents show that confidential FBI sources infiltrated anti-war meetings at a public library in Iowa City during August of 2008. The height, weight, hair color, lisps, grooming habits, online activities, phone numbers and e-mails of attendees were documented. Also in April of last year, according to published reports, an informant working for Ramsey County attended activist gatherings in Iowa.

Informants at meetings

Police infiltration and surveillance did not come as a total surprise to those involved in the Welcoming Committee's planning get-togethers. They considered themselves essentially a logistical group but assumed authorities would misconstrue their intentions anyway.

Activist Rob Czernik, 34, grew up as an Army brat and moved frequently about the country before becoming politicized at age 13 by the sight of poverty and destructive mountain-top removal in West Virginia, he said recently. Czernick moved to the Twin Cities 11 years ago.
The Welcoming Committee's meetings were public and anyone could attend. Two who did, Czernik sensed, were informants and he turned out to be right. "Just the way they acted and behaved," Czernik said, "aloof and not really making an effort to understand the politics of what we were doing."

Among the protesters, anxiety escalated as the convention neared. Rumors circulated that people were being stopped at the Canadian border.

+ Read "Assessing RNC Police Tactics, Part 2"

This account is based on in-depth interviews, news stories and an extensive examination of police reports, available court records and other public and government documents, including memos obtained from the Minnesota Joint Analysis Center through the state's open-records laws.

This story is part of a collaborative project by the Center for Public Integrity and CIR examining the effectiveness of America’s homeland security efforts. Support for this partnership project is provided by the Open Society Institute.

More from this investigation:

Assessing RNC Police Tactics, Part 1 of 2

Assessing RNC Police Tactics, Part 2 of 2

Greetings from St. Paul [video]

A Legacy of Spying

Fighting Crime with Computers in Minnesota

Are Things Any Different in Denver?

Photo by Dirk Spennemann

Despite its go-it-alone spirit, sparsely populated Alaska is one of the greatest per-capita beneficiaries of funding from Washington among the 50 states. A major portion of those federal taxpayer dollars in recent years has come from large infusions of homeland security grants and appropriations handed out to the state since the Sept. 11 attacks.

Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin's hometown of Wasilla, where she was Mayor from 1996 to 2002, has benefited immensely from the anti-terrorism bonanza. Wasilla, with a population of 7,028, has acquired a surveillance system for its water wells, a 150-foot tall communications tower that altered the city's landscape, a half-million dollar mobile command vehicle with off-road capabilities and more.

According to an analysis of federal spending figures and additional records obtained by the Center for Investigative Reporting from the state of Alaska through open-government laws:

• Between 2002 and 2006, Alaska received at least $66.6 million from the most common preparedness grants distributed by the Department of Homeland Security putting the state behind only three others in per-capita spending: Vice President Dick Cheney's home state of Wyoming, Vermont and North Dakota. The amount is about $100 per Alaskan, more than double the per-capita figure for the state of New York and $70 more than for each California resident.

• Between 2003 and 2007, Wasilla received at least $1.4 million in homeland security grants, including $987,550 from the Assistance to Firefighters Grant program, for which fire departments apply to the Federal Emergency Management Agency on their own. The state of Alaska received $18.2 million from the assistance to firefighters program between 2002-2008 on top of what it had already won in other homeland security grants.

• Using $244,500 in funding from the 2005 grant cycle, Wasilla constructed a 100-foot tall communications tower for its small police force. An additional $148,000 came during 2007, to improve law enforcement communications and to raise the new tower 50 feet after the city realized the one it built wasn't tall enough.

The borough that surrounds Wasilla – Alaska's equivalent of a county jurisdiction – has received at least $2.8 million in grants from the Homeland Security Department over the last five years. The Matanuska-Susitna Borough, or Mat-Su as locals call it, spent nearly $70,000 to install security equipment at two fire stations in Wasilla and also acquired a $410,000 mobile command communications vehicle outfitted with a conference room and an incinerator toilet. It's kept in Wasilla, as is a $427,000 hazardous materials truck the borough purchased that contains a computer program for plotting potentially deadly chemical plumes.

Wasilla has further enjoyed a windfall of federal money for other public safety purposes outside of Homeland Security Department grants. That amount is more than $5 million since 2006 alone, mostly from earmarks.

