Homeless in Arizona

Who is the #1 environmental terrorist in the USA???

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6 leaking tanks Hanford nuke site’s latest woe

By Shannon Dininny Associated Press Sat Feb 23, 2013 10:42 AM

YAKIMA, Wash. — Federal and state officials say six underground tanks holding a brew of radioactive and toxic waste are leaking at the country’s most contaminated nuclear site in south-central Washington, raising concerns about delays for emptying the aging tanks.

The leaking materials at Hanford Nuclear Reservation pose no immediate risk to public safety or the environment because it would take perhaps years for the chemicals to reach groundwater, Washington Gov. Jay Inslee said Friday.

But the news has renewed discussion over delays for emptying the tanks, which were installed decades ago and are long past their intended 20-year life span.

“None of these tanks would be acceptable for use today. They are all beyond their design life. None of them should be in service,” said Tom Carpenter of Hanford Challenge, a Hanford watchdog group. “And yet, they’re holding two-thirds of the nation’s high-level nuclear waste.”

Just last week, state officials announced that one of Hanford’s 177 tanks was leaking 150 to 300 gallons a year, posing a risk to groundwater and rivers. So far, nearby monitoring wells haven’t detected higher radioactivity levels.

Inslee then traveled to Washington, D.C., to discuss the problem with federal officials, learning in meetings Friday that six tanks are leaking.

The declining waste levels in the six tanks were missed because only a narrow band of measurements was evaluated, rather than a wider band that would have shown the levels changing over time, Inslee said.

“It’s like if you’re trying to determine if climate change is happening, only looking at the data for today,” he said. “Perhaps human error, the protocol did not call for it. But that’s not the most important thing at the moment. The important thing now is to find and address the leakers.”

Department of Energy spokeswoman Lindsey Geisler said there was no immediate health risk and that federal officials would work with Washington state to address the matter.

Regardless, Sen. Ron Wyden, the new chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, will ask the Government Accountability Office to investigate Hanford’s tank monitoring and maintenance program, said his spokesman, Tom Towslee.

The federal government built the Hanford facility at the height of World War II as part of the Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb. The remote site produced plutonium for the bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, and continued supporting the nation’s nuclear weapons arsenal for years.

Today, it is the most contaminated nuclear site in the country, still surrounded by sagebrush but with Washington’s Tri-Cities of Richland, Kennewick and Pasco several miles downriver.

Several years ago, workers at Hanford completed two of three projects deemed urgent risks to the public and the environment, removing all weapons-grade plutonium from the site and emptying leaky pools that held spent nuclear fuel just 400 yards from the river.

But successes at the site often are overshadowed by delays, budget overruns and technological challenges. Nowhere have those challenges been more apparent than in Hanford’s central plateau, home to the site’s third most urgent project: emptying the tanks.

Hanford’s tanks hold some 53 million gallons of highly radioactive waste — enough to fill dozens of Olympic-size swimming pools — and many of those tanks are known to have leaked in the past. An estimated 1 million gallons of radioactive liquid has already leaked there.

The cornerstone of emptying the tanks is a treatment plant that will convert the waste into glasslike logs for safe, secure storage. The plant, last estimated to cost more than $12.3 billion, is billions of dollars over budget and behind schedule. It isn’t expected to being operating until at least 2019.

Washington state is imposing a “zero-tolerance” policy on radioactive waste leaking into the soil, Inslee said. So given those delays and the apparent deterioration of some of the tanks, the federal government will have to show that there is adequate storage for the waste in the meantime, he said.

“We are not convinced of this,” he said. “There will be a robust exchange of information in the coming weeks to get to the bottom of this.”

Inslee and Oregon Gov. John Kitzhaber, both Democrats, have championed building additional tanks to ensure safe storage of the waste until the plant is completed.

Wyden, D-Ore., toured the site earlier this week. He said he shares the governors’ concerns about the integrity of the tanks but he wants more scientific information to determine it’s the correct way to spend scarce money.

