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Coast Guard resources for protecting the environment fell in recent years

G.W. Schulz — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 13:07:52 -0700

A Coast Guard helicopter refuels during the response to Haiti’s January earthquake. Image by Petty Officer 2nd Class Etta Smith. The Coast Guard since 2005 has dedicated fewer and fewer resources to environmental protection, one of its myriad responsibilities that includes preventing oil spills like the BP catastrophe now making history in the Gulf of Mexico. A new report from the Department of Homeland Security’s watchdog inspector general says the number of resource hours committed annually by the Coast Guard to stopping perpetrators from dumping illegally into the ocean and otherwise halting the discharge of dangerous substances dropped in 2009, continuing a trend that’s lasted now for five years. Lawmakers mounted ever-increasing pressure on the Coast Guard to fight terrorism after Sept. 11 while also insisting that it maintain traditional duties the public is more familiar with, among them plucking citizens from raging floodwaters and rescuing boaters stranded at sea. Resource hours dedicated to search and rescue have also dipped since 2001, although that particular mission depends on how many people actually need help. Energy devoted to the Coast Guard’s so-called “homeland security missions,” which include things like securing the nation’s ports and stopping undocumented migrants from entering the United States, have increased markedly since the 9/11 hijackings. The federal government defines “resource hours” as the amount of time aircraft are in flight and ships are in the water carrying out specific missions. More of those hours were spent by the Coast Guard in 2009 protecting the nation’s ports, waterways and coastlines from “maritime security threats” than anything else. Marine environmental protection has been at the bottom of the Coast Guard’s several missions for at least four years when using resource hours as a measurement. The IG is required by Congress to report on the division of resource hours annually. Actual incidents involving the spillage of oil and other dangerous chemicals were declining prior to the BP disaster, which may account at least in part for the fact that such environmental hazards were “not at the top of the list,” as a retired Coast Guard captain described it to the Washington Post recently. The Post published an assessment of the Coast Guard Aug. 13 and pointed out that its inspectors relied on decades-old regulations when they visited offshore drilling rigs to ensure workers were adequately protected and units were seaworthy:

Since the Deepwater Horizon blowout in the Gulf of Mexico, investigations into oversight gaps have focused on systemic problems within the Interior Department’s Minerals Management Service, which in recent weeks has been renamed and revamped. But the Coast Guard, which shared oversight with MMS, has largely escaped scrutiny. … Some analysts said the spill highlights the need to rethink Coast Guard priorities. In the past 35 years, Congress has handed the agency at least 27 new responsibilities, according to a tally by Rep. James L. Oberstar (D-Minn.), chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. ‘They just don’t have enough personnel to carry out all those missions,’ said Oberstar, who favors severing the Coast Guard from the Homeland Security Department. ‘That’s just not possible.’

Elevated Risk reported in May that budget plans by the Obama administration called for cutting $75 million and hundreds of personnel from the Coast Guard. That included decommissioning a strike force coordination center in North Carolina, which provides support to specialized teams in charge of handling oil spills and the release of other hazardous materials. Coast Guard officials promise the center’s responsibilities will be taken over by offices elsewhere and not abandoned. Members of a key Senate subcommittee that controls the federal government’s purse strings nonetheless complained in a July report that the Coast Guard’s obligation to protect the environment “has been diluted by the increased demands of other homeland security missions.” The panel noted a 45 percent drop overall in mission hours dedicated to marine environmental responses since Sept. 11.

Obama’s proposed 2011 budget also sought an increase in funding of more than $45 million for the Coast Guard to battle drug traffickers, a homeland security mission, while its search-and-rescue functions, considered a “non-homeland security mission,” was scheduled to lose almost $50 million over the previous year. But many of the Coast Guard’s high-profile response missions in recent months had nothing to do with the drug war. Coast Guard men and women were among the earliest to arrive in January when a colossal earthquake turned Haiti’s Port-au-Prince into near rubble. Its personnel were there to free motorists and homeowners trapped during torrential May floods in Tennessee. It remains the face of Washington’s response to the Deepwater Horizon explosion that killed 11 people before launching an unforgettable environmental tragedy. Recently retired Adm. Thad Allen likes to remind the public that all of these doubtlessly heroic episodes were carried out despite the Coast Guard having one of the oldest fleets in the world. He said during a February speech that two water vessels were forced to abandon the Haiti relief effort for emergency repairs and aircraft were diverted to help supply repair parts rather than participate in evacuations. One of the Coast Guard’s leading preoccupations for several years now has been a gigantic, multibillion-dollar campaign to modernize its aging ships and aircraft and purchase advanced technologies. Known as Deepwater, Allen doesn’t always emphasize publicly for obvious reasons that the program has suffered from serious allegations of poor contractor oversight, mismanagement and waste. The bungled handling of Deepwater has since made pleas from senior leaders for more money a tougher sell even as many acknowledge that the rank-and-file are being asked to do too much. Allen himself eventually conceded that the Coast Guard relied excessively on large defense contractors to direct Deepwater, but not before the program endured costly setbacks.

Federal initiative fails to warm cold cases

CIR Staff — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 00:29:00 -0700

Reporter Ben Greenberg talks to the hosts of The Takeaway, a national online news program, about a 2007 federal initiative to investigate and solve "cold case" murders from the civil rights era, and why so few cases are being pursued. Listen to the program:

Dirty Business takes to the road in Kansas

Peter Bull — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 00:01:00 -0700

This August DIRTY BUSINESS joined the debate over coal-fired electricity in Kansas. We held two screenings timed to coincide with a public comment and hearing process opened by the Kansas Department of Health and Environment (KDHE) about expansion of the Holcomb Station power plant in the western part of the state. Sunflower Electric Power Corporation has proposed to expand its existing 360 megawatt (MW) coal plant, built in 1983, to 895 MW, enough to meet the power needs of 448,000 households. Proponents of Sunflower’s expansion cite the need to update the old, existing plant and to meet the growing load requirement in Kansas and the region. Opponents argue that Kansas has the nation’s second-best wind resource and that, in the long run, renewable energy and increased energy efficiency can meet energy requirements at lower cost to ratepayers and to the environment. Moreover, local critics point out that only about 200 MW of the expanded plant’s power would remain in Kansas – the rest would be exported to electric cooperatives in Colorado and Texas. The screenings took place on August 9^th in Lawrence, Kan. and August 11^th in Wichita and were organized by Working Films. The Kansas chapter of the Sierra Club, the Great Plains Alliance for Clean Energy (GPACE) and Films for Action of Lawrence helped draw the audience. “We saw a lot of new faces in the crowd, especially in Lawrence,” said Stephanie Cole of Sierra Club Kansas. “Sometimes we feel like we’re preaching to the choir, but we were thrilled that the film brought out these new people who are interested in the issues.” Tim Hjersted of Films for Action did a great job promoting the screening in Lawrence and some 100 people turned out. Many stayed for a Q & A session afterwards with Stephanie and Scott Allegrucci of GPACE, in which they discussed the Sunflower coal plant situation and how folks could participate in the permitting process. The Wichita screening had a good turnout on short notice, as well. Stephanie Cole: “People I spoke with liked that the film looked at the entire lifecycle of coal vs. only covering one aspect of coal, such as mining. One person also commented to me that it was encouraging to see folks outside of Kansas who are also opposing coal plants. I had requests from folks for a copy of the film. People are interested in showing the film to community groups in Wichita, as well as hosting house parties.” Pete Ferrell of Energy for Generations (E4G), a rancher and operator of the Elk River Wind Project who appears in DIRTY BUSINESS, was on hand for a Q & A session following the Wichita screening. Pete said that, “Most of the people I talked to who saw the film reacted much the same way Jeff Goodell did when he first saw an open-pit coal mine: incredulous. The impact is a bit overwhelming. ‘Do we still depend on a filthy 19^th century energy source in the 21^st century?’” According to a Sierra Club Kansas report, Holcomb will burn 4,712,500 tons of Wyoming coal per year, sending upwards of $100 Million to Wyoming mines and railroads. However, as described in the permit application, emissions from the expanded Holcomb facility – including mercury and nitrogen oxide, a precursor to ozone - would be far greater than emissions from many coal-fired plants today. Local press reported that about the same number of people who saw DIRTY BUSINESS turned out for a public comment meeting held in Garden City, near the site of the Holcomb coal plant, the afternoon of August 9^th. Kansas Department of Health and Environment (KDHE) officials heard from both sides as they considered whether to approve the electric company's air quality construction permit. Proponents of the plant expansion, like Seward County Commissioner Jim Rice, said the coal plant would generate jobs and an export economy. (Sunflower claims that 1,900 would be employed for construction and 70 would be hired as full-time employees.) "How I look at the coal plant is it is a new wealth industry," Rice told the Southwest Times. “The way I look at that is it would bring money in from out-of-state and an export of electricity.” Opponents were mainly concerned about the deterioration of air quality that would inevitably result from the new facility. Others, like James Cottrell, worried about the further depletion of ground water resources in Western Kansas, and he told the officials that approving the plant would be a step back in the development of alternative energy sources. "Global warming is real," Cottrell said. "We cannot continue making decisions on our energy future without taking global warming into account. Not if we want to preserve our planet for future generations. All of us share a responsibility for limiting CO2 emissions. We can't put this off until tomorrow because tomorrow has already come." Other KDHE-sponsored public meetings were held in Salina and Overland Park before the public comment period ended August 15^th. Video of comments by proponents and opponents alike can be viewed at the Kansas WatchDog site. Read the original blog post here.

Tension over Obama Policies within Immigration and Customs Enforcement

Suzanne Yada — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 14:19:12 -0700

As it poises for further immigration initiatives, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is struggling with festering internal divisions between political appointees and career officials over how to enforce laws and handle detainees facing deportation. Read full article here View original memo from ICE

ICE deporting more immigrants than ever... or are they?

Andrew Becker — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 13:46:35 -0700

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials and the Obama administration have repeatedly said this summer that the agency is on track to meet its stated goal -- or what its budget allows for: to remove about 400,000 people from the country this year. The number, officials say, indicates that ICE is tougher than ever on immigration. The agency projected, however, to be "well under" that goal about halfway through the fiscal year -- at a rate 20 percent below the year before. Reaching 400,000, therefore, would be an achievement. As of August 2nd, the agency had removed 310,013 people, about 90,000 removals shy of its 400,000 projection with two months left in the fiscal year. In the final two months of last fiscal year, the agency removed a little more than 67,000 people. A review of ICE's own figures, as posted on the agency's web site, shows that the most removals in any month in the last four fiscal years, including FY2010 to date, is slightly more than 39,000. This year in only three months -- October, November and June -- have ICE removals exceeded the same month in FY2009. So, is or isn't ICE on pace to reach 400,000? ICE spokesman Brian P. Hale wrote in an email:

At this point in time indications are that we will meet or exceed our overall removal numbers from last year. The caveat is that criminal removals take longer to complete and the average length of stay (in detention) is longer too. So the lag time (in reporting the statistics) can take a few months.

Last year, ICE removed nearly 390,000 people. Including the "lag" from FY 2008, the agency removed 389,834 individuals. Excluding the lag, the agency removed 387,790. The latest figures -- as of Aug. 23 -- show ICE has removed a total of 343,883 people, of which 167,742 are convicted criminals, Hale said. That means the agency has deported more noncriminals -- 176,141, to be precise -- than criminals so far this year. A month earlier -- as of July 22 -- the agency' figures showed total removals at 292,663. The record the Obama administration is setting is the removal of criminals, as ICE expects to have a significantly higher number of criminal removals than last year, Hale said. Many of those people have been found through a program that enables local law enforcement to identify immigrants with criminal records who are in their custody. The program, dubbed Secure Communities, has been criticized for sweeping up noncriminals despite the stated goal of targeting the "worst of the worst" criminals. Overall, the Obama administration seems hard-pressed to please anyone when it comes to immigration. As the rhetoric heats up this political season, the right has hammered the White House for being soft on immigration enforcement while the left has slammed Obama and ICE for being too tough. John Morton, the agency chief, just says the administration is putting more people into immigration proceedings than ever before. But some telling shifts may be happening. ICE has begun a review of all cases in immigration courts, and in some instances is dropping efforts to deport illegal immigrants and legal residents who have committed minor crimes. Morton also issued a memo recently instructing ICE attorneys and immigration officials to dismiss deportation charges in certain situations where, among other concerns, the person has properly requested to stay in the country, and has an application or petition that appears eligible for approval. The issue at hand addressed in the latest Morton memo is the growing backlog -- nearly 250,000 -- in the nation's immigration courts. Morton points out in the memo that in July 2009 there were roughly 17,000 removal cases held up in immigration courts because of pending applications. A version of this story also appeared on the Huffington Post.

Corrupt customs employee sentenced to 20 years in prison

Andrew Becker — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 14:04:23 -0700

Martha Garnica was sentenced to 20 years in prison.
Photo: Department of Homeland Security

EL PASO — A veteran customs employee who pleaded guilty to drug trafficking, human smuggling and bribery charges was sentenced today to 20 years in prison by a Federal District Judge. Martha Alicia Garnica, 43, was also ordered to pay a fine of $5,000 and supervised release for four years once released from prison. Judge David Briones denied prosecutors' request for Garnica to forfeit $1 million. Garnica, who pleaded guilty in May, choked back tears in the courtroom as she apologized to several family members in attendance, the government and the judge. About two dozen federal agents sat in the courtroom as the sentence was handed down. Garnica conspired with drug traffickers to import more than 200 pounds of marijuana between April and November 2009. Garnica and a co-defendant also paid bribes totaling $5,500 to a Customs and Border Protection officer to allow drugs and an illegal immigrant into the country. The inspector, in turn, cooperated with federal internal affairs agents in the investigation. Hired as customs inspector in February 1997, Garnica became a CBP officer when DHS formed in 2003. Since March 2008 she had been a technician assigned to an El Paso-area border crossing. Three other defendants received prison sentences, ranging from two years to a little more than five years. A fourth defendant was murdered in February in Juarez.

A new perspective on tragedy from your living room

G.W. Schulz — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 00:23:35 -0700

In journalism school, our professors were fond of reminding us that perspective is essential. It’s not always enough to simply report that tens of thousands of people had their lives upended by a tornado in south-central Oklahoma. How many is 15,000 or 26,000 or 367,000 people? Maybe there’s a sports stadium in the newspaper’s coverage area and readers would better understand the story if they knew the storm’s survivors could fill every seat plus the skyboxes. Take the recent catastrophe that hammered Pakistan. Authorities from the United Nations and the Pakistani government say floodwaters have left as many as six million people without homes. If true, that’s nearly enough disaster victims to replace every single resident in the U.S. cities of Los Angeles, Sacramento, San Francisco and San Diego. Combined. Have you ever been to San Francisco? There are people everywhere. You can’t escape them. The BBC of London has taken this valuable journalism exercise and turned it into an online public-service tool driven not by reporters but readers themselves. Found at Howbigreally.com, the Dimensions project allows you to take the geographic breadth of a major event and place it over a map of where you live or work with the help of satellite images. The best example there now is the segment of Pakistan believed to be affected by the deluge. We overlayed it with the San Francisco Bay Area where the Center for Investigative Reporting is located (see first image). By typing in our main office’s zip code, we could instantly see that the flooding reached far into Oregon at its northern tip and well past California’s southern border with Mexico at the base. Or, to look at it another way, driving the length of the damage would take roughly 13 hours. “We want to bring home the human scale of events and places in history,” the project’s site says. “Dimensions is part of the BBC’s continual experimentation in trying to find new ways to communicate history.” Unfortunately, there’s no embed option, so we had to use screen shots here instead of interactive versions you could play with. But check out the numerous other events they’re making available for you to visualize in entirely new ways. How big are the footprints of the Twin Towers in your neighborhood? Is a deep-sea trawler net used by commercial fishermen and banned in some parts of the world big enough to drag away your local corner store and maybe a few neighbors or a rec center? An extraordinarily giant mass of trash swirling endlessly in the Pacific Ocean is big enough to cover the entire southwestern United States with plenty of room to spare. Of course, there’s a Gulf oil spill mapping option, too. A service like this could potentially contain all kinds of accuracy issues. We’re not professional cartographers to begin with, and debate continues over how far oil in the Gulf has actually spread. But Dimensions at least begins to help anyone interested develop a stronger grasp of one moment in time that may otherwise seem worlds removed from the average American. Image credits: British Broadcasting Corporation

Lawmakers continue to voice concerns over whole-body imagers

G.W. Schulz — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 12:24:47 -0700

It wasn't a lead story when scientists from the University of California at San Francisco first publicly expressed their unease earlier this year about the possible negative health effects caused by full-body airport scanners now being used across the United States to stop explosives from making it onto jet airliners. By then the Transportation Security Administration had largely managed to remove itself from headlines announcing privacy complaints some were making about the devices, which allow security screeners to see underneath the clothing of passengers unlike traditional metal detectors. Powerful members of Congress have since begun to throw their weight behind the issue, however, threatening to place whole-body imagers back in the spotlight as the federal government continues to spend tens of millions on them, much of it from economic stimulus dollars. This month Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, ranking member of a key committee that oversees the Department of Homeland Security, sent a letter to Secretary Janet Napolitano raising questions about the federal government’s decision in May to purchase 100 more scanning devices, particularly those using so-called “backscatter X-ray” technology. Joined by fellow GOP senators Tom Coburn (Okla.) and Richard Burr (N.C.), Collins requested that the department’s chief medical officer and a group of independent experts review the health impacts of full-body scanners on airline travelers, employees of the Transportation Security Administration and other airport personnel. The trio wants homeland security officials to find out what happens as a result of repeated exposure to radiation from the machines. “Please explain why the department continues to purchase this technology when legitimate concerns about its safety appear to remain unanswered,” they wrote. The four medical experts at UCSF warn that whole-body imagers could subject the skin to “dangerously high” doses of radiation because of the unique technology used. They’re worried certain travelers may be particularly vulnerable to emissions from the scanners including seniors, women prone to breast cancer, expectant mothers and children for which the impact hasn’t been fully evaluated. Their own April 6 letter to President Obama’s top science advisor says independent safety data on the devices do not exist to determine if radiation damage is occurring. The UCSF scientists are hardly first-year med students. One is a biophysicist, while another is an internationally known cancer expert. Three are members of the National Academy of Sciences. According to their letter:

Crises create a sense of urgency that frequently leads to hasty decisions where unintended consequences are not recognized. Examples include the failure of the [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] to recognize the risk of blood transfusions in the early stages of the AIDS epidemic, approval of drugs and devices by the [Food and Drug Administration] without sufficient review, and improper standards set by the [Environmental Protection Agency], to name a few.

The more recent crisis they’re referring to is the failed Christmas Day bombing when would-be radical Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab allegedly tried to blow up a Northwest Airlines flight on its way to Detroit. That set off a campaign to more rapidly implement full-body scanning at airports around the globe, including several in the United States and those in the Netherlands and Nigeria where Abdumutallab reportedly boarded connecting flights with explosives hidden in his underwear. One maker of whole-body imagers, California-based OSI Systems, has since begun boasting to investors about the surge in demand reporting that total orders stood at $50 million worth as of mid-May. Authorities in Great Britain also announced this year following the attempted attack that they would be purchasing scanners from the company. Meanwhile, federal officials have been able to quell some grievances over privacy associated with the machines by promising the flying public that images generated from them would not be stored or transmitted. Security officers also review the images in a separate room preventing workers from seeing the actual passenger, TSA says. Those assurances haven’t stopped some briefly high-profile and even bizarre incidents from occurring. A whole-body imager in May led to one situation seemingly worse than any dreadful scenario a privacy advocate could dream up as evidence against their use. The Smoking Gun obtained a police report showing that an airport screener had beat his co-worker with a baton causing “bruises and abrasions” after he was teased relentlessly by fellow security officers for having a small penis. How were they familiar with the size of his genitals? It was revealed during a training session involving an X-ray scanner. The man “stated he could not take the jokes anymore and lost his mind,” according to the report. Sen. Collins had already been asking the Department of Homeland Security why it wasn’t using whole-body scanners like those deployed in Amsterdam that rely on software to automatically detect the presence of dangerous items on flyers as they pass through security gates. That way screeners don’t need to review detailed images or conduct further inspection unless the program alerts them to a possible threat. She wrote in a separate mid-April letter to the department that Amsterdam’s scanning machines are faster at moving travelers past security and they also prevent passengers and screeners from being exposed to radiation.

While no technology is 100 percent effective at detecting dangerous items, the Dutch officials we talked to expressed confidence that there was a high probability that this technology would have detected Abdulmutallab’s concealed explosives. We wanted to bring this technology to your attention because it appears to offer a solution to the significant privacy concerns that have been raised about DHS’s deployment of whole-body imaging machines in the United States.

The letter was co-signed by senators Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) and Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.). Flickr image courtesy Mad House Photography.

How did spiced rum become a homeland security threat in the Caribbean?

G.W. Schulz — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 13:02:18 -0700

Flickr image of St. John in the Virgin Islands courtesy Snap Man. Virtually everything today is in one way or another a potential danger to U.S. national security. There are foreign terrorists, of course. Beyond that authorities cite drug cartels, downturns in the economy, espionage, street gangs, counterfeit goods, right-wing militias, left-wing environmentalists and the multiple personalities of Mother Nature. Beautiful Caribbean locales, on the other hand, face their own hazards. For the Virgin Islands, one of several U.S. territories many Americans forget have deep historical, political and economic ties to the mainland, it’s apparently adult beverages and “Puerto Rican terrorists” that together form a feasible threat. First, background. The story begins with daiquiri-addicted Americans who love the taste of sweet rum at home and while away visiting sun-drenched vacation resorts. More specifically, it’s the Spring Break love potion known as Captain Morgan, manufactured by a company called Diageo PLC, the U.K.-based conglomerate behind such intoxicating substances as Guinness beer and Smirnoff vodka. Certain rums like Captain Morgan are produced in vast Caribbean distilleries. From there the story leads to a monthly magazine called Homeland Security Today, which, at the risk of offending those fine folks, would not be easily mistaken for the New Yorker and certainly won’t be appearing next to Cosmo at the check-out stand anytime soon. Its readers are narrowly focused, many of them government contractors and bureaucrats, so an intriguing revelation within its pages could slip by without much notice. The June issue of Homeland Security Today contained a feature from its editor, David Silverberg, who described changes the Virgin Islands have been making to better prepare for catastrophes and build a stronger culture of emergency management. Established as a U.S. territory in 1917, the cluster of stunning beaches and seaside hills is by no means free from peril, despite what travel brochures suggest. Droughts can occur on the Virgin Islands due to a dependence on limited rainwater, in addition to the possibility of hurricanes, tropical storms, earthquakes and tsunamis. Plus, hundreds of thousands of barrels of crude oil are refined on the island of Saint Croix every day, Silverberg writes. But emergency managers in the Virgin Islands didn’t emphasize any of these scenarios when they developed a response exercise last year to challenge the area’s preparedness capabilities. Instead, according to a brief sidebar from Silverberg headlined “Rum and radicals,” they came up with a narrative seemingly capable of causing diplomatic problems by pretending that a group of Puerto Rican terrorists called “The People’s Hope” planned to attack facilities on the islands with improvised explosive devices. Puerto Rico is also a U.S. territory located not far west in the Caribbean. Why Puerto Rico? The response exercise leads back to rum, Silverberg implies. An ambitious governor of the Virgin Islands who took office in 2007 but went to school in Ohio, John deJongh, persuaded Diageo, parent of Captain Morgan, to move its rum-making operations from Puerto Rico to his tropical destination. DeJongh did so by promising massive subsidies to Diageo, but the departure would also cost Puerto Rico jobs and tens of millions in tax revenue.
View Trouble in paradise in a larger map Officials in the Virgin Islands argue that Diageo planned to head elsewhere with Captain Morgan anyway, but the perception of a coup enraged the Puerto Rican community, both on the island and the mainland. This summer a group that coordinates New York City’s annual Puerto Rican Day Parade rejected Diageo as a sponsor following a years-long relationship between the two. Rum taxes collected from the drink’s sale to consumers in the United States are administered by the federal government, so Washington found itself at the center of an ugly political clash over the fate of Captain Morgan. Leaders in the Virgin Islands planned to use those rum taxes to lure Diageo eastward, while advocates for Puerto Rico sought to stop what they characterized as a bailout for the company and keep production where it’s been for more than two decades. The whole thing is now known as the “rum wars.” There are reported racial tensions as well. The Congressional Black Caucus has actively defended deJongh’s campaign in Washington, while Puerto Rico is linked politically with Hispanic lawmakers. So now consider in that context not only what’s regarded by one side as a drive to “poach” jobs and income needed for public services, but also an exercise for emergency responders in which one government refers to the citizens of a nearby government as terrorists. According to Homeland Security Today:

The scenario was fictional and intended mainly to test areas of responsibility and jurisdiction among island responders – but the real resentment continues. As recently as April, deJongh was fighting legislative efforts in Congress to nullify the deal and keep Captain Morgan rum in Puerto Rico.

Aggressive lobbying under the capitol dome is one thing. But are Puerto Ricans aware that the folks next door have imagined them as something far worse? The rum wars may in the end serve as a larger commentary about the use of labels in the global war on terror.

Backlog of immigration cases reaches new height under Obama

G.W. Schulz — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 11:20:38 -0700

The United States has again broken its previous record for the number of immigration cases waiting to be resolved by a federal court judge. There were nearly 248,000 cases pending by the middle of June this year, a whopping 33 percent higher than where the figure stood at the end of fiscal year 2008. The latest numbers come courtesy of researchers at Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, which specializes in federal law enforcement statistics. TRAC also found that the average length of time it’s taken to conclude immigration cases during 2010 reached 459 days, a number higher than any year since at least 1998. By state, California remains the leader in average wait times with more than 640 days. One hearing location in San Diego posted an extraordinary average wait time of nearly 1,300 days, or to put it another way, more than three years. Experts attribute the enormous backlog of immigration cases to a list of possible factors. First, the number of judges available to hear immigration cases is declining, and as of March, one out of every six such positions was unfilled. Just five immigration judges have been sworn in since that time. “[The federal government] still has a very long way to go to fill existing judge vacancies,” according to TRAC. Second, immigration enforcement in one region of the country over another may be changing, which could lead to a greater number of cases that judges are suddenly required to contend with. New proceedings have actually gone down somewhat during the 2010 fiscal year nationwide. But new matters that required attention from an immigration court reached all-time highs in 2009. Individual courts in Texas, Nevada, Illinois and Arizona, meanwhile, saw the number of pending cases accumulate rapidly during the first none months of this year, from 37 percent in Phoenix to as high as 67 percent in Harlingen, Texas. Illustrating the amount of pressure faced by politicians in Washington on the issue of illegal immigration, a bill pumping $600 million into increased border security easily passed both the House and Senate last week before Obama signed it Aug. 13. The White House first requested more money for border security from Congress earlier this summer when Obama committed to sending 1,200 National Guard troops to the southwest following complaints by high-profile elected officials that the federal government wasn’t doing enough there. The money will also be used to build new Border Patrol stations and acquire unmanned surveillance aircraft. But as we’ve noted before, hiring personnel to fight drug traffickers and illegal border crossers costs taxpayers a fortune. After factoring in background checks, fitness evaluations, night-vision goggles, uniforms, mobile radios and more, Customs and Border Protection estimated last year that the cost of each new hire is about $160,000. If correct, that would put the price tag of taking on 1,000 new border-patrol agents at $160 million. Under former President Bush, the number of law-enforcement officers carrying out patrol activities on the border grew to nearly 19,000 nationally by April 2009 from about 12,000 just a few years before. Bush also sought to dramatically scale back the federal government’s policy of releasing people charged with immigration violations until a court hearing could be held. That led to a jump in the expense needed to keep them in detention. The Department of Homeland Security has in addition already spent $800 million on the troubled SBInet program, an attempt to line the nation’s border with surveillance devices capable of alerting authorities to the presence of border crossers. But SBInet has so far failed to meet expectations and is under review. Senior homeland security officials will face the difficulty of finding reliable border agents as they embark on a new recruitment drive. The department’s watchdog inspector general had 230 corruption cases under its purview last year, in part because drug traffickers have succeeded at bribing some border agents. The FBI had more than 110 border-related cases during that time. Customs and Border Protection has added over 200 internal affairs agents since 2006. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano spoke with NewsHour on PBS last week about border security. During the interview she was asked to comment on a statement made by Arizona’s two GOP senators, John McCain and Jon Kyl, who said the latest measure from Congress “is a start.” They complained nonetheless that it still didn’t include enough for more customs inspectors in some parts of their home state. Her response:

What we want to make sure that we do is, don’t just throw money at the border, but do things that make sense, do things that are efficient, and establish control along that whole 2,000-mile-long border. And as we do that, let’s make sure that we’ve got the right mix – the right mix of manpower, the right mix of technology, the right mix of infrastructure.

Figures in chart courtesy Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse.

On the government's growing obsession with Hollywood-style command centers

G.W. Schulz — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 12:39:16 -0700

Image: North American Aerospace Defense Command It’s one of the most powerful addictions formed by government since the Sept. 11 hijackings. Blooming in every corner of the country are high-tech command facilities for fighting terrorism, battling crime linked to national security, coordinating disaster responses, enhancing infrastructure protection and more. The desire for them is insatiable, and Congress seems ever the enabler. Some existed prior to the attacks and received an injection of cash when new, massive spending on homeland security by Washington exploded. Others were created following 9/11 to address every hazard imaginable. Many of these coordination and intelligence centers are not unlike how action-film directors portray them. There are banks of monitors with analysts working behind three or four panels each, large screens on the wall tuned to cable news networks or weather feeds, lights bleeping from server racks and, of course, lots of maps. Always lots of maps. The only thing missing is a chain-smoking character actor determinedly leading the response to total pandemonium as it rages outside. Keeping track of the centers turns out to be extraordinarily difficult. It’s never clear where one overlaps with or replaces another. There’s the National Response Coordination Center, the National Operations Center, the Terrorist Screening Center, the National Counterterrorism Center, the Transportation Security Operations Center (aka the “Freedom Center”), the Transportation Security Information Sharing and Analysis Center, the Secret Service’s National Threat Assessment Center, the Coast Guard Intelligence Coordination Center, the National Maritime Intelligence Center, the National Vessel Movement Center, the National Hazardous Materials Fusion Center, the Human Smuggling and Trafficking Center, the Bulk Cash Smuggling Center, the National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Center, the International Organized Crime Intelligence and Operations Center and the National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center. That’s a partial list.
View Center of the world in a larger map A sample array of intelligence and coordination centers located in or around the nation’s capital. Click on the tabs to learn more. The Department of Homeland Security also spent more than $250 million over a three-year period helping to build 70 local police fusion centers where authorities trade information about terrorists, natural disasters, threats to public health and everyday crime (it used to be just terrorists, but the expense proved difficult to justify). Last year’s homeland security appropriations bill contained over 80 earmarks totaling almost $52 million for so-called emergency operations centers located in dozens of communities across the country, from the city of Green Cove Springs in Florida to the city of White Fish in Montana (estimated combined population – about 15,000). Officials say EOCs are necessary for coordinating disaster response and recovery. Then there’s the National Biodefense Analysis and Countermeasures Center, not to be confused with the National Biosurveillance Integration Center. The first determines what dangers we face if biological agents fall into the hands of terrorists. The second center’s annual budget is about $8 million. Officials who work on preparedness issues elsewhere in government told congressional investigators last year they weren’t sure if it “contributed anything to the federal biosurveillance community that other agencies were not already accomplishing,” according to a December 2009 report. Passage of a law in 2007 that implemented leftover recommendations from the 9/11 Commission led to the establishment of the biosurveillance integration center. Its job is to analyze biothreat data flowing in from “partner” agencies and to send out an alert if disturbing trends or events are detected. At least that’s its job on paper. The center’s “partners,” interviewed by the Government Accountability Office, expressed “widespread uncertainty and skepticism” about its purpose and responsibilities. Its partners include the Department of Health and Human Services and the Environmental Protection Agency. Others complained that during the response to H1N1, the center “was not able to demonstrate that it had unique value to add.” Some said they’d rather deal with another of the many centers available, namely the Department of Homeland Security’s National Operations Center. There were even worries that the biosurveillance center would fail to accurately interpret data and end up mass distributing ill-informed reports. Interviewees said they were concerned “that [the center’s] lack of contextual sophistication could lead to confusion, a greater volume of unnecessary communication in the biosurveillance environment, or even panic.” In other words, an overabundance of centers could lead to the very shockwaves from non-existent impending doom that we fear. To be certain, the risks involved shouldn’t be dismissed as science fiction. Experts say the outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in the U.K. during 2001 led to billions of dollars in losses suffered by the food and agricultural industries. If perpetrators actually figured out a way to spread deadly biological agents over, say, a large vacation resort, it would cause unbelievable tragedy and no doubt send tremors through the economy. The Obama administration is training postal workers to distribute treatments if something like anthrax is loosed into the air. But the GAO learned that federal agencies responsible for transmitting essential data to the biosurveillance center aren’t doing so with enthusiasm, leaving it to rely in part on publicly available information, which includes news stories. The center’s “partners” also weren’t detailing personnel there with enough expertise to make it effective in rapidly detecting biological threats. The National Biosurveillance Integration Center isn’t alone in its troubles. Federal drug enforcement officials created the El Paso Intelligence Center (EPIC) all the way back in the 1970s to collect, analyze and share information about narcotics traffickers and border violence. More than 20 agencies have representatives there. Yet requests for information from its own federal partners, some of them critical, have declined substantially in recent years, the Justice Department’s watchdog inspector general concluded in a June report. Its ability to coordinate with state and federal bureaucracies “is inconsistent,” the report said. And the center did not keep an up-to-date list of all the other intelligence and fusion centers it should have ties with, nor did EPIC know if it had users in each of those facilities. The following quote, however, seems to say the most about the rise of such centers:

When we compared EPIC with other multi-agency centers having counterdrug intelligence responsibilities, we found increasing potential for overlap in certain areas. … With the emergence of new centers and EPIC’s expansion into program areas that were not addressed [in earlier planning], there is an increased likelihood for duplication of effort among the centers.