Not everyone in Wasilla welcomes the federal handouts. Steve Stoll, a local land surveyor and City Hall gadfly in Wasilla, ran for mayor in 2005 arguing that the city shouldn't too quickly grab at every dollar in homeland security assistance that becomes available.

"So many times I've heard the expression, 'If we don't take it, someone else will,'" Stoll, who lost the election, said in an interview with CIR. "I just don't subscribe to that at all. I think it's a totally wrong way to run government."

The largely conservative and independent voters of Alaska exhibit a dual personality when it comes to taxation. Opposing greater local sales and property taxes is a reliable strategy for politicians seeking to win elections. But Alaska has profited from the billions of dollars in grants federal lawmakers began distributing to local governments for disaster preparedness after Sept. 11. Since the attacks, Alaska's delegation has also sought lucrative congressional earmarks for large state projects, emphasizing in each any veneer of national security.

Palin first became mayor of Wasilla in 1996 after claiming that her opponent had a "tax-and-spend mentality" because he sought a 2 percent sales tax to fix the city's roads and sewer system. She defeated former Alaska governor Frank Murkowski in 2006 after promising voters she would sell a $2 million publicly owned passenger jet he used to travel on state business. Murkowski originally attempted to buy the plane with homeland security money – the federal government said no.

While the state's receipt of federal subsidies has continued apace, Palin boosted her popularity as governor earlier this year by handing out a $1,200 energy rebate to Alaskans in addition to the $2,069 payment each already received from an oil royalty fund paid into by energy producers.

"Of course we believe ourselves to be self-reliant but are far more reliant on federal spending and oil taxes, which pay for most of state government expenses, than any other state," said Gerald McBeath, a political science professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. "That's a contradiction leading to a good deal of ambivalence in our attitudes toward government."

Voters in Anchorage, the state's most populous city, rejected $117 million worth of local bond measures that had seemed like a sure thing during a 2006 election after mayoral candidate Jack Frost fiercely campaigned in opposition to property taxes. The measures included $98 million for schools and $13 million more for "homeland security" improvements ranging from the replacement of ambulances to radio communications upgrades. But Frost lost.

Alaskans aren't as swift to turn away federal grants. Wasilla used 2003 homeland security funds of $46,000 to place surveillance cameras at its sewage treatment plant and water supply facilities.

"We're a small city, so we're not a large target, hopefully," a public works director told the Anchorage Daily News in 2005 for a story headlined "Homeland security has been good to Mat-Su." "The only thing we've experienced is minor vandalism on the (water storage) tanks."

The Wasilla Police Department had only eight officers when it was created in 1993 not long before Palin became mayor, and it remains small today with about two-dozen officers, which patrol the 13-square mile city. The man Palin appointed during her tenure to be the city's police chief, Charlie Fannon, later became a consultant and grant writer for Wasilla helping to oversee its major homeland security purchases, including the tower.

The extra funds Wasilla received for raising the tower are part of a boon of federal money awarded to the city aside from the grants already acquired from the Department of Homeland Security.

City budget documents show that Wasilla had a total operating budget in 2008 of $13.7 million. But it received for its small police department $986,643 in federal aid for radio repeaters and to outfit its patrol cars with wireless mobile computers, which connect to police headquarters and an emergency dispatch center.

Records also show that Wasilla was granted $4.2 million in federal earmarks last year from Congress for a pilot broadband communications project designed to link law enforcement and medical personnel together between Wasilla and the Mat-Su Borough allowing them to, among other things, transmit video and audio back and forth. Local officials say the project is one-of-a-kind in the state.

The city didn't expect to use any of its own money for those projects.

"There are so many applications, I think we're only limited by our creativity in the areas of homeland security, emergency response, EMS and fire," Fannon, the grants consultant, told the Daily News in 2005.

Wasilla is by no means the only rural, lightly populated Alaska town benefiting from the post-9/11 surge in federal largesse. The city of Whittier located 60 miles southeast of Anchorage has a population of about 175 people. But it boasts of attracting tourists and various cruise lines. It spent $28,400 in federal grants to purchase two SABRE 3000 Anthrax detectors, $24,000 on an "incident command vehicle" and $15,000 for two Kawasaki 4x4 ATVs with winches, state records show.