Wyden noted the nation’s most contaminated nuclear site — and the challenges associated with ridding it of its toxic legacy — will be a subject of upcoming hearings and a higher priority in Washington, D.C.

The federal government already spends $2 billion each year on Hanford cleanup — one-third of its entire budget for nuclear cleanup nationally. The Energy Department has said it expects funding levels to remain the same for the foreseeable future, but a new Energy Department report released this week calls for annual budgets of as much as $3.5 billion during some years of the cleanup effort.

There are legal, moral and ethical considerations to cleaning up the Hanford site at the national level, Inslee said, adding that he will continue to insist that the Energy Department completely clean up the site.

Uncle Sam goes hunting for local government crooks

Robert Robb gives the nitty gritty details!!!

Yes, Ben Arredondo, Sheriff Joe, and Tom Horne are all probably big time crooks that belong in prison. But by both the Federal and Arizona Constitutions I think the job of arresting and jailing these government crooks belongs to the local cops, not Uncle Sam.

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Robert Robb | azcentral opinions

Reach Robert Robb at robert.robb@arizonarepublic.com or 602-444-8472.

Posted on February 22, 2013 2:13 pm by Robert Robb

Feds go hunting for local officials

The federal Department of Justice makes investigating and prosecuting public corruption, including by state and local officials, a major priority.

And the focus is not just on major corruption with national implications or involving federal programs. Acting principally through local branches of the FBI and U.S. Attorney’s Office, DOJ views any corruption by any state or local official, regardless of how small or distant from federal operations, as its business.

The justification is that corruption, regardless of how small, robs the public of the honest administration of their government, and local law enforcement is frequently conflicted, complaisant or complicit.

There is a superficial sensibility to this justification. But there are substantial problems with the role DOJ has arrogated both in theory and in practice, as illustrated by the recent raft of such cases in the Phoenix metro area.

In the first place, there is nothing in the U.S. Constitution that can be even remotely argued to assign the task of policing the integrity of state and local officials to the executive branch of the federal government. Such a role would have been anathema to the framers. In fact, it’s fair to say that if policing the integrity of state and local officials had been an enumerated executive branch responsibility, the Constitution would never have been ratified.

So, how has DOJ managed to assume this extra-constitutional role? Congress has enacted some highly elastic statutes that permit DOJ to turn practically any malfeasance by state and local officials into federal crimes. The most elastic are the federal crimes of bribery, mail fraud and wire fraud.

Bribery involving a state or local official working for an entity that takes at least $10,000 from the federal government can become a federal crime. Since the federal government doles out over $600 billion a year to state and local governments, basically there are no state or local officials not subject to a federal bribery charge, irrespective of how profoundly local the venality.

If any element of the misdeed involved sending something through the mail, it can be mail fraud. Through the Internet, it’s wire fraud.

When federal judge Fred Martone gave former Tempe City Councilman Ben Arredondo a relatively light sentence, it was generally assumed that he did so in part because he thought that the federal government had wasted resources in pursuing such a small-potatoes case. And, indeed, Martone said words to that effect in open court.

But perhaps Martone was also influenced by how much the federal government had stretched these elastic statutes. Although Arredondo was initially charged with an independent count of bribery, that accusation was folded into one of the two counts of mail fraud to which he actually pled. One involved receiving sports tickets through the mail. The other was for sending a letter to ASU saying none of the recipients of the scholarship fund he sponsored were relatives.

The conclusion of the Arredondo case is highly unsatisfying. Was he on the take, explicitly selling his official services to special interests outside the sting operation conducted by the federal government? If so, he got off much too lightly. Or was he just a political hustler, maneuvering aggressively in the gray areas but stopping short of an illegal quid pro quo, despite his plea agreement? If so, he was wrongly subjected to the heavy hand of the federal government, which ultimately threatened to criminally prosecute his wife.