If only the federal government would create a command center for processing Freedom of Information Act requests. At least then there would be a single institution to hold accountable.

Obama End-Run Amnesty Claim Is 'Nuts,' Immigration Official Says

Andrew Becker — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 07:44:22 -0700

A high-ranking immigration official brushed off claims that the Obama administration wants to make an end-run around Congress to grant amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants, saying the notion is "nuts." Roxana Bacon, the top attorney at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, said that many of the administrative remedies outlined in a leaked draft memo she co-wrote are concepts that had been floating around the agency, which oversees legal immigration, for years. The memo caused a backlash among Republicans, who asserted it was proof that the Obama administration is looking for a "backdoor amnesty plan." Bacon, who became USCIS chief counsel last October, explained that the memo is only a snapshot of a long conversation and represents government at its best: deliberative and open-minded. "The ideas are not new ideas, and came out of many different sources: Congress, advocacy groups, academia and within government itself," she said. "It's only a collection of ideas, not a final determination." Speaking last Friday on a panel at the American Bar Association's annual meeting in San Francisco, Bacon made her first public statements about the memo, titled "Administrative Alternatives to Comprehensive Immigration Reform." Bacon and three other officials sent the draft in April to the agency's director, Alejandro Mayorkas, according to news reports. The unadopted memo outlines potential administrative fixes to immigration law if Congress doesn't pass new legislation. Among them is a form of immigration "relief" to exercise discretion to delay -- even indefinitely -- deportation. Here's how the officials introduce the draft:

This memorandum offers administrative relief options to promote family unity, foster economic growth, achieve significant process improvements and reduce the threat of removal for certain individuals present in the United States without authorization. It includes recommendations regarding implementation timeframes and required resources.

Although the need for comprehensive immigration reform is frequently mentioned, Congress has not seriously debated the controversial topic since 2007. Chances appear slim that legislators will take up the matter in an election year. Nevertheless, the immigration issue has heated up in recent months as states, such as Arizona and Virginia, have waded into the debate. Meanwhile, criminal immigration prosecution and deportation levels under the Obama administration rival or surpass those during the Bush era, according to recent reports by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University. Republicans have nonetheless blasted the White House for being lenient on illegal immigrants and lax on border security. Figures posted by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Homeland Security Department arm that detains and deports immigrants, show that the agency's removal numbers for the first nine months of Fiscal Year 2010 are down by nearly 9,000 compared to the same time period last year. TRAC notes in its report that delays in recording can result in preliminary FY 2010 figures missing some cases, making comparisons between 2009 and 2010 year-to-date unreliable. Lucas Guttentag, director of the American Civil Liberties Union Immigrants' Rights Project and a co-panelist with Bacon, said that the memo illustrates that the Obama administration is thoughtfully considering modest steps to address some of the "perverse aspects of immigration law." Obtained by Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, the 11-page memo outraged Republicans, who said it showed the Obama administration was trying to sneak around Congress to give amnesty for the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants living in the United States. The memo became public the day after a federal judge blocked key provisions of Arizona's controversial immigration law, known as SB 1070. "The document provides an additional basis for our concerns that the administration will go to great lengths to circumvent Congress and unilaterally execute a backdoor amnesty plan," Grassley told The Associated Press. USCIS could grant deferred action to an unrestricted number of illegal immigrants, but "doing so would likely be controversial, not to mention expensive," the memo states. Instead of an umbrella "amnesty," the agency could use deferred action with specific groups, such as young immigrants who would be eligible under legislation known as the Dream Act. The proposed bill aims to create a pathway to citizenship for people who have clean criminal records, graduated from high school in the United States and have at least two years of college or military service. A version of this story also appeared on the Huffington Post.

Maryland to store license-plate scanner data at intel fusion center

G.W. Schulz — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 15:07:43 -0700

Authorities in Maryland plan to collect data on motorists using automated license-plate scanners and centrally store it at a police intelligence fusion center where law enforcement specialists analyze and share sensitive information about criminal and terrorist threats. The initiative makes Maryland among the first nationally to establish a statewide network for data generated from license-plate readers. While the devices have not endured regular scrutiny and occasional opposition the way public surveillance cameras have historically, the technology in many respects is more powerful. Privacy advocates warn that plate recognition enables police to document where drivers go – both guilty car thieves and innocent citizens alike – by registering their GPS locations when each license plate is scanned. Police need reasonable suspicion that a crime has been or will be committed for much of the contact officers have with the public, at least in theory. But laws that restrict data gathering by law enforcement don’t always keep up with the 21st century. A statement by Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley on Aug. 4 says only that the data will be used for “legitimate law enforcement purposes” and “the privacy rights of Maryland’s citizens are protected using appropriate policies and procedures.” The state plans to spend $4 million by next year for over 200 scanners and says so far they’ve alerted police to carjacking suspects, plates stolen from other cars, suspended registrations, drivers wanted on felony warrants and more. After Elevated Risk pressed a spokesman in the governor’s office for additional answers, Shaun Adamec said in an e-mail that local agencies are being encouraged to develop privacy policies that limit how long data can be held. Maryland’s Coordination and Analysis Center, meanwhile, has internal rules for ensuring that information “is carefully maintained, responsibly stored, safely disseminated and routinely purged,” he said. “Any information on license plates is used specifically for public safety purposes,” Adamec said. “It’s also important to note that license plates are state-issued and are not considered private property.” The latest news comes just two years after civil liberties advocates exposed a spying program coordinated by the Maryland State Police and aimed at political activist groups not necessarily believed to have committed any crimes. State authorities infiltrated and monitored activist organizations and collected information about their members, in part by using fake e-mail addresses and screen names. Targets of the spying included death penalty opponents, mainstream human rights groups and peace activists. One longtime anti-violence organizer ended up in a database used for storing information about high-level drug traffickers. There he was categorized under “terrorism – anti-government” and “terrorism – anti-war protesters.” Surveillance logs generated by police even described a meeting he had with a member of Congress to discuss withdrawing troops from Iraq. The revelation led O’Malley to request an investigation of the state police, and he called on past-U.S. Attorney Stephen Sachs to conduct it. In a final report, the former prosecutor concluded that no one in the state police’s chain of command “gave any thought whatever” to the possibility that infiltrating such groups was inappropriate, nor were efforts made to establish reasonable suspicion that the activists were involved in criminal activity. According to the probe from Sachs:

Many of the [Maryland State Police] troopers and commanders whom we interviewed maintained, essentially, that it is better to be safe than sorry, and that even a remote risk to public safety justifies the infiltration of groups that plan lawful protests and demonstrations. Such a justification proves too much. It would justify government infiltration, without limitation, of any group of people who seek to exercise publicly their rights of free expression and association.

Shaun Adamec, the spokesman for O’Malley, said Maryland’s spy scandal occurred under a past governor. “Such behavior may have been the policy of that administration,” he said. “It’s certainly not the practice of this one.” By “that administration” he means former Maryland Gov. Bob Ehrlich, who’s now locked in an election battle with O’Malley to regain his throne after losing it in 2006. Ehrlich has publicly expressed concern about plate readers, and he strongly opposes the use of traffic cameras, a very similar technology facing resistance in many corners of the country. Police nationally are buying license-plate readers with greater frequency in part because of the availability of economic stimulus funds and advancements in the technology. Funding for Maryland’s plate-recognition program comes from a mix of federal criminal justice and homeland security grants. The Illinois-based company Motorola Inc., which has made a small fortune since Sept. 11 from readiness grants by selling public safety radio systems to state and local governments, foresees patrol cars someday carrying four scanners aimed in different directions. Officers have to do virtually nothing when the devices are in operation. Motorola says the recognition technology allows police to check up to 5,000 plates during an eight-hour shift. The systems then compare plate information automatically against databases of outstanding warrants or vehicles reported stolen. But Motorola’s product literature also emphasizes that the scanners can “quietly note the time and location” when a “vehicle of interest” is captured by the device. From there, a software program named BOSS turns the data into “useful intelligence,” which police can query by time, date, all or a portion of the plate’s numbers and location of the vehicle. This data can also be mapped to form a larger portrait of the driver’s activities. Few states have distinct rules governing the scanners. The Kansas City Star did a story on them Aug. 2 and found this:

Police like the devices for their speed and efficiency but mostly for their ability to record thousands of plates and their locations each day. … Over time, as more information is collected, the database is more likely to reveal a particular vehicle’s movements, according to a privacy study released last year by the International Association of Chiefs of Police, which supports police use of the license plate readers. The study noted that residents may worry that cameras would collect their license plate numbers at places with which they may not prefer to be linked, such as addiction counseling meetings, doctors’ offices or staging areas for political protests. Police agencies should adopt a policy that regulates the collection and use of the data, to reduce residents’ anxiety, according to the study. Area police departments, including Kansas City, don’t yet have such policies.

Video demonstration of automated license-plate scanners from NDI Recognition Systems, a vendor of the technology founded in the U.K. Flickr image of a license-plate recognition device courtesy alexrhee25.

WaPo: Journalists crucial to solving civil rights era cold cases

Hank Klibanoff — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 13:11:37 -0700

An opinion piece the Washington Post ran Sunday says the Justice Department is slow to prosecute what appear to be "racially motivated" murder cases from the 1950s and '60s.
I goes on to say that all the Justice Department's successful prosecutions on these types of cases have only come about because of investigative journalists' work, like that of the Center for Investigative Reporting's Cold Case Project.

ICE issues new memo on detainers, seeks public comment

Andrew Becker — Sat, 07 Aug 2010 00:03:38 -0700

The draft memo ICE wants comment on

In an unusually open move, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is seeking public comment on a policy that directs immigration officers on when they can request local police to temporarily detain immigrants suspected of being in the country illegally. The draft memo states that immigration officers generally should not issue detainers - or an immigration hold - on a person charged only with a traffic-related misdemeanor unless or until the person is convicted, except for the following reasons:

• the alien has a prior criminal conviction; • the alien previously has been excluded, deported, or removed from the United States or allowed to voluntarily return to his or her country of nationality; • the alien is the subject of an outstanding immigration warrant or is the subject of a final order (of deportation); • the alien is part of an existing criminal investigation; • an articulable reason exists to believe that the alien presents a danger to national security or a genuine risk to public safety; or • the traffic-related misdemeanor involves driving under the influence of alcohol or drugs, physical injury to a person or property, or flight from the scene of an accident.

The agency posted the draft memo on its web site Friday, and included an email address to send comments.

Request for Public Comment on Immigration Detainer Policy ICE has drafted an immigration detainer policy to engage all interested stakeholders and solicit a broad range of views and comments. This is not a final policy and is disseminated solely to collect feedback. ICE is interested in a concrete assessment of how this draft policy, if issued and implemented, would affect the agency's law enforcement partners, the operation of the criminal justice system, communities and individuals. Please respond with your comments to ICEDetainerComments@dhs.gov by Thursday, September 30, 2010.

Not known for its transparency, ICE has pulled back the curtain in a few areas as the agency's leadership pushes various reforms, such as civil enforcement measures and overhauling immigration detention. The agency has also recently launched a new system to locate locked-up immigrants. The draft policy comes on the heels of a federal judge's decision to block key parts of Arizona's controversial immigration law, and days after the Virginia attorney general issued a legal opinion that permits police to "inquire into the immigration status of persons stopped or arrested." The policy defines then instructs immigration officers that they can only issue a detainer on an immigrant who has been arrested on a criminal charge. Immigration officers, which include local law enforcement officers who are given authority to issue detainers under a provision known as 287(g), are not allowed to seek an immigration hold on someone who has been temporarily detained, such as a roadside stop. The previous policy is here. Earlier in the week ICE chief John Morton signed an interim memo, a summary of which, posted below, was also sent to ICE employees.

10074.1 Interim Detainers Directive Only immigration officers may issue detainers. Immigration officers shall issue detainers only after a local law enforcement agency (LEA) has exercised its independent authority to arrest the alien for a criminal violation. Immigration officers shall not issue detainers for aliens who have been temporarily detained by the LEA (i.e., roadside or Terry stops) but not arrested. If an immigration officer has reason to believe that an individual arrested by an LEA is subject to ICE detention for removal or removal proceedings, and issuance of the detainer otherwise comports with this policy and appears to advance the priorities of the agency, the immigration officer may issue a detainer (Form I-247) to the LEA. Immigration officers are expected to make arrangements to assume custody of an alien who is the subject of a detainer in a timely manner and without unnecessary delay. If at any time after a detainer is issued, ICE determines it will not assume custody of the alien, the detainer should be withdrawn or rescinded and the LEA notified. Immigration officers shall take particular care when issuing a detainer against a lawful permanent resident (LPR) as some grounds of removability hinge on a conviction, while others do not [e.g. removability pursuant to INA § 237(a)(4) and INA § 237(a)(1)(E)].

David Leopold, president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said exposing the draft memo to public scrutiny may lead to better policy. "People who work in the system day in and day out - lawyers, advocates - may be able to offer constructive criticism the government hasn't thought about," he said.

Illegal immigration isn't the only thing infuriating Arizona residents

G.W. Schulz — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 14:52:31 -0700

Few stories about the state of Arizona could possibly command more attention right now than its passage of a bill that directs police officers to determine the immigration status of people they come into contact with and suspect of being in the country illegally. While Americans were riveted by debate over the law, however, something else occurred there recently that’s nothing short of remarkable, something that also turned out to be fatally tragic for one man. And it could have implications for the former governor of Arizona, called upon by Barack Obama at the beginning of his term to take over the Department of Homeland Security. At midnight on July 15, Arizona’s Department of Public Safety pulled the plug on dozens of speed cameras that criss-crossed state highways, part of a widely loathed program to catch traffic violators and control erratic driving. This at a time when every other government agency around the nation is steadily adopting as many enhanced security technologies as possible. Outrage among residents over the cameras grew so severe that a technician who worked for the contractor hired to maintain the devices was shot to death last year. Other less-violent local tales of defiance include covering the cameras with boxes and Post-it Notes, disarming them with an axe, leaving tickets unpaid, or in the case of one driver, donning a monkey mask to foil attempts at identification. A politician from the area even said surveillance trends like speed cameras are an ominous sign that Obama and the federal government may eventually track drivers with microchips. Janet Napolitano, one-time governor of the state, “famously” declared the camera system would generate $90 million in needed revenue from citations during its first year, according to the Arizona Republic. The total instead came in at $78 million after almost two years, a figure that still arguably makes the program a cash cow but nonetheless was cited as another reason for abandoning it. Aggravation some Arizona residents expressed over the intrusive nature of the cameras poses an intriguing dilemma for Washington where Napolitano now leads a sprawling homeland security bureaucracy that probably does more to represent the idea of domestic surveillance – good or bad – than any other federal agency. Ex-GOP state Rep. Sam Crump, who’s now making a bid for Congress, applauded Arizona’s move to end its speed-camera program calling it an abusive use of the technology and suggesting it would result in more spying from the government. “I can see the Obama administration putting a chip in every car and saying, ‘We’ll issue a ticket,’” if you break the law, the Republic quoted him as saying. Redflex Traffic Systems, the company in charge of operating the cameras, warned gravely – and perhaps somewhat predictably – that if they were taken down, a segment of drivers would endanger the lives of others by becoming bold and reckless. The recent move doesn’t impact similar speed-camera systems maintained by local governments in Arizona since this case only involves a state-run network. But there have been attempts through a ballot initiative and legislation to ban them completely from state highways. Instances exist elsewhere of towns fighting back against public-safety projects viewed as a threat to privacy. Local leaders in the tiny fishing village of Dillingham, Ala., used $200,000 in federal homeland security grants to blanket parts of the town with 80 surveillance cameras. Some residents complained about them so relentlessly that Dillingham’s mayor eventually resigned due to criticism. Meanwhile, police in other cities across the country are continuing years-long campaigns to expand the use of such cameras, much of it fueled by anti-terrorism funds handed out by Washington. Or they’re deploying more sophisticated technologies that actually are capable of registering the GPS locations of innocent and guilty motorists alike, namely license-plate scanners. New York City is among the leaders with its “ring of steel,” a plan announced in 2006 to install 3,000 public and private cameras alongside dozens of license-plates readers to guard Lower Manhattan against terrorists. Yet residents in the Big Apple learned recently that hundreds of cameras controlled by the city’s public transit authority didn’t actually work. Police in Pittsburgh, on the other hand, say camera footage helped them identify two teenaged suspects allegedly behind the killing of a retired firefighter. Shortly afterward the mayor announced he wanted to use $12 million in Recovery Act funding for a project that would include 200 more cameras. Surveillance devices can also aid in enforcing better conduct among public employees. Los Angeles installed them in the control cabs of metro trains to observe engineers after one operator, reportedly distracted by text messaging, was blamed in part for the gruesome 2008 Chatsworth accident that killed 25 people. GOP Congressman Jeff Flake of Arizona blasts a $200,000 homeland security grant as wasteful. A tiny fishing village in Alaska used it to purchase surveillance cameras. Flickr image courtesy anarchosyn.

U.S. government sued over detention of mentally disabled immigrants

Andrew Becker — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 07:34:00 -0700

The American Civil Liberties Union and a coalition of legal advocates from Seattle to San Diego have sued the U.S. government over the detention of immigrants with mental disabilities. The class-action suit, which the ACLU of Southern California called the first of its kind, asks a Federal District Court in California to push the government to create a system to determine which immigrants facing possible deportation are competent to represent themselves and to appoint legal representation for those who cannot defend themselves, according to a statement. The complaint, filed late Monday, names seven plaintiffs, including lead plaintiff Jose Antonio Franco-Gonzalez, whom CIR and the Los Angeles Times previously reported on in March. Franco, who suffers from moderate mental retardation, was detained for nearly five years until ICE officials released him after another suit was filed on his behalf. The ACLU and Human Rights Watch published last month a report on the mentally disabled in the immigration court system and detention. The complaint can be found here.

ICE goes on media blitz

Andrew Becker — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 21:59:45 -0700

ICE's new online detainee system
Photo: Immigration and Customs Enforcement

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the federal agency that wants attention more for its complex customs and terrorism investigations than its immigration duties, has gone on a media blitz as of late. ICE chief John Morton has popped up all over the place, from making public appearances around the country — including co-headlining a press conference Tuesday in San Francisco on a counterfeit clothing bust — to writing a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed piece with Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Alan D. Bersin to sitting for a Washington Post interview amid calls for his resignation to announcing in June a big drug bust with cohorts at the FBI, DEA and Justice Department. (non-subscribers can find the WSJ op-ed here on the Homeland Security Department's social networking site, ourborder.ning.com) Along with increasing Morton's visibility, the agency has also tried to raise its profile in other ways, with an organizational shake-up and a steady flow of press releases on everything from child pornography busts to its efforts to crackdown on human rights violators seeking safe haven in the United States. Under the Obama administration ICE officials have stated that one of their priorities is to reform how the agency detains immigrants. In late July, the agency unveiled a new online system to find detained immigrants after previous reports of detainees moved around the country. Last week the agency posted on its web site a month-by-month report of deportations. ICE has also tweaked its site, with prominent displays of the statistics, the new detainee finder system and its list of reforms. The agency, however, might take another look at some of these displays, immigration advocates say. Notice the image of the tandem searching for someone — a friend, a sibling, a parent or a spouse — on the computer. Who are they? Mother and daughter? Aunt and niece? Tutor and pupil? Frank Sharry, executive director of America's Voice, a pro-immigration group that advocates for reform, wondered what the two are doing: Searching for a relative, or solving a homework problem? "ICE has separated more families than any other federal agency by far, and a stock photo on a web site is a cruel joke rather than an image enhancer," Sharry said. "It just shows how tone deaf they are."

Update: ICE replaced the image for the online detainee locator system on Wednesday. The image of a computer keyboard, below left, replaced the original image, below right.

ICE's new online detainee system (revised)
Photo: Immigration and Customs Enforcement

ICE's new online detainee system (original)
Photo: Immigration and Customs Enforcement

Then, depending on your web browser, under "ICE Detention and Policy Reform," is a section on detainee safety.

The text doesn't appear in Internet Explorer or Safari, but it's right there in Firefox:

Detainee Care and Safety Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat.

The jumbled Latin phrase is, of course, often used as placeholder text.

Update: The placeholder text was removed as of Wednesday morning.

An ICE spokesman said the agency would review the web site.

After Mumbai, former LAPD chief wanted more firepower for officers

G.W. Schulz — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 12:09:09 -0700

Former Los Angeles Police Chief William Bratton (right) during a meeting in 2009. Flickr image courtesy ericrichardson. Speaking at a high-profile security conference in Colorado this summer, former Los Angeles Police Chief William Bratton touched on a subject we’ve been exploring here at Elevated Risk: the militarization of local police since the Sept. 11 attacks. The legendary police leader joined a roster of star-studded attendees for the Aspen Security Forum, which included past homeland security honcho Michael Chertoff; Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, Michael Leiter, and a host of inside-the-beltway journalists and one-time senior national security officials. Bratton told an audience that even though the LAPD’s special weapons and tactics team had access to “several hundred high-powered firearms,” the 2008 bloodshed in Mumbai, India, led him to believe it wasn’t enough and the department needed more assault weapons, according to Government Security News, which both sponsored and heavily covered the event. Segments of the forum have also been appearing on C-SPAN. During the Mumbai attacks carried out at several locations, gunmen killed nearly 180 people in a three-day spree of violence that demonstrated to the world terrorism isn’t limited to airliner hijackings. Also as a result of the Mumbai shootings, according to GSN:

The LAPD changed its entire strategy related to a hostage-taking incident conducted by terrorists in the future. Bratton said he concluded that terrorists are not interested in negotiating for the release of the hostages, but would try to gain as much media attention as possible, and would eventually kill their hostages. So, instead of negotiating, Bratton said he would plan for his police officers to break in on the terrorists quickly, and kill them, if possible. At the time [of the Mumbai shooting deaths], the LAPD had about 300 officers assigned to its counterterrorism units, said Bratton, and they were retrained ‘on a dime’ in the revised tactics.

Bratton added that terrorism was a low priority earlier in his career as a policeman, but when he announced plans to leave the LAPD in August of 2009, literally half his time was spent on terrorism-related issues. Local police have sought to acquire more military-style equipment and techniques, and as we’ve noted in recent weeks, the LAPD isn’t the only force to argue it should be carrying more lethal weaponry. The Boston Police Department pushed for the right last year to accept 200 M-16s free from the Defense Department for its patrol officers citing terrorist threats as a justification. Community leaders condemned the plan, however. Police agencies in addition have the used the hundreds of millions of dollars in anti-terrorism and preparedness grants handed out by Congress since the 9/11 hijackings to finance armored trucks, beefed-up incident command vehicles that resemble RVs on steroids, battering rams, surveillance devices and an endless array of expensive gear capable of defeating or at least limiting the impact of explosives and ammunition. But the new, aggressive look of your neighborhood police department hasn’t been without political resistance from citizens and civilian elected officials. The police chief appointed by Detroit Mayor Dave Bing last year to take on the city’s notorious street violence was asked to step down in July following a string of headline-grabbing incidents that at least in part centered around the city’s SWAT team. Chief Warren Evans made a habit of deploying the specialized unit for everyday law-enforcement activities. The department on his watch also became friendly toward reality TV cameras, and the crew of one program was present when an officer from Detroit’s Special Response Team shot and killed a 7-year-old girl during a botched raid. Weeks later, after the tragedy had agitated already deep divisions between the city’s black community and police, a Hollywood-style promotional video for another show called “The Chief” surfaced in which Evans wielded an assault rifle and promised he’d do “whatever it takes” to fix Detroit. The instantly controversial video illustrated another habit for Evans – to join field-level police officers and march through frostbitten Detroit neighborhoods in combat boots, handcuffing perpetrators and seizing bags of drugs. “Instead of sitting at my desk with my feet up, eating potato chips and reading the newspaper, I’d much rather have my 61-year-old ass on the street in a scout car, working,” Evans says at one point in the promo. And elsewhere: “Every time I enter a dark building, I don’t know what’s waiting for me on the other end.” Although the video was likely filmed prior to the death of Aiyana Jones, Bing eventually told the press he was “blindsided” by the department’s participation in reality TV and wasn’t aware of a contract it had signed with A&E’s “The First 48." Bing announced a ban on camera crews after the deadly house raid. It’s worth noting there were other factors that apparently contributed to Bing asking for the police chief’s resignation. Evans also had an ongoing relationship with a subordinate woman inside the department. The Associated Press sought comments from Evans last month about turmoil at the agency but after not hearing back referred to statements posted on his Facebook page that addressed the TV stints: “I don’t get the big fuss! It’s a producers [sic] product. If the City doesn’t like it there won’t be a series Period! Does someone want to believe the streets aren’t like that? LOL.” While the melodrama Evans brought to his campaign against crime isn’t shared by every police official in the United States, including Bratton, it fits a larger narrative maintained by the law enforcement community since Sept. 11. Police cast the world as more dangerous than ever before, arguing that without hundreds of millions of dollars in intelligence fusion centers, evermore military-type apparel and the right to carry powerful assault weapons, they won’t be able to protect and serve communities vulnerable to the 21st century’s brand of terrorism, drug cartels, ruthless street gangs and more. But the rise and fall of Warren Evans raises questions about which solutions may go too far.

Ex-cop says makers of data-mining software must recognize intel rules

G.W. Schulz — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 16:00:51 -0700

Companies that make data-mining software for local intelligence fusion centers “don’t understand” police are required to observe decades-old federal rules that restrict how certain computer systems containing sensitive information can be used. That conclusion comes from a 25-year veteran of the state police in New Jersey who now works for a company that sells intelligence management products to the law-enforcement community. Stephen Serrao has visited and worked with several so-called fusion centers, which Congress helped finance after Sept. 11 by making hundreds of millions of dollars in federal homeland security grants available to state and local governments. The idea is for police in your area to better share essential information about possible criminal and terrorist threats with their federal counterparts, poor communication being one of the reasons why the terrorist hijackings were allowed to occur in the first place. Civil libertarians have repeatedly expressed concern that the centers are stockpiling too much personal data about Americans who haven’t committed a crime in the hope that some piece of it can be “fused” with another to unravel a terrorist plot. Serrao and his colleagues counter that organizations like the ACLU “have no clue” what’s actually being collected and analyzed at fusion centers. But Serrao in recent months has also written candid articles for security industry media outlets that contained enlightening disclosures while he intended to help fusion centers improve their capabilities. Last year he raised questions about whether the centers had consistently developed clear enough missions for what they wanted to accomplish. One center, he wrote, spent much of its time handing out driver’s license photos to police who’d requested them because it turned out to be faster than calling the DMV. “So, the center has resources tied up sending out pictures,” he stated, “which leaves little to no resources or time for checking to see if the suspect has any ties to Al-Qaeda. See the problem?” Centers elsewhere have spent a small fortune constructing facilities with specialized walls, windows and locks so that personnel inside could securely handle top-secret information. “Many fusion centers that will never have to deal with top-secret information have been built to this standard … Most centers are dealing with top secret data less than five percent of the time. We are overbuilding and over-securing these centers at significant cost, and it is causing great inefficiency.” His latest commentary appeared July 22 on the Security Debrief blog where Serrao described a recent trend among fusion centers to purchase new data-mining tools – one of the very concerns civil libertarians have about the centers. There are multiple data streams available to police that have “separate and distinct laws governing what law enforcement can and cannot do with them.” To begin with, the tools these vendors are selling may not perform functions that authorities want them to, he wrote, like properly capturing “suspicious activity reports,” another emerging but controversial development at fusion centers. He goes on to say that many of the companies “don’t understand these systems need to comply with [28 CFR Part 23],” federal standards that govern how police intelligence can be used and shared. The guidelines say that police can’t collect and broadly share intelligence about an individual or group unless reasonable suspicion exists that they are involved in criminal activity. Intelligence here is distinguishable from other police work, such as material generated during the investigation of a crime that’s already been committed. Consider the difference between a husband investigated for murdering his wife and a large gang suspected of supporting itself by trafficking counterfeit consumer goods. The scope of inquiry can sweep in a greater number of people, and with police power involved, authorities have a responsibility to show that otherwise constitutionally protected Americans deserve to be scrutinized by law enforcement for public safety reasons. Rules controlling this data were conceived years ago following an unsavory legacy of local police intelligence abuses that led to lawsuits and changes in the law. Which brings us back to data mining, a process that involves much more than finding out if a perpetrator stabbed his beloved to death. Law enforcement officials say the world has become more dangerous since Part 23 first went into effect. Terrorists could be planning attacks in any community across the country, they argue. Technology has made it easier to collect and probe vast amounts of data that could be useful. And with the right information in place to “connect the dots,” police may be able curtail violent crimes before they occur, an extremely popular concept among authorities at the moment known as “intelligence-led policing.” A fusion center in Massachusetts, for example, uses multiple databases, including two that contain motor vehicle information and insurance claims. The center distributed a pamphlet that says its personnel collect and analyze information “from all available sources to produce and disseminate actionable intelligence to stakeholders for strategic and tactical decision-making in order to disrupt domestic and international terrorism.” That doesn’t necessarily mean Massachusetts is mining data, but clearly fusion centers have transcended standard witness interviews from everyday burglary investigations. And despite ongoing efforts to improve protections for privacy and civil liberties at the centers, Serrao very lightly suggests that at least when it comes to data mining, it’s possible they’re pursuing new frontiers in law enforcement without fully recognizing the need to respect individual rights:

Agencies want to ensure that they are holding data consistent with all the rules and regulations. If the data-mining technology companies have not considered any of the aforementioned issues, their tools are putting fusion centers at risk of violating statutes, laws and regulations.

Anti-corruption bill moves to full Senate

Andrew Becker — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 11:16:28 -0700

A bill aimed at preventing corruption among border agents and keeping drug cartels from infiltrating the ranks of U.S. Customs and Border Protection has moved out of committee and will now be considered by the full Senate. The bill, S. 3243, also known as the Anti Border Corruption Act, passed out of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs committee on Wednesday. Introduced in April by Sen. Mark Pryor, D-Ark., the legislation requires CBP to administer polygraph examinations to all applicants seeking a law enforcement position within the agency, among other measures. As previously reported by CIR, officials are concerned about an increased risk of infiltration and border corruption. The Department of Homeland Security Inspector General's office launched 576 investigations on allegations of improper conduct by CBP employees last year, according to the bill. Less than 15 percent of applicants receive such a screening, according to CBP's internal affairs office, although the agency's policy is for all applicants to sit for a polygraph examination. The new law, if passed, would also require the agency to complete periodic background re-investigations of employees. As of March 2010, the agency had a backlog of about 10,000 re-investigations. The backlog could nearly double to 19,000 by the end of the fiscal year if CBP doesn't get more money, according to the bill. In introducing the legislation Pryor cited a CIR/Washington Post story that detailed how turf battles by the various agencies that police border corruption can have a negative effect on investigations.

The other, other sultry spy

G.W. Schulz — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 13:00:57 -0700

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 be 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

Hefty price tag for global war on terror tops $1 trillion

G.W. Schulz — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 12:30:52 -0700

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

US forest strategy boomerangs in Brazil

Natalia Viana — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 11:45:48 -0700

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.

More docs describe neglected gear bought with grants in New York

G.W. Schulz — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 14:09:38 -0700

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

Lobbyists push asbestos use in the developing world

Carrie Ching — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 12:18:12 -0700

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.

Record number of immigration cases referred by ICE

G.W. Schulz — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 16:00:37 -0700

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 immigrants (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.

ICE union accuses agency of discrimination in leak probe

Andrew Becker — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 17:44:14 -0700

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.

Funding for bioterror contracts targeted during budget fight

G.W. Schulz — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 12:16:09 -0700

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 were 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.

Bid to reform homeland security oversight could lead to ugly battle

G.W. Schulz — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 12:02:58 -0700

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

Colombian journalist denied a U.S. visa

Mark Schapiro — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 17:28:04 -0700

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:

Is pride the reason we won't accept help from other countries?

G.W. Schulz — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 15:49:00 -0700

Only after the horrifying devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina did the United States begin for the first time to consider accepting assistance from other countries around the world following a catastrophe. But when the federal government had a chance again to do just that, it neglected gestures of aid coming from the international community as oil billowed from the ocean floor causing the greatest environmental disaster in the nation’s history. Two experts say that’s a mistake. Writing for George Washington University’s Homeland Security Policy Institute last month, they argued the offers of support weren’t just symbolic table scraps that wouldn't significantly help limit the damage. Sweden, the pair cites as an example, made available three newly built Coast Guard vessels early in the spill designed specifically for cleaning up such messes. The ships are capable of sucking up 50 tons of oil an hour from the ocean’s surface and can retain 1,000 tons in their bellies. But by June, Sweden’s offer was still merely under consideration. According to the Heritage Foundation’s James Carafano and institute deputy director Daniel Kaniewski, who helped pen an after-action report on Katrina for the Bush administration:

The delay in accepting offers of assistance is unacceptable. The international community possesses specialized equipment and technical expertise that, if the U.S. has at all, is in limited supply. Even now that the Obama administration is finally waking up to this reality – months into the disaster – by slowly accepting offers of assistance, there seems to be a failure to coordinate the assistance offered and to communicate the administration’s needs to the international community. Both bear striking resemblance to the failed response to Hurricane Katrina.