There's never been a reported case of Anthrax infection in Alaska history, according to the state's Department of Health and Social Services.

The western Alaska port city of Bethel, with fewer than 6,000 people, spent $6,287 to buy a "surveillance shotgun listening device," $44,000 on seven ATVs and $22,000 for video surveillance of its water treatment plant.

The fishing village of Dillingham in southwestern Alaska, which contains about 2,500 people, spent $2,050 on an "impact-resistant door" and $202,000 on a wireless surveillance system that blanketed its downtown and port areas with 80 cameras. The cameras so irked some local residents leery of government intrusion that the longtime mayor who pursued them, Chris Napoli, resigned under persistent criticism in 2006.

The borough that surrounds Wasilla, Matanuska-Susitna, also benefited from federal funds. It has more governmental responsibility than Wasilla overseeing schools and fire emergencies, for example. It is an area of south central Alaska about the size of West Virginia and has roughly 80,000 people.

According to an examination of state spending records, of the nearly $3 million it received in Homeland Security grants since 2003, the borough spent $66,200 to install surveillance cameras and a key-card entry system at two fire stations in Wasilla, $25,000 on infrared cameras, $14,277 on four laptops and $2,193 on 15 bullhorns. Borough officials also acquired a $410,000 mobile command communications vehicle specially outfitted with a four-wheel drive chassis to accommodate Alaska's rugged terrain, a conference room with a projector screen and an incinerator toilet, which operates without water.

Another $60,000 in grant funds was needed to outfit the new truck with interoperable radios that could reach the state's emergency communications system, and $70,769 more was spent installing a satellite system for Internet access and video conferences.

Dennis Brodigan, the borough's emergency services director, said in an interview with CIR that the fire department had trouble figuring out where to store the new command center, so now it's kept in a commercial building next door to a Wasilla firehouse. At least $9,000 in grant funds has covered leasing expenses so far, records show.

The Mat-Su Borough isn't without the threat of natural disasters. An area of the borough southwest of Wasilla known as Big Lake sustained one of the state's most destructive wildfires in 1996 that left hundreds of people without homes. In the late summer of 2006, major flooding downed bridges and washed out roads further north. The region is also vulnerable to seismic activity.

Brodigan said the truck would enable first responders to maintain connections with central command from distant corners of the region during emergencies.

"We get high winds about four times a year on the average," Brodigan said. "And when I say high winds I mean 80 and 100 miles an hour, and they don't come in and leave a few hours later. They stay for days. So everything we've bought so far will serve us not only for larger disasters but actually day in and day out."

The idea of buying the vehicle came in part from Palin's former police chief, Fannon, and was supposed to serve as an extension to a new emergency dispatch center Wasilla finished building in 2004, considered a major achievement of Palin's mayoral term along with the construction of a sports complex.

In the years immediately following 9/11, the Department of Homeland Security distributed some of its grants in equal proportions to states and based others on population. The actual likelihood of a terrorist attack occurring in one place over another wasn't a major consideration. Since that time, direct homeland security grants for Alaska have begun to diminish, which Brodigan admits is reasonable.

"I think the chance of this area having a 9/11-type event is remote compared to larger areas in the lower 48 and the different infrastructure down there," Brodigan said. "So I understand the cutback and I certainly agree with it."

Before then, however, the borough also purchased a $427,000 hazardous materials truck that serves as a mobile decontamination system and includes a computer program for plotting potentially deadly chemical plumes. It's kept at a fire station in downtown Wasilla. Another $325,000 in grants enabled the borough to obtain 92 digital radios that comply with the state's interoperable communications initiative.

In other instances, Wasilla found a way to finance public safety and law enforcement projects through additional types of non-local assistance, such as earmarks shepherded with the help of a Washington lobbyist the city hired while Palin was mayor.

Wasilla negotiated for two or three years with neighboring towns over a plan to consolidate dispatch services regionally. Until then, the city paid fees to nearby Palmer for the service but wanted greater control over the system, said former borough fire chief Jack Krill Sr.