The pursuit of Attorney General Tom Horne also yields disturbing questions. After an intense investigation by the FBI, Horne has been charged by Maricopa County Attorney Bill Montgomery with the civil state offense of illegally coordinating with an independent campaign conducted on his behalf.

So, why was it the FBI that launched the investigation, if it involved the violation of a civil state statute? Initially, the FBI thought the elastic mail and wire fraud statutes could apply, but apparently that was too much of a stretch for the local U.S. Attorney’s Office.

If Horne did violate state law about coordination with an independent campaign, the offense took place in a very few days toward the end of the 2012 campaign, and involved just a handful of people. Yet the FBI, in a sprawling investigation, developed an extraordinary interest in the interpersonal relationships between people in Horne’s Attorney General’s Office. Although the details are pretty salacious, they have no obvious connection to a campaign finance law violation that is alleged to have occurred before Horne was ever elected to the office.

A staffer to former state House Speaker Jim Weiers, John Mills, has been charged with federal wire fraud for taking money from Weiers’ campaign account for personal uses, and then returning it. His attorney is asking that the case be dismissed because the federal government is stretching the wire fraud statutes too far.

The Mills case best illustrates the practical problem with the role the federal government has arrogated. Arizona has very robust state statutes against bribery, fraud and embezzlement. If the facts against Mills are as alleged, he could be prosecuted under some of them without any question that they were being stretched beyond reason.

So why, if state statutes are so much more apropos, are the feds pursuing an iffy wire fraud case rather than turn it over to state or local prosecutors? Impossible to say for sure. But the feds do seem to like to mount their own trophies.

Now there have been several local public corruption cases in which the federal role was unarguably appropriate. Some of the illegal Fiesta Bowl campaign contributions went to candidates for federal office. Former state legislator Richard Miranda embezzled from a federal non-profit and engaged in federal tax evasion in the process.

And the federal government, or at least the U.S. Attorney’s Office, has shown some restraint. Federal charges weren’t filed against Horne. After investigating Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio for criminal civil rights violations, which is something the federal government is uniquely empowered to do, the U.S. Attorney’s Office made a rare public announcement that charges wouldn’t be filed.

Arizona is not being picked on, as some allege. The raft of local public corruption investigations isn’t because Arizona passed SB 1070 or because Gov. Jan Brewer wagged her finger at President Obama.

The investigatory targets in Arizona are a bipartisan lot. And similar small-potatoes federal investigations and charges are occurring all over the country. The feds recently busted some traffic court judges in Philadelphia for fixing tickets for friends and relatives.

The Department of Justice just sees policing the integrity of state and local officials as its job. But is justice truly being served by turning what are really state crimes into federal offenses?

U.S. sends troops to Niger for drone missions

U.S. sends troops to Niger for drone missions

By David S. Cloud and Kathleen Hennessey, Los Angeles Times

February 22, 2013, 8:28 p.m.

WASHINGTON — About 100 U.S. troops have deployed to the West African country of Niger to help establish a drone base for surveillance missions, in the latest step by the United States to aid French forces battling Islamic militants in neighboring Mali.

In a letter to Congress on Friday, President Obama said the deployment would "provide support for intelligence collection and will also facilitate intelligence sharing with French forces conducting operations in Mali, and with other partners in the region."

The last 40 American troops in the deployment arrived in Niger on Feb. 20 with the consent of the government, Obama said.

A senior U.S. officer described the troops as a security unit that will protect crews flying and maintaining U.S. Air Force drones now operating from an airfield near the capital, Niamey. The force includes drone pilots, intelligence liaison officers and aircraft maintenance personnel, the officer said.

"We're basing drones there to help the French, and this deployment is the security element," the officer said.

He spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss details of the operation publicly.

French forces have been battling to push Islamic militants out of northern Mali in recent weeks in an effort to oust insurgents who seized local control after the civilian government collapsed last year.