They further complain that the administration has been “characteristically deferential to BP” allowing the company responsible for the spill to decide what it needs while not aggressively leading the response itself. Cost should no longer be a concern if it turns out some allies offering resources expect to eventually be reimbursed. Such a thing is common in disaster recovery, even between federal bureaucracies here when personnel and supplies are provided to FEMA by another agency. The devastation is unprecedented and threatens greater economic consequences to the southeastern United States making cost less of an issue now. Besides, Kaniewski and Carafano wrote, BP will, or at least should, cover those expenses, especially since the company has already set aside $20 billion for response and recovery. Flickr image by Nils Reiter

Interns bring new blood to the newsroom

Mark Katches — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 13:12:24 -0700

It’s intern season at California Watch and the Center for Investigative Reporting. We’ve been fortunate to have interns year-round. But summer is a special time. New intern blood transfuses our newsroom. Exuberant, wide-eyed youngsters strive to make their mark during short stints as reporters, web producers and copy editors.

Ah, the internship.

My first came 26 years ago at the now-defunct Peninsula Times Tribune, a small, local paper in downtown Palo Alto. I can’t even begin to measure what I learned in those three months.

One of my biggest early influences in the Palo Alto newsroom was Judy Miller, then the young city editor of the Times Tribune. She soon left for the San Francisco Chronicle. Later, she directed two Pulitzer Prize-winning projects at the Miami Herald where she eventually rose to managing editor.

Judy earned the nickname “Bulldog.” And it fit. I’ve never met anyone as tenacious and as relentless. I ran into her at the recent gathering of Investigative Reporters and Editors in Las Vegas a few weeks ago. We reminisced about the old days, and what she meant to my career. She inspired reporters to dig deep and to stop only when you reached the bottom.

Judy has been an important mentor over the years. She's always been available as a sounding board when I've been stuck. And yet, I can’t remember if she said even two words to me during my summer internship.

Her influence went beyond mere words. She taught by example. If you stopped for just a second to watch her in action, you learned a ton. And if you stopped too long, you would likely get a sharp look back, as if to wonder – no, demand – your next front page story.

I could only hope that our interns this summer will find their own mentor or influential figure somewhere among our own accomplished staff – whether it’s one of our superb veterans such as Lance Williams, Susanne Rust, Michael Montgomery, Mark Schapiro, Louis Freedberg or Bob Salladay. Or one of our talented younger guns like Mark Luckie, Erica Perez, Ryan Gabrielson, Christina Jewett, Corey Johnson, G.W. Schulz, Carrie Ching, Andy Becker or Chase Davis.

Every one of us remembers what it was like to be an intern. And we’re all here to help.

And I'm personally thrilled to see all the energy in our newsroom. One of the more unpleasant things I had to do in my last job was call a young college student we had selected for an internship a few weeks earlier to relay the bad news that her internship had been canceled. In a budget crisis, the interns were the first to go.

This summer our interns aren't exactly getting rich off their paychecks from us. But we are proud that we are offering so many internships at a time when many news organizations are still living without the help of eager college students.

So without further ado, let me introduce our current crop of interns:

Austin Fast is a Dow Jones News Fund copy editing intern with California Watch and assists in producing Politics Verbatim. He is a recent graduate of Miami University (of Ohio) with degrees in journalism and international studies. While in college, Austin produced stories at Miami's NPR station, served as editor in chief of Miami's student newspaper and completed an internship with an online news wire service in Pristina, Kosovo.

Mandy Hofmockel is a Dow Jones News Fund web production intern for California Watch and the Center for Investigative Reporting. She is a senior majoring in media studies and political science at Penn State University. Mandy has worked as a reporter, copy editor and web editor for her college newspaper for the past three years. She also spent a summer reporting for her local paper.

Timothy Sandoval is a reporting intern in the Sacramento bureau for California Watch. He has covered the California State University budget crisis, student protests, and general news stories for The State Hornet, CSU Sacramento’s newspaper. Timothy grew up in Los Angeles. He graduated from St. John Bosco High School, and attended Cal Poly Pomona from 2007 to 2009. He currently attends Sacramento State and is set to graduate in 2012.

Alex Brewer is a reporting intern for the Center for Investigative Reporting where he will primarily work with Andy Becker on immigration stories and with the Investigative Reporting Program at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. Alex is the annual Neil Isaacs and Frank Wright Fellow from Carleton College in Northfield, Minn. Next year he will be a junior pursuing a double bachelor's degree in psychology and cinema media studies. On campus he is also chief content editor for The Lens, Carleton's bi-yearly society and politics magazine.

Erin Ferguson is a shared reporting intern for KQED Radio, the Ventura County Star and California Watch, based in Sacramento. Erin mostly will be blogging about the state budget. She is a senior in modern literary studies at UC Santa Cruz. She is part of the internship program coordinated by the University of California public affairs journalism program. It's a joint venture between UC Center Sacramento and the UC Berkeley graduate school of journalism.

Sarah McHie is the veteran of our intern crew. She started her internship in October with the Center for Investigative Reporting as a web production assistant. Sarah previously was an associate web producer at San Francisco magazine. She is a recent graduate of Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana where she obtained a degree in Telecommunications with a concentration in multimedia.

We expect you'll be seeing their names a lot this summer and for a long time to come.

As NYC demands more anti-terror cash, small county rejects grant

G.W. Schulz — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 12:58:34 -0700

Chautauqua County in western New York State is just a few paces – or 300 miles to be more exact – from Times Square. Flickr image by Doug Kerr While prominent political leaders from the New York City area attacked the Obama administration in May complaining it was leaving the Big Apple vulnerable to terrorism by reducing the large sums it receives each year in federal homeland security grants, a small county far away in the western section of the state turned down similar funds for a boat and trailer. The sheriff of Chautauqua County told local officials at a business meeting last month that preparedness cash would cover not only the watercraft and trailer but also the cost of personnel and gas for a year. “If we don’t take [the money], then they will give it to someone else,” the Post-Journal newspaper quoted a captain from the sheriff’s department as saying. But county legislators worried costs for maintaining it would fall back on them, or they’d be barred from dry-docking it if necessary. Although the final vote was narrow, a resolution to accept the grant was ultimately defeated. New York City, meanwhile, has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to enhance security using federal readiness grants and during recent months pointed to the attempted Times Square bombing as evidence that it deserves more, not less, from Washington. Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the state’s congressional delegation stepped in line to lob criticism at the Obama White House over reported plans to cut back transit and port security funds for New York. GOP Congressman Pete King of Long Island, ranking member of the House Homeland Security Committee, called the move “dangerous and unconscionable.” The city still stood to rake in $144 million from these programs alone for the year. Elevated Risk reported June 15 using documents obtained from the state through an open-government request that some public safety equipment purchased there went long lengths of time without being used. In many ways the debate in Chautauqua County mirrored what occurs at the municipal level everyday in America without much notice. One area Democrat said seeking the grant was proof the county didn’t want to contend with the larger hazard of an $18 million deficit and preferred to instead spend as much as possible until it was forced to make painful decisions, which he called “business as usual.” What makes the county remarkable is that it’s almost unheard of for any state or local community nationwide to turn away federal anti-terrorism and disaster preparedness funds. Congress began handing out billions of dollars worth after the Sept. 11 attacks to finance everything from urban assault vehicles to intelligence fusion centers. In every corner of the country there's an explanation in grant applications for why they have a right to the money. Our town has a large amusement park that fills to the brim with tourists every year making it a likely target for terrorists. Yeah, but our town has a manufacturing plant, and surely Al Qaeda wants to do us economic harm by incinerating it in an explosion. Seattle, for instance, didn’t just buy any boat. It used at least $1.5 million (conservatively gleaning from records Elevated Risk obtained last year) on a 50-foot “rapid-response vessel” for handling chemical, biological and nuclear incidents. So the Chautauqua County sheriff’s request for a mere jet ski by comparison is modest. The vote by civilian representatives who oversee his budget is nonetheless compelling and demonstrates that public debate can occur over just how much the nation is willing to spend for the war on terror.

Lawmakers still blasting away at homeland security contracts

G.W. Schulz — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 14:52:26 -0700

Members of a House panel say that reforms designed to improve the Department of Homeland Security’s oversight of private-sector contractors haven’t gone far enough and the federal government is still failing to properly police billions of dollars in taxpayer money spent on programs to protect the nation’s borders, track international travelers entering the United States and more. Pointing to a recently released report on large homeland security programs done by the watchdog Government Accountability Office, Democratic Rep. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi said inaccurate cost estimates and scheduling delays plague the department and officials rely too much on companies hired to perform the public’s business. In a June 30 statement, Thompson, chair of the powerful House Homeland Security Committee, blamed a splintered purchasing system sprawled across the department’s myriad agencies, which led to cost overruns among other things. Further, he said, contract overseers internally “have raised concerns about the accuracy of cost estimates for most major programs.” A top homeland security official in April credited his boss, Secretary Janet Napolitano, with making changes that improved contract efficiency at the department, telling a leading industry publication that she had spent much of her life in public service, including as governor of Arizona, “focusing on how to do a better job spending public dollars.” The GAO report released late last month, however, found that while improvements have been made, more than three-dozen projects had not been reviewed by a senior-level oversight board created to enhance performance and that cost estimates for many of them increased significantly from earlier price tags, sometimes within just a few months time. The purchase price for a Bush-era plan to line the southwest border with surveillance devices capable of detecting illegal border crossers jumped an eye-popping 564 percent to more than $1.8 billion in three-and-a-half years, according to the GAO. Setbacks in the time necessary to complete essential tasks were another problem. As the GAO says in its typically understated and wonkish fashion:

Schedule delays can lead to loss of program credibility with stakeholders, increased acquisition costs, new systems not being available to meet department needs, and continued use of less-capable systems. Fifteen of the major programs we reviewed reported estimated or actual schedule delays in delivery of initial operating capability of an average of 12 months, and eight programs reported delays of a year or more. … None of the selected programs reported delivering full operating capability for all increments.

Meanwhile, outsized spending on acquisition continues a steady upward march at the Department of Homeland Security having increased by well more than half from 2004 to over $14 billion during 2009 alone further threatening the ability of bureaucrats to properly oversee it. During a blistering 2008 hearing, the homeland security committee criticized almost $15 billion in “failed contracts” saying the department’s relationship with private companies had ballooned alongside a “surge of waste, abuse, and mismanagement.” According to a release from Thompson then:

The heart of functionality, governance and accountability is simple – create an administrative and management system that is transparent and accountable. Agency officials must know where and how the money is being spent and must be able to assure that a program receives internal oversight prior to its rollout and after its completion. DHS still has not created that kind of system. Instead, DHS leadership has permitted a system of waste, abuse and mismanagement, vague contractual terms, overspending, bonuses for bad performance, contractors being hired to oversee contractors and the same missteps over and over again.

A GAO investigator told policymakers at the hearing that the government risked losing control over accountability and the power to make key decisions by handing too many tasks considered inherently governmental to contractors. Several massive programs were singled out for scrutiny, including a $52 million system called eMerge2 that ironically was supposed to help fix accounting and contracting weaknesses at DHS. It was ultimately scrapped in 2005 with “little to show for it,” investigators concluded. Illustration courtesy of Roberto De Vido via Flickr

Chat live with Lance Williams, senior reporter for California Watch

CIR Staff — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 10:57:31 -0700

Join California Watch senior reporter Lance Williams for a live video chat this Thursday, July 8, at 3 p.m. Williams will discuss his investigative story about unsupervised San Francisco workers accused of cheating taxpayers out of hundreds of thousands of dollars. The city electricians also allegedly entertained prostitutes at a city office.

To ask a question, go to the UStream page and enter your question in the chat box on the right. If you are not currently a UStream member, you will need to register. If you just want to watch, go to the California Watch page here to watch it live.

Lawyer for Your Black Muslim bakery leader smuggled hit list from jail

Sarah Terry-Cobo — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 15:38:36 -0700

A former lawyer representing members of Your Black Muslim Bakery allegedly smuggled a hit list and other "unauthorized written communications" from Yusef Bey IV, who is being held in the Santa Rita jail on murder charges, according to an affidavit filed in Alameda County court on Tuesday. On the alleged hit list was a list of witnesses who would testify against Bey IV in three murder cases, the Chauncey Bailey Project reports. Bey IV and associates are charged with ordering the assassination of Oakland-based journalist, Chauncey Bailey, and two other people in 2007. Read the full post by Thomas Peele, on the Chauncey Bailey Project website: Bakery leader’s lawyer smuggled witness hit list from jail, court records say

From Climate Desk: Oil industry "reforms," despondent fishermen's wives and quantifying the oil spill

Sarah Terry-Cobo — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 13:27:49 -0700

Digging deeper into the effects of the ongoing Gulf Oil Spill, PBS's Need to Know produced an infographic on quantifying how much crude has gushed into the ocean, showing low and high estimates. Mother Jones looks at crisis centers in St. Bernard parish, who are counseling wives of the fishermen impacted and often out of work; one worker called their trauma "BPTSD" (combining BP and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder). And for Need to Know, Jon Meacham interviews oil expert Lisa Margonelli from the TEDx Oil Spill Conference about the moral choice of offshore drilling. Finally, another MoJo reporter looks at the possibility of reforming the oil industry in an election year. INFOGRAPHIC: How much oil are we talking about? | PBS Need to Know Depression, abuse, suicide: fishermen's wives face post-spill trauma | Mother Jones Not in my backyard? | PBS Need to Know Congress' oil industry "reforms" = election-year greenwashing | Mother Jones

The newest frontier for Congress in earmarks: homeland security

G.W. Schulz — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 14:35:44 -0700

A movement to restrict unregulated earmarks in the newest area of taxpayer spending for the federal government, homeland security, is gaining steam and cleared the Senate June 28. Legislation proposed in April by Sen. Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut authorizes nearly $1 billion in grants over the next five years for states to complete construction projects ostensibly designed to limit damage caused by disasters. Known as hazard mitigation, the idea is to fortify unstable structures otherwise vulnerable to collapse in the event of a catastrophe and to perform additional work that protects populations from direct and indirect calamity, like, say, floods caused by levees that give way during a hurricane. Funds allocated for the program are managed by FEMA. But the annual homeland security appropriations bill, now an entrenched part of the spending process in Washington, has in recent years been stuffed with congressionally directed expenditures, i.e. earmarks, that lawmakers set aside to benefit constituents. Those earmarks have included millions in cash for hazard mitigation projects that some critics complained had little to do with homeland security, if anything. Last year an annoyed Sen. John McCain of Arizona, well known for his contempt of earmarks, zeroed in on nearly 200 of them totaling $269 million contained in the homeland security appropriations bill for the 2010 fiscal year. Speaking from the Senate floor, McCain pointed to several he considered questionable, including $250,000 to retrofit a senior center in Utah sought by that state’s congressional delegation. “The last time I checked, senior centers are important but they have very little relation to homeland security,” McCain said at the time. He singled out another $3.6 million for a Coast Guard operations center in the landlocked state of West Virginia, $200,000 for a college radio station in Ohio and $900,000 for an emergency operations facility in one Montana town with fewer than 6,000 residents. (Quick note: During the debate, McCain incorrectly attributed a $4 million earmark to the state of Wisconsin when records actually show the funds were designated for a bridge in Iowa.) Not all members of Congress regard earmarks as unsavory. Defenders, like Republican Sen. Bob Bennett of Utah, argue that Americans living outside of the Washington power structure know more about what’s needed for their communities than federal bureaucrats and they’re the ones who request earmarks from elected representatives to satisfy those needs. In fact, policymakers packed last year’s homeland security spending bill with $60 million in earmarks for emergency operations centers spread across dozens of cities in the United States. Local authorities have pushed for federal financing to build EOCs arguing that emergency personnel rely on them to coordinate response and recovery efforts during major catastrophes. The powerful chair of the House Homeland Security Committee, Democrat Bennie Thompson, squirreled away $750,000 for a town called Port Gibson in his home state of Mississippi to have such as center. Its population is about 2,000. But McCain and long-time Democratic ally Russ Feingold of Wisconsin complained there was no competitive process for awarding the funds that took into account actual risks of disaster faced by local communities. Feingold went so far as to tell the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that the Democratic Party was repeating mistakes made by Republicans when they held a majority in Congress during the Bush administration and declared that the “shamelessness of earmarking is getting out of control.” The pair sought an amendment last year to fix what they considered to be a growing problem in homeland security spending. It was voted down by their colleagues, however. Lieberman’s Senate Bill 3249 amounts to a second attempt thanks to an amendment sponsored by Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), also a frequent antagonist of congressionally directed spending items. It would specifically prohibit hazard mitigation money from being used as earmarks. In an April statement noting the amendment’s survival, Coburn called the mitigation program “a slush fund for earmarks”:

I’m pleased my colleagues agreed taxpayer dollars should be spent to prevent disasters instead of financing special-interest pork projects. This amendment will help protect taxpayers’ lives and wallets. In Congress, true change tends to happen in small steps rather than great leaps. This legislative earmark ban is a small step, but it crosses a rubicon. Never before has Congress accepted a legislative earmark ban as broad as this one.

A review from the Congressional Budget Office points out nonetheless that under Lieberman’s bill, grants for hazard mitigation in 2011 would nearly double over the previous year to $180 million and the cash would essentially remain at that level for each of the next five years with a high of $200 million. His legislation would also ensure that states are annually awarded at the very least $575,000 or one percent of the total amount appropriated for the program by Washington. GOP Sen. John McCain of Arizona blasts earmarks during a debate over homeland security spending on Oct. 20, 2009. Video courtesy of C-SPAN. Stock.xchng image by Billy Alexander (ba1969)

Series of bills would affect terror grant spending

G.W. Schulz — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 11:34:35 -0700

Speed detectors purchased by the city of Glendale in California with federal homeland security grants. Photo courtesy California Emergency Management Agency Three new pieces of legislation pending in Congress could impact how states use the billions of dollars worth of preparedness grants Washington began awarding to them after the Sept. 11 attacks for enhancing protections against terrorism and other disasters. House Resolution 5562 sponsored by California Democrat Laura Richardson would limit FEMA’s ability to require certain types of investments in public safety equipment, such as devices capable of defeating improvised explosive devices. The bill would also direct FEMA to determine whether caps on how much grantees can spend for management and administrative costs don’t leave enough to cover things like office personnel. Local governments frequently complain that mountains of paperwork and ever-changing rules imposed on the funds are too burdensome. But Congress itself is often responsible for strings attached to homeland security grants, as the Center for Investigative Reporting has noted before. Richardson said in a June 23 statement: “These legislative shortcomings have created headaches for our state and local homeland security agencies for nearly eight years, and now is the time to fix the problem so our focus can be on keeping our nation safe and not on red tape.” A second measure, H.R. 5563, would require FEMA to annually assess the risks of disaster and terrorism each state faces and include local officials in the process. Debates over which areas of the country are actually at a high risk of attack have plagued the distribution of homeland security grants since 9/11 as lawmakers sought to deliver for constituents the most money possible from Washington. The bill is being sponsored by Democratic Rep. Dina Titus of Nevada, whose district includes the urban Las Vegas area. “This legislation is about making sure communities, such as Las Vegas that face certain risks, have the information and data they need to best use vital homeland security funding,” Titus said in her own statement. “ … Las Vegas, like many other cities, faces unique challenges and threats, and this legislation will help FEMA understand our specific needs and more effectively administer these funds.” Finally, Pennsylvania Democrat Chris Carney in H.R. 5573 wants the Department of Homeland Security’s watchdog inspector general to examine FEMA’s oversight of readiness grants every two years. Carney is calling on the inspector general to among other things look at whether agency bureaucrats know how to properly police the funds. So far since Sept. 11 the IG has only evaluated grant spending intermittently. It hasn’t always been clear how long the new source of government spending would be around, but as of now, the spigot continues to flow freely. The inspector general has released several reports that specifically looked at grant expenditures in individual states, and few of them have amounted to glowing reviews. States where auditors issued notably critical findings included California, Colorado, Ohio and Pennsylvania, where the nation’s first homeland security secretary once served as governor.

Iranian guards detained Americans in Iraq, witnesses say

Mandy Hofmockel — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 16:02:15 -0700

The three Americans who were arrested near the Iran-Iraq border about 11 months ago—Shane Bauer, Josh Fattal and Sarah Shourd—are still being detained in Iran despite witness reports that Iranian guards crossed the border into Iraq to detain them, according to a new report from The Investigative Fund and The Nation Institute. Accusations that the Americans crossed into Iran to spy were denied by those close to the them, the State Department, and others, who say that they were hiking in the mountains there, The Nation reported. Until recently it was believed that the hikers accidentally crossed the border into Iran, but The Nation's five-month long investigation has revealed witnesses with a different story. Two witnesses say that the Americans were taken into custody on Iraqi soil, and another two say that the guard "who likely ordered their detention has since been arrested on charges of smuggling, kidnapping and murder." The Nation reported that witnesses saw guards from Iran's national police force use "'threatening' and 'menacing' gestures" in an attempt to get the three Americans over the border before guards crossed the border to apprehend them last July. The Iranian lieutenant colonel who witnesses say was the only one who could order the Americans be detained and transferred to Tehran, was arrested last August in connection with the murder of an influential cleric and has since been sentenced to death. Other lawsuits have been filed against Lt. Col. Heyva Taab "alleging libel, theft, rape, kidnapping and murder," according to The Nation. An Iranian official issued a statement earlier this month about the state of the Americans' case:

On June 11 Mohammad Javad Larijani, secretary general of Iran's High Council for Human Rights, said that the government's investigation was nearly complete and a trial for Bauer, Fattal and Shourd "should not be very far from now." In a statement issued on June 17, the mothers of the hikers called on Iran either to prosecute or release their children. "Iran has no legitimate reason at this stage not to release them or move forward with a fair trial in which our children can openly answer any allegations against them."

Arizona-style laws in other states 'fizzled' during later years

G.W. Schulz — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 11:45:24 -0700

The June issue of Governing magazine points out that two other states have already passed laws similar to the controversial anti-immigration legislation signed by Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer in April. Georgia policymakers decided in 2006 that contractors doing business with state and local governments could be audited to make certain their employees were allowed to be in the country. But no one's been audited four years later, in part because resources weren't set aside for the probes. A group representing Hispanic public officials argued the law had more to do with Georgia wanting to lead the nation in states attempting to act on immigration. It also elevated the status of a man who aggressively backed the measure and later became a leader of the Georgia Senate. There are key differences between Arizona and Georgia, as Governing notes. Arizona's law directs police to ask about the immigration status of people they come into contact with if 'reasonable suspicion' exists.

Still, the lesson from Georgia might well apply to Arizona. No state effort to crack down on illegal immigration will do very much unless legislators, bureaucrats and local law enforcement officers stay committed to it. In Arizona, where many police chiefs oppose the new law, it's quite possible that officers won't be suspecting residents are illegal immigrants very often.

Critical provisions of another tough-on-immigration law passed by Oklahoma in 2007 have been dismantled by subsequent court challenges, the magazine writes.

As spill rages, Coast Guard quietly carries out other rescue missions

G.W. Schulz — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 22:42:53 -0700

Coast Guard Cutter Bertholf in the Columbia River May 16 headed toward Portland, Ore., for maintenance. Image by Petty Officer 3rd Class Nate Littlejohn The United States Coast Guard has experienced more visibility in recent weeks than it has in some time due to the Gulf oil spill and Adm. Thad Allen’s almost daily appearances on television describing the government's strategy to fix the problem. But as the clean-up continues, Coast Guard men and women are still doing what most Americans know them for with little notice: rescuing people from accidents and disasters. Elevated Risk noted last month that prior to the oil spill, President Obama’s proposed budget for the Coast Guard contained tens of millions in cuts despite it being called upon frequently to provide assistance. Missions include plucking boaters from the ocean following mishaps, searching for victims who go missing on the high seas, responding to inland floods and more. Recent updates from the Coast Guard’s Twitter profile tell the story best: • June 24 – District 17 (Alaska) Coast Guard medevacs man from cruise ship southwest of Juneau • June 24 – District 7 (Miami): Coast Guard rescues three men, tows recreational vessel • June 24 – District 8: *Update* Coast Guard continues to search for missing fisherman • June 24 – Headquarters: Coast Guard conducts search for missing man near Ashtabula, Ohio • June 23 – District 11: Handheld radio assists Coast Guard in rescue of kite surfer • June 23 – District 9: Coast Guard rescues three near Saginaw Bay, Mich. • June 23 – District 8: Coast Guard searches for missing fisherman off the Coast of Freeport, Texas • June 23 – District 8: Coast Guard rescues five stranded men off Port Mansfield • June 23 – District 9: Coast Guard rescues boy near Sheboygan, Wis. • June 23 – District 7 (Miami): Coast Guard rescues, detains man off Belleair Beach • June 22 – District 7 (Miami): Coast Guard rescues woman, two children in Tampa Bay • June 22 – District 9: Coast Guard medically evacuates man from Beaver Island • June 22 – District 14 (Hawaii) U.S. Coast Guard medically evacuates ill fisherman: (VIDEO AVAILABLE) • June 21 – District 8: UPDATE: Coast Guard suspends search for missing boater on Lake Pontchartrain Video taken June 20 of Coast Guard personnel evacuating a fisherman from his ship near Hawaii after the man fell ill and needed medical treatment.

Bizarre neighbor up to something? Report it to Seattle's fusion center

G.W. Schulz — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 21:45:26 -0700

The state of Washington's intelligence fusion center in Seattle has posted a special form online citizens can use to report suspicious activity they observe. It's part of a growing campaign by authorities to collect information about possible terrorist planning. "With your help, we can stop a crime or a terrorist plot," says a website where the tip submission form is located. Although violent extremism is a priority for them, fusion centers have increasingly focused their attention on everyday law enforcement responsibilities. Dozens of the centers were established after Sept. 11 with the help of federal homeland security grants. The Seattle Weekly newspaper caught up with Washington state's fusion center in a full-length June 9 story that raised questions about police in the area falsely arresting political protesters and collecting information on them. One incident led to the state patrol and two local governments paying more than $500,000 as part of a settlement. According to the story:

Funded with both federal and local money, the center's 17 employees, says [state patrol spokesman Lt. Randy] Drake, scour the internet and sift through e-mails and law-enforcement tips on 'suspicious activities, that type of thing.' ... Through a series of security corridors, center employees can also reach the nearby offices of the Puget Sound Joint Terrorism Task Force and the regional FBI Field Intelligence Group. Besides state investigators and analysts, Seattle police and the King County sheriff also have full-time intelligence officers at the fusion center. Almost every city and county law-enforcement agency in the state is linked to the center through the secure State Intelligence Network. Operatives [sic] also have access to the FBI computer system, and, depending on their security-clearance level and the type of case, can access intelligence from around the globe."

June 2010 Washington State Fusion Center Bulletin

Preparedness board game sure to be a downer for the whole family

G.W. Schulz — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 21:41:30 -0700

You’re free to pass go and collect $200, but be aware that just around the corner a raging swarm of disease-carrying insects could be poised to destroy your community. Purchase a house on classy Park Place, but understand that at any moment, wild-eyed extremists could burn it to a heap of ashes with firebombs crudely constructed in an anonymous hotel room. By all means, invest with friends in the Marvin Gardens Beach Resort, but assume that terrifying, biblical floods could sweep away the guests when you least expect it. That’s the kind of cheery optimism you’ll find packed into a board game that undoubtedly will fill the guests of your family’s next dinner party with endless dread and anxiety. Called simply “Disaster Game,” its creators are pitching it as a valuable tool to help organizations prepare for catastrophes and build “business continuity readiness,” as they put it in the wonkiest of terms. Disaster Game challenges you to consider various devastating events, from hurricanes to nuclear fallout. A set of playing cards lists every conceivable nightmare scenario you can imagine and plenty more you likely never considered. So how does it work? First step is to decide what type of disaster exercise you want to explore. For example, will you be initially responding to a terrible tragedy involving a crazed gunman or recovering long-term from punishing weather conditions? Next, roll the dice to determine the date and time of this awful episode – it could be any unknown combination just like real life. Third, pick a card from one of two decks. It says a utility substation has caught fire and the power is gone. Restoration could take several days. Not too awful, relatively speaking. But now roll the dice again and select cards from a second deck of variables based on the numeral that comes up. The variables can be anything that makes the situation worse. Perhaps an ill-equipped command center has little more than an erasure board “with one partially dried out purple marker.” Or the center’s only available phone line was accidentally released to the media and now authorities are being inundated with calls leading to a deeper sense of pandemonium. That’s really it for the Disaster Game, according to power point directions online. There are no clear winners in which a seemingly outgunned Bruce Willis defeats the hostage taker or firefighters against impossible odds free everyone from a screaming inferno at the very last moment. According to the company behind it, Disaster Game is a thinking tool used to brace organizations for the worst and to encourage the development of effective responses. From the game’s website:

With it, you create unique and highly detailed disaster event scenarios that engage and challenge exercise participants. These scenarios can be used to test your organization’s business continuity plans or help build awareness about business continuity and the need for emergency preparedness. … The purpose of an exercise is NOT to pass. The purpose is to identify weaknesses or gaps in your plans that can be corrected and to engage and educate the participants so that they are prepared when a real event happens.

While Disaster Game appears to have originally been developed for enhancing security at major public and private institutions, there’s also an edition for families that comes complete with a 16-page guide instructing you and the kids on how to be ready. Promotional materials for the corporate version picture a furious tornado reaching down from a darkened sky, surely creating havoc for some distant town of hapless farmers. The family version, on the other hand, features a smiling mother with arms crossed and dad behind her tossing their child playfully into the air. This could all end tomorrow, it seems to suggest. That may be overstating the intent a bit, and to be fair, the game’s backers (who are preparedness professionals) certainly didn’t set out to startle anyone. They’re only trying to ensure folks know what to do if things go terribly wrong, and things can go terribly wrong. Just ask the people of Louisiana who have seen history-making cataclysm twice now in half a decade. No doubt we pay lip service to civil preparedness but continue to treat it as unessential in practice, learning again and again after the fact that reliable plans make for good policy. Disaster Game is entrepreneurship in the public interest. Its website also doesn’t misleadingly portray the game as some sort of reasonable substitute for Monopoly:

Although designed in game form and based on a standard deck of cards, it is not for casual play. It deals with serious (and sometimes deadly) crises that could impact you and your family, and the subject matter is mature in nature. Each card presents detailed and realistic events for use in discussion and preparation for the unexpected.