When the issue of control could not be resolved Wasilla went its own way and created the Wasilla Regional Dispatch Center, or MatCom as it's known. It was built using a $1 million federal appropriation secured in 2001 before Palin left office. The earmark was in one of the first major appropriations bills signed by President Bush after the 9/11 attacks, known as the Combating Terrorism Act.

The city secured yet another $750,000 earmark the following year for the center from an omnibus appropriations bill, while $600,000 more in Justice Department grants later paid for the installation of a computer-aided dispatch system. Not to be outdone, neighboring Palmer joined the fray and won a similar amount in federal aid for its own computerized dispatch upgrades.

Jack Krill Jr., who became the borough's fire chief after his father retired but eventually left for a job in Idaho, said the community where he used to work "is not big enough to run millions of dollars into two different systems."

"It seemed like kind of a waste of money, because they were both doing their own software and they weren't necessarily compatible with each other," Krill said.

Another of Palin's accomplishments, the Wasilla Multi-Use Sports Complex, was financed with $14.7 million in bond sales authorized by local voters in 2002, but the city ended up paying $1.3 million more than expected following a land dispute. Officials had hoped from the beginning that it could double as an emergency evacuation facility, though there wasn't enough money available at the time, according to complex manager Bruce Urban.

So as governor, Palin last year secured a $630,000 appropriation from the state's budget allowing the complex to add on an industrial-sized kitchen and serve residents needing shelter if necessary. The funding led to charges that Palin was biased toward her hometown because elsewhere she'd made big spending cuts – including dozens of sports-related projects around Alaska, according to local press accounts.

Urban said that if a major disaster occurred in the area again, residents wouldn't need to fill up the local schools and prevent students from continuing classes. School buildings and churches were used to house victims of the Big Lake fire.

"Can we use [the kitchen] for purposes other than an evacuation shelter? Well, of course we can," Urban said. "We can use it for banquets, we can use it for luncheons, we can use it for a number of things."

Statewide, Alaska has also enjoyed the clout of two senior Republicans – Rep. Don Young and Sen. Ted Stevens – well known for delivering earmarks to their constituents that are frequently criticized as pork. Both have recently been mired in corruption probes; a jury found Stevens guilty this month of failing to report $250,000 in gifts. After Sept. 11, many such appropriations took on a new sense of urgency, expedited for the purpose of securing the homeland.

Congress made establishing interoperable communications between local, state and federal officials a top priority after 9/11, and the Alaska Land Mobile Radio system is considered one of the most advanced in the country, heavily backed by $80 million worth of earmarks written by Stevens into several defense appropriations bills.

Local authorities then used homeland security grants for digital equipment that allowed them to become subscribers to the network. About 3,000 national defense personnel stationed in the state are also today connected to it, said Heather Handyside, a deputy city manager for Anchorage who sat on an executive council overseeing the initiative.

In fact, Handyside, also Anchorage's former homeland security and emergency management director, faced grumbling from local emergency responders working inside the Anchorage municipality because she emphasized communications improvements with the city's own grant money while other areas indulged in bomb robots, boats and anti-ballistics apparel.

"I know a lot of communities were buying new rigs for responders, the fancy gadgets. … We were trying to do what we thought would make the most sense," Handyside said. " … I think in the early years it was such an incredible administrative process in terms of purchasing things and figuring out the grant procedures; that played a huge role in why things may have gotten muddled in the smaller communities, because it takes a level of administration that's maybe not there."

That wasn't the end of national security appropriations in Alaska. What began as a $100 million port overhaul in Anchorage before 9/11 has morphed into a $700 million expansion project presided over by a former governor, Bill Sheffield, who's well connected to Young and Stevens. Port officials say that more than half of the project's costs will be covered by federal funds, and at least $150 million has already been steered by Young and Stevens toward the project through defense, transportation and homeland security appropriations, according to the Daily News and the watchdog group Citizens Against Government Waste, which tracks earmarks.

Environmentalists complain that the project's large, new design could threaten beluga whale and salmon habitats located in the area because it calls for 135 acres of wetlands to be filled in. Proponents, however, argue the port's size is needed to better serve cruise ships and to stage the swift deployment of troops based in Alaska if needed.

"The port's important, we recognize that," said Bob Shavelson, executive director of the Anchorage environmental nonprofit Cook Inletkeeper. "But there's no demonstrated need for an expansion this size. … They've wrapped this project in a shroud of homeland security to legitimize it when in fact the project can't stand scrutiny."