Predator drones are already flying over Mali to assist French troops, who intervened in January and have driven back militants and Tuareg rebels, who had taken over three major cities and were threatening Mali's capital, Bamako.

The drones flying from Niger will be unarmed surveillance aircraft tracking suspected militants operating in the remote parts of northern Mali. The aircraft could also be used over other countries in the region, the officer said.

The Obama administration has not yet decided to establish a permanent drone base in Niger, the senior officer said. For the moment, the operation is considered a temporary mission to assist the French.

But some senior officers in the Pentagon's Africa Command, which oversees military operations on the continent, favor a permanent base to develop a better picture of the militant threat in West Africa, the officer said.

Among the groups the U.S. is worried about is Boko Haram, an Islamist extremist group in neighboring Nigeria.

Currently, the only permanent base in Africa from which drones operate is in Djibouti, thousands of miles to the east.

In addition to the militants in Mali — some with loose ties to Al Qaeda groups — extremists have taken refuge in the largely ungoverned desert areas of southern Libya and Algeria.

If the Obama administration decides to authorize a permanent base in Niger, it would probably be in Agadez, near northern Mali, the officer said, confirming a report in the New York Times.

Some senior military commanders, in arguing for a permanent base, say the militant threat in the region is growing and could eventually threaten the U.S. and its allies unless more aggressive action is taken.

But some Obama administration officials are skeptical about getting more deeply involved in the region, saying there is no strong evidence that militants there want to target the United States.

Some officials also argue against getting involved in a low-level military operation just as direct U.S. involvement in the war in Afghanistan is nearing an end.

The Obama administration has helped the French operation in Mali with intelligence, transportation for French troops and air refueling of French fighters. But the White House has kept the U.S. role limited.

The U.S. buildup in Niger, though still small in numbers, has unfolded quickly. Last month, the U.S. and Niger signed an agreement outlining legal protections for American troops operating there.

The U.S. also has been operating surveillance drones across the region, including over a natural gas complex last month in eastern Algeria, where militants took hundreds of people prisoner during a four-day siege that killed 37 hostages.

david.cloud@latimes.com

kathleen.hennessey@latimes.com

Afghanistan Bans Elite U.S. Troops From a Key Province

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Afghanistan Bans Elite U.S. Troops From a Key Province

By MATTHEW ROSENBERG

Published: February 24, 2013

KABUL, Afghanistan — The Afghan government on Sunday banned elite American forces from operating in a strategic province adjoining Kabul, citing complaints that Afghans working for American Special Forces have killed and tortured villagers in the area.

The ban is scheduled to go into effect in two weeks in the province, Maidan Wardak, which has long been seen as a crucial link in the defense of the capital against the Taliban. If fully enacted, it would effectively remove the American military’s main source of offensive firepower from the area, which lies southwest of Kabul and is used by the Taliban as a staging ground for attacks on Kabul.

The order has even more potential significance with the scheduled withdrawal of regular American combat forces in Maidan Wardak. By late spring, American officials have said they expect almost all conventional troops in eastern Afghanistan to be focused on advising Afghan forces, leaving Special Operations units as the only offensive troops in the region.

Coalition officials said they were alerted to the Afghan government’s decision on Sunday afternoon, shortly after it was made. But they were still seeking to clarify what it actually entailed and what accusations had prompted it, the officials said, declining to comment further.

Afghan officials described the ban as a measure of last resort. Aimal Faizi, a spokesman for President Hamid Karzai, said Afghanistan’s National Security Council decided to impose the ban after weeks of trying — and failing — to get answers from the coalition about accusations that Maidan Wardak residents were being killed or tortured or had disappeared.

While the officials stressed that they preferred to work with the international forces, the move appeared to signal increasing willingness by the Afghans to publicly confront and limit the work of the coalition forces, if it was felt they were not acting in Afghanistan’s best interests.