Despite the purest of intentions, however, it’s easy to explain why Wal-Mart locations likely won’t be carrying Disaster Game on store shelves nationwide. It takes enough to withstand the everyday worlds we each inhabit. Who wants to give over a Friday night to box wine and pretending that deadly gas billowing from the scene of a industrial accident is robbing the air of precious oxygen? A survey done of Washington, D.C. residents provides valuable insight. Officials there spent $4.6 million in federal homeland security grants during 2005 on a major media campaign that included television, print and radio ads, plus one million “personal preparedness planners.” They hoped at least half of the nation's capital region would better prepare for calamity after becoming inspired, but later interviews showed the number rose by only a few percentage points. According to a report published last year that cites the outreach effort, focus-group research showed most people did “not want to spend time thinking about terrorism or the potential effects of a terrorist act.” It goes on: “The bottom line is that citizens are doubtful there is really any way to prepare for an unknown type of attack, in an unknown place, at an unknown time.” A secondary online initiative, 72hours.dc.gov, sought to help families create emergency plans, but hardly anyone had used it, the report states. FEMA, too, offers a readiness board game called Disaster Discovery. But it’s not nearly as brutal as Disaster Game. Thank you for trying, though, FEMA. Elevated Risk will be sure to break it out next time we’re on a double date. Flickr image courtesy [ henning ]

Tracking BP: The Climate Desk

Mark Schapiro — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 16:43:43 -0700

As the fast-motion oil catastrophe unfolds in the Gulf, check out some great reporting from a new media consortium, The Climate Desk . The desk is an innovative cooperative approach to in-depth reporting into climate change and energy. Participants range across all media, including Mother Jones, The Atlantic, Wired, Slate, Grist, WNET’s news show Need to Know, and CIR. They sent a team down to the Gulf which is producing some insightful revelations, analysis and news. Here is some of the latest: Conflict of Interest for Judge Who Decided Against Offshore Moratorium? License to Drill: New Leases in the Gulf of Mexico How Will Distributing Money from the $20 Billion Claims Fund Work? Why Won’t BP Measure the Oil Spill? Why Did BP Take the Risks That it Did? Should I Boycott BP? Uncharted Waters: The Spill and Human Health How do you put a dollar value on something like a coral reef? Uncharted Waters: The Spill and Human Health

One terror fusion center's big catch: dollar-store thief

G.W. Schulz — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 13:42:15 -0700

Local police intelligence fusion centers created after Sept. 11 to foil terrorism plots are now being used for the most common law enforcement responsibilities despite an enormous investment from the Department of Homeland Security. A fusion center in Iowa helped police this month nab a dollar-store thief who made off with $250 during a “bold daytime burglary,” one local paper described it. The Dollar General Store in Vinton, Iowa, is a retailer of low-cost groceries, as its name suggests. Authorities in Arizona announced recently that a fusion center there would be involved in a summer campaign against youth crime starting with shoplifting and loud house parties, which police say can lead to drug activity and homicides. Since a genuine threat of terrorism is uncommon for so many areas of the United States, fusion centers over time have broadened their missions to include “all crimes” and “all hazards,” partly to convince skeptical police departments to participate and so they could seek a wider array of resources like federal grants to keep them afloat. Poor information sharing between local, state and federal agencies emerged as a chief factor contributing to the deadly success of 9/11. Since then, countless reports, commissions and initiatives from the government have offered various solutions to the problem of authorities failing to utilize intelligence that could halt terrorism attempts. There are now several dozen fusion centers in the United States, and Washington has committed more than a quarter-of-a-billion dollars to their construction, mostly through the use of homeland security grants. Local law enforcement officials still complain that’s not enough and have pressured lawmakers to find more money for hiring intelligence analysts and covering other costs. Meanwhile, the centers today often appear to be fighting everyday crime over al-Qaeda. In the case of Iowa, terrorists would need to rob Dollar General locations 1,600 times at $250 a hit in order to raise enough money for another Sept. 11-style assault, if it happened that the incidents were connected to terrorism. The 9/11 Commission conservatively says al-Qaeda raised about $400,000 for the attacks. As for Arizona, the state’s new anti-immigration law may turn out be a bigger hurdle for law enforcement during its seasonal crackdown on lawless young people rather than any perceived shortcoming in intelligence collection and sharing. The police chief in Mesa, Ariz., earlier this month sought to emphasize that undocumented immigrants should not fear deportation as a result of providing tips to officials that could aid the operation. “The community does not need to be afraid of this police department,” the Arizona Republic quoted him as saying June 4. “We don’t need to know who you are. There is no need for identification. There will be no third degree.” There are other examples of fusion centers performing standard police duties. When a 52-year-old woman in Bentonville, Ark., turned up missing earlier this year after a domestic dispute, police forwarded details about the case to that state’s fusion center, created in 2008. In Nacogdoches, Texas, the sheriff’s department hopes a fusion center will help solve the abduction and sexual assault of a woman seized last month in her home by an unknown masked assailant. A Michigan fusion center may have at one time been in a position to help stop the Christmas Day underwear bomber, but according to the Detroit News, it wasn’t enlisted in the case until after airline passengers had already restrained the suspect. Texas Republican Congressman Michael McCaul mentioned Houston’s fusion center in a June 9 statement reacting to news that authorities had charged a man from the Lone Star State with seeking to help al-Qaeda. But it’s not clear what role if any the center played in that arrest. One of the most enlightening commentaries yet on the phenomenon of fusion centers came from a 25-year-veteran of the New Jersey State Police. Stephen Serrao wrote in a leading industry publication last year that many fusion centers still have widely scattered missions that aren’t clearly defined. Lower-level personnel end up determining priorities for them since top law enforcement commanders don’t always bother becoming directly involved with the centers. He cited one example where police officers contact a center for simple driver’s license information because it’s faster than calling the DMV. Another center purchased sophisticated intelligence management software, but without knowing what tools were actually needed, it deployed clerks and administrative assistants to use the program, not professional analysts. Center managers elsewhere constructed their facilities with thick walls, intricate combination locks and additional security features so they would be permitted to handle classified documents and data. But according to Serrao, some centers won’t ever have to deal with top-secret information. Furthermore:

Many of the staff assigned to work [in the centers] don’t have top-secret clearances, so they are literally sitting in the hall outside the facility without access to many information systems. Most centers are dealing with top-secret data less than five percent of the time. We are overbuilding and over-securing these centers at significant cost, and it is causing great inefficiency. Entering a door at some fusion centers can take up to five minutes because of the complex locking mechanisms on the door to meet the top-secret standard; yet, when you get inside, there is no top-secret information being handled at that facility. The data are usually unclassified and in some cases are open source. Over-securing the facility hampers access, thereby hindering investigations.

The federal government has published two critical reports now on fusion centers, and both point to missions that were poorly defined at conception, or the centers swiftly expanded their scope of operations arguing that any number of crimes could turn out to have a link with terrorism. One center examined had to focus on all crimes so multiple agencies would be willing to contribute resources, while a second said having a larger purpose made it easier to apply for different types of funding, according to assessments from the Government Accountability Office and the Congressional Research Service, issued in 2007 and 2008 respectively. From CRS:

Leadership at several fusion centers interviewed for this report noted they believed the country was moving towards an all-crimes and/or all-hazards model and they felt they needed to move with the changing tide. Others suggested it was impossible to create ‘buy-in’ amongst local law enforcement agencies and other public sectors if a fusion center was solely focused on counterterrorism, as the center’s partners often didn’t feel threatened by terrorism, nor did they think their community would produce would-be terrorists. Rather, most police departments and public-sector agencies are more concerned with issues such as gangs, narcotics and street crime, which are more relevant to their communities.

While the growth of fusion centers occurred suddenly amid the war on terror, the concept of intelligence fusion and sharing isn’t new. A fusion center in El Paso, Texas, created by the Drug Enforcement Administration during the 1970s should be setting the best example nationally for how to effectively compile and distribute intelligence. But nearly four decades later the center is still struggling to prove it can contribute meaningfully to the fight against narcotics trafficking and illegal immigration. This month a report from the Justice Department’s inspector general concluded that the ability of the El Paso Intelligence Center – EPIC as it’s known – to coordinate with federal and state agencies “is inconsistent.” (One Washington Post commenter called it an “EPIC fail.”) The center doesn’t analyze information from unique sources it has access to and as a result “may be overlooking drug trafficking trends and patterns that could assist interdiction investigations and operations.” EPIC’s information on border threats, moreover, isn’t always current, and it could be doing the same work of other agencies leading to wasted energy:

For EPIC to efficiently disseminate its information, it should have contacts in each key intelligence center throughout the country and ensure that those contacts are aware of EPIC’s products and services and how to access them. … When we compared EPIC with other multi-agency centers having counterdrug intelligence responsibilities, we found increasing potential for overlap in certain areas. … With the emergence of new centers and EPIC’s expansion into program areas that were not addressed [in earlier planning], there is an increased likelihood for duplication of effort among the centers.

Flickr images by davidsonscott15 and Steve Snodgrass. Thanks to Steven Aftergood and Secrecy News for making Congressional Research Service reports available to the public.

California Watch launches Politics Verbatim

Mark Katches — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 10:02:20 -0700

One of the most gratifying things about California Watch is the speed at which we can embrace innovation. And then go for it.

Today, we’re unveiling a website built by our own Chase Davis called Politics Verbatim. This new site will attempt to track every quote, promise and statement made by our two major candidates for governor in California – Democrat Jerry Brown and Republican Meg Whitman.

Check out the search tool that Davis created. It allows readers to sort candidate statements by nine different categories – including promises, attacks, and vague policy points. If they dodge an issue or a subject, there’s a search category for that, too. Readers can also sort by geography, to see where the candidates have been appearing – and what parts of the state they’ve been ignoring.

The site also will include blog posts from Davis, our Senior Editor Robert Salladay and Sacramento based reporter Timothy Sandoval.

The candidates’ statements are sorted by 26 topics – from abortion to welfare.

We are unveiling Politics Verbatim today with about 300 documents and 1,000 excerpts. We will be adding to the site daily, scouring news and campaign sites and Twitter and Facebook feeds. We also are encouraging crowd-sourcing from other journalists and readers. We hope to soon create easy ways for readers to upload video and audio files from public campaign events. California is a massive state, and we can’t provide blanket coverage. But with help from others and from our media partners, we believe we can build a useful, relevant tool in a critical election year. We are hoping to explore additional partnerships with other media outlets to strengthen the content of Politics Verbatim.

Our overarching goal is to create a resource for voters and for those interested in policy. When Davis pitched Politics Verbatim a couple months back, he hoped the site would be a way to bring more accountability to the political process. By tracking the candidates' spoken words, we could hold their feet to the fire when they break promises or fail to live up to campaign pledges.

We expect the site to evolve in the next few weeks. We’re treating today’s launch as Phase I. We are up and running and functional. We expect to roll out a second phase in the next month or so – a phase that will include easier ways to assess side-by-side the positions of Brown and Whitman. In that respect, Politics Verbatim will help serve as an interactive guide for undecided voters.

Ideally, we would track other candidates and races. And that will be the eventual goal – hopefully sooner rather than later. We'd like to add the U.S. Senate race and initiative campaigns, for instance. But that takes resources. So for now, we’re focusing on the race to become the next chief executive in the nation’s most dysfunctional state.

Politics Verbatim speaks to the advantages of a small newsroom. One reporter had an idea, made a pitch. And it was green-lighted quickly. No mess. No fuss. We’ve been able to move fast to create this project because of the amazing talents of Davis and the lack of obstructions along the way.

I’ve worked in some terrific newsrooms where innovation was valued. But even in the most receptive large newsrooms, I’m betting a project such as Politics Verbatim would have been slowed by multiple rounds of memos, meetings and bureaucratic hurdles that might have sucked the momentum out of the idea.

Several other people deserve credit for today’s launch. Freelancer Coulter Jones and California Watch intern Austin Fast were instrumental in searching for campaign statements and materials to load onto our site. Our Senior Editor Salladay helped shape the project and multimedia producer Lisa Pickoff-White contributed to the look of Politics Verbatim. Davis, who is in his mid 20s, recruited his friends at Upstatement to design our logo and site layout. They did it at a steep discount. I’m told that Davis enticed them with some barbecue and a promise of a Terminator DVD.

You have got to love this generation of innovators.

Please let us know what you think.

California Watch is a project of the Center for Investigative Reporting and is now the largest investigative reporting team operating in the state. Visit the Web site at www.californiawatch.org for in-depth coverage of K-12 schools, higher education, money and politics, health and welfare, public safety and the environment.

Trouble in three states draws scrutiny for veteran private jailer

G.W. Schulz — Sat, 19 Jun 2010 01:35:30 -0700

The nation’s largest private jail operator is facing a new public relations fight following multiple high-profile incidents this year in three states – Idaho, Texas and Arizona. The Corrections Corporation of America based in Nashville, Tenn. experienced a meteoric rise during the 1990s when Washington opened its doors to privatization during the Clinton administration and helped set the stage for public-sector outsourcing that is now commonplace in the United States, notably at the still-young Department of Homeland Security. Officials from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement revealed in late May that a guard at the company’s T. Don Hutto Residential Center located 35 miles east of Austin, Texas, sexually assaulted women detainees held there. The federal government has since reportedly directed CCA to institute changes, such as prohibiting male guards from being alone with women in custody, and ICE said it would enhance oversight of the government’s larger detention facilities. A letter to the company from ICE obtained by the Associated Press said the guard’s alleged actions occurred because CCA failed to follow federal guidelines regulating the transport of detainees. During a past life when CCA helped lead the movement toward privatization, it so anticipated limitless fortunes that the company nearly went bankrupt building more beds than federal, state and local governments wanted to fill. But Washington pumped new life into CCA partly after the Bush administration moved to dramatically scale back the federal government’s “catch-and-release” policy in which suspected immigration violators were freed before being required to appear at a deportation hearing unless they had a criminal record. Detention facilities ballooned after the change creating significant new demand for CCA’s services and a path for the company back to big earnings. Today CCA is a top five contractor for ICE and earned more than $200 million in revenues from the agency last year alone, according to the jailer’s Securities and Exchange Commission filings. Executives at CCA also believe that the economic downturn and a perception by public officials that outsourcing is a solution for money woes will make it more competitive on Wall Street. The company’s latest successes, however, are occurring alongside allegations of misconduct among guards and other episodes that have attracted the attention of critics. The Hutto facility in Texas is named after one of CCA’s founders and houses not just individuals accused of entering the country illegally but also asylum seekers, the investigative journalism outfit Texas Tribune noted earlier this month. According to the most recent accusations against Hutto, women were allegedly molested while being patted down by a guard and one was propositioned for sex. The ACLU of Texas called the revelations part of a pattern at immigrant detention facilities in the Lone Star State. A guard in Los Fresnos, Texas, was sentenced to prison time in April for the repeated sexual abuse of detainees. The man admitted that he “snuck into medical isolation rooms at the detention center infirmary to grope female patients. He frequently volunteered for infirmary duty so that he would be alone with the victims, and his victims were usually asleep when he entered the room,” the Justice Department says. Also at the Hutto facility in 2007, a CCA guard was reportedly fired amid an investigation into whether he had sex with a woman inmate in her cell. According to Lisa Graybill, legal director for the Texas ACLU:

Sadly, the most unusual aspect of this incident [at Hutto last month] may be that the abused women actually complained. Immigrant detainees, particularly women, are especially vulnerable to abuse because they may not speak English, and may be afraid of retaliation if they speak up. Victims may be promised help with citizenship proceedings if they comply, and threatened with rapid deportation if they resist.

Further west in Idaho, meanwhile, CCA found itself in another controversy when the Associated Press reported that state officials would be fining the company over $40,000 and demanding that it improve health care services and overhaul weak alcohol treatment programs. The Idaho Correctional Center near a town called Kuna (not an immigrant detention facility, to be clear) was described by one local paper in a recent editorial as “easily the most trouble-prone prison in the state’s history.” The Magic Valley Times-News recounted how three years ago state leaders imagined savings for taxpayers by contracting out the costly responsibility of incarceration to a company like CCA, which has long lured government officials into contracts by promising fewer headaches and expenses. But documents later obtained by reporters showed that most of the facility’s alcohol and drug counselors lacked necessary qualifications. A probe also cast CCA’s procedures for carrying out medical care as flawed, while the ACLU sued the company earlier this year over how it was generally managing the Idaho prison – inmates allegedly described the facility as a “gladiator school” due to its reputation for widespread violence. The suit in addition charged that CCA guards enforced control by allowing inmates near others likely to commit brutality and withheld medical treatment to save on costs. An ACLU attorney claimed he’d brought cases against at least 100 prisons and jails nationally but none were as violent as CCA’s facility in Idaho. An AP investigation last year revealed that carnage at the prison was three times greater than elsewhere in the state, and authorities believed occurrences were underreported by inmates and CCA employees. According to the Times-News:

The ACLU contends that [Idaho Correctional Center] is understaffed, with sometimes only two guards on duty to control prison wings with as many as 350 inmates. Which may be one of the reasons that the publicly traded company was able to report a four percent revenue increase for the fourth quarter of the last fiscal year, and a 12.5 percent increase in earnings per share. Not many legislators have much appetite anymore for another [such] facility in the state. There’s much more enthusiasm for alternative sentencing and drug, alcohol and mental-health courts to keep Idaho’s inmate numbers as low as possible. But stay tuned. Thanks to CCA’s actions, a federal judge – and not the state – may soon be dictating how Idaho handles its prison population.

Finally, at a CCA-managed facility in Arizona where nearly 2,000 inmates from Hawaii are held as part of a contract with that state’s Department of Public Safety (also not a center that holds immigrants, for the record), two convicts have died already this year. One was killed during a dispute with another prisoner, and police concluded only in recent days that the second was strangled to death by his cellmate. The latter victim was discovered unresponsive June 8, according to news accounts, and authorities from Hawaii traveled to Arizona following both incidents to investigate what happened. Stock.xchng image courtesy of amirhd

More observers asking if Detroit's 'paramilitary' police tactics go too far

G.W. Schulz — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 14:16:14 -0700

Submachine guns like the MP5 are common among SWAT police units, including Detroit's Special Response Team. Flickr image courtesy Mateus 27:24&25 The military-style methods promoted by Detroit’s police chief have come under fire since officers shot and killed a small girl last month during a botched house raid that ignited public outrage. Chief Warren Evans took over the police department there last year and embarked on an aggressive campaign to win back the city from its stubbornly high violent-crime rate by among other things dispatching a so-called Special Response Team for everyday law enforcement activities. The unit’s members dress in intimidating SWAT attire and carry submachine guns capable of unleashing an extraordinary 800 rounds per minute. At least that’s how their firepower is described on the website of “S.W.A.T.,” a television program hosted by the cable TV network A&E that showcases Detroit’s elite law enforcement team alongside two others in Dallas and Kansas City. Elevated Risk previously asked whether the tragedy that exacerbated already deep fissures in Detroit between the black community and police also showed that local law enforcement in the United States had become overly militarized since Sept. 11. Time magazine answered that question in part by later reporting that the techniques Evans preferred for turning around Detroit were backfiring and Mayor Dave Bing had publicly declared the city would be “reigning him in.” Before the SWAT raid, Evans appeared to be someone who could reinvigorate a city in slow decay. As Time notes, Evans was born and raised in Detroit where notable black radicals visited his parents and family members helped break down barriers to employment for African Americans in health care and public safety. The mayor no doubt believed Evans was capable, because Bing hired him even though the two were at one time political opponents. Responses to 911 calls improved on Evans’ watch, and reported homicides dropped, too. The police department’s leadership is now under a microscope following last month’s killing. The Detroit Free Press on June 6 reported in depth on another unit in the agency known as the Mobile Strike Force that openly turns even the smallest infractions – including jaywalking and loitering – into a search for drugs and weapons. “In a city where an average of three people are shot every day,” the paper wrote, “Chief Warren Evans said the only way to combat guns is to get the illegal ones off the street. If that means stopping people breaking minor laws, he said, so be it.” Inevitably, that’s led critics to accuse the police of profiling citizens and relying on tactics better suited for Baghdad. Meanwhile, the increased use in Detroit of its SWAT team parallels an ongoing trend nationally of police departments seeking to emulate the armed forces. Many officers are in fact reservists who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan. A flood of federal homeland security grants awarded by the billions since 2001 has further encouraged this new look of local law enforcement, enabling police agencies to buy armored assault vehicles, muscle-bound RVs known as incident-command trucks, beefy tactical body armor and battering rams. As part of our months-long project examining homeland security in the United States, the Center for Investigative Reporting has seen community after community snap up such special tactics gear amid thousands of pages of grant spending records reviewed – night-vision binoculars, ballistic helmets, “under-door remote viewing” devices, material for outfitting snipers, bullet-proof entry shields and much more. (Attempts to learn about Michigan’s purchases stalled after the state police demanded over $1,000 in fees to process an open-government request.) The man identified as having fired the bullet that killed young Aiyana Jones during a “no-knock” raid, Officer Joseph Weekley, still appeared on the website of A&E’s “S.W.A.T.” when Elevated Risk first wrote about the subject May 26. He continues to be featured on the site today. Weekley poses grim-faced in the photo and handles a hefty-barreled “multi-launcher” that shoots “less-lethal rounds” designed to halt unruly crowds or suspects without anyone getting killed. He’s a lead driver of the unit’s armored personnel carrier, the site says. To some degree the 9/11 attacks only added fuel to a movement in policing that was already underway. But it’s now influenced heavily by the rhetoric of the war on terror and a perception in local police circles that the world is growing more unstable every day, even as crime in most corners of America drops to historic lows. These revolutionary changes in American law enforcement could have unintended consequences, Time says:

Detroit is not the only city to go the paramilitary route. Since the 1980s drug war, experts say, many local police departments have developed such units, often with surplus U.S. military gear. Initially, the units responded to hostage situations. Increasingly, they’re used proactively to search for illegal contraband, like guns and drugs, says Peter Kraska, professor of criminal justice at Eastern Kentucky University and author of Militarizing the American Criminal Justice System. Local police have a fundamental mission: to use the minimum amount of force to bring criminals to justice. That’s a very different mission from that of the military: to destroy the enemy.

Detroit also isn’t the only city where special weapons and tactics squads are being scrutinized for their conduct. Just this week in Columbus, Ohio, city leaders announced that they wanted to know more about a mask-wearing, non-uniformed group of local police officers who leaped out of unmarked vans during a traffic stop. Police searched the car and its two occupants explaining later that they believed it was stolen. But the driver reportedly turned out to be a teenage boy who’d just picked up his father from work during the early morning hours of May 7. The youth’s pants were allegedly pulled down during a search for drugs and weapons. Officers present were later identified as part of the local Strategic Response Bureau, which, according to the Columbus Dispatch, “often operates undercover to gather intelligence, investigate gangs and handle other special operations.” At the time, they were “dressed in black fatigues, and some wore masks. Neither father nor son saw badges, but one of the men wore a ball cap with the word police.” The incident is also being investigated by internal affairs, the Dispatch reports. Additional image by Cyril Thomas and the Tenafly Police Department

Rebranding at ICE Meant to Soften Immigration Enforcement Agency's Image

Sarah McHie — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 09:18:28 -0700

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement will realign its duties to promote criminal investigations over immigrant deportation, officials have announced. CIR's Andrew Becker reports on ICE's makeover in the Washington Post.

Reports contrasting claims of border crime mount

G.W. Schulz — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 14:43:18 -0700

Agents and officers from U.S. Customs and Border Protection honor fallen federal law enforcers during a memorial ceremony in 2008. Image courtesy of CBP. Three critical reports have emerged in recent weeks contrasting sharply with assertions that endless crime emanating from a porous border made it necessary to pass Arizona’s controversial immigration law. But the new revelations appear to have only minimally impacted the rancor swirling anew around perceived border violence in the wake of a shooting by federal law enforcement June 7 that left a 15-year-old boy dead. Authorities say the teenager was part of a group throwing rocks at border patrol agents as they attempted to detain a suspected illegal immigrant during the headline-grabbing incident. The border patrol internally put together one of the latest reports, which says that law enforcers working on the nation's southwest boundary with Mexico are safer at work than the average American police officer. A second academic study published this month found not only that crime had decreased in cities with rising immigration levels but also that the presence of more immigrants appeared to be partly responsible for dips in reported violent activity. Writing in Social Science Quarterly, University of Colorado sociologist Tim Wadsworth stated that cities with the biggest jump in immigration between 1990 and 2000 also experienced the greatest reductions in homicide and robbery during that same time period. “The findings offer insights into the complex relationship between immigration and crime and suggest that growth in immigration may have been responsible for part of the precipitous crime drops of the 1990s,” Wadsworth said in the study’s abstract. Then on June 3, Associated Press reporter Martha Mendoza publicized an in-house report by U.S. Customs and Border Protection she obtained under the Freedom of Information Act revealing that just three percent of border patrol agents and officers were attacked last year, “mostly when assailants threw rocks at them.” That’s compared with statistics showing 11 percent of sheriff’s deputies and police officers nationwide were assaulted with knives or guns during the same examined timeframe suggesting there were fewer risks working as a cop on the border. Additionally, new FBI crime statistics cited in the AP story showed that during 2009, border states were home to four big cities in America where the lowest rates of violent crime occurred, three of them central to the debate over whether the U.S. is endlessly threatened by bloodshed on the border. Some insistent policymakers paint a portrait of Phoenix, San Diego and El Paso in particular as being under siege, and they continue to call for National Guard personnel and hundreds of millions of dollars more in federal aid to quell border chaos. President Obama has agreed to meet those demands by promising infusions of cash and the deployment of troops. Evidence has shown for some time now that El Paso specifically enjoys a low number of violent crimes, even though it’s situated just across the border from Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, where drug cartels have taken thousands of lives in a bloody fight to control essential trafficking routes. The fourth big city with one of the lowest rates of violent crime is Austin, Texas. Yet the latest findings haven’t slowed intense rhetoric from some political leaders in southwestern states who cast the border as a warzone and say turbulence there is an alarming threat to national security. Gov. Jan Brewer of Arizona attributes crime in her state to illegal immigration, and Sen. John McCain, who’s facing a tough reelection battle that centers in part on immigration issues, points to marijuana seizures and property crime as evidence of a need for bolder action. After noting a remarkable drop in the number of violent crimes experienced by Phoenix between 2008 and 2009, Newsweek journalist Christopher Dickey wrote May 27:

The FBI numbers show that in the midst of the supposed crime wave, many other cities in the southwest have had declines in crime similar to Phoenix. El Paso, Texas, just across the Rio Grande from a ferocious drug war in Juarez, where some 5,000 people have been murdered in recent years, saw almost no change in its own crime rate and remains one of the safest cities in the country, with only 12 murders last year. San Antonio saw violent crime drop from 9,699 incidents to 7,844; murders from 116 to 99. Compare that with a city like Detroit, which is a little bigger than El Paso and much smaller than San Antonio – and not exactly a magnet for job-seeking immigrants. Its murder rate went up from 323 in 2008 to 361 in 2009.

Not all is perfect on the border, however. Statistics also show that in some parts of Texas, border agents endured an increase in assaults between 2008 and 2009 and needed to fire their weapons on more occasions. It’s also the case that decreases in violent attacks perpetrated against law enforcement may be due to a wilted economy discouraging illegal immigration and a doubling of the number of agents working on the border since 2004.

Gear bought with terror grants in New York went unused

G.W. Schulz — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 11:01:00 -0700

On several occasions in recent weeks, lawmakers and local officials from New York have loudly complained that the Obama administration is shortchanging them on federal preparedness funds while the Big Apple continues to face significant terrorist threats. Everyone from GOP Congressman Peter King of Long Island to New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg condemned budget plans that called for trimming back two major homeland security grant programs benefiting the state. They point to the attempted Times Square bombing as evidence that New York needs more cash from Washington, not less. Reporters mostly cast the story as a boxing match between the nation’s most visible metropolis and the White House with coverage not going far beyond remarks issued from both corners of the ring. But a look at public documents suggests that while New York no doubt suffered most from the Sept. 11 attacks, the need for more security funding there may not always be as urgent as its leaders insist. Records show that New York City’s health department acquired 12 computer servers in September of 2007 to enhance its tracking of infectious diseases and bioterrorism risks. When state officials arrived nearly two years later in 2009 to check up on them, “these servers were still not operational and no project completion plan was offered,” according to a report. Documents also state that there wasn’t enough information available to determine if two more servers “were being used for the purpose of the grant.” After Elevated Risk exchanged multiple e-mails with the department’s press office, it remained unclear how much work the servers were performing today, and officials refused to disclose the amount paid for them. A spokesperson said only that two servers replaced non-functioning equipment, and the others were currently being relied upon “for testing and back-up” to an existing laboratory information management system. A prepared statement did say their use is limited because the servers were manufactured by a company that is no longer in business and so cannot provide technical support. The state’s Office of Homeland Security is responsible for overseeing federal readiness grants across New York, and under open-government laws Elevated Risk requested site inspection reports in which officials described what they found after visiting local grantees. Another such report questioned five toxic vapor analyzers and gamma monitors costing a total of $80,000 and purchased by the New York City Department of Environmental Protection. Overseers found that the devices went “unutilized” a year after being acquired. The equipment also wasn’t calibrated for use, and “no one was assigned to, or trained to use these monitors,” records state. Spokesman Farrell Sklerov said in an e-mail that the monitors have since been conditioned for use and are deployed during both routine and special events “to protect the citizens of New York City from exposure to hazardous materials.” Specifically, the gear is designed to monitor the air in real time for toxic chemicals, and department officials told the state they planned to use the equipment last year at the U.S. Open and a major United Nations session. The city’s IT department shares responsibility with local firefighters for over 1,000 Motorola devices used to track the location of emergency vehicles. Purchased with grant funds from 2005, state officials said in a report that when they showed up in the summer of 2009, a “significant number” were still stored in boxes. “Equipment not being utilized is not benefiting the goals and objectives of this project and therefore expenditures may be disallowed.” The Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications vigorously disputed the finding, records show, telling the state that 250 of the devices were used as spares “to ensure system-wide service integrity.” Ninety more were at one time installed in emergency vehicles that had to be taken out of commission, so those locators were added to the pool of spares, while another three dozen or so were awaiting repairs. Local officials conceded, however, that over 200 of the trackers were “pending installations” at the time of the state’s visit and they’ve since been pressed into service. That means nearly 400 of them overall still weren’t actively being used when the IT department provided its response, but according to documents, state overseers more or less considered the issue resolved by then. A spokesman for the IT department, Nick Sbordone, said it was his office’s job merely to make sure the grant funds were spent before federal deadlines expired, and that responsibility was carried out. “We’re in full compliance with the federal government,” he said. Steve Ritea, spokesman for New York City’s fire department, couldn’t immediately say how much the trackers cost but added this: “There’s a certain number used as spares so they can be on hand to replace units that are damaged, and the state has showed they are satisfied with our response.” New York OHS To be sure, site-inspection reports generated by the state’s homeland security office show that others had no or few difficulties handling federal readiness grants, including county emergency management offices, small towns, colleges and nonprofits. Nonetheless, government watchdogs elsewhere in the state of New York have additionally questioned millions of dollars worth expenditures for GPS devices, robotic equipment, computers and more. Last year an investigation of the New York Harbor’s Waterfront Commission revealed that local officials spent port security grants totaling $619,000 for laptops, software and other equipment so personnel could remotely connect to registration and photo-identification databases. The waterfront commission submitted reports to the federal government claiming the system was fully operational, but by the end of 2008, that wasn’t the case. According to a report from New York’s inspector general: “Laptops that were purchased with grant funds to give police access to databases were not installed in the police cars and were never used for their intended purpose. There was little or no use of other wireless communications proposed in the grant due to inaccessibility or lack of proper training.” Also discovered was a $170,000 patrol boat the commission told homeland security officials in Washington would be used for detecting “a waterborne attack.” But the inspector general’s investigation found that the craft was only used “sparingly and irregularly,” and trips it did make were mostly for escorting VIPs during major events such as Fleet Week. Federal auditors in 2008 separately found a lack of explanation for $160,000 in “landlord administrative fees” and called a $3.1 million automated student health record system “questionable,” because school employees who used it said the system had no bio-terrorism application. Officials targeted in the report countered that the system did have a bio-terrorism function, which was cited as the justification for buying it, and argued that perhaps auditors simply interviewed the wrong people. Finally, a 2007 report from the state comptroller described how New York City’s health department spent $126,000 on subscription fees for almost 400 GPS systems that officials planned to install in government vehicles. Investigators discovered that over 100 of the systems were left in storage and had not been used three years after being purchased. Due to the revelation, department officials requested that a contractor partially credit them for subscription fees totaling $93,000. Auditors in that same report also learned that a $188,000 robotic arm and a $183,000 machine designed for providing information to the public through mass mailings each sat unused for a year. The recent squabble between Obama officials and New York was in large part initiated by Republican Rep. King, ranking member of the House Homeland Security Committee, who described several intercepted terrorism plots in a press release last month before accusing the administration of slashing port and transit security grants for the area by a quarter. “One would expect the Obama administration’s Department of Homeland Security to understand that the terrorist threat to the United States of America is aimed primarily at the Big Apple,” King said in the statement. “But, sadly, they don’t.” Democrats from New York’s congressional delegation chimed in with their own barbs attributing the cuts to “mind-bogglingly bad judgment” and saying the change in grant awards “makes absolutely no sense.” The White House responded by pointing out that New York had been slow to spend hundreds of millions of dollars awarded to the state during past grant years and added that New York would receive over $100 million in security funding from President Obama’s economic stimulus program. New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg reportedly called that a “numbers game.” “The real issue is that this city is the target, and we don’t get our fair share,” he said. Reminding readers that New York already receives far more in readiness dollars than any other place in the country, the Los Angeles Times offered one of the more memorable headlines during the dispute: “Can New York’s bolstered security ever be enough?” Flickr image by Robert Scoble

Carbon carousel: European market a haven for tax fraud

Mark Schapiro — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 09:29:58 -0700

Flying below the American radar, a tax scandal has been rocking the global carbon markets. Ironically, it is emanating from Copenhagen, the city that six months ago hosted the world's largest climate summit. But back in 2007, long before COP 15 arrived, the Danes began working behind the scenes to host a growing cadre of carbon brokerage firms, which have become central to trading the world's fastest growing commodity. To make it easier for these financial firms to set up shop in the Danish capital, the Ministry of Finance decided to skip background checks on companies being vetted to trade on the country's national carbon exchange. According to a string of reports in the Danish newspaper Ekstra Bladet, all the government asked companies to provide was an email address. This laissez-faire attitude succeeded in channeling close to a third of all EU carbon trades through Denmark, and has since backfired badly. The paper reported that one firm after another was little more than a front company for transacting complicated financial scams. In fact, more than 80 percent of the carbon trading firms registered on the Danish exchange closed down after the media probe began, according to a statement (pdf) by the country's Environment Minister, Lykke Friis. The fraud is known as a "tax carousel." Danish-registered companies buy carbon credits from brokers in other European countries. This intra-European trading of credits to meet EU emissions standards (and the trades made by speculators betting on the price of these credits) are not taxed. But when the buyer and seller are trading in the same country, in this case Denmark, a value added tax, or VAT, is imposed. In Denmark, VAT is a hefty 25 percent on each transaction -- one of the highest rates in Europe. But rather than turn the tax monies over to the Danish treasury, the traders packed up and disappeared. Three-quarters of the carbon traders registered in Denmark during the past year have either been dismantled by their owners or were shut down by the authorities. According to a Reuters report, EuroPol estimates the scheme has so far cost treasuries in Denmark and other European countries some 5 billion euros (about US$7 billion) in lost revenues, while throwing into question the veracity of thousands of carbon trades. Bo Elkjaer, the Danish reporter who broke the story, explained over email that his further investigations suggest the scandal is by no means confined to Denmark. Many of the same firms are suspected of running similar schemes in the Netherlands, Germany, Norway and the UK. EuroPol reports that after the governments of France, the UK, the Netherlands and Spain changed their tax codes to close the loophole, the volume of carbon trading in those countries collapsed by 90 percent. Meanwhile, the media blitz has raised questions about the EU's new commissioner for climate action, Connie Hedegaard, who was Denmark's climate minister when many of the fraudulent deals were set in motion. Hedegaard said publicly that she knew nothing about the fraud before Mr. Elkjaer and his newspaper began reporting on the case last December. In May, the Guardian reported that it had obtained a document from inside the Danish ministry drawing attention to the tax fraud problem, which Ms. Hedegaard had initialed back in August 2009. Since then, she has admitted she was aware of the problem but says that at the time she signed the report, she saw it as a tax issue and, therefore, not her responsibility. EuroPol is in the middle of a full scale investigation into the scam, and hundreds of arrests have been made across Europe. Elkjaer says the scandal highlights the vulnerability of a system based on trading an intangible asset. "It's just a computer certificate, moved from account to account in endless loops," he said. "A trade can be performed from a single laptop anywhere in the world. All it needs is an internet connection."