When 2,000 competitors gathered in Alaska's Kenai Peninsula for the Arctic Winter Games two years ago, organizers realized they were facing a large budget deficit. Stevens saved the day again with a $500,000 earmark folded into a defense-spending bill that his office said included a fund for ensuring security at international sporting events like the Olympics. The federal government had already spent $5.2 million to help build out the peninsula's rural arctic infrastructure for the games and prepare its tiny regional airport for suddenly becoming a major point of entry by international travelers into the United States.

Tim Dillon, general manager of the games, said the $500,000 was used for "all homeland security related things" and explained that event coordinators had to brace for potential landslides and activity from the nearby Augustine Volcano, which began steaming during the competition.

"No only did we do a background check on every single volunteer but we needed to make sure that everything was secure," Dillon said. "You had 350 athletes being housed at Kenai High School – we had to make sure that there was no way an outsider could just go walking into that school and wind up in the sleeping quarters or bedroom or bathroom of the participants."

The group Taxpayers for Common Sense nonetheless designated the earmark as pork, as did one member of Congress in particular: Sen. John McCain of Arizona.

"The cumulative effect of these earmarks is the erosion of the integrity of the appropriations process, and by extension, our responsibility to the taxpayer," McCain said on the Senate floor in December of 2005 after listing each of the earmarks slipped into the bill by Stevens and other lawmakers.

Stevens has even found cash that allowed the U.S. Coast Guard to test pilotless Predator aircraft over Alaska's vast, minimally active airspace.

As for Don Young, an aide to the Alaska representative pleaded guilty to charges made by federal prosecutors last year that he formed an illegal relationship with convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

Prosecutors alleged that the aide, Mark Zachares, handed Abramoff privileged information about the 2002 creation of the Homeland Security Department, the largest reorganization of the federal government since World War II. Zachares hoped to eventually win a high-level position at DHS, according to the charging papers, and special knowledge of its inner workings could have benefited Abramoff's contractor clients.

Young remains under investigation today by the FBI for possible corruption, but it's not clear where that probe could go, though documents have already surfaced publicly showing a relationship between Abramoff and Young.

Anchorage resident Diane Benson launched two attempts as a Democrat to defeat Young in the last four years arguing that Alaska should expand social services and reach out to military families and veterans with the same zeal it displays in obtaining military contracts and financing for homeland security projects.

She surprised observers in 2006 by coming relatively close with 40 percent of the vote against Young, pounding on his associations with Abramoff clients. Benson lost a primary race this year but still managed to do the unthinkable for a former Green Party member – attract a sizable number of military votes.

"The oil boom brought in an influx of people and from that emerged a new politics," Benson, a former truck driver on the Alaska Pipeline, said of her home state. "This is what we've come to be – a state that is in some ways obsessed with money. The irony is you hear these strong individualistic notions in this state that we're fiercely proud of, and at the same time we're just sucking on the tit of the federal government."

An obscure nonprofit has flooded campaign battleground states with an inflammatory DVD on radical Islam. Critics say the charity is trying to influence the presidential race. NPR and CIR investigate who is behind it.

>> Listen to the story on NPR.org.

In this CIR television investigation, producer Oriana Zill de Granados reports on how terrorists use legal loopholes to obtain U.S. guns and ammunition. A companion story, "The Guns of Opa Locka," by Julia Reynolds and Jake Bergman appeared in The Nation.

Reporters Jake Bergman and Julia Reynolds uncover how terrorists can manipulate lax U.S. gun laws. This CIR investigation, a companion to "Gun Land" for NOW with Bill Moyers, focuses on the case of a retired U.S. military official who bought more than 800 MAK-90 semi-automatic rifles from a Florida gun store. U.S. Customs officials say the guns were bound for the FARC Guerilla movement in Colombia.

Reporter David Kaplan examines the FBI's investigations of more than 50 cases of terrorists suspected of plotting attacks in the United States. Kaplan reveals that the next wave of terrorism may come at the hands of easy to make chemical and biological weapons, which pose a more dangerous threat than those of famed unabomber Theodore Kaczynski.