The attacks were believed to have been attributed to either Afghans or Afghan-Americans working with American Special Forces, Mr. Faizi said, adding that Afghan defense officials have provided photographs and videos of the men to the coalition.

After seeing the evidence a few weeks ago, coalition officers seemed ready to cooperate, Mr. Faizi said, citing a briefing that Afghan defense officials had given to the Afghan National Security Council.

But soon after, the coalition’s position shifted, according to Mr. Faizi. Alliance officials said the men in question had disappeared or had never worked with American forces. Some coalition officers also questioned whether there had been any killings or torture, and whether anyone tied to the Americans was responsible.

Mr. Faizi expressed little doubt that someone or some group was killing and torturing Maidan Wardak residents. “People from the province, elders from villages, have come to Kabul so many times, and they have brought photographs and videos of their family members who have been tortured,” he said.

Mr. Faizi said the Afghan government simply wanted to investigate the allegations, adding that it was possible that people not connected to the coalition could be responsible, he said.

That, though, would raise another question. “Let’s imagine that the U.S. Special Forces are not involved,” Mr. Faizi said. “Then how come they have not once heard about this? How come they do not know who is doing this?” As for concerns that banning Special Forces from the province could reduce pressure on the Taliban, he said that the Afghan Army and police would “certainly be able to handle this work.”

He pointed out that the security situation had not improved in Maidan Wardak for years, even after the Special Forces stepped up their activity, most of which focuses on Taliban field commanders and other high-ranking officials. Nevertheless, Mr. Faizi said, the operations have failed to reduce the violence.

The violence, he said, had only worsened, and now “local people are blaming the U.S. Special Forces for every incident that is taking place there.”

“It is better to make the Special Forces withdraw from the province and let the local people understand that they are facing only Afghan forces,” he said. “That will bring clarity to the situation.”

Much of the Special Forces’ work in Afghanistan is highly classified, and it was not immediately clear if any of the elite troops were based in Maidan Wardak or if they simply flew in for operations.

Habib Zahori and Sangar Rahimi contributed from Kabul.

Drone Pilots Are Found to Get Stress Disorders Much as Those in Combat Do

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Drone Pilots Are Found to Get Stress Disorders Much as Those in Combat Do

By JAMES DAO

Published: February 22, 2013

In the first study of its kind, researchers with the Defense Department have found that pilots of drone aircraft experience mental health problems like depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress at the same rate as pilots of manned aircraft who are deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan.

The study affirms a growing body of research finding health hazards even for those piloting machines from bases far from actual combat zones.

“Though it might be thousands of miles from the battlefield, this work still involves tough stressors and has tough consequences for those crews,” said Peter W. Singer, a scholar at the Brookings Institution who has written extensively about drones. He was not involved in the new research.

That study, by the Armed Forces Health Surveillance Center, which analyzes health trends among military personnel, did not try to explain the sources of mental health problems among drone pilots.

But Air Force officials and independent experts have suggested several potential causes, among them witnessing combat violence on live video feeds, working in isolation or under inflexible shift hours, juggling the simultaneous demands of home life with combat operations and dealing with intense stress because of crew shortages.

“Remotely piloted aircraft pilots may stare at the same piece of ground for days,” said Jean Lin Otto, an epidemiologist who was a co-author of the study. “They witness the carnage. Manned aircraft pilots don’t do that. They get out of there as soon as possible.”

Dr. Otto said she had begun the study expecting that drone pilots would actually have a higher rate of mental health problems because of the unique pressures of their job.

Since 2008, the number of pilots of remotely piloted aircraft — the Air Force’s preferred term for drones — has grown fourfold, to nearly 1,300. The Air Force is now training more pilots for its drones than for its fighter jets and bombers combined. And by 2015, it expects to have more drone pilots than bomber pilots, although fighter pilots will remain a larger group.

Those figures do not include drones operated by the C.I.A. in counterterrorism operations over Pakistan, Yemen and other countries.