Border Patrol agent sentenced to six years for corruption conviction

Andrew Becker — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 18:16:37 -0700

Eric Macias was sentenced to six years in prison.
Photo: Department of Homeland Security

A Border Patrol agent who helped drug traffickers smuggle cocaine and marijuana into the country for about two years was sentenced today by a federal judge in New Mexico to six years in prison. Eric R. Macias, who was stationed in Deming, New Mexico, previously pleaded guilty to one count of bribery and one count of attempt to aid and abet possession and intent to distribute five kilograms of cocaine. Macias also accepted about $14,000 in bribe money, according to court records. A federal grand jury in Las Cruces indicted Macias in March 2009 on eight counts. Four other counts of bribery and two other drug-related charges were dismissed, according to court records. The case was investigated by the FBI, Department of Homeland Security Inspector General and Customs and Border Protection internal affairs. The former agent admitted in his Oct. 2009 plea agreement that from March 2006 until at least February 2008 he helped drug traffickers transport cocaine and marijuana. Macias, 31, was hired by the Border Patrol in 2005, said Border Patrol spokesman Doug Mosier. He was arrested in January 2009 after he told a confidential informant how to avoid getting caught smuggling marijuana. He also provided cover by escorting two shipments of cocaine. He admitted to accepting a $10,000 bribe to escort in early December 2007 a person he thought was a drug trafficker smuggle five kilograms of cocaine, according to the plea agreement. The drug trafficker was a government informant. Macias admitted that while he was on roving patrol he escorted the informant’s vehicle. He would distract other Border Patrol agents by pulling off to the side of the road to speak with them to allow the vehicle to pass undetected. Macias would then catch up with the vehicle and continue the escort, according to the plea agreement. The agent's sentencing comes on the heels of the arrest of Daniel Ledezma, a Customs and Border Protection officer. Ledezma, 33, was swept up last week as part of a 22-month, multi-agency drug-trafficking investigation that resulted in 2,200 arrests and seizures of more than 70 tons of drugs and $154 million, according to a Justice Department press release.

The American Power Act: cap and trade 2.0

Sarah Terry-Cobo — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 09:21:23 -0700

On May 12, in the midst of the growing oil spill crisis in the Gulf of Mexico, Senators John Kerry (D-MA) and Joseph Lieberman (I-CT) released the first draft of the American Power Act, without the support of Lindsey Graham (R-SC), originally a co-author of the bill. Seen as the companion bill to the climate and energy bill authored by Representatives Henry Waxman (D-CA) and Edward Markey (D-MA), the Senate version, for the first time, establishes greenhouse gas (GHG) emission limits on U.S. industry, namely utilities, petrochemicals and large manufacturers. To gain industry support, Kerry and Lieberman have tailored the pollution limits for each sector, rather than using a one-size-fits-all approach. In an open letter published on the Grist and the Huffington Post websites, Kerry called the bill a good one but not a perfect one: "...It's got to be an effort that makes my colleagues -- and that has to include Republicans so we can get to 60 -- comfortable about the jobs we're going to create and the protection for consumers and the national security benefits... And it has to address those pieces on their terms. The good news: I think we got that balance right." (Read more from Kerry and the public's response.) What are the Targets? How do they Differ Between Bills? The Senate bill's reductions targets are nearly identical to those in the House version, but how and when industries must meet those targets is vastly more complex. Regulated sectors must reduce their GHG emissions 17 percent (compared with 2005 levels) by 2020 and 83 percent by 2050. However, the targets in both bills are less than what other industrialized countries have committed to under the Kyoto Protocol, where reduction targets are set against 1990 levels. Cap and Trade 2.0 Both the Senate and House bills aim to create a regulated carbon market, although the Senate version has added a "dividend," or rebate, approach to the cap and trade market at the heart of both proposals and already established in Europe. The dividend approach returns a portion of revenues generated by trading some of the pollution permits back to consumers in the form of energy rebates. Sectors participating in this new market include electric utilities, petrochemical refiners, and manufacturing and heavy industry. Each sector has a deadline for entering the market: utilities start at the beginning of 2013, while natural gas providers and heavy industry enter in 2016. Petrochemical refineries and importers will also be regulated starting in 2016 but will not be allowed to trade pollution credits on a carbon exchange. Instead, they must purchase fixed-price allowances each quarter, which cannot be traded or sold. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will buy and sell these allowances from a strategic reserve in order to stabilize the price for the permits. Any allowances that the industry does not purchase will be rolled over to the next quarter's auction. The Senate bill would only allow regulated entities to purchase these pollution permits, in this case, the big three -- utilities, petrochemicals and large manufacturers. A handful of small polluters are also allowed to purchase allowances, including consumers using heating oil or propane to heat their homes. The aim of restricting the market only to heavy polluters is to keep out speculators looking to profit from the market, rather than reduce pollution levels. When regulations begin in 2013, many of the pollution allowances will be given away for free, and the rest auctioned. Again, to help prevent price volatility, the bill establishes a "price collar" of how much these pollution credits can be traded between industries, with a floor of $12 and a ceiling of $25 per ton of carbon. The EPA can buy and sell allowances to help stabilize the price of pollution permits within that price range. In the first year of the program, there will be 4.722 billion pollution allowances issued (1 allowance equals 1 ton of carbon). Each entity must hold an allowance for each ton of GHGs emitted during the previous year, except for emissions from "renewable biomass" sources, such as wood chips. If a utility polluted more in 2013 than the year before, it will need to bid for additional allowances on the market. What Others Have Said About the Bill The next challenge will be to parse the complex matrix of pollution allowances and how they will create reductions over time. So far, the bill has gained some support -- however cautious -- from energy policy analysts, who note it is "better than nothing," and a good place to start. In an analysis of the pollution allowances, Brookings Institution staffer and co-director of economic studies, Ted Gayer cautioned that giving away allowances for free "misses an opportunity to substantially lower the overall cost of a cap-and-trade program." By his estimate, if all pollution permits were auctioned, it would generate $60 to $80 billion annually in the beginning of the program, and in the next couple of decades, could generate up to $100 billion annually. This revenue, he argues, could be used to help close the federal budget deficit. Joseph Romm, left-leaning blogger at Climate Progress and a former Clinton administration official, said that while the bill "is worth settling for," and could go further, it could reasonably pass: "As I've said many times, the APA meets key criteria for the kind of bill one could reasonably expect Congress to enact right now, which I enumerated in What to look for in the bipartisan climate and clean energy jobs bill." David Brooks, the conservative columnist for the New York Times also wrote about the potential benefits of the bill in his April 29 column: "The bill, like all politically plausible bills these days, is larded with special-interest provisions and public giveaways to defuse opposition and win votes. But it does perform a few essential tasks. To boost innovation, it raises the price on carbon and devotes some of that money (though not nearly enough) to research and development. In addition, it establishes a predictable price for carbon." The next challenge will be to parse the complex matrix of pollution allowances and how they will create reductions over time. Many experts call the reductions "modest," but say the passage of U.S. legislation is key to negotiating a post-Kyoto treaty at the next round of U.N. climate talks in Cancun at the end of this year. For a detailed comparison of climate bills in the current Congress, read this analysis (pdf) by the World Resources Institute senior climate and energy associate, John Larsen.

South Africa's Shadows: A Journey into the "Bad Buildings" of Johannesburg

Carrie Ching — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 22:43:51 -0700

In the shadows of the World Cup stadium in Johannesburg, correspondent Christopher Werth visits innercity neighborhoods where the challenges to provide decent housing for hundreds of thousands of South Africans are coming sharply into focus. Werth's reporting was supported in part by a grant from CIR's Henry Demarest Lloyd Investigative Fund. + Watch part one of this series: Out of Bounds? Cape Town's Cleanup for the World Cup + Read Christopher Werth's article in Newsweek: Kicked Out for the Cup? REPORTER: Christopher Werth MULTIMEDIA PRODUCER and EDITOR: Carrie Ching EDITORIAL ADVISOR: Mark Schapiro PHOTOGRAPHY: Christopher Werth Ismail Farouk Aldon Scott Mc Leod DigitalGlobe Warren Rohner United Nations: unmultimedia.org Bryan Lever olechkaok VIDEO: Christopher Werth MUSIC: JFS Audio

Another look one year later at Obama's call in Cairo for a 'new beginning'

G.W. Schulz — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 12:00:12 -0700

One year ago now, President Obama made a speech in Cairo, Egypt, that historians will probably consider to be among the most important of his presidency. There, he called America's relationship with Israel "unbreakable," but argued that Palestinians had "suffered in pursuit of a homeland" and vowed that the United States would not turn its back "on the legitimate Palestinian aspiration for dignity, opportunity and a state of their own." He also said that while Sept. 11 fostered fear and anger in the United States, "in some cases, it led us to act contrary to our traditions and our ideals." Elevated Risk created this word cloud showing which terms were repeated by the president possibly indicating emphasis he wished to place on certain ideas. "Terror" doesn't even register, but assertive words like "will" and "must" do, as do the terms "progress" and "communities." We've also posted video of the speech.

Struggling emergency radio projects could hamper plans for $16B nationwide system

G.W. Schulz — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 13:32:56 -0700

The Federal Communications Commission is aggressively pursuing a massive, multibillion-dollar national wireless network that would enable emergency response personnel to more easily communicate with one another, despite an ongoing strain on government coffers. The idea is known as interoperability, in which communications systems otherwise made up of disparate parts that aren’t always compatible can work together effectively. Poor radio connectivity stymied the response both to 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina, and Washington has since been slow to fulfill promises of reform that would make it easier for first responders to more easily communicate with one another in times of peril. The latest plan by FCC officials could cost as much as $16 billion over the next decade and be financed through fees paid by broadband users and money allocated from Congress. But largely overlooked so far since the FCC announced its costly ambitions are multiple negative reports in recent years that have questioned the progress and management of major state and local public safety radio initiatives already underway. The biggest let down of all, perhaps, occurred in New York state. Following years of setbacks, officials there canceled a colossal $2 billion contract with a private vendor to establish wireless communications for the state’s emergency responders. The system reportedly suffered from equipment failures and coverage areas that weren’t always dependable. A contractor blew through deadlines set for needed repairs of the system in two counties where testing was taking place, according to press accounts. State troopers in Virginia reportedly grew so frustrated with new radio equipment experiencing problems there that they began using personal cell phones to communicate. State auditors concluded in April of 2009 that completing the $330 million project “on-time and on-budget remains a concern.” Laptops used in government vehicles that were supposed to be linked to the system failed up to 30 percent of the time, and officials at one point stopped installing them “because the rate of failure does not meet the contract specifications,” according to auditors. Known by its acronym as STARS, Virginia’s pricey attempt to upgrade public safety radios began all the way back in 2000. A state lawmaker said to the Richmond Times-Dispatch that STARS “has had continuing problems, and we are repeatedly told this thing will be corrected and made to work. At some point you just wonder if we are getting the whole story.” Glitches have also plagued a $17.5 million police radio system in Milwaukee where officers complained that they couldn’t hear radio transmissions, “including calls for back-up,” the Journal-Sentinel reported in November. Then just recently in late May, Wisconsin state auditors found that there were serious unknowns in a statewide interoperability project years in the making and funded in large part with federal homeland security grants. Local governments weren’t sure how much it would cost for equipment needed to access the system, and in some cases, the price tag “may be significant,” auditors determined. Radios that first responders do have could be too weak to establish a connection, and the system may not work well in urban areas. Federal auditors looking at the use of preparedness grants in California found last year that two San Francisco Bay Area counties had committed over $33 million to an interoperable radio system. But local officials were unsure where they would find $50 million more to distribute thousands of new radios to the health department, emergency medical services, police, firefighters, the public works department and the sheriff. The auditors also determined that no formal cost analysis of a multimillion-dollar agreement with private contractors was done “to assure that the price was fair and reasonable.” Our partners at the Center for Public Integrity put together an extensive look at interoperability in the United States and reported earlier this year that Congress rushed to spend on new communications hardware like radios and antennas for local first responders before fully understanding the level of planning that needed to take place. That included a failure to determine how training on new equipment would occur and what command-and-control protocols would look like. Some homeland security officials worry that as cities improve their communications systems without thinking regionally, they’ll create “islands of interoperability” by purchasing new equipment and not considering whether it links to other, older devices used by their neighbors. That’s precisely what auditors discovered in Georgia during 2008. Among CPI’s own findings:

From 2004 to 2008, the only years for which detailed figures are available, the Department of Homeland security approved more than $4.3 billion in grant money to improve interoperability among first responders nationwide. DHS officials have said that more grant money has gone to interoperability than to any other initiative, and it continues to be a major focus for DHS grant programs, while also drawing funding from the economic stimulus package. Yet for years, results have failed to live up to expectations. In 2004, then-DHS Secretary Tom Ridge promised that by year’s end, it would be possible for most first responders to talk to each other in a crisis. But in 2005, Hurricane Katrina proved that the country was nowhere near ready to handle a real disaster. By 2009, DHS officials were still struggling to convince Congress that first responders could reach basic communications goals.

Here’s a partial list we’ve compiled over time of several state-level audits that examined emergency radio systems: • Wisconsin Emergency Management – A Review, May 2010, Wisconsin Legislative Audit Bureau • Virginia Interim Review of STARS Project, April 2009, Virginia Auditor of Public Accounts • Georgia Interoperable Communications: State Must Provide Additional Leadership, September 2008, Georgia Department of Audits and Accounts • Idaho Governance of Information Technology and Public Safety Communications, March 2008, Idaho Office of Performance Evaluations • Colorado Public Safety Radio Communications, October 2007, Colorado State Auditor’s Office • Missouri Homeland Security Program (refers to radio project), May 2006, Missouri State Auditor’s Office • Alaska Land Mobile Radio Project, September 2005, Alaska Division of Legislative Audit Flickr image by avramc

California Watch announces new public engagement manager

Mark Katches — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 11:00:01 -0700

Our newsroom is growing so fast we may need nametags. Today we’re announcing another hire – our first public engagement manager. She’s Ashley Alvarado, a talented young journalist who has been working at Los Angeles and Los Cabos magazines.

Ashley is set to start July 6. She joins other recent hires, Susanne Rust and Joanna Lin, who will be joining us a in few weeks. We also landed Pulitzer Prize winner Ryan Gabrielson, who won’t officially start until Sept. 1.

This wave of hiring brings our California Watch newsroom to 16 people, including 11 reporters. That doesn't even count support, administrative and leadership staff we share with the Center for Investigative Reporting.

So what exactly is a public engagement manager? It’s an innovative, new job that combines the skills of a reporter, editor, web producer and community manager. And Ashley is the perfect person to fill that role.

Since it’s a new job, we expect it to evolve, and Ashley will play a key role helping to shape it. The main aim of the public engagement manager will be to help identify stories in neglected, forgotten and voiceless communities throughout California. Once we tell these stories, Ashley’s job will be to make sure we’re reaching the people who need to know about our work – both the affected parties and those who can make a difference.

We expect that Ashley also will help bring community stakeholders together for town hall-style round table forums or live chats online. She will work collaboratively with reporters and multimedia producers inside our newsroom while building relationships and networks with other news organizations and community stakeholders.

Ultimately we want to make sure our stories make a difference. Ashley will help us meet that goal.

Here’s a little more about her:

Ashley is a graduate of USC where she earned degrees in print journalism and Spanish. She most recently served as a researcher/proof reader at Los Angeles Magazine, where she also contributed stories. She also serves as managing editor of Los Cabos Magazine in Mexico.

Ashley has freelanced for Bon Appetit, the Contra Costa Times, Latina, the Los Angeles Times Magazine and Entrepreneur. She also previously worked as a researcher and copy editor at Tu Ciudad Los Angeles until the magazine folded in 2008. She is a native of Eugene, Oregon.

Out of Bounds? Cape Town's Cleanup for the World Cup

Carrie Ching — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 19:48:58 -0700

As soccer stars and fans converge in South Africa for the World Cup, Christopher Werth travels into the Cape Town slums to investigate reports that people are being displaced to make way for the games. Werth's reporting was supported in part by a grant from CIR's Henry Demarest Lloyd Investigative Fund. + Watch part two of this series: South Africa's Shadows: A Journey into the "Bad Buildings" of Johannesburg + Read Christopher Werth's article in Newsweek: Kicked Out for the Cup? REPORTER: Christopher Werth MULTIMEDIA PRODUCER and EDITOR: Carrie Ching EDITORIAL ADVISOR: Mark Schapiro PHOTOGRAPHY: Christopher Werth United Nations: unmultimedia.org Ken Hackman: defenseimagery.mil Andres de Wet Victor Geere Frombelow flowcomm warrenski Frerieke valkyrieh116 Tom Nguyen/enviziondotnet DonDomingo adamcnelson/super.heavy United Nations Photo bbcworldservice (H) foto-grafic NESRI The Raz/Raz Barneg
VIDEO: Christopher Werth Simon Krzic
SATELLITE IMAGES: World Wind Geo NASA Google
MUSIC: JFS Audio

Maker of whole-body imagers touts phenomenal demand to investors

G.W. Schulz — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 12:59:19 -0700

A leading manufacturer of full-body airport scanners in the United States is gushing to investors that its fortunes have swelled since prosecutors accused a Nigerian man of carrying explosives onto an airliner bound for Detroit last Christmas. While other segments of the company are actually posting losses, California-based OSI Systems announced in April that a division specializing in whole-body imagers during the first three months of the year enjoyed a 23 percent leap in revenues over the same period in 2009 to more than $69 million due to major government investments around the globe in additional security equipment. Company chairman and CEO Deepak Chopra told investors during an April 26 conference call that income for OSI’s security division known as Rapiscan broke past records with operating profits more than doubling to roughly $7 million in its third fiscal quarter despite the “challenging economic environment.”

The level of market activity within this industry is currently unprecedented, both domestically and internationally. The funnel of orders we are chasing is at an all-time high. Internationally there has been increased focus recently on the body scanners. We are currently in discussions with a number of key international airports and aviation authorities regarding the body scanners following the [Transportation Security Administration’s] decision to deploy the scanners domestically in the U.S. We remain one of only two TSA-qualified vendors for body scanners.

Support for the X-ray technology, which unlike traditional metal detectors enables security screeners to see underneath the clothing of travelers, gained momentum when 23-year-old Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab became known around the world as the “underwear bomber” for allegedly trying to blow up Northwest Flight 253, which had nearly 300 passengers on board. Plans were already in place for the TSA to buy whole-body imagers known as Secure 1000s from Rapiscan in part using funds from President Obama’s economic stimulus program. But demand in the United States and internationally expanded quickly following the attempted attack, making this relatively obscure company more visible among procurement officials. The federal government so far has placed two orders with Rapiscan worth a combined $36 million. That’s part of a larger indefinite quantity contract the company received in September of 2009 that could generate as much as $173 million for parent OSI Systems if U.S. authorities carry it out completely. Then in February, company executives announced that they had inked a deal with the government of Nigeria for Secure 1000s after the country became an international focal point of attention due to the underwear bomber’s flight originating there. Days before that, authorities in Great Britain selected Rapiscan for new full-body scanners they wished to place in the Heathrow and Manchester international airports. The UK specifically said it wanted the scanners as a result of the Christmas Day bomb plot. Details of those arrangements weren’t disclosed publicly by the company, but OSI has said that orders for its Secure 1000 totaled $50 million as of mid-May. Rapiscan also produces security equipment for scanning traveler baggage and revealed yet another deal in January, this time with Mexico. The $35 million contract with a state-owned company based in Guadalajara calls for Rapiscan to install X-ray equipment capable of screening baggage “at multiple Mexican airports." Wall Street investors responded to all of these new opportunities for Rapiscan by driving up the share price of OSI Systems at the turn of the year to $32.58, double the company’s 52-week low in 2009 of $16.31. As for complaints about the intrusive nature of the scanners, federal authorities say security personnel are unable to directly see private parts of the body. Scanners deployed in the Netherlands, where Abdulmutallab reportedly waited for a connecting flight to the United States, rely on software that alerts a screener when potentially dangerous concealed items are detected, rather than operators being required to view an X-ray scan of each passenger. Rapiscan says its technology can identify organic materials and items that are not metallic, such as ceramic weapons, liquids, narcotics and plastic explosives. Some critics have nonetheless referred to full-body scanners as virtual strip searches. That’s not the only controversy OSI Systems has faced since the attempted bombing made it a global star. Some observers have condemned the so-called “full-body scanner lobby,” pointing out that former homeland security chief Michael Chertoff advocated using the imagers during his time in the Bush administration. Chertoff turned up that advocacy after Abdulmutallab’s arrest. However, he eventually disclosed that Rapiscan was a client of the private security consulting business he established after leaving government. It’s also worth pointing out that during the first quarter of this year alone, Rapiscan spent $169,000 on lobbying expenses, which it loosely says in public records was aimed at “procurement policy” and “federal government oversight and funding of homeland security.” Flickr image by Bapper-Barry

Marijuana delivery services evade bans on dispensaries, spreading across California

CIR Staff — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 16:55:59 -0700

A flourishing and unregulated industry of pot delivery services is circumventing bans on storefront dispensaries and bringing medical marijuana directly to people’s homes, offices and more unconventional locations across the state, records and interviews show. The unfettered delivery of marijuana through hundreds of these services highlights how quickly California’s fabled pot industry is moving from the shadows and into uncharted legal territory. These new couriers include enterprising farmers, business entrepreneurs and even a former Los Angeles pot dealer methodically switching her former clients to legal patients. In newspapers and on the Internet, hundreds of “mobile dispensaries” advertise a wide range of strains and other products, such as brownies and cookies laced with THC, the active ingredient in marijuana. One service delivers organic vegetables along with medical marijuana, as part of a “farm-direct” service. Some operate in multiple counties, including jurisdictions where storefront dispensaries are banned, or make local deliveries to drop-off points, such as Starbucks parking lots and gas stations. At least three ship to clients around the state using private prescription-drug couriers. Although delivery of medical marijuana is not a new phenomenon, advocates say the growth of these services could be a game-changer in the state’s pot war, which pits law enforcement, elected officials and community groups in some localities against dispensary owners and patients. A question remains on whether these services are legal. Some local and federal officials say delivery services violate the 1996 Compassionate Use Act that legalized medical marijuana in California for qualified patients, as well as other laws. The services are viewed as a way to circumvent local regulations clearly banning dispensaries. + MAP: Medical marijuana delivery services in California + VIDEO: Delivering marijuana from plant to pipe + RADIO: Medical marijuana finds another avenue in LA Read the full story at CaliforniaWatch.org

License-plate readers becoming a fixture in local police arsenals

G.W. Schulz — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 10:48:52 -0700

Private manufactures enthuse that it’s like having an extra police officer in every patrol car while saving on personnel costs. Opponents of excessive government intrusion warn it will allow law enforcement to spy on innocent people by tracking their whereabouts. Automatic license-plate readers enable police to rapidly verify that passing motorists aren’t behind the wheel of a stolen vehicle or don’t have outstanding warrants. Motorola Inc. unveiled a major public safety initiative last month in which company officials envisioned four separate license-plate readers aiming in different directions someday being affixed to the outside of all squad cars. The company for several years now has capitalized on large, post-Sept. 11 investments made by government agencies in new emergency communications systems and other enhanced security equipment. While plate readers are less visible than public video cameras in the debate over probing surveillance technology, they’re perhaps even more powerfully tempting to law enforcement: Motorola claims the devices can read up to 5,000 plates during an eight-hour shift. Software compares information sucked up by the readers to electronic lists of cars reported stolen and warrants that are outstanding. Officers would otherwise have to manually check such information and cover just a fraction of the license plates they come into contact with while on the beat. Police in Long Beach, Calif., Motorola says, made 50 arrests, identified nearly 1,000 stolen or lost license plates and seized 275 stolen vehicles in just six months. The readers can also put a quick stop to motorists evading a pesky traffic ticket or four that they’ve allowed to languish without attention for months. Police are required to do virtually nothing when plate readers are in operation. The system is automatic and notifies the officer when a suspect vehicle is identified among thousands being scanned, presenting him or her with an image of the car and its plate, plus details about why the driver deserves scrutiny. Legally speaking, license-plate readers are not unlike what law enforcers do every day, confirming automobile registration and other information the government already retains electronically. In other words, on their surface the readers don’t seem to resemble a new Orwellian monster in which the most sensitive personal information about yourself is stockpiled in massive data systems. A closer look, however, could set off alarm bells. The American Civil Liberties Union of Washington state argued May 26 that plate readers store the time, date and GPS location of each passing car. Plenty of those cars don’t match any list of known code violators or stolen vehicles. Big-city police departments especially, civil libertarians say, are in a position to record tens of millions of driver details every year. According to the ACLU:

[License-plate readers] raise serious privacy concerns because of the system’s ability to monitor and track the movements of all vehicles, including those registered to people who are not suspected of any crime. Without restrictions, law enforcement agencies can and do store the data gathered by the license-plate readers forever, allowing them to monitor where you have traveled and when you traveled there over an extended period of time. In fact, a key selling point for vendors is the system’s ability to track drivers.

Motorola’s own product literature indeed emphasizes these unique capabilities pointing out that the readers can “quietly note the time and location” when a “vehicle of interest” passes an officer. The collected information is then loaded into a program called Back Office System Software, or BOSS, a Motorola sales pitch says:

[Plate readers] can generate vast amounts of data: database hits, GPS coordinates, time of day, photographs, plate numbers and more. Back at headquarters, BOSS turns this data into useful intelligence. … Users can query the data using multiple search parameters including time, date, full or partial plate, location and user. BOSS can also map all locations related to a single plate to track vehicle movements. The BOSS web interface allows data to be easily shared across multiple locations and agencies.

Eighteen police departments in Washington state are relying on them, but the ACLU says that only two states nationally have established restrictions for how data collected from the readers can be used. While license-plate readers have been in operation for some time now, the ACLU attributes a surge in their popularity to improvements in the technology and the availability of federal grants to finance them, including funds from President Obama’s Recovery Act. As seen here, Recovery Act spending figures show that agencies across the country are seeking license-plate readers with stimulus cash An almost giddy Charlie Beck, chief of the Los Angeles Police Department, told Government Technology in 2008 that the difference is like fishing with a net instead of a line. Safeguards can be put in place that protect the privacy rights of citizens, he said, but plate readers aren’t going anywhere. And Beck, too, puts a premium on the fact that they can document automobile locations. “The real value comes from the long-term investigative uses of being able to track vehicles – where they’ve been and what they’ve been doing – and tie that to crimes that have occurred or that will occur … The hope is to take all the readings and put them into one database for when you’ve got another jurisdiction or state looking for a car that may have shown up here.” Now might be a good time to catch up on parking tickets before a license-plate reader identifies you and all your neighbors as good candidates for the boot. Flickr photo of New Hampshire license plate by Amy the Nurse

Lots of activity in our bubbling, journalistic petri dish

Robert Rosenthal — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 15:22:45 -0700

I was in senior management at big newspapers for nearly 15 years. In all that time I was never involved in a strategic, content-driven growth initiative that involved hiring and planning for the creation of a new team.

There were one-off hires where you were looking for a certain fit, and there were opportunities to divert staff in the newsroom or to ask people to switch jobs and then convince them why the new job was a great opportunity. And there were times you had to ask someone to do something that you believed was for the good of the organization but which you knew the person would not like. All part of managing.

When I started as executive director at the Center for Investigative Reporting in January 2008, we had a staff of eight. With hires that we announced this week for California Watch, we now have 26 staffers.

Managing growth is complicated. It is challenging; it can be difficult, but it is fun. I'm sorry to say I had a lot more experience in cutting staff, and it was not fun. Truth be told, I was not very good at it. Hence my departure from two previous editing posts.

When building a team without really knowing the skill sets or the personalities of each person, there is a certain gamble you take. You rely on your gut, references, past work and the energy and passion you feel from someone who is willing to take a risk and be part of a new venture. Sometimes you've worked with someone and that makes it easier. Even though CIR has been around for 33 years, we feel like we're hiring for a startup – a startup with a great legacy.

Our next hires will be for very nontraditional jobs – jobs that will help us distribute our stories, both through legacy media and through new media partners and social media. We will also be looking for someone who can lead and innovate around content and technology and coordinate our efforts to tell stories utilizing the evolving technologies. We will also be seeking an individual with a business background who can help us with revenue generation, marketing, branding – all the things a business needs to survive.

We are a nonprofit, but we are working to alleviate our dependence on foundations that account for the vast majority of our income. Our goal is to create a model to support high-quality journalism and investigative reporting. We have built an editorial team and now we must build the business infrastruture.

Gene Roberts forgive me. I sound like a publisher, but I have to admit that's what I have also become. But while wearing my publisher hat, my goal is not focused on making a profit. Instead, it's about sustaining our operation in the midst of this transitional, transformational era. I want to keep these 26 staffers working for a long time.

To help do it, we need to all think like entrepreneurs. Our value is based on the work we produce. Our success is going to be measured in strong journalism, credibility and unique and traditional ways of story telling. And if we can create an application or an informational tool that generates widespread interest, or even revenue, it will go back into the operation so that we – and the journalism community that we are part of – can learn. Whatever we do here that works, or does not work, will be shared.

We are in a bubbling petri dish surrounded by opportunity on the run. And yes, it continues to be exciting, fun and challenging.

Kentucky official under cloud for grant spending hit with unrelated indictment

G.W. Schulz — Thu, 27 May 2010 17:10:48 -0700

A grand jury has indicted the former emergency management director of Laurel County in Kentucky after he allegedly bought a handgun with public money for personal use. The Center for Investigative Reporting wrote about the local bureaucrat, Brian Reams, earlier this year after auditors revealed that he’d overseen $530,000 worth of contracts handed to a woman with whom he had a private business connection. She later became his wife, according to records. That money stemmed from $1.9 million in federal preparedness grants awarded by the Department of Homeland Security as part of larger program local communities are eligible for when they’re located near U.S. Army chemical-weapons stockpiles. Auditors expressed doubt about how the entire amount was handled. Local news outlets have reported that the recent charges against Reams involving the handgun are not related to the earlier findings. But auditors have said their conclusions were forwarded to the FBI and state authorities. Independent reports disclosed allegations that a company linked to Reams called PREP was hired by Laurel County to provide communities in the region with emergency-response trailers and generators. According to the Lexington Herald-Leader, Reams was terminated last year. The trailers ultimately delivered “were inferior in quality and specifications,” auditors concluded. “Questions were raised by one [county official] as to whether these were even new trailers due to deteriorated conditions in some areas,” a report states. The company also appeared to overcharge for generators that counties were later forced to replace with more suitable ones. There were other issues with Laurel County’s use of federal grants. Problems with the construction of an emergency operations center led to cost overruns of $220,000, and at least one vendor involved was overpaid by $20,000, according to auditors. Then again this year watchdogs raised additional red flags about another $44,000 in expenditures. Among them were more than $5,600 in home furnishings for which Reams sought reimbursement, according to state records, including a sectional couch, dressers, night stands, three “captain beds,” La-Z-Boys and a cocktail table. “[Kentucky’s Division of Emergency Management] has not required source documents, such as invoices or canceled checks,” auditors wrote. “This has provided an open door for subrecipients to falsify information and receive federal dollars for unallowable transactions.” Elsewhere in Kentucky, other counties have been criticized by auditors in recent years for how they handled disaster recovery assistance provided by FEMA. One report shows that Carter County in the eastern part of Kentucky couldn’t provide adequate documents to explain what happened with $286,000 worth of such funds. “The majority of the project files contained only worksheets and did not include the required information recording that the work was completed, what work was completed, when and where the work was done, and why this work was done,” a report said. Local officials promised that in the future they would maintain better records. In 2008, auditors scrutinized another $2 million in federal cash spent by Leslie County, also in eastern Kentucky, for recovering from disasters. They determined that in several cases there was little or no documentation to explain how the money was managed. Concerns about the spending were voiced repeatedly without the issues being resolved. Auditors finally said in 2008 they would encourage the state to determine if the funds should be paid back. Local officials continually vowed improvements but by that year had resorted to a brief answer contained in reports: “We will comply.”

What does the killing of a small girl say about police raids in an age of terror?

G.W. Schulz — Wed, 26 May 2010 23:17:04 -0700

Armored truck purchased by police in Long Beach, Calif., with readiness grants A house raid by law enforcement in Michigan that led to the killing of a 7-year-old girl May 16 sheds new light on the question of whether police have become overly militarized in the post-Sept. 11 age of terrorism. The Detroit Police Department was executing a “no-knock” search warrant intending to nab an alleged murderer with the help of its SWAT team when authorities say Aiyana Jones was accidentally shot by one of the officers. A lawyer for the family insists the shot was fired from outside and that a flash-bang grenade tossed through the window burned the girl before she was fatally wounded by gunfire. Crew members from a popular reality TV show, “The First 48,” captured footage as the raid occurred and subsequently turned it over to investigators looking into the shooting, according to press accounts. The show is produced by a UK company called Granada Media, also coincidentally the force behind another A&E cable network program called “S.W.A.T.” It chronicles the high-octane work of police special weapons and tactics units from three major cities. One of them is Detroit. The show’s website features images of Detroit’s special response team dressed in military-style apparel and carrying submachine guns capable of spraying 800 rounds per minute. One officer wields an intimidating, large-barreled “multi-launcher,” which fires tear-gas projectiles “to disorient potential threats” and “less-lethal rounds,” such as sand bags that are used for crowd-control situations. Reporters have attributed the shooting of Aiyana Jones to team member Joseph Weekley, who still appears on the site. Police departments across the United States have used federal homeland security grants to equip these teams with armored vehicles, battering rams, modern devices for conducting surveillance, incident-command trucks resembling RVs on steroids and SWAT attire that seems to visually transform local police into the armed forces. In one area of Hawaii, police use a 19,000-pound armored BearCat purchased with $240,000 in grants “mostly for executing high-risk search warrants,” according to the Honolulu Star-Bulletin. The vehicle has detectors on board for radiation and methane gas, and it’s followed on “missions” by a $330,000 mobile-command post. New Hampshire spent $378,000 for two armored vehicles, and police in the town of Nashua there acquired a $250,000 mobile-command unit. Hidalgo County in southern Texas used federal cash set aside by lawmakers for border security to snap up a $346,000 “ballistic engineered armored response” vehicle, according to grant records Elevated Risk obtained this year. Those are just a few examples. A company based in Massachusetts called Lenco Industries has supplied numerous communities across the country in recent years with muscle-bound armored trucks purchased using anti-terrorism and preparedness grants. Guidelines prohibit buying actual weapons and ammunition, but just about anything else a police tactical response team might consider essential is included in the list of authorized expenditures. Authorities have argued that such high-tech gear is justified because officers face an increasingly dangerous world. One item, for instance, is an armored bulldozer fronted by a thick shield known as an “assault platform.” The vehicle is propelled forward by “tank-like, all-terrain tracks,” as the manufacturer, Dolmen Corporation, describes them. Dolmen’s product allows police to “gain the edge on crime,” company officials say on a website maintained by FEMA that offers descriptions alongside photos of equipment local officials are allowed to purchase with the grants. “Law enforcement’s operating climate is violent and getting worse,” Dolmen warns on the site. “ … As the bad guys gain access to sophisticated weapons and technology, officers place themselves in great jeopardy to keep the public safe.” Such language is part of a larger law enforcement narrative that has broadened in scope since 9/11 from the war on terror to the war on crime. The police chief of an Arkansas town that borders Tennessee announced this month he wanted law enforcers to carry shotguns with them during traffic stops after a man and his son wielding an assault weapon allegedly shot and killed two officers. “They were completely outgunned," Tennessee’s Commercial Appeal newspaper quoted the chief as saying. "We are dealing with people who rant and rave about killing. They want government officials dead. We had a 16-year-old better armed than the police.” The father was reportedly an anti-government extremist. Police are also increasingly seeking permission to use military-style firearms even if grants won’t finance them, such as a push by the Boston Police Department last year to obtain 200 M-16s free from the Defense Department for its patrol officers. Authorities pointed to terrorist threats as one reason for pursuing the guns, but community leaders questioned why neighborhood police needed such firepower. As for home entries by law enforcement, a 2006 study by the libertarian Cato Institute citing academic research says SWAT team deployments have soared since the 1980s, and during that time, “at least 40 innocent people have been killed in botched raids,” the authors wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed. “There are dozens more cases where low-level, nonviolent offenders and police officers themselves have been killed.” During a six-month period last year, police in Prince George’s County, Maryland, carried out nearly 200 “tactical entries,” and half of them involved non-serious felonies and misdemeanors. Those statistics surfaced after police crashed into the home of a local mayor armed with automatic rifles and shot his two dogs, according to Baltimore Sun columnist Peter Hermann. The raid turned out to be a mistake made while police were investigating the sale of marijuana. Long Beach truck image from the California Emergency Management Agency. Screenshots from A&E's "S.W.A.T." and the Department of Homeland Security's Responder Knowledge Base website.

London has own program for private guards to report suspicious behavior

G.W. Schulz — Tue, 25 May 2010 13:33:03 -0700

Police in Great Britain’s largest city of London are training thousands of private security guards to be on the lookout for individuals making sketches near buildings, taking photographs and recording video footage, even if they appear to be legitimate tourists, the country’s Guardian newspaper reports. Using relatively new open-government laws similar to the Freedom of Information Act in the United States, a Guardian reporter learned that authorities have directed as many as 5,000 security guards to report suspicious activity, and the anti-terror campaign “helps explain a number of recent cases in which photographers have been stopped and searched by police … after first being approached by security guards,” according to the paper. “The person you think is a legitimate tourist may be somebody else!” one document says in bold letters. Police have told artists to stop painting in the street, and a section of Britain’s Terrorism Act, which is not unlike our own Patriot Act, allows officers there to search anyone without suspicion after stopping them in certain areas, the paper says, which has generated concerns about abuse. Amid records turned over to the Guardian, “there is no reference to the legal rights of photographers, or the need to treat members of the public cordially.” Questioning by security guards twice led an architectural photographer to be detained by police after he was snapping images of a church and later a major square. The incidents are similar to some that have occurred in the United States, including one during 2008 in which a man was arrested while taking photographs of New York’s Penn Station for a contest coordinated by Amtrak. This month the Associated Press also reported that as part of new government program in the United States officials hope parking and meter attendants will help police keep an eye out for suspicious conduct, like loitering around garages, “asking unusual questions” and taking photographs. It was street vendors in Times Square who alerted police May 1 to smoke pouring from a vehicle that turned out to be an alleged bombing attempt by naturalized U.S. citizen Faisal Shahzad. According to the AP:

The program is part of a larger effort by the government since 9/11 to enlist ordinary people – airline passengers, subway riders, bus drivers, truckers, doormen, building superintendents – to serve as the eyes and ears of law enforcement. [Former FBI agent Jeff] Beatty said the idea is not to turn ordinary people into government agents. ‘You’re not going to be Jack Bauer. You’re not going to be James Bond,’ he said. But he said terror attacks like the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 people often are preceded by warning signs.

The push in London resembles another project stateside that’s on the verge of going national. The federal government wants police around the country to adopt standards for suspicious activity reporting like those formulated by the Los Angeles Police Department. Officers there are required to fill out a suspicious activity report when they observe one of more than 40 different types of behavior. Categories include taking photographs or video “with no apparent aesthetic value,” drawing diagrams, or possessing and soliciting weapons and ammunition, which are specifically distinguished in department guidelines from chemical agents and explosives that would undoubtedly cause concern. Outcry from citizens worried that mail carriers and utility workers would become spies and overreact to legal behavior led officials to abandon related past plans for documenting suspicious activities. While faced with criticism again, such initiatives have nonetheless gained momentum in recent months with less open resistance. A liberal civil liberties advocacy group in Massachusetts released a study earlier this year of the federal government’s plans warning that unreliable data collected from the program could overload intelligence systems with “noise” that didn’t identify terrorist threats. A commander with the LAPD who helped develop its standards told Congress last year that her department had collected more than 1,300 suspicious activity reports and about 50 of them were sent to terrorism task force members for follow-up. Four arrests had been made. “In my opinion, while the number of investigations and arrests is important, they are almost secondary to a new-found ability to connect events that in the past would have appeared unrelated,” Joan McNamara of the LAPD’s Counter Terrorism and Criminal Intelligence Bureau testified to the House Homeland Security Committee. While detractors are skeptical of some behavior categories police are told to take note of, others listed in LAPD guidelines would seem to make sense for a city considered attractive to terrorists, such as attempts to smuggle contraband through screening checkpoints or acquire hospital x-ray discards that contain radiological material. Flickr images of London police by Darrell Berry and AleReportage

CIR obtains report describing past border surveillance program

G.W. Schulz — Mon, 24 May 2010 13:21:40 -0700

Over the weekend, the Center for Investigative Reporting partnered with Politicsdaily.com to examine a Bush-era program called the Secure Border Initiative designed to enhance control of the nation’s southwest boundary with Mexico. A high-tech component known as SBInet became central to the initiative. Today, SBInet is under fire by lawmakers for scheduling setbacks and cost overruns. As we explain in the story, however, SBInet is only the nation’s latest attempt to seal the border with modern, sophisticated technology. Another program launched during the Clinton Administration called the Integrated Surveillance Intelligence System, or ISIS, promised digital eyes and ears that would extend the reach of border patrol agents. While working on the story, we obtained a blistering December 2004 audit of ISIS that wasn’t readily available to the public and describes questionable contracting practices as well as serious concerns government watchdogs had about the quality of equipment being delivered. There were even allegations that workers at one site did little or nothing for up to a year. You can read the report in its entirety below or download it at a link provided there. First, auditors found that the International Microwave Corporation was awarded $43 million worth of contract work for ISIS by the General Services Administration “without benefit of competition,” meaning taxpayers were possibly denied value and quality since the private sector wasn't required to fully compete for the government business involved. That’s not all. During testimony in 2005 before a House homeland security subcommittee, a deputy inspector general for the GSA explained technical shortcomings in the surveillance equipment itself and said in one instance taxpayers may have forked over $6.5 million more than necessary for thermal imaging cameras that were cheaper than promised. Elsewhere, auditors discovered an equipment maintenance and operations support center in New Mexico where “little or no work was performed” for a year even though $6.7 million was required to operate the facility between 2000 and 2003. The report we’ve posted today states that nearly half the surveillance cameras purchased by the border patrol could not be serviced by the center mostly due to warranty issues. Despite several people working at the New Mexico facility – both contractors and government employees – many cameras were sent to the original manufacturer for repair instead, the report said. As of 2005, the government had spent approximately $340 million on ISIS and a short-lived program that followed it before the Secure Border Initiative was unveiled. Audit of the Integrated Surveillance Intelligence System According to the deputy inspector general’s 2005 testimony:

We found locations where no equipment had been delivered and no work was underway for as long as two years after issuance of the task orders. In other locations, equipment had been delivered but not installed, or had been installed but was not operational, with cameras and other equipment not functioning or having continuing reliability problems. We found parts laying on the desert floor and in storage adjacent to border patrol property. We also found that the contractor ordered and billed the government for equipment that sat in warehouses sometimes for years.

A company official from L-3 Communications, which acquired the International Microwave Corporation in late 2002, admitted at the hearing that the contract began small but later ballooned, “taxing seriously the management capacity of both IMC and the administering government office.” He nonetheless defended the program arguing that nearly 250 sites with daytime and nighttime cameras were ultimately installed, and where adequately tended to, “this system is operational today.” The official also vigorously denied allegations by the GSA’s inspector general of wrongdoing calling many of the claims unfounded and stating that L-3 Communications sought to correct the record yet wasn’t allowed to answer the December 2004 report. “We are here today because we take our partnership with the government seriously and have a deep sense of responsibility for the continued performance of the [remote video surveillance] program,” he said. L-3 Communications later became a subcontractor for SBInet. The Boeing Co. is its primary contractor. We’re also posting C-SPAN video from Republican Rep. Mike Rogers of Alabama who chaired the 2005 subcommittee hearing and describes his frustration with the progress of ISIS at a time when the federal government was deploying the Secure Border Initiative. In the video, Rogers discusses a bill he proposed in 2006 to enforce financial accountability over the initiative, but the legislation never made it out of the House. The video is below. According to Rogers during the hearing:

[The Integrated Surveillance Intelligence System] has been plagued by mismanagement, operational problems and financial waste. On June 16, 2005, our subcommittee heard from the GSA deputy inspector general that electronic surveillance equipment covered only two to four percent of the border and that over $200 million was paid by the federal government for poor, incomplete and never-delivered goods and services. At our second hearing on Dec. 16, 2005, the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general testified that cameras and sensors were not integrated, oversight of contractor performance was ineffective, numerous poles and cameras were never even installed on the border, and millions of program dollars remained unspent in accounts at the GSA.

Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Ala.) on the Integrated Surveillance Intelligence System, or ISIS.

More High-Tech Setbacks for Border Security

Sarah McHie — Mon, 24 May 2010 13:07:35 -0700

The Obama administration's recent surprise decision to suspend new work on a multibillion-dollar high-tech border control system raises further questions about the government's use of computer networks and sensors in an effort to seal the border with Mexico.

Travelers recount odd experiences with airport security

G.W. Schulz — Fri, 21 May 2010 14:24:04 -0700

The Transportation Security Administration has plans to survey about 25,000 people a year so it can learn more about their views on airport security, from the amount of time it takes to pass through a checkpoint to the intensity of baggage screening some travelers face over others. TSA officials will also ask about things like stress levels and confidence in the workers carrying out security procedures. But Government Computer News magazine posted a feature on its website recently in which travelers described some of the more curious interactions they’ve had with airport security. We thought our own Elevated Risk readers would appreciate seeing some of the best among them: • One man purchased a “kilo” of sweet, chocolate truffles while visiting Belgium. They came wrapped in foil and stuffed into a brick-shaped box. He always travels with an alarm clock and happened to pack it in his bag alongside the brick and an electric razor. The traveler was also carrying coiled tubes for inkjet printers related to his work. “When I packed my bag, I never considered how the ensemble would look to an x-ray machine (clock, large battery, lots of coil, and an apparent brick of plastique).” He was directed to a secure room by armed personnel and made to unpack the bag. “The moral of the story? Shipping items is often more convenient and less costly than a missed flight!” • Before airports began requiring that shoes be removed, a newly hired passenger screener used a metal-detector wand near a traveler’s feet. It beeped, so the man removed his shoes. It beeped again, so he rolled up his pants. When asked if he had pins in his ankles, the man answered no, but it beeped again anyway. He was moved out of the line before a supervisor arrived and discovered what happened. Speaking to the new recruit: “You’re picking up the rebar in the concrete floor.” Says the traveler: “We all had a good laugh and I assured the new guy I wasn’t offended and went on my way. You just have to have a sense of humor about this.” • Several years ago, airport authorities in Germany would determine the physical weight of laptop computers travelers carried with them and then compare the results to known laptop weights contained in a book. One passenger’s laptop happened to come in a little overweight. “When I told them it was probably because the hard drive was full, they nodded knowingly and let me through!” Flickr photo from alex-s

9/11 commissioners fault Obama over privacy, civil liberties

G.W. Schulz — Thu, 20 May 2010 13:11:32 -0700

The intelligence community is awash in information and still struggles to understand how it can be fully utilized to fight terrorism. At the same time, the government has not done enough to protect American citizens from privacy intrusions and civil liberties abuses resulting from the collection of intelligence and surveillance by authorities. Those were among the conclusions offered May 19 by two influential politicians who led the panel charged with investigating the events surrounding the Sept. 11 attacks, known as the 9/11 Commission. Former New Jersey Gov. Thomas Kean and one-time Indiana Congressman Lee Hamilton appeared together before the House Homeland Security Committee to offer their assessment of where the U.S. government stands in the war on terror. During testimony, they pointed out that the Obama Administration has allowed a Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board recommended by the commission to become “dormant” since no one has been appointed to fill its five seats. Several policymakers including the House Homeland Security Committee’s chairman, Democrat Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, sent a letter to Obama in March complaining that even though budgets were established this year and last for the board, it’s still not conducting business. “For over two years,” they wrote, “the vision for the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board has not been realized. As new privacy and civil liberties issues emerge, such as the use of screening technologies and watchlisting procedures, it is imperative that the board be fully operational and evaluate and advise the executive branch on the privacy and civil liberties implications associated with such changes.” The board was created in 2004, but a 2007 law made it an independent agency. The White House says its vetting candidates and Republicans in Congress are responsible for filling two of them. But the Los Angeles Times in an April editorial nonetheless called the vacancies “an embarrassment.” According to Lee and Hamilton: “The balance between security and liberty will always be part of the struggle against terrorism. America must not sacrifice one for the other. … With the massive capacity to develop data on individuals, the board should fight to ensure that collection capabilities do not violate privacy and civil liberties.” The pair’s testimony came amid newly released findings this week from the Senate Intelligence Committee that many of the same failures leading to the Sept. 11 attacks allowed a Nigerian man to board a flight headed to Detroit with explosives last Christmas. Despite the major overhaul of intelligence agencies and other changes that occurred government-wide after 9/11, authorities still suffered from “systemic failures” that led to them not identifying would-be bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab as a threat. The National Counterterrorism Center, created to be the primary office for analyzing terrorism intelligence, “was not organized adequately to fulfill its missions” and did not connect information the government possessed on Abdulmutallab. Elsewhere, the State Department did not revoke Abdulmutallab’s visa when it should have, he was not placed on appropriate watchlists and the CIA did not do enough to examine his background. The testimony of Hamilton and Lee also addressed another of the 9/11 Commission’s key recommendations that has still not been implemented. Last year, our partners at the Center for Public Integrity in Washington, D.C., reported that a confusing spread of nearly 90 different congressional committees and subcommittees had jurisdiction over homeland security requiring top officials to spend an inordinate amount of their time testifying rather than battling terrorists. But lawmakers haven’t seriously debated consolidating them and focusing oversight to make it more effective, in part because members of Congress don’t want to give up valuable political turf they control. According to Lee and Hamilton:

Enduring fractured and overlapping committee jurisdictions on both sides of the Hill have left congressional oversight in an unsatisfactory state. [Department of Homeland Security] entities still report to dozens of separate committees hundreds of times per year, which constitutes a serious drain of time and resources for senior officials. Furthermore, 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.

Coast Guard faces funding cuts despite oil spill, other disasters

G.W. Schulz — Wed, 19 May 2010 15:58:27 -0700

Members of Congress are questioning whether cuts proposed by the Obama Administration for the U.S. Coast Guard are the right idea in light of the recent Gulf oil spill and other headline-grabbing incidents that occurred this year. Two Coast Guard ships and aircraft were the earliest to arrive when the federal government learned of the oil-rig explosion last month that set off what is now a major environmental disaster. Search-and-rescue operations continued for three days until more than 100 crew members were found and attempts to locate 11 more rig workers were ended. Under current plans for the Coast Guard, it would lose $75 million over the previous year and uniformed personnel would be reduced by 1,100. The ranking member of a key Senate homeland security committee, Republican Susan Collins of Maine, argues that $200 million the White House intended to use for enhancing security in metropolitan areas where terrorism trials were slated to take place, should be reallocated to offset Coast Guard losses. “Since the Coast Guard keeps coming to the rescue over and over again, and since it’s very difficult to find anyone who agrees with the plan to try Guantanamo Bay detainees in major cities, doesn’t it make sense for the administration to submit a revised budget that fully restores the money cut out of the Coast Guard using those funds?” Collins asked homeland security chief Janet Napolitano during a May 17 hearing. “Senator Collins, I will be happy to transmit that message to the White House,” responded Napolitano, a former Arizona governor who’s focused significant energy on drug-war violence along the nation’s southern border since taking office. The committee’s chair, Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), has also been critical of the budget reductions, and Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.), the chairman of an appropriations subcommittee on homeland security, has reportedly described them as “pennywise and pound foolish.” The budget among other things calls for decommissioning a strike force coordination center in North Carolina, which supports specialized teams in charge of responding to oil spills and the release of hazardous materials. Search and rescue functions generally would lose nearly $50 million, while drug interdiction, considered a “homeland security mission,” would see the biggest increase of more than $45 million. Over half of the Coast Guard’s resource hours since 2002 have been committed to homeland security missions, such as port security, migrant interdiction and defense readiness, according to the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general. Increased demands burdened available Coast Guard resources after the Sept. 11 attacks as it sought to balance pressure from Congress to ramp up its role in the fight against terrorism and its traditional responsibilities of marine safety, search and rescue and environmental protection. Furthermore, poor oversight of a massive and costly program to update the Coast Guard’s ships, aircraft and additional equipment led to withering criticism that officials there were wasting money. Much of the acquisition project’s management was relinquished to a private joint venture formed by the defense contractors Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, which Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen admitted in 2007 went too far in turning over government control. He said during a series of candid public statements referring to the program that government and industry “failed to accurately predict and control costs.” In the meantime, the Coast Guard relies on an aging fleet that required emergency repairs during its response to the earthquake in Haiti earlier this year. Aircraft needing spare parts were diverted during evacuation efforts, Allen told the National Press Club in February, and because of the size of the catastrophe, the Coast Guard was “over-extended.” Personnel from the Coast Guard also provided significant aid to victims of Hurricane Katrina during 2005 and helped save residents in Tennessee as torrential floods covered the western part of the state this spring. Defense and homeland security expert James Carafano of the conservative Heritage Foundation wrote May 11 on the think tank’s website that some Coast Guard cuts are currently on the table because the federal government believed major incidents like oil spills were declining and it could afford to trim those response capabilities. Carafano argues that the reduced budget strains a Coast Guard already enduring an array of competing missions:

Slow-going Coast Guard modernization and cutting back on force structure to save money were mistakes even before the Gulf Coast catastrophe. Continuing with that wrong-headed plan makes even less sense now. A robust Coast Guard is essential to preventing future disasters at sea by enforcing regulations that prevent industrial accidents or thwarting deliberately malicious activity. Furthermore, cuts will only ensure that the federal response to the next disaster will be worse.

Image courtesy U.S. Coast Guard

Senator's pursuit of border fence kills attempt to reform secret holds

G.W. Schulz — Tue, 18 May 2010 14:05:52 -0700

A U.S. senator’s campaign to force an expansion of the border fence that partially divides Mexico from the United States is causing a deeper political stir now that procedural maneuvering on his part has scuttled an unrelated amendment designed to strengthen government transparency. As Elevated Risk reported last week, Republican Jim DeMint of South Carolina added an amendment May 5 calling for more fence construction to a pending high-profile Senate bill that would overhaul the nation’s financial system. DeMint wants 700 miles of double-layer fencing along the southwest border to deter intruders. The barrier now covers about 650 miles with just a few areas containing an additional layer. But on May 13 DeMint upped the stakes by attaching his amendment to another offered by Democrat Ron Wyden of Oregon that would have required members of the Senate to publicly disclose secret holds in which lawmakers quietly halt legislation from moving forward without explaining why or identifying themselves. Several members of Congress from both parties backed Wyden’s amendment, and passage of the end to secret holds seemed a sure thing. As the Washington Post said in an editorial May 18 criticizing DeMint, “the only mystery was whether anyone would have the nerve to vote against it.” DeMint believed the divisive border fence was important enough to at least jam things up, so Wyden in response withdrew his own amendment since any politically charged, border-related proposal would undoubtedly have complicated matters. The Oregon senator lashed out at DeMint's move during a floor debate:

I intend to come back to my post here again and again and again until we abolish the secret hold, until we ensure the American people see that government is being brought out of the shadows and debates are out in the open, where they out to be. We did not win this afternoon because I think we got kneecapped. I do not know how to describe it any other way.

According to the Post, a DeMint spokesman said the senator opposes secret holds and didn’t intend to jettison the reform attempt. DeMint only offered his amendment after seeing Democrats do the same thing with a proposal that was also unrelated to the underlying legislation – consumer protection and financial stability. Ironically, DeMint said earlier this month that he brought the amendment in the first place after Democrats “gutted” a similar effort last year “behind closed doors.” He attributed that to the Obama Administration’s resistance to a larger fence, which angered the country’s North American neighbors when it was first built and led to litigation by some border communities in Texas. According to DeMint:

We’ve now had two administrations fail to keep their promise to the American people to secure our border and Americans are tired of excuses. Americans have demanded a real fence to combat the very real problems of illegal immigration that have led to human trafficking, drug trafficking, kidnapping and violence on our border. Congress will never be able to achieve long-term reform to create a legal immigration system that works until we secure our borders.

The fence has so far cost taxpayers about $2.6 billion, but well more than half of the nation’s 2,000-mile southwest boundary remains without the barrier. Watchdogs like the Government Accountability Office have said that U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials don’t know its impact on curtailing drug traffickers and illegal immigrants, because it hasn’t been evaluated. However, the fence has plenty of visible supporters, including Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona, who co-sponsored DeMint’s amendment and is currently locked in a reelection fight that centers around border security. Thanks to Steven Aftergood of Secrecy News for creating a convenient link to the May 13 floor debate. Photo: Jim DeMint of South Carolina.

More border security proposals won't come cheap

G.W. Schulz — Mon, 17 May 2010 11:54:56 -0700

A new Arizona law requiring police to question the immigration status of people they come into contact with hasn’t slowed policymakers from proposing additional measures in recent weeks that could lead to yet more major dramatic changes on the border. Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick (D-Ariz.) introduced a bill May 11 that would direct the homeland security secretary to hire 3,500 new border patrol agents by next year. “Expanding the border patrol will keep Arizonans safe in a dangerous time and offer new, well-paying jobs in an important field,” she said in a statement. “It is great for public safety and great for our economy.” While H.R. 5256 has no co-sponsors and so could disappear in committee, it’s worth noting that sudden hiring surges with tight deadlines may not be so great for the border patrol itself. The Bush Administration embarked on a massive recruitment drive beginning in 2006 that led the government to hire thousands of new agents – an increase of more than 50 percent over a two-and-a-half year period. U.S. Customs and Border Protection estimated last year that each new hire runs taxpayers somewhere around $160,000 each, a price tag that includes background checks, fitness evaluations, night-vision goggles, mobile radios, uniforms, salaries and more. That means Kirkpatrick’s plan could cost the nation an estimated $558 million, if Elevated Risk is doing the math correctly. Then there's the issue of integrity. Our own Andrew Becker here at CIR noted in a March story for the Washington Post that corruption has become such a problem at CBP, an internal affairs division there is locked in a turf battle with the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general over who should get to lead the hundreds of investigations underway. The internal affairs office alone, Becker wrote, was involved in approximately 100 corruption inquiries by the end of last year with cases ranging from agents improperly searching law enforcement databases to the increasingly common bribery of border authorities by drug traffickers. The IG, for its part, opened over 80 corruption cases last year in states situated along the southwest boundary, the most in half-a-decade. There were more than 230 corruption probes nationally under the IG’s purview by last year, and the FBI has about 110 border-related cases. According to the story:

The United States has spent billions of dollars in recent years to bolster border enforcement, including a doubling of the number of border patrol agents. Officials say the crackdown has spurred drug and human-smuggling gangs to redouble efforts to recruit agents. More than 100 CBP employees have been arrested, indicted and convicted of corruption-related crimes since October 2004. … CBP has added more than 200 internal affairs agents since 2006. The FBI in the past year has expanded the number of task forces focused on uncovering border corruption from six to 14 and hopes to create around 20 nationwide.

While working on another story this month, we interviewed a Texas rancher who’s lived near the border for 76 years. The man, Dob Cunningham, also happens to be a retired immigration officer and allowed the federal government to place a tower on his property with surveillance cameras attached as part of its ongoing technological security enhancements on the border. But in Cunningham’s view, no costly solutions will work unless CBP improves its process for selecting new agents. He described for us one case in which a young agent from Texas was accused of giving two men caught with 600 pounds of marijuana the location of remote electronic sensors used to alert officials when illegal border crossers are detected. A jury found the agent guilty of conspiracy last year. “The border patrol is gonna have to start by hiring better people,” Cunningham told us. “They’ve hired a lot of misfits – anyone who could make a shadow.” Other recent legislation, meanwhile, includes a proposal by Republican Sen. John McCain to deploy 3,000 National Guard troops to the border, as well as 3,000 new CBP agents hired over a five-year period specifically for two sectors in his home state of Arizona. McCain is facing a tough reelection challenge that has drawn the senator away from what were historically more moderate positions on the border. The law would also enlarge by $40 million annually a homeland security grant program known as Operation Stonegarden made available to local police for border security. Recent election ad from John McCain Another bill offered up by Republican Congressman Todd Tiahrt of Kansas would extend the 650 miles of physical fencing now on the U.S.-Mexico border to cover its entire 2,000 miles. It would also add a complete second layer of fencing, which now exists only in very limited areas. The nation’s border fence with Mexico has so far cost about $2.6 billion. McCain’s legislation seeks double and even triple-layer fencing in some areas of the Arizona border.

Texas counties claiming exclusion from security grants cashed in

G.W. Schulz — Fri, 14 May 2010 01:52:02 -0700

Five Texas congressmen representing districts along the southern boundary with Mexico are firing away at Gov. Rick Perry accusing his office of not sending enough in federal homeland security grants to the border. Responding to Perry’s own statements that Washington has failed to deploy sufficient resources for border security, they say the governor is responsible for deciding how grants are distributed. “While we continue to fight in Congress to ensure Texas gets its fair share of federal funding, we hope the state would in turn allocate the funding where it is most needed,” the lawmakers said in a letter to Perry last month. The letter adds that just three percent of one readiness grant Texas is eligible for has made its way to border communities, which implies the total amount is mere pennies. But a review of appropriations language and spending records obtained from the Texas Department of Public Safety shows the criticism directed at Perry overlooks millions in expenditures that have already benefited cities and counties within the five districts. Local governments in southern Texas have purchased SUVs, patrol sedans, surveillance platforms, mobile radios, in-car video systems, night-vision goggles and bullet-proof vests with federal assistance. Zavala County in the southwest Texas district of Democrat Ciro Rodriguez, one of the five co-signers, even sought a $32,000 Chevrolet Camero, records show. The federal Department of Homeland Security makes several anti-terrorism and preparedness grants available to local authorities, and Congress began setting aside huge sums of taxpayer money after the Sept. 11 attacks for such purposes. Policymakers also pursue congressionally directed spending items, i.e. earmarks, for homeland security initiatives that exclusively benefit their constituents. The letter’s co-signers, in fact, tucked away a combined $5.5 million worth of earmarks in last year’s homeland security appropriations bill for their districts. Among them was $1 million to fund an emergency operations center in the state’s middle Rio Grande region, secured by Rodriguez, who sits on the House appropriations subcommittee for homeland security. Democrat Henry Cuellar, also a co-signer of the letter, chairs another House homeland security subcommittee and pulled down $500,000 for disaster mitigation work in his district. Senators John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Russ Feingold (D-Wis.) last year were critical of the $60 million in earmarks stuffed into the homeland security appropriations bill for emergency operations centers and tried to pass an amendment requiring communities to compete for the money. It was voted down. As for grant programs, one known as Operation Stonegarden is specifically set aside for bolstering border security, and Texas state records show that counties within the five districts over the last two years alone have received somewhere in the neighborhood of $7.1 million. Hidalgo County, for instance, in the district of Democrat Rubén Hinojosa, purchased four new Chevrolet Tahoes at a total cost of $167,000. That’s on top of five Ford Expeditions that each carried a price tag of almost $40,000. The county also last year picked up a $346,000 “ballistic engineered armored response” vehicle from the Massachusetts-based company Lenco, records show. Tens of thousands more went toward overtime and fringe benefits for local law enforcement officials. The tense security situation on the border is no doubt a major focal point for the nation this year, and communities in the deep southwest face a different reality than those situated further inland. But the letter to Perry by the five congressmen only cites one program as evidence that border jurisdictions are being shortchanged, while state and local governments can and do apply for an array of grants offered by the Department of Homeland Security. Earlier this year, the nonprofit investigative journalism organization Texas Tribune created a publicly available database of grant purchases made by cities and counties across the state using records we obtained on their behalf from the Department of Public Safety. A look at that data shows the five districts have made millions of dollars in additional grant-related investments for everything from communications systems and laptops to surveillance devices and haz-mat boots. More Chevy Tahoes are on the list, too, as well as digital cameras, pairs of binoculars costing $370 each and GPS devices. Have a look at the spending yourself here. The key counties are Maverick, Kinney, Val Verde, Brewster, Presidio, El Paso, Webb, Zapata, Starr, Cameron, Hidalgo, Terrell, Hudspeth and Jeff Davis. Border counties also profit from grant purchases made by regional councils of government that represent their interests. Within the five congressional districts those are the Rio Grande Council of Governments, the Permian Basin Regional Planning Commission, the Middle Rio Grande Development Council, the South Texas Development Council and the Lower Rio Grande Valley Development Council.

CIR gaining international attention as a "new model" for journalism

CIR Staff — Thu, 13 May 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Click on the image to download the PDF.

Will the nonprofit model save investigative journalism? Is it sustainable? A recent article in the Columbia Journalism Review explores this question, focusing on CIR's new venture, California Watch, along with the Center for Public Integrity and ProPublica:

Most everyone agrees that it’s still early in the nonprofit investigative news experiment, and hard to know what will eventually happen. Many use the “Wild West” cliché to describe the environment. Numerous centers of various size and scope are up and running and publishing their work, writing their rules as they go and attempting to engage new readers through social networking and other methods enabled by the Internet. Several others are teed up, trying to raise enough money to launch. Their hurried steps and missteps will determine whether the nonprofit model develops and endures or returns to its previous perch on the margin.

Whether the nonprofit model sticks or slips in the U.S. is a question that is apparently of international significance. CIR's executive director Robert Rosenthal has recently been interviewed by several foreign-language publications. The Asahi Shimbun, a Japanese magazine, recently published this article (above) about nonprofit journalism featuring CIR's Rosenthal. Interviews with "Rosey," as he is called by those who know him, also appeared in the Spanish publication La Palabra Escrita and the German publication Digitale Mediapolis.