The Pentagon has begun taking steps to keep pace with the rapid expansion of drone operations. It recently created a new medal to honor troops involved in both drone warfare and cyberwarfare. And the Air Force has expanded access to chaplains and therapists for drone operators, said Col. William M. Tart, who commanded remotely piloted aircraft crews at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada.

The Air Force has also conducted research into the health issues of drone crew members. In a 2011 survey of nearly 840 drone operators, it found that 46 percent of Reaper and Predator pilots, and 48 percent of Global Hawk sensor operators, reported “high operational stress.” Those crews cited long hours and frequent shift changes as major causes.

That study found the stress among drone operators to be much higher than that reported by Air Force members in logistics or support jobs. But it did not compare the stress levels of the drone operators with those of traditional pilots.

The new study looked at the electronic health records of 709 drone pilots and 5,256 manned aircraft pilots between October 2003 and December 2011. Those records included information about clinical diagnoses by medical professionals and not just self-reported symptoms.

After analyzing diagnosis and treatment records, the researchers initially found that the drone pilots had higher incidence rates for 12 conditions, including anxiety disorder, depressive disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, substance abuse and suicidal ideation.

But after the data were adjusted for age, number of deployments, time in service and history of previous mental health problems, the rates were similar, said Dr. Otto, who was scheduled to present her findings in Arizona on Saturday at a conference of the American College of Preventive Medicine.

The study also found that the incidence rates of mental heath problems among drone pilots spiked in 2009. Dr. Otto speculated that the increase might have been the result of intense pressure on pilots during the Iraq surge in the preceding years.

The study found that pilots of both manned and unmanned aircraft had lower rates of mental health problems than other Air Force personnel. But Dr. Otto conceded that her study might underestimate problems among both manned and unmanned aircraft pilots, who may feel pressure not to report mental health symptoms to doctors out of fears that they will be grounded.

She said she planned to conduct two follow-up studies: one that tries to compensate for possible underreporting of mental health problems by pilots and another that analyzes mental health issues among sensor operators, who control drone cameras while sitting next to the pilots.

“The increasing use of remotely piloted aircraft for war fighting as well as humanitarian relief should prompt increased surveillance,” she said.

Sen. Rich Crandall wants to create a jobs program for cops???

The law doesn't apply in Phoenix, Tucson, Flagstaff, Prescott or any other Arizona cities and only applies to rural areas.

The law would continue to create a jobs program for cops in schools, because only cops would be allowed to carry guns.

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Arizona bill to arm teachers returns to Senate for public hearing

By Alia Beard Rau The Republic | azcentral.com Mon Feb 25, 2013 10:17 PM

Efforts to arm teachers in schools and to “sweep” public-campaign finance revenue to hire more school-resource officers were among 15 Senate bills granted special permission on Monday to move forward with public hearings.

Although Friday was the deadline for bills to get hearings, Republican leadership usually gives some bills an extra week, and the Senate Appropriations Committee will today hear the Senate bills granted an extension.

Senate Bill 1325, introduced by Sen. Rich Crandall, R-Mesa, would allow school governing boards to authorize a teacher or administrator to carry a concealed gun on campus if the school has fewer than 600 students, is more than 30 minutes and 20 miles away from the closest law-enforcement facility, and does not have its own school-resource officer.

A proposed amendment would allow any school governing board to allow a retired law-enforcement officer who is an employee of the school to carry a gun on school grounds.

Crandall’s bill was thought to be dead. A similar bill pushed by Attorney General Tom Horne that would have allowed school districts to arm any teacher or administrator went nowhere.

But Crandall said late last week that he worked with Senate leadership on the amendment and convinced them to give the bill a hearing.

Senate Concurrent Resolution 1017, also introduced by Crandall, would ask voters to allow the state to use excess Clean Elections money to help schools pay for resource officers, counselors and behavioral-health services.