Tenn. county evaded storm's fury but endured corrupt emergency manager

G.W. Schulz — Wed, 12 May 2010 16:11:29 -0700

Bedford County in Tennessee narrowly escaped the devastating floods that pummeled its neighbors beginning in late April and led to a major disaster declaration by President Obama. But if the residents of Bedford had suffered a darker fate as a result of the catastrophe, trouble with corruption that surfaced in the county’s emergency management office two years ago raises questions about whether authorities would have been adequately prepared to save them. A profile of Tennessee was among the dozens we compiled for an interactive map of the United States documenting the use and misuse of $30 billion in preparedness grants handed out by the federal government since Sept. 11, 2001. As we wrote of Tennessee, auditors found something other than a commitment to readiness and homeland security when they arrived at the offices of the Bedford County Emergency Management Agency during 2008. Bank accounts showed a cash shortage of $117,000, and after sifting through financial records, according to a November 2008 report, investigators learned that more than two-dozen checks were used to cover a series of personal loans obtained by an agency deputy director named Eugene Nichols. He allegedly forged the agency chief's signature on 13 of them. Auditors couldn’t determine the legitimacy of another $33,000 in payments signed to Nichols “for various reimbursements, overtime or payroll advances.” There were also purportedly bogus invoices sent to the Tennessee Emergency Management Agency, which oversees the state’s use of federal anti-terrorism and preparedness grants, for the purchase of safety gear and services. The report didn’t say for certain how much money was involved, but county officials vowed in response that they would examine records to find out. The report did, however, cite a $37,000 payment made to a computer company for surveillance cameras that were supposed to be mounted on towers, but the equipment was never received. In response to the report, the county said its own employees were the ones to alert authorities when they became suspicious of Nichols, although officials conceded that the alleged misconduct “spanned approximately four years over the tenure of two BCEMA directors.” Investigators said a lack of oversight and internal controls led the misappropriation of funds. County leaders said that Bedford’s finance department had since been placed in charge of the emergency management agency and “a repeat of this finding should not recur.” As for Nichols, a grand jury indicted him on multiple counts of theft and forgery in late 2008, and he pleaded guilty to embezzlement last year before being sentenced to nine years in prison. Meanwhile, the state’s comptroller found separate issues with the Tennessee Emergency Management Agency in 2007, as we wrote in our profile of the state. A report concluded that money from one federal homeland security grant was not handed out based on which counties faced the most risk. The cash was instead distributed according to regional wish lists, and counties held only “informal discussions” with state officials about the funds rather than applying for them formally. “There is little documented objectivity on record to support TEMA’s decisions or to suggest that the grant funds are being disbursed most effectively to meet the state’s emergency management goals and needs,” the report determined then. The state answered by promising to establish an assessment tool that would enable it to rank counties based on risk and past performance. Watchdogs like the Government Accountability Office in Washington have long argued that risk evaluations and other factors are critical for determining how readiness grants should be awarded, because as the storms in Tennessee show, the potential for catastrophe and ability to respond vary from one area of the country to the next. Elsewhere, the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general released the report below last year after looking at how Memphis, which was included in the May 4 disaster declaration, handled federal storm assistance resulting from severe weather in 2003. Auditors questioned nearly $2 million from charges “that were ineligible and non-disaster related, excessive, covered by insurance, unsupported, and duplicative.” IG audit of Memphis disaster spending Flickr photos of recent flooding in Nashville by Eric Hamiter and Les DeFoor

DARPA's homeland security sister working on device that 'detects' intent

G.W. Schulz — Tue, 11 May 2010 11:13:28 -0700

Since its inception, the Department of Homeland Security has promoted modern technology as a way to save the nation from terrorism, and it’s done so in part by emulating the Pentagon’s preoccupation with science and experimentation. Some of the country’s most significant achievements, in fact, were conceived by pioneering researchers the government hired to help give warfighters an advantage over their enemies. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, performed many of those tasks, taking credit in part for the Stealth Fighter and pilotless drones, as well as other advancements that are slightly more civilian in nature, like the Internet. DARPA is also frequently cast in popular culture and science fiction as the government’s secret laboratory for building disturbing tools that can do things like read our minds. That distinction now belongs to DARPA’s sister, the Homeland Security Advanced Research Projects Agency, and officials are suggesting they’re closer to making the unthinkable a reality. Here at Elevated Risk, we’re reluctant to lead the tin-foil hat and 9/11 Truth crowds into fanciful conspiracy theories, but there’s no doubt the Department of Homeland Security believes it’s possible for the right technology to “sense” human intentions. Among a list of experimental achievements listed in the department’s budget request this year is the testing of a “real-time malintent detection capability,” or machinery that can measure things like heart rate, micro-facial expressions, breathing patterns and body heat as an individual walks through a security portal. Software algorithms would determine if a combined set of behaviors and physiological qualities amounted to someone hiding plans to carry out a terrorist attack. “It actually seems to be working,” Robert Burns, program manager of the Future Attribute Screening Technology, as it’s known, told an industry publication last year. Experiments have been conducted on hundreds of people so far. Writing for the United States Naval Institute in October, another official from the homeland security division that houses HSARPA said the program “aims to increase the accuracy and validity of detecting people planning destructive acts based simply on how they present themselves and behave in a given situation. The theoretical foundation for this program is the relatively new theory of malintent, which proposes that individuals with the intent to cause harm may experience and display distinct emotional, cognitive, and behavioral cues or signals.” Behavioral detection is nothing new for airport security officers, and the Obama Administration wants to hire hundreds more people this year who specialize in looking for subtle bodily reactions that human beings have difficulty controlling when they fear misbehavior will be discovered. Directing a machine to know when someone should be singled out by authorities, however, is altogether different for a country that’s spent two centuries frowning upon excessive government intrusion. National Defense magazine said late last year that the department had spent $20 million on research for the project so far, and scientists tested the technology at a September conference in Massachusetts using study participants:

Some of the participants were given items that, if smuggled into the exhibition, would have been capable of causing a major disruption. Others were told to enter the exhibition hall, locate a hidden device and set it off. In both cases the items were inert, a fact that was unknown to the participants. … [They] walked single-file through a security checkpoint. A guard asked them a series of questions. Meanwhile, a laser measured their heart and respiratory rates, an eye tracker measured their blink rates and pupil dilation, a thermal camera measured the heat on their skin and a reconfigured Nintendo Wii Balance Board measured their fidgeting. Nearby computers processed the data, and the system’s software recommended to the security guard which participants should be taken aside for follow-up questioning.

Experts say it’s not something you’re likely to see at the airport tomorrow, but with sustained pressure on Washington to prevent the next terrorist incident, every possibility seems to be on the table. During congressional testimony in March, DHS Deputy Undersecretary Bradley Buswell called it a “leap-ahead” idea. “Though we have established an initial scientific basis for the technology, this project is still in the early stages as we work on both the science and theory to support the concept.”

The Carbon Hunters

Carrie Ching — Tue, 11 May 2010 00:43:51 -0700

CIR and FRONTLINE/World track the emerging market in forest carbon offsets. In this FRONTLINE/World segment (broadcast May 11) CIR senior correspondent Mark Schapiro and producer Andres Cediel travel deep into the Atlantic Forest and the Amazon, where they discover what life is like on the other end of an offset deal. >> Watch the full episode online after broadcast on May 11. >> See web exclusive features on Carbon Watch.

Cop memoir contains new revelations about police spying at RNC

G.W. Schulz — Mon, 10 May 2010 09:17:09 -0700

The autobiography of a former police officer in Minnesota discloses fresh details about the breadth of law enforcement spying on political protesters that took place leading up the 2008 Republican National Convention in St. Paul. The book has received only scant attention outside of Minnesota since first being published in June of 2009. But now-retired officer Richard Greelis from the Bloomington Police Department near Minneapolis reveals that local authorities quarreled over who would get to plant informants in political-protest groups, created their own activist organization with an “appropriately provocative name” and laughed about getting paid to participate in a monthly demonstration bike ride known as Critical Mass that encourages alternative transportation. Political activists have posted sections of the book online and point to it as evidence that law enforcement officials overstepped their boundaries in gathering intelligence on protesters and infiltrating groups engaged in First Amendment-protected activities. Titled simply “CopBook,” Greelis says that another “certain law enforcement administrator” who is not identified sought to be the lead official for security planning at the RNC among local authorities. Giving him the pseudonym “Chicken Little,” Greelis describes the official as wanting credit for “saving” St. Paul and the approximately 45,000 people who were expected to attend the Republican Party’s nominating bash. It’s possible the unnamed official is Ramsey County Sheriff Bob Fletcher, who coordinated what became the most aggressive effort to collect information on political activists planning to protest the GOP’s agenda during the convention. Authorities considered the protesters – namely a group calling itself the RNC Welcoming Committee – a possible terrorist threat with plans to disrupt the convention, and eight locals were arrested at the height of global media attention on the city just as the event kicked off. According to Greelis:

[Chicken Little] had a longtime, reliable undercover in the Welcoming Committee who was getting him good intel. When he learned that our intel unit had inserted a source into the group as well, he became adamant that we remove him; adamant enough that he followed our intel unit back to Bloomington from a surveillance in Minneapolis, and performed a traffic stop on the truck I was driving. … As he approached the passenger side of my truck, [Greelis’s partner] reluctantly lowered her window. Expecting obsequiousness, or at least acquiescence, he was disappointed to find that [we] defended our position and strategy. Though I had a good, working relationship with Little’s intel commander, there had been some miscommunication between agencies, and Little overreacted like a spoiled child.

The eight people arrested were ultimately charged with “conspiracy to riot in the furtherance of terrorism,” a relatively new state law passed after Sept. 11 and used for the first time during the convention. A county prosecutor later dropped the terrorism enhancements, however, complaining that they “complicated” the case. The group still faces lesser charges today. According to the book, Greelis worried of losing his own cover while secretly attending a meeting held by protesters at a public library. Greelis realized that among panel participants was a former FBI agent he knew named Colleen Rowley who in recent years has become a vocal critic of police spying on political activists. But Rowley didn't say anything. Greelis says he and a partner attended the meeting to determine if anyone was “advocating violence,” and they noticed what appeared to be another undercover officer seated nearby, “looking mostly at his feet and probably feeling as out of place as we did.” It turned out later the man was doing his own version of intelligence gathering but actually worked for emergency medical services and not the police. Greelis writes that the meeting’s crowd mostly consisted of older people and a handful of college kids. While skeptical of the subjects he was monitoring at the meeting, Greelis says he was aware of differences between nonviolent protesters and those who seemed open to more confrontational measures on the street:

I was encouraged by most panel members who, like Rowley and the Vets for Peace, espoused only nonviolent demonstrations and protest. One of the Welcoming Committee members, however, had a different agenda. His casual delivery belied an obvious contempt for law enforcement; his arrogance was transparent beneath the polished veneer of articulate presentation. … He cautioned them that even though they might be peaceful protesters, they should respect other protesters who ‘might be acting out, using other tactics.’

The book says that the Bloomington Police Department’s intelligence unit also answered solicitations from the Welcoming Committee’s website to claim an area of St. Paul where they would conduct protests. The unit did so by establishing its own group with an “appropriately provocative name” and even wrote up an “anti-capitalist manifesto” that was then published on radical websites. Sheriff Fletcher, meanwhile, deployed undercover personnel from his office to attend protest planning meetings and travel to other parts of the country where activist gatherings were taking place. Spying from Fletcher’s team occurred for as long as a year before the RNC. During the weekend prior to the convention, deputies carried out several high-profile “pre-emptive” raids in the Twin Cities area where police seized cameras, cell phones, laptops, supplies for making banners and signs and political pamphlets. They also allegedly found “caltrops,” steel points that can be used to deflate car tires by placing them in the road. The Center for Investigative Reporting co-published a two-part series of stories last year with the news website Minnpost.com that examined police conduct before and at the time of the convention. The stories were in part based on documents obtained from Minnesota’s intelligence fusion center through open-government laws. Hundreds of people were arrested during convention protests mostly for misdemeanors that included unlawful assembly, disorderly conduct and obstructing traffic. About a dozen people were charged with felonies, seven of which had resulted in guilty pleas for criminal property damage at the time of our story. Richard Greelis worked as an officer for nearly 30 years in Minnesota, mostly with the Bloomington Police Department, and served for five years after the Sept. 11 attacks on a local Joint Terrorism Task Force. Several such teams are maintained around the country by the FBI. Recent satirical video from eight Minnesota locals facing RNC-related charges Flickr RNC protest photos by Waiting Line

Texas group calls on senators to nix border fence expansion

G.W. Schulz — Fri, 07 May 2010 13:04:15 -0700

More than two-dozen cities and counties in southern Texas joined by environmentalists and immigrant-rights organizations are calling on two lawmakers to end their push for additional fencing along the nation’s boundary with Mexico. In a letter to Senate leaders May 6, the Texas Border Coalition and others argued that the approximately 650 miles of fencing already constructed in recent years has divided communities, negatively impacted the environment and cost taxpayers a fortune. They say that despite investing $2.6 billion so far, the barrier’s value in stopping the flow of illegal immigration and drug traffickers from Mexico hasn’t been studied. The lack of such an analysis was confirmed this week by the Government Accountability Office, a watchdog arm of Congress, which concluded in a report that Customs and Border Protection “cannot account separately for the impact of tactical infrastructure,” i.e. border fencing. tbcletter Nonetheless, Republican senators Jim DeMint of South Carolina and David Vitter of Louisiana on Wednesday proposed expanding the fence in a legislative amendment attached to an unrelated bill that addresses Wall Street reform. DeMint said in a statement May 5 that little more than 30 miles of the fencing so far is double-layered and his amendment would make that the case for a full 700 miles. Last year, the press release said, a similar amendment was approved in the Senate by a 54-44 vote, but “Democrat leaders gutted the amendment behind closed doors.” “We’ve had rhetoric and promises for four years without results,” DeMint said. “It’s time we completed the fence and secured our borders to protect American citizens.” The letter from opponents, however, disputes that the barrier is successful in deterring intruders:

The amendment has nothing to do with the issue of financial reform and threatens to play politics with the important goals of the underlying legislation. … Existing border walls have separated communities and families, cut through significant cultural sites and historic lands, caused damaging floods and erosion, and fractured habitat and migration corridors vital to wildlife pushed to the brink of extinction. These impacts are even more pronounced in light of the inability of a fence to solve our broken immigration system. If Congress perceives that the purpose of border walls is to seal the border from illegal activity, then the program is, and will continue to be, a costly failure.

The Texas Border Coalition represents several cities and counties in the southern area of the Lone Star State and filed suit against the Bush Administration in 2008 to stop 70 miles of fencing planned for the Rio Grande Valley. They argued at the time that the Department of Homeland Security failed to consult with them about the fence’s environmental and commercial impacts and claimed that the fence arbitrarily ceased at the property lines of wealthier landowners. A judge tossed the coalition’s legal challenge last year. Other lawmakers in recent weeks, meanwhile, have raised questions about whether an expensive and troubled border surveillance program known as SBInet should be abandoned due to delays and cost overruns. At one time, the government proposed lining the entire southwestern border with cameras, sensors and wired command centers that could detect illegal border crossers. But after spending somewhere in the neighborhood of $800 million, the defense contractor hired to build SBInet, Boeing Co., will complete only about 50 miles for certain. The Obama Administration announced earlier this year that it was re-directing $50 million in Recovery Act funds set aside for SBInet to other technologies. Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, during an April hearing called SBInet “a classic example of a program that was grossly oversold.” He’s argued in support of fencing and said the alternative to SBInet may be to double and even triple-layer the barrier in some areas of the border. Sample surveillance video from SBInet prototype P-28 Flickr photo: 37 Degrees

California Watch rolls out site tweaks, including star ratings for comments

Mark Katches — Fri, 07 May 2010 09:44:21 -0700

In our ongoing effort to make our website more interactive and engaging, we rolled out a few subtle changes this past weekend. Some of the refinements are totally under the hood. You won't really see them. We added a spell checker to our writing and editing tool for creating blog posts, for instance. We all pride ourselves in knowing how to use the English language, but it can't hurt to have a spell checker given that our editing staff is fairly small.

One change you might notice is that we’ve made our "donate" link far more prominent on our homepage because, frankly, we want to stay in business for a long time to come. A little more visibility can't hurt.

And in our ongoing effort to promote and encourage responsible commenting, we’ve added a new star-rating system on our site. Readers can now rate all comments on stories, blogs and data features. If someone makes a particularly astute observation or you just plain agree, say it with stars. You can rate a comment from one to five stars – with five being the highest. No reason to mince words here. If you think a comment sucks, give it one star. The average rating bestowed by all readers appears alongside your rating. It’s basically a Yelp-inspired system. We like it because it’s simple and easy. It provides a little more flexibility than the thumbs up/thumbs down rating systems that a lot of other sites appear to be gravitating toward.

Adding star ratings to comments is a simple way to reward and acknowledge commenters who are especially articulate or persuasive. Is there shame in one-star comments? That's in the eye of the commenter, I suppose. But you can express your dissatisfaction when you think any commenter falls below the bar.

The rating system is just our latest effort to keep that bar high. A couple months back we eliminated anonymous commenting. Since we did that, we’ve barely had to remove any inappropriate comments (although we’re still battling with an influx of spam commenting on our site).

We’ve also given away an iPod Touch each of the last two months as part of our Debate Championship promotion. Every month, we enter the best comments on our site into a drawing and ship out an iPod Touch to the winner. You can read more about the promotion here.

We think the promotion, the removal of anonymous comments and the rating system all are steps that will help make our online forum an engaging, informative and family-friendly place to be. Let us know what you think.

Arrest in Kosovo points to secret camps

Michael Montgomery — Fri, 07 May 2010 09:32:53 -0700

International police in Kosovo have arrested a former guerrilla commander suspected of war crimes in a widening investigation that was spurred by our exposé of secret detention camps run by the Kosovo Liberation Army during and after the 1999 war. Local media reported European Union police detained Sabit Geci on Thursday following a raid on his home in Pristina. Witnesses have linked Geci and other KLA commanders to the torture and murder of prisoners at an operations base in the Albanian border town of Kukes. A series of joint reports last year by CIR, the BBC and the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network detailed evidence of the abuses and killings following a multi-year investigation. A wide range of sources—from survivors to former KLA soldiers—spoke of a network of secret camps scattered throughout Kosovo and Albania where civilians and POWs were held, tortured and sometimes killed. In some cases the abuses allegedly occurred under the noses of UN officials and NATO troops, who arrived in Kosovo in June 1999. We reviewed internal documents that showed United Nations officials knew about the allegations as early as 2002 but failed to launch a serious investigation. What’s more, officials at the UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague destroyed physical evidence that related to some of the allegations. This is the first case of possible war crimes on Albanian soil and it could lift the lid on Albania’s covert support of the KLA and links to wartime abuses. Sources close to the investigation say the government of Albania refused to cooperate with EU prosecutors despite an earlier pledge to help international investigators looking into the allegations. There’s been no reaction from Kosovo’s current leadership, which is dominated by former KLA commanders. But here’s what Kosovo’s prime minister and former KLA political director Hashim Thaci told us last year when pressed about the Kukes allegations. "It just didn't happen," Thaci said. "At any time, in any case, in any place, any space —this has nothing to do with the Kosovo Liberation Army." I spoke about these developments today with Marco Werman on PRI's The World.

Overlap of numerous terror grants may lead to waste

G.W. Schulz — Thu, 06 May 2010 14:19:01 -0700

The bewildering array of anti-terrorism and preparedness grants handed out to states by the Department of Homeland Security is creating inefficiency and possibly leading to the same projects being funded through multiple programs without the federal government being aware of it, a recent watchdog report concluded. The Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general said that innumerable goals established after the 9/11 attacks to brace states and local communities for the next disaster sometimes compete with one another. The 2010 appropriations bill for homeland security was stuffed with $2.7 billion worth of grants, and a list describing them on the department’s website would dizzy any taxpayer. Cash is available for urban area security, public transportation security, railroad security, port security, driver’s license security, regional catastrophic preparedness, buffer zone protection, communications devices, emergency operations centers and more. Local governments are deeply protective of the money nine years after Sept. 11, particularly now that many of them are desperate to offset revenue decreases. Congress has awarded approximately $33 billion worth of readiness grants since 2001. But according to Inspector General Richard Skinner, the federal government doesn’t always know if grant applicants who are denied funding for one purchase – from pricey incident-command vehicles to gas masks to intelligence fusion centers – are simply seeking the money under another program, most of which today are handled by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. “Since grant programs may have overlapping goals or activities, FEMA risks funding potentially duplicative or redundant projects,” Skinner 's report found adding later, “applicants may apply for multiple grant programs for the same items to maximize their chances to fully fund a project.” The latest findings actually understate the issue. There is no central database the federal government can use to identify individual grant transactions or purchases, and to put together our exhaustive U.S. map of spending we had to approach each state with open-government requests seeking records that detailed expenditures. Other departments like the Environmental Protection Agency offer homeland security grants to states for such things as protecting facilities that produce drinking water. But EPA officials “considered it embarrassing that federal partners may be allocating security funding to the same projects,” another report found last year. Democratic Congressman Henry Cuellar of Texas complained during an October hearing that FEMA still has no reliable tool to measure how much the grants have made communities safer, despite the extraordinarily large amount spent on them so far. FEMA in fact spent $15 million over three years on one web-based system that was supposed to evaluate the readiness capabilities of states, but that effort was ultimately abandoned because it didn’t produce meaningful results. Skinner also says that Congress itself is to blame in part for directing the creation of grant programs that have similar goals, which makes it more difficult for FEMA to control waste and inefficiency. Further, pork-barrel spending by lawmakers may be worsening the problem. Members of Congress appropriate unregulated earmarks on behalf of their local constituents to finance investments in homeland security that grants are intended to fund. Earmarks also allow the recipients to avoid rules requiring that grants be distributed based on merit or competition. “These earmarks limit FEMA’s ability to ensure federal assistance is being provided to fund grant recipients’ most urgent homeland security and emergency management needs and priorities,” Skinner wrote. His report recommended that FEMA better coordinate its application review process and work with Congress to streamline grant programs. FEMA officials responded that they were working on a department-wide system for managing grants that should mitigate some of the inefficiency. Image: Golf cart purchased by Long Beach Fire Department in California with homeland security grants. Photo obtained from the California Emergency Management Agency.

CIR's Andrew Becker on KALW

Sarah McHie — Thu, 06 May 2010 09:50:26 -0700

An interview with CIR's Andrew Becker aired on KALW yesterday. Becker discusses his recent story in the Washington Post about an Immigration and Customs Enforcement internal memo that suggests quotas to deport more illegal immigrants and maps out specific moves to increase arrests and removals.

Customs employee to plead guilty of corruption

Andrew Becker — Wed, 05 May 2010 15:16:15 -0700

Martha Garnica was arrested in November 2009.
Photo: Department of Homeland Security

A veteran customs inspector arrested last November on corruption-related charges is expected to enter a guilty plea next week, according to federal court records. Martha Alicia Garnica, 43, is scheduled to change her plea to guilty on May 14 in U.S. District Court in El Paso. She previously pleaded not guilty. She was arrested with two other suspects last November and indicted on charges of conspiracy to smuggle undocumented aliens, two counts of bribery, and one count of importation of a controlled substance. The charges she was indicted on could result in a sentence of 10 years to life. Prosecutors are also seeking forfeiture of $1 million and other property. Prosecutors alleged that she and four other suspects imported more than 200 pounds of marijuana between April and November 2009. Garnica and a co-defendant also paid bribes totaling $5,500 to a Customs and Border Protection officer on three occasions to allow drugs and an illegal immigrant into the country, according to a superceding indictment. The CBP officer cooperated with agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Department of Homeland Security Inspector General and CBP Internal Affairs, who investigated the case against Garnica and her co-defendants. Three other defendants already pleaded guilty. Garnica's nephew, Edgar "Ely" Meraz, pleaded guilty on March 26 to a drug smuggling charge. He is scheduled to be sentenced on June 4. Her boyfriend, Carlos Ramirez Rosales, pleaded guilty on April 30 to bribery of a public official. Other charges were dismissed. He is scheduled to be sentenced on July 15. The other defendant, Arturo Leal Rosales, pleaded guilty on a drug-smuggling charge April 29 and is scheduled to be sentenced on July 13. Another suspect died in Juarez, Mexico, in February after gunmen shot him to death, the El Paso Times reported. Hugo Flores Colmenero, a U.S. citizen, was shot 14 times. He was killed about a month after the indictment against him was unsealed. The government's witnesses said Flores Colmenero gave orders to Garnica and the other defendants, the Times reported. An ICE agent testified that Garnica took over the operation after Flores Colmenero's brother was killed last August at a bar in Juarez. Garnica was hired as a customs inspector in February 1997 and became a CBP officer when the Department of Homeland Security stood up in 2003, a CBP spokesman said. Garnica had been assigned to an administrative position as a CBP technician since March 2008 at an El Paso-area border crossing point. She was an El Paso police officer from 1990 to 1997. According to the Times, Garnica was shot in the left hand in 1996 when she got in a scuffle as she stopped to check on two men. One of the men reached for her gun, which fired and injured her. Another recent case involving a corrupt female customs inspector working in El Paso with Mexican drug traffickers resulted in a 20-year prison sentence for the woman. Margarita Crispin, who became a CBP officer in 2003, was arrested in 2007 on corruption-related charges. She was ordered to forfeit $5 million, and is believed to have aided several traffickers smuggle thousands of pounds of marijuana into the country.

Austin City Hall hosts raucous debate over fusion center

G.W. Schulz — Wed, 05 May 2010 09:44:58 -0700

It’s not every day that Elevated Risk gets to report on a local story. But yours truly works from Austin, Texas, and on May 3 the city’s Public Safety Commission here in the heart of the Lone Star State held a meeting on the area's police intelligence fusion center. The event at Austin’s City Hall became a microcosm of what we’ve seen nationally: protests that the centers haven’t developed strong enough policies to protect civil liberties and privacy rights. A small but vocal group of Austin residents, convinced that the centers will give police too much power, shouted at the commissioners as they voted almost unanimously to recommend that the City Council give approval for the facility to move forward. However, there was one holdout vote from a local judge. More than 70 fusion centers have been constructed around the country with the help of over $250 million from the federal government, largely if not completely from anti-terrorism and preparedness grants. Local, state and federal law enforcement agencies say the centers make it easier to exchange critical information about possible terrorist threats. But the centers have also quickly expanded their missions to include everyday crimes partly to justify the expense of maintaining them. Civil liberties advocates have increasingly complained that the centers, hoping to detect terrorist planning, will go too far in collecting sensitive personal information like financial records that belong to people who haven’t committed a crime. We additionally wrote last week that the federal government is close to implementing a nationwide program for gathering “suspicious activity reports,” which fusion centers will help collect and analyze. Public Safety Commissioner Ramey Ko during a line of questioning aimed at an assistant city attorney exposed what appeared to be two weaknesses in the privacy policy Austin is developing to govern its fusion center, which will include representatives from several area law enforcement agencies. The policy would be contained in a larger interlocal agreement that establishes certain rules police departments must comply with if they want to participate in the center. That guiding document, Ko’s questioning revealed, didn’t contain clear legal remedies for citizens if the center were to abuse its power, say, by leaking personal information. Commissioner Ramey Ko:

Let me pose this question to you as maybe a hypothetical. Let’s say someone working in the [fusion center], some individual employee is discovered to have compromised the privacy of someone resulting in some kind of damages, such as exposing personal health and financial information in a damaging manner. Well, who would that person sue? Would it be just that agency itself, or since the city of Austin and the [Austin Police Department] are really the overseers, recipients of the grants specifically, would we as a city also end up being liable – potentially liable – for at least legal costs if not damages?

Assistant City Attorney Kristy Orr:

I don’t know how to answer that question at this point in time. I’d have to look into it.

Ko also showed that there were not easily understood procedures for citizens to correct information in intelligence databases used by the fusion center if police records wrongly designated someone a criminal or even a terrorist. States like Minnesota, on the other hand, allow citizens to obtain police files on themselves and take action if they’re unfairly portrayed as criminal suspects. We’ve reported on a similar lack of control over national security databases maintained by the Department of Homeland Security, which are exempt from certain provisions of the Privacy Act. The revelation surfaced awkwardly amid another exchange between Ko and Orr. See the video posted here for more. Opponents further grumble that Austin’s fusion center privacy policy wasn’t finalized before being sent to the City Council, and instead officials were characterizing it as a “living document” that could be enhanced over time to include stronger oversight provisions. Texas is all the more noteworthy due to a local magazine last year discovering that another fusion center in the state was disseminating intelligence memos to hundreds of police officials containing far-fetched claims, including that the federal Treasury Department may be attempting to adopt an economic variation of Shariah law in the United States. Reportedly, a former scientist for the defense contractor Raytheon Co. who was involved in data-mining projects there and his wife have been paid more than $1 million in no-bid contracts since 2004 to run that center. The memos caused an uproar when they became public.

Three weeks in a hopeless land

Anna Badkhen — Tue, 04 May 2010 15:15:44 -0700

"The world was new each day for God so made it daily. Yet it contained within it all the evils as before, no more, no less." -- Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing.

MAZAR-E-SHARIF — Southwest of the airport, where the Northern Plains slope up into the dramatic massif of the Hindu Kush, a clay road meanders through some farmland until it meets a dried-out freshet. Park here and turn off the engine. Step outside and sit among the earthy tang of the grazing goats. Turn your back on the mountains, and watch gusts of wind drive herds of green wheat horses across the emerald valley; the coffee-colored billow of dust undulate above the low sprawl of Mazar-e-Sharif; and, beyond it, the dun, barely irrigated desert shimmer with diffraction.

If you sit here long enough, you will hear a low rumble at the airport: a B-52 Stratofortress bomber taking wing. It can carry 18 2,000-pound "smart" bombs, 51 500-pound bombs, 29,250 cluster bomblets, 12 nuclear cruise missiles. It could pulverize the Hindu Kush into beach sand.

A B-52 cruises at almost 50,000 feet. You can't build a clinic or a well from that high up.

In 2001, I watched this plane's sisters drive the Taliban out of power. I watched the children of my friend, Mahbuhbullah, dance atop the mud-brick fence of his farm and sing, "Airplane, airplane!"

Northern Afghanistan was brimming with hope then.

Almost nine years later, I traveled across the region to visit Mahbuhbullah and his children. The two-day road trip from Mazar-e-Sharif took me in and out of Taliban territory a dozen times. This time around, there were no checkpoints to mark my entries and exits, no friendly gunmen to direct my route. The Afghan government may control a town by day, and the Taliban, by night. There is no front line.

There is also no electricity, no clean water, no health care, no education for most Afghans. The land seems suspended in time. I notice two big changes. One: Islamist insurgents are gaining new ground in the north -- a region largely hostile to the Taliban the first time I came here -- almost daily. Towns that never saw Taliban rule before the war are now little fiefdoms of the militia. Taliban strongholds pincer my friend's village.

Two: the proliferation of cell-phone towers. In 2001, there were no cell phones.

Afghans have little hope for the future. But they have good cell-phone reception almost everywhere.

Mazar-e-Sharif to Kabul

Through the window of my Boeing 737, I see the pale veins of ancient clay paths over which the Achaemenid invading armies marched, then the Greeks, then the British. A handful of craters in no particular pattern: a Soviet air raid. A neat row of 12 craters: A B-52 dropped its payload of 1,000-pound bombs here.

Among these scars, people eke out a living the way they have forever: with primitive wooden tools, nursing centuries-old grudges, alone. They bake delicious nan and cook giant vats of rice pilau and grow pomegranates with seeds the color of the fratricidal blood that soaks their tree-roots. They live in fear that their closest neighbors will kill their men and rape their women. They don't trust a government that has done nothing for them. They have no faith in the international donors whose aid has yet, nine years later, to reach them.

They do not invite the Taliban. They do not resist its advance, either. They are just trying to get through whatever misfortune rolls their way across these wracked plains next. These people are experienced at the art of war survival. They have been practicing it, almost incessantly, for millennia.

I had traveled to the north to see what had happened to the people I saw celebrate the Taliban's downfall in 2001. Of all the friends I had made then, I could find only Mahbuhbullah. The only effect the post-Taliban government has had on his life has been a negative one: Kabul has clamped down on the illegal trade of artifacts, and my friend can no longer augment his earnings by fencing small relics looted from Ai Khanuom, the town Alexander the Great built 2,300 years ago on the banks of the ancient Oxus River.

I could not find Hanon, a former Northern Alliance fighter who, in 2001, taught me how to cross a minefield and how to recognize the proximity of a bullet by the sound it makes. I could not find Ghulam Sahib, who drove me around northern Afghanistan in a Soviet-made military jeep with no suspension. The last time I saw them, they lived in Kunduz. Today, the province is mostly under Taliban control.

I imagine that they are not doing too well. Few people in Afghanistan are these days. But I like to think that they, like Mahbuhbullah, are surviving.

A few days before I left northern Afghanistan, I met an old man in a soiled turban sitting on his haunches on the sidewalk of Dasht-e-Shor street in Mazar-e-Sharif, cupping a white pigeon.

"Take her," the man said, thrusting the bird at me. The pigeon fluttered her hollow-boned wings whitely, then settled in his palm again. "Take her."

Men tending nearby juice stalls strolled over to watch. A young boy pushing a wheelbarrow loaded with cement slowed down. Women craned inside the stifling blue nylon of their burqas. I touched the pigeon's neck with my fingertips. Soft, weightless. She unfolded her wings again, and I could see the marble of her underbelly. Her legs were broken.

This article originally appeared on Foreign Policy.

Chat live with Robert Rosenthal, head of Center for Investigative Reporting

CIR Staff — Tue, 04 May 2010 09:18:27 -0700

Join Center for Investigative Reporting Executive Director Robert Rosenthal for a live video chat this Thursday, May 6 at 11 a.m. Rosenthal will discuss the Center's new project, California Watch, and take your questions about investigative reporting and the future of journalism.

The chat will happen live via UStream in the embedded player below. Just bookmark this page and return on May 6th to join the discussion.

CIR unveils new version of homeland security map

G.W. Schulz — Mon, 03 May 2010 10:21:06 -0700

Earlier this year, the Center for Investigative Reporting presented the results of its unprecedented effort to collect records from around the country using open-government laws that showed how each state had used the more than $30 billion Congress has handed out since the Sept. 11 attacks for anti-terrorism and preparedness. Our findings were initially housed on the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Public Integrity’s website. We partnered with them for our homeland security project, “America’s War Within,” beginning in late 2008. Now we’ve repackaged the material and posted it anew on CIR’s website with additional features and a different look. The initial online package included an interactive map and vignettes showing how each state figured into the recent history of homeland security. Also available were stories we reported along the way, from an examination of homeland security grant spending in California to a reckoning of the hundreds of millions states have spent attempting to create interoperable public-safety radio systems. We also uploaded hundreds of documents detailing individual grant transactions and investments as well as audits and investigations describing instances in which the money had been abused. All of those features are now available on our site as well, but previously visitors could only access the documents we obtained by downloading a large folder for each state. We’ve now uploaded the files individually in boxes located next to the state profiles, so you can see a description of the document before reading it for yourself. For instance, records made available by the state of Louisiana show local officials there purchased several dozen new Dodge Durango SUVs. The vehicles are categorized for “terrorism incident prevention” and threats posed by chemical, biological and nuclear agents. By going to Louisiana’s profile in our map, you can download the 600-page PDF listing hundreds of other such transactions and then look for your community. Was the $7,700 4x4 Trail Gator bought by Acadia Parish an appropriate use of taxpayer money? How about the two ballistic shields Evangeline acquired with a price tag of $1,500 each? You decide. For each state you’ll still find our own analysis of how local authorities used preparedness grants, but in many cases, we also wrote profiles that went beyond the spending of taxpayer money, because 9/11 did more than just prompt extraordinary new investments in homeland security. The state of South Carolina made headlines when its governor, Mark Sanford, rebelled against a Bush-era law requiring enhanced security features in drivers’ licenses to prevent terrorists and illegal immigrants from fraudulently obtaining identification. Sanford and others viewed the law as a possible step toward national ID cards. Texas, meanwhile, became the center of debate when Congress passed a law directing the homeland security secretary to build a fence hundreds of miles long on the southwest border. Several counties there filed suit to stop it in 2008, and some communities were literally divided by the fence’s construction. But there’s plenty of original reporting in our map on the use of federal homeland-security grants, too. From West Virginia we obtained a document showing that the federal government questioned the use of more than $8 million in funds spent on trips, lapel pins, furniture, office supplies, cell-phone charges and more. A number of the state’s top homeland-security officials resigned, retired or were fired amid allegations that the money was mismanaged. Records turned over by officials in Colorado showed that a $54,000 trailer one county purchased “did not appear to have been used” after four years had passed. We also highlighted states that received praise from auditors and other observers for managing the grants effectively or implementing unique emergency preparedness programs. The Government Accountability Office, a watchdog arm of Congress, points to the 1997 Red River flood in North Dakota as an example of disaster response done right. Among other things, officials there established a credentialing program for contractors so that residents would be protected from fraud and shoddy work as they sought to rebuild their lives. We’re calling it the Price of Peril, because figuratively and literally the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks have cost us dearly. Now the nation must ensure that every dime we pay and every right we give up for greater security is worth it.

My Afghan home

Anna Badkhen — Mon, 03 May 2010 00:00:00 -0700

MAZAR-E-SHARIF — At dusk, the woman of the house kneels on the edge of the tandoor built into the cement floor in the corner of her yard, slips her hand into a sleeve ripped off years ago from some old jacket, reaches in, and pulls.

Nothing. The loaf of nan is stuck; the clay oven refuses to release it. She straightens up, pulling her hand away, and hollers for one of the handful of grandchildren in her twilit yard to fetch a long knife from the kitchen. The heat from the coals has colored her full face the color of a ripe orange. She throws back her head, takes a swig from a tall plastic bottle in which a chunk of ice has begun to melt, wipes her mouth with the back of her hand, spots me watching her, and laughs.

My hostess has 13 children. For the last three weeks, I have been the 14th.

Every morning, after I pull on my shoes outside her front door, she throws water in my direction from a red plastic pitcher. A protective charm. The woman knows: This war has no front lines. Any highway or dirt road or city street or courtyard can become a battle zone at the clang of a bullet slipping into the breech of a Kalashnikov. The Taliban is nowhere and everywhere. Last week, insurgents wearing police uniforms set up a roadblock near a rotary I often take and searched passing cars for government employees and Afghan civilians working for NATO. A foreign journalist would have been a prize. Who knows whether one morning, the Taliban won't set up a checkpoint down the street?

If the Islamist militia finds out my hostess has been sheltering an American, the punishment will be severe. Unutterable. (That's why I will not publish the woman's name.) But she is a risk-taker. In 1997, when Hazaras and Uzbeks launched an ethnic cleansing campaign against Pashtuns in Mazar-e-Sharif, she provided sanctuary to a Pashtun family. In 1998, when the Taliban slaughtered and maimed Hazaras, she took in Hazara neighbors.

I know how these people felt inside the mortared walls of my hostess's compound.

Safe.

At home.

Mothered.

During the day, I keep the door to my room open because I know people will be filing in and out anyway, usually without knocking. That's how life happens in this family of 24 (or 27; the matriarch is not sure). Someone will come by to bring me a thermos of fresh green tea. A china saucer of green raisins, sometimes with tiny brown teardrops of almonds mixed in. A pewter tray with some apples, and a paring knife.

One of the woman's nine sons will stop by to see if I need anything else, and if I am feeling well. Another will borrow some stationery. The 8-year-old granddaughter will run in to give me a quick, firm hug, and then run off to the kitchen, where the women are always cooking something good in giant pressure cookers. The 2-year-old granddaughter, the baby of the family who calls me auntie, will stop by to raid the pistachios I keep on my magazine table.

One morning the grandchildren ambush me as I am headed out the door and spray me with deodorant, all over my clothes and headscarf. They want me to smell extra nice out there, in the hostile and unpredictable world beyond their grandmother's protective walls.

Sometimes the matron herself comes in and sits on the couch her sons thoughtfully brought up to my room the day I arrived. She fans herself with the free end of her gauze scarf and complains about the heat. About the housework that has consumed her 50-something years. (She does not know exactly how many. Few Afghans keep track of their age -- who wants to count the seasons of privation?)

She complains about the war that has plundered her country during most of these years.

She talks in Dari, a language I do not speak. But I know what she is saying. An Afghan woman's lot, like war, requires no translation.

Each afternoon, I stumble into the house distraught after another day of reporting. Villagers abandoned by the world to survive or perish in the violence that has been wracking Afghanistan since time immemorial. The slow caving in of the mud-brick compounds whose owners were either fortunate enough to have run away from war -- or unfortunate enough to have been killed in it. Refugees who survive on stale bread soaked in boiling water. Opiated women hand-weaving priceless carpets for 40 cents a day.

Children as young as 7 forced into hard labor by their indigent parents.

Children who die before they become old enough to be forced to wheelbarrow bags of cement, or shoe horses, or pump car tires; whose death is foretold by their poverty.

If she could, my hostess would take in all these children, too.

She would let them fly kites on the flat cement roof of her house. She would mix up their names the way she mixes up the names of her children and grandchildren. (She'll go through five or six names before getting to the one she is looking for. Mothers do that.) They would sleep in the room where I am staying now, with its second-floor view of the labyrinthine sprawl of mud-brick and poured concrete rooftops and courtyards that recede toward the gunmetal knuckles of the northern Hindu Kush. Round loaves of cow manure, for cooking fuel, dry on the rooftops. (The courtyard beneath my window is taken up entirely by a neighbor's milch cow. On hot afternoons, the cow sends wafts of hot, wholesome farm smell into my room. At night, it sighs meaningfully in its sleep.)

She would feed these children fresh disks of whole-wheat nan from her hot clay oven. The nan tastes like love.

I will never forget this taste.

My time in Mazar-e-Sharif is nearly up. I leave the house tomorrow. Tonight is the last time I get to watch my hostess bake bread.

A granddaughter -- the one who likes to run into my room for a quick hug and a kiss -- arrives at the tandoor with a kitchen knife. The woman draws a sharp breath, as though before a deep dive, and leans back into the oven. At knifepoint, the oven surrenders; the bread loaf emerges crusty underneath and soft and ocher on the top. The color of the land that produced it.

She dabs the hot nan with some water from an aluminum basin, to keep it moist, tosses it onto a cut of folded, clean cotton cloth, and reaches into the tandoor again. More loaves come out. Night has sprinkled stars into the high Afghan sky, the rice pilau is seething in the pressure cooker in the kitchen, and it is almost time for dinner.

This article originally appeared on Foreign Policy.

Price of Peril: Homeland Security Spending By State

Carrie Ching — Sun, 02 May 2010 21:41:51 -0700

The nation has committed billions of dollars to improving homeland security since 2001, including large sums awarded to states in preparedness grants. In this CIR web exclusive map, reporter G.W. Schulz reports how authorities in each state have managed, or mismanaged, anti-terrorism funds from the federal government. Click on each state to learn more, and to download source documents obtained through state open records laws. Follow our ongoing coverage on CIR's homeland security blog: Elevated Risk >> Launch interactive map. MAP PRODUCED BY SHIMRIT BERMAN AND CARRIE CHING

Eternal enemies, one mile apart

Anna Badkhen — Sun, 02 May 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Hajji Nizam, the Hazara leader in Karaghuzhlah.

SHINGILABAD AND KARAGHUZHLAH — An Afghan grave is rarely more than an ovoid mound of dry clay. Sometimes there are a few rocks, arranged in no particular pattern, or a few shards of chipped pottery. Occasionally, some strips of colorful cloth whiffle from an uneven wooden pole that cants over the dead.

But don't be fooled by this lack of mnemonics. The living remember their dead very well here. Especially if the deaths were violent.

Especially if the killers have crossed one of the many ethnic divides that carve up the Afghan countryside into a volatile jigsaw puzzle.

Beneath the vaulted ceiling of his living room in the village of Shingilabad, Hajji Sultan, a Pashtun elder with henna-painted toenails, recounts murders that took place 15 years ago as though they happened yesterday.

"Hazara people from Karaghuzhlah village killed my brother and my nephew," Hajji Sultan says. His long gray beard fades to ivory where it reaches his chest. "In broad daylight. At four o'clock, on a Thursday. They ambushed them on the road, walked them off to the desert, broke their arms, and shot them in the head, several times."

Hajji Sultan bends his fingers to count the 22 people Hazaras killed in Shingilabad that year: "Khan, Ghazi, Qamalladin, Sakhedad, Matai, Abdul Rauf..." Half of the old man's right thumb is missing. "Shrapnel," he explains, but refuses to tell me which battle the shrapnel had come from, and whom he was fighting.

I drive over to Karaghuzhlah, a mile or so to the southeast. Hot spring air along the gravel road quivers with bad blood and recriminations.

In the shadow of a white mulberry tree, Hajji Nizam, the Hazara leader in Karaghuzhlah, offers a tally of his own.

"Mohammad, Alivar, Haidar, Ghulam Sakhi, Nawruz." Hajji Nizam touches the outstretched fingers of his right hand with the index finger of his left. His grandchildren, squatting around him, listen carefully, so that they, too, can remember the names of their ancestors murdered by the Pashtuns. So that they can one day repeat them to their children. Overripe berries fall soundlessly to the ground. "We also found two dead bodies of our people near Shingilabad," Hajji Nizam says.

The old man cannot recall the exact year the Karaghuzhlah Hazara were murdered. Was it 1998, the year the Taliban, which is made up mostly of ethnic Pashtuns, mutilated, shot, and slit the throats of some 6,000 Hazaras in Mazar-e-Sharif?

Or was it 1997, the year members of the Hazara Hezb-e-Wahdat party joined the Uzbek Junbish-e-Milli militia in the massacre of 3,000 Pashtun Taliban soldiers in the Balkh capital?

Hajji Sultan, Pashtun elder.

In a country racked by ethnic bloodshed for centuries, what's a year or two -- and who is to say that the decade-old crimes will not repeat tomorrow? The presence of Pashtuns in northern Afghanistan is itself the product of a 120-year-old state-sanctioned ethnic cleansing of Hazaras, the Shia Muslim minority who are believed to have descended from the armies of Genghis Khan, and who are traditionally shunned by other Afghans. As part of an anti-Shia campaign, the Afghan king Abdur Rahman -- the "Iron Amir," the history books here call him -- forcibly settled 10,000 Pashtun families north of the Hindu Kush in the 1890s.

Today, the resurgent Taliban is finding a foothold in the pockets of Pashtun settlements across northern Afghanistan that date back to that forced migration. Fear of ethnic violence is one of the reasons some Pashtuns in the north embrace the return of the Islamic militia. Hajji Sultan says that only during the Taliban regime did he feel protected from his Hazara neighbors.

"Maybe there are good men among them," the Pashtun elder concedes. "But how can we trust them? They want to rape our women and kill us, kill all the Pashtuns."

"Maybe there are good Pashtuns in Shingilabad," responds a young Hazara man named Sayed Aref. His village, Nawaqel, is a small oasis about three miles southeast of the Pashtun settlement. Sayed Aref's cousin, Azghar, was one of the 14 villagers Taliban soldiers killed in 1998. The soldiers put him in a ditch and emptied a Kalashnikov magazine into his body. Azghar was 13 years old.

"I think these villagers are Taliban, or helped the Taliban," Sayed Aref says. "We see them as a threat."

On the way back to Mazar-e-Sharif, the gravel road takes me past a smattering of settlements: Pashtun, Uzbek, Tajik, Hazara. Each village sits apart from the rest, isolated within its thick clay walls like a small fortress. A few minutes outside the district center, Dawlatabad, the road cuts through what is left of the village of Desham.

Ethnic Pashtuns lived here once, until the U.S.-led offensive drove out the Taliban regime in 2001. Fearing reprisals by Uzbek and Hazara militias, the villagers fled. Some say they went to Pakistan; others say they moved to Chardara, the Taliban stronghold in Kunduz province. Stray blades of wheat and pale-blue wildflowers have sprouted beneath the caved-in domes of derelict rooftops.

But beyond the ruined houses, the fallow fields are still furrowed. As though eight years count for nothing. As though the abandoned village still remembers the men who once tilled its blood-soaked earth.

This article originally appeared on Foreign Policy.

State of Iowa posts illuminating videos about fusion centers

G.W. Schulz — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 11:59:14 -0700

The state of Iowa has posted intriguing videos online that depict how controversial state and local intelligence fusion centers operate. Several dozen centers have been constructed around the United States with the help of hundreds of millions of dollars in federal homeland security grants. Authorities argue the centers will help prevent another 9/11 attack by enabling police to collect and share critical intelligence about possible terrorist threats. But civil libertarians have increasingly sounded the alarm that the centers will go too far in warehousing sensitive personal information about Americans who have done nothing wrong. Earlier this week Elevated Risk reported that a program to gather so-called “suspicious activity reports” and share them among fusion centers is on the verge of going national. The second video below features Russell Porter, head of the fusion center in Iowa who also leads the private nonprofit Association of Law Enforcement Intelligence Units. That group has represented local police intelligence teams since 1956 when “Red Squads,” as they were sometimes called, aggressively collected and stored information on Americans believed to be a Communist threat. Many fusion center backers such as Porter today are highly sensitive to suggestions that the past conduct of Red Squads will be repeated anew in the war on terror, and they’re eager to prove the centers have strong civil liberties and privacy protections in place. Porter does exactly that at the beginning of the second video stating first and foremost the state of Iowa's motto: "Our liberties we prize, and our rights we will maintain." But the centers to a large degree operate independently without significant federal oversight, and so they haven’t escaped gaffs that led to bad publicity. For anyone interested in domestic intelligence, these videos are a must-see. Meanwhile, a libertarian group in Austin, Texas, says that during a May 3 local Public Safety Commission meeting it will be putting on “quite a show” to protest a fusion center there that’s scheduled be up and running soon. National overview of fusion centers in the United States Overview of fusion center in the state of Iowa

In the children’s ward

Anna Badkhen — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 00:00:00 -0700

MAZAR-E-SHARIF — By the time the government-run Mazar Civil Hospital finally accepted Nadia four days ago, the 22-month-old girl had been unable to hold down any food for eight months. She couldn't walk. She couldn't stand.

Now she lies motionless, sweating on top of a cruddy synthetic blanket in 90-degree heat, with an IV catheter sticking out of her limp right foot. The catheter is hooked up to nothing.

The diagnosis on the handwritten chart Nadia's grandmother has tucked behind some clothes tied into a filthy checkered scarf reads: Diarrhea. Dehydration. Malnutrition. Pneumonia.

The same diagnosis is scribbled on the chart of the 22-day-old Khurzadeh, who passes in and out of conscience next to a plastic bag holding two cucumbers, his mother's beggarly dinner.

And on the chart of the three-month-old Naqibullah, he of the thumb-thin legs and the horrid, scratching cough; he whose moonfaced mother spends her days rocking him in her arms -- because what else can she do? Her breasts are barren from too many children and too little food.

She cannot afford to buy most of the medicine the doctors here have prescribed. Love and oscillation is all she can offer.

The hospital is foul-smelling and grimy. The floor has not been washed for days. A piece of old gauze hard with black dried blood lies in the hallway. But the children who are here are the lucky ones. In most of rural Afghanistan, sick children just die. Oxfam, the British relief agency, reports that the mortality rate for Afghan children under five is 257 out of 1,000.

In a country where less than a third of adults can read and policemen adorn their stations with ram's horns to block jinxes, taking a sick child to the hospital is usually the last resort. Government hospitals and clinics are free, but travel is too expensive, or too distant. Few parents recognize the symptoms of disease. The mothers who squat over their children at the pediatric ward had waited for weeks, even months, before they decided to come here. Abdul Rauf Furukh, the chief doctor of the pediatric ward, says two out of every 100 children arrive in his care too late to be saved. That number seems low, given the circumstances.

With a piece of coal, Sharifa has drawn a black vertical line on the forehead of her five-month-old son, Hasan, to ward off the evil eye. She also has stitched a special prayer -- written for her on a piece of paper by a mullah at her mosque -- into a square of brown cloth, pinned that cloth and some beads to a white cotton sheet, and wound the sheet tightly around Hasan. Hasan was born prematurely; his twin brother died at birth, before Sharifa had a chance to name him.

Sharifa says Hasan has always been sick.

"Even with the doctors and the mullah, he is not well," Sharifa sighs.

The same four words -- diarrhea, pneumonia, dehydration, and malnutrition -- are written in Hasan's chart. But who is to say for sure that the diagnosis is correct?

"Our diagnostic system is antiquated," says Dr. Furukh. "It has not been updated in 50 years."

Across the aisle from Hasan, two emaciated toddlers share a rusty metal cot by the window, next to the cardboard box inscribed with the word BIOHAZARD; three used syringes stick out of the top of the box. There are not enough cots in the 120-bed pediatric ward for each patient to have one to himself. The boys' mothers sleep in this cot, too: The ward has only 15 nurses, and relatives have to stay by their children at all times.

I ask the women how the four of them fit on the same bed at night. They don't seem to understand the question. Their children got admitted to the hospital. Maybe they will get better. Who are these mothers to complain?

At one point during the winter, when the annual pneumonia epidemic spread through northern Afghanistan, the ward had three, even four children -- and their mothers -- to a cot.

As the desert air outside the hospital windows pulsates in the heat, Dr. Furukh prepares for another annual epidemic: dysentery. Children will ingest infection with river water (only a third of Afghans has access to clean drinking water) and lick it off their fingers at family meals; they will pass bacteria to each other at night, on the sweaty mattresses they share with their siblings.

Sick children at the hospital will have to double and triple up on beds again. Doctors will have to stop admitting new patients.

It was winter, pneumonia time, when the hospital turned Nadia away.

"They said there was no room, no medicine," says Nadia's grandmother, Safia. "Eight days ago, they finally accepted us."

But there is still no medicine for Nadia. Her treatment at the hospital consists of some IV fluid and milk formula, which she still does not hold down. Safia has wrapped the doctors' prescriptions for antibiotics and anti-diarrheal drugs into the same filthy checkered kerchief in which she keeps a change of clothes. The prescriptions add up to almost $150 worth of medicine to fill at the bazaar. Nadia's mother is recovering from giving birth to another baby, her fifth. Nadia's father, a day laborer in a western suburb of Mazar-e-Sharif, earns enough for the family to eat dinners of stale bread soaked in hot water.

Flies land on Nadia's face. Her eyes are open, unfocused, unseeing.

Safia will not buy the medicine.

This article originally appeared on Foreign Policy.

Legislators press administration on corruption, cite CIR/Post report

Andrew Becker — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 16:09:17 -0700

Citing a March CIR/Washington Post story that exposed internal discord among federal agencies that police border corruption, legislators are pushing the Homeland Security Department for better cooperation and to improve information sharing. Legislators from both the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives recently sent letters to Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, asking her to facilitate agreements between the different anti-corruption units and to define clearly their roles and responsibilities. Sen. Mark Pryor, D-Ark., along with three other U.S. senators, sent on April 21 a letter to Napolitano asking her to assist the department's Inspector General and Customs and Border Protection's Internal Affairs office in defining their respective roles to avoid duplicating investigations and for better collaboration. "It is our belief that cooperation and participation by Federal, state and local law enforcement is essential to eliminating this growing threat to our national security," the senators wrote. The other senators include Russell Feingold, D-Wis., Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and Roland Burris, D-Ill. A day earlier, California Republican Congressman Darrell Issa also sent a letter to Napolitano that quoted from the CIR/Post story. Issa urged Napolitano to facilitate an agreement between the different entities "that makes clear each agency's investigative authority while maintaining and strengthening the mandate to share information and foster cooperation." The March 30 CIR/Post story highlighted a turf battle that has hindered some investigations. The Post also published an internal memo, obtained by CIR, that suggested friction between the Inspector General's office and CBP's internal affairs office. "An exchange of memoranda within DHS entities arguing against (underlined in the original letter) information sharing and collaborative investigations represents a step backward," Issa wrote. "In the past information was hoarded and not shared, with tragic results."

Will city life end privacy?

G.W. Schulz — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 12:33:44 -0700

It’s already the case that major areas of our lives are intruded upon by surveillance technology, frequently, we’re told, for improved public safety and convenience. But Governing magazine this month examines what a fully wired city might look like. “City 2.0” or the “sentient city” could virtually sense every move you make and the environment around you. Many of the technologies sound perfectly innocuous, but others don’t so much. Sensors gather outside temperatures and measure rainfall, plus they can monitor pollution. They’re also used in cities to pinpoint the location of gunfire so police can respond immediately, and more than two-dozen deploy them today. Cities in Texas, Iowa and Colorado are pursuing tools that would allow them to view energy use as each kilowatt is burned. License-plate readers are increasingly common. Surveillance cameras can help control the flow of cars, but some cities also strongly believe they prevent crime and terrorism and have installed them by the thousands. A system in Chicago links more than 2,000 cameras. The subway in New York has over 4,300, while authorities there announced plans in 2006 to spend tens of millions for cameras and license-plate readers in the Lower Manhattan area, a project that’s become known as the “Ring of Steel.” High-tech gear in the Big Apple also notifies public-safety officials when an unknown presence is discovered in the sewer system. According to Governing:

This [technology] helps officials send resources to the street corner where gangs are converging, manage traffic before it becomes congested, and respond to emergencies seamlessly – automatically – before they’re even reported. It may sound like science fiction, but the idea of a living, sentient city – one in which managers use real-time data to respond to events as they occur – isn’t the stuff of fantasy anymore. By creating intricately linked networks of cameras and sensors throughout an urban area, cities in the U.S. and elsewhere are already making great strides toward tracking weather conditions and traffic flow, to name a few, and then using that data to govern more effectively. … Alone, each of these blocks performs one discrete function for one purpose. But if a city fused all of those different data streams, it could create a place keenly aware of changes in the urban environment. … [Technology analyst Rob] Enderle likens the vision of sentient cities to the concept of ‘arcologies,’ the classic sci-fi notion of megalopolises made up of gargantuan, self-contained structures that house thousands of residents in an all-encapsulating environment.

How close to such a proposition are we willing to come? Governing notes that Stockholm, Sweden, uses radio-frequency tags to track the automobiles of citizens as part of its congestion-pricing system. We reported on our blog last week that Mexico intends for hundreds of millions of its citizens to eventually have biometric data such as iris scans and fingerprints embedded in ID cards, and it recently signed a massive contract with Unisys Corp. to begin the process. Authorities there argue it will help the country fight organized crime and drug trafficking, our southern neighbor’s version of the war on terror. Unisys claims Americans are open to the idea of similarly using biometric data to enhance homeland security. Many such technologies are implemented individually without a broader understanding of what they can become when integrated with one another in a way that makes government “keenly aware” of a city’s every breath. Perhaps what’s most chilling is the definition of “sentient,” the word used by Governing to describe the future. Wikipedia contributors define it as “the ability to feel or perceive subjectively.” It’s used to denote consciousness or the capacity to sense and experience something. “In science fiction, sentience is ‘personhood’: the essential quality that separates humankind from machines or animals.” Flickr Image: Caveman

Homesick for nowhere

Anna Badkhen — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 00:00:00 -0700

MAWJIR KISHLAK — Homesickness.

Dictionaries define it as the longing for home during a period of absence. There must be, then, a separate term for the pining of the 1,300 people who have settled in the wind-beaten tents, dugouts, and hand-slapped mud huts of Mawjir Kishlak. Their homesickness is without a specific object or duration; it is metaphysical and infinite. Their period of absence began before most of them were born.

Who knows when it will end?

The two knolls of Mawjir Kishlak -- "Immigrant Village" in Dari -- rise out of the clay road like the twin humps of a Bactrian camel. Children in bright dresses eddy around the dwellings that saddle the hillocks. Most of the children are barefoot. Their hair and voices are thick with dust. None of them seem to know their exact age. But their parents can tell you in which refugee camp they were born.

Most were born in Jalozai Refugee Camp, near Peshawar, Pakistan, where the 225 families that now squat in Mawjir Kishlak lived after fleeing the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan 28 years ago.

Some were born in Sholgara, a town southwest of Mazar-e-Sharif, in a field designated for buzkashi, the Afghan national sport that involves horsemen and a beheaded goat. The buzkashi field was where the Afghan Ministry for Refugees and Repatriation first dumped the families when they returned to their homeland two years ago.

The littlest ones were born here, in Mawjir Kishlak, where the ministry's officials moved the families when the buzkashi season started. The ministry promised the refugees that Mawjir Kishlak was their final destination. That this land was in government possession and the government was allocating it to them. That finally, they were home.

When word of this reached Malim Salam in his large family house in Kishlak Qadim, two miles away, he was surprised.

Malim Salam spreads a piece of paper on the carpet of his large living room. The paper shows a map and some official-looking stamps. It is a deed to the hills of Mawjir Kishlak. His father owned the land before him, and his father's father owned it before that. It is the pasturage of his sheep and goats. The government has never asked Malim Salam for permission to put any refugees on this land.

"I respect these people; I have nothing against them," Malim Salam tells me. "I respect their human rights and I respect the government, so I have not kicked them out by force. But they have usurped my land."

Misallocation of land has plagued the return of refugees to Afghanistan. Many refugees end up on land like the stretch of infertile, salt desert I visited two weeks ago, in Camp Shahraqi Mawjirin, with no access to jobs or health care or schools for the children. Many others, like the families in Mawjir Kishlak, are placed on contested or private land. People in Mawjir Kishlak, incidentally, have no access to health care or schools, either. The nearest water source is the Balkh River, a muddy mountain runoff that gurgles through a valley near Malim Salam's house.

The conflict over Mawjir Kishlak is all the more contentious because the landowner is an ethnic Uzbek, and the returnees are Baluch, a Pashto-speaking people. Northern Afghanistan dwells in the blood Uzbek and Pashtun militias have spilled over decades of recurrent fighting with each other.

April is ending; it is time to take livestock to pasture. Malim Salam wants his grazing land back. Last week, he filed a petition to the government, asking that the refugees be removed.

"I'm not a powerful man. I am not against the government. I am not a warlord. I want to solve my problem legally," he says, pushing the deed toward me again across the black-and-red crystal pattern of his carpet.

But the squatters' elder, Mullah Ghulam Rasul, says that the families are not leaving. That the government has put them on this land and therefore it is rightfully theirs. That vagrancy has exhausted his small flock. He is a beautiful, tall man with an aquiline nose and ember-like eyes. He looks three decades older than his 54 years. A homesick year counts for two.

I don't know the age of Bibi Rangina, who lets her wild gray hair hang unbraided under a large black scarf. She looks to be 100.

"They should either give us land, or bury us all in it," she croaks, and spits.

Last year, the settlers began to fortify their encampment. Among the weathered donated tents bearing sky-blue UNHCR stamps, they built single-room huts out of clay. They clawed caves out of the face of the hill and roofed them with straw and sticks. They spread colorful, threadbare kilims inside and nailed wooden hooks into walls to hang handwoven cradles for their infants. Their dwellings began to take on the appearance of home.

Like the Little Prince, who started each day by pulling baobab sprouts out of his tiny planet, the women of Mawjir Kishlak begin each day by sweeping out snakes and frogs that have crawled into their huts and caves overnight.

And then, they keep sweeping. All day. Until their arms go numb. Until the kilims are impeccably, painfully clean. Until they can almost forget that clumps of dry earth shake loose out of the walls each time someone walks by. Until they can almost believe that they are home.

Until night seeps into the unlit camp in streaks of dusty ultramarine and umber, and white flashes of dry lightening flare over the twin humps of Mawjir Kishlak, and it is time to put another homeless, homesick day to bed.

This article originally appeared on Foreign Policy.

Contractor allowed to review own invoices for payment, IG finds

G.W. Schulz — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 11:44:14 -0700

The Department of Homeland Security continues to rely heavily on contractors, and a new report says employees at private companies were even in a position to review their own invoices and determine if they were reasonable, according to Inspector General Richard Skinner. In May, the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee learned that contract workers outnumbered civilian employees at the department by approximately 12,000. Senators Joseph Lieberman and Susan Collins who lead the committee wrote a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano (photo) calling the imbalance “unacceptable, untenable, and unsustainable.” The revelation raised questions about whether the department ceded essential decisions to private companies, according to the letter. Allegations of potential conflicts of interest like those contained in the most recent report have occurred in the past with the department. Democratic Congressman Henry Waxman of Los Angeles led a series of hearings in 2007 to examine a pair of major homeland-security projects. He found that more than half of the personnel hired to oversee one of them, a bid to line the southwest border with high-tech surveillance gear known as SBInet, worked for private companies, and some of them were even employed by businesses with ties to SBInet’s prime contractor, Boeing. “What we have learned is that there seems to be no task too important to be outsourced to private contractors,” Waxman said at the time. A senior homeland security official countered that the company Waxman claimed had links to Boeing, consultant Booz Allen Hamilton, didn’t provide “oversight” but rather served a “support” function. Waxman nonetheless pointed to Booz Allen’s own Web site, which described its “solid working relationship” with Boeing and personal connections between the companies that ranged from the executive office “to the people on the shop floor.” Waxman added that SBInet was still overly dependent on private companies to perform functions government employees would ordinarily do, and in this case “with a company that may have a conflict of interest.” Critics have said that the Coast Guard’s decision to relinquish many of its management and oversight responsibilities to contractors led to trouble eventually faced by the Deepwater program, a years-long push to acquire new ships and aircraft. At one time, the majority of Deepwater’s administrative staff also worked for private companies, Waxman said at the hearing. “We need to correct our mistakes, not repeat them,” he said. “The Deepwater contract is a textbook case of what not do. Yet Deepwater seems to be the model for SBInet.” The inspector general’s latest report, meanwhile, looked at $609 million worth of support services contracts signed by transportation security officials and found that employees working for private companies performed “inherently governmental functions” for more than $250 million worth. Such activities included determining whether invoices were reasonable, allowable and correctly charged. Contractors then made recommendations for approval and payment, auditors found. Federal acquisition rules define contract administration duties as “inherently governmental,” meaning public employees should be performing them, according to the inspector general. When Transportation Security Administration managers were told by the Inspector General’s Office that one contractor was allowed to review its own invoices, “they took immediate action to correct the problem.” “[Federal rules] require that agency officials retain control over and remain accountable for contract administration, approval, and payment of invoices,” the inspector general wrote. “Until TSA provides greater scrutiny and enhances management oversight of support services contracts, it will continue to risk transferring government responsibility to contractors.” Skinner’s report also determined that the TSA lacked its own employees to carry out purchasing tasks, and as a result “did not have reasonable assurance that contractors were performing as required, that it contracted for services it needed, that it received the services it paid for, or that taxpayers were receiving the best value.” The TSA responded that it would annually review professional services contracts over $1 million to make certain they didn’t include work federal employees should be doing. It also promised that an internal policy on conflicts of interest had been finalized to prevent contractors from overseeing their own work.