The program’s sources of revenue include a surcharge on civil penalties and criminal fines, $5 donations collected by candidates, and taxpayer donations. Currently, Clean Elections money not used to fund participating candidates goes into the state’s general fund.

Arizona Education Association President Andrew Morrill said his organization opposes SB 1325.

“I think Sen. Crandall is trying to be about as reasonable as anybody down there and I know he’s trying to look at some of the unique rural needs,” he said. “But we have drawn a pretty firm line to say there is no substitute for the school-resource officer program.”

He said he’d rather see lawmakers focus on helping schools make their campuses safer, whether that’s by hiring school-resource officers or better securing a school’s perimeter with fencing.

But Morrill said there may be a compromise in allowing retired law-enforcement officers to help schools with safety, especially if they were required to go through the school-resource officer training.

“That’s one of the few suggestions I’ve heard down at the Legislature that could actually work and would have the effect of increasing school safety,” he said.

He said the AEA supports increasing funding for the school-resource officer program but hasn’t researched SCR 1017 enough to know if it may be a viable solution.

Arizonans for Gun Safety President Hildy Saizow, whose group worked with the Obama administration earlier this year on its gun reform proposals, said she has concerns about both bills.

“We don’t agree at all that teachers or administrators or any civilians in the school should be carrying weapons,” she said, saying she even has concerns if the bill does limit who can carry weapons. “There are just too many variables that can lead to a bad outcome.”

She said the organization supports creating a safe environment in schools and supports school-resource officers, but said it does not believe that boosting funds for the schools addresses the issue of gun violence.

“If you look at the 900 gun deaths that took place (in Arizona) last year, not one of them occurred on school grounds,” she said.

She said it would be more helpful if the Legislature would toughen background-check requirements for gun buyers or take weapons away from individuals with mental illnesses.

The Citizens Clean Elections Commission is not opposed to Crandall’s bill to use excess funds to help schools.

Executive Director Todd Lang said Crandall has introduced an amendment that would remedy an administrative problem the Clean Elections bill would have caused. “So in that case ... we’re fine with it,” he said.

Other bills to be heard today would give more adopted children access to behavioral-health services, give the Legislature more oversight over Arizona Department of Transportation highway construction projects and establish a performance-based funding program for schools.

Wednesday, the House Appropriations Committee will hear seven bills granted extensions in that chamber. They include efforts to expand mental-health services funding.

Supremes to flush 4th and 5th Amendments for DNA testing???

I think they were right on that, but sadly the courts didn't buy it.

I suspect this forced DNA testing is also unconstitutional, but sadly I suspect the courts will approve it.

If "solving crimes" was the most important function of government, the Founders probably would not have created a "Bill of Rights" to protect us from government abuse.

Source

Supreme Court appears conflicted over DNA sampling

Associated Press Tue Feb 26, 2013 3:04 PM

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday struggled with what one of the justices called its most important criminal procedure case in decades, whether to let police take DNA without a warrant from those arrested in hopes of using it to solve old cases.

Justices seemed conflicted over whether police have a right to take genetic information from people who have only been arrested without getting a judge’s approval first, or if the government’s interest in solving cold cases trumped the immediate privacy rights of those under police suspicion of other crimes. [Notice they didn't say a word about the government claiming to be a "public servant" here. When they say the "government's interest" here, it sounds like they consider the "government's interest" more important then the people the government pretends to serve!!!]

One justice seemed to make clear what he thought. “I think this is perhaps the most important criminal procedure case that this court has heard in decades,” said Justice Samuel Alito, a former prosecutor.

“This is what is at stake: Lots of murders, lots of rapes that can be solved using this new technology that involves a very minimal intrusion on personal privacy,” Alito said later. “Why isn’t this the fingerprinting of the 21st century? What is the difference? If it was permissible, and it’s been assumed to be so for decades, that it is permissible to fingerprint anybody who’s booked, why is it not permissible to take a DNA sample from anybody who is arrested?”

But Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Elena Kagan questioned how far the government can go if they decide that the police have an interest in people’s DNA to help solve cases, with Roberts noting that it wouldn’t take much for police to add DNA swabs to traffic stops. “Police officers who give Breathalyzer tests, they can also take a Q-tip or whatever and get a DNA sample, right?” Roberts said.

“It could be any arrestee, no matter how minor the offense,” Kagan said. “It could be just any old person in the street. Why don’t we do this for everybody who comes in for a driver’s license because it’s very effective?”

Getting DNA swabs from criminals is common. All 50 states and the federal government take cheek swabs from convicted criminals to check against federal and state databanks, with the court’s blessing. But now 28 states and the federal government now also take samples from people who have been arrested for various crimes, long before their guilt or innocence has been proven.

According to court documents, the FBI’s Combined DNA Index System or CODIS — a coordinated system of federal, state and local databases of DNA profiles — contains more than 10 million criminal profiles and 1.1 million profiles of those arrested.

In the case before the court, a 53-year-old woman was raped and robbed but no one was arrested. Almost six years later, Alonzo King was arrested and charged with felony second-degree assault. Taking advantage of a Maryland law that allowed warrantless DNA tests following some felony arrests, police took a cheek swab of King’s DNA, which matched a sample from the 2003 Salisbury rape. King was convicted of rape and sentenced to life in prison.

King eventually pleaded guilty to a lesser charge of misdemeanor assault from his arrest, a crime for which Maryland cannot take warrantless DNA samples. The state courts said it violated King’s rights for the state to take his DNA based on an arrest alone.

The state Court of Appeals said King had “a sufficiently weighty and reasonable expectation of privacy against warrantless, suspicionless searches.”

The Supreme Court is reviewing that decision. The justices will make a decision later this year.

King’s lawyer, Kannon K. Shanmugam, told the justices there’s “legitimate expectation of privacy” in the contents of an individual’s DNA. “An individual’s DNA contains far more information and far more personal information than an individual’s fingerprints,” Shanmugam said.

But prosecutors argued that those arrested have less expectations of privacy than people not in police custody. An arrested individual “by virtue of being in that class of individuals whose conduct has led the police to arrest him on, based on probable cause, surrenders a substantial amount of liberty and privacy,” said Maryland Chief Deputy Attorney General Katherine Winfree. [People are routinely arrested without the required "probable cause" or "reasonable suspicion"! Does the prosecutor think the police have some God given right to illegally take a DNA sample from these people after illegally arresting them???]

In addition to solving cold cases, prosecutors argued that DNA testing is needed to help identify the person in custody, just like fingerprinting — when police make ink impressions of suspects’ fingers and compare them quickly to others kept by authorities and found at crime scenes. [If you ask me the Fifth Amendment allows people to refuse to identify themselves to the police. Of course the case Hiibel v Nevada, partially flushed that right down the toilet, when the Supreme Court said that people who are detained by the police with "reasonable suspicion" are required to verbally tell the police their name, if their state has a law requiring it.]

With arrested individuals, the government has a compelling interest in “knowing who that person is, which includes knowing what the person has done. And DNA does that in a far more powerful way than fingerprints have done,” Justice Department lawyer Michael R. Dreeben said.

If that comparison can be made, “I think that you would have a quite good case,” Kagan said.

But Winfree said it currently takes 11-17 days to get results from a DNA swab, making it useless for instant identification. Winfree argued that technology will soon go into use give the police the ability to get results back from DNA swabs within minutes, instead of the days it takes now. But “can I base a decision today on what you say is going to happen in two years?” Roberts said.

“You can’t demonstrate that the purpose is immediate identification of the people coming into custody. You just can’t demonstrate that now,” Justice Antonin Scalia said to Winfree. “Maybe you can in two years. The purpose now is the purpose you began your presentation with, to catch the bad guys, which is a good thing. But you know, the Fourth Amendment sometimes stands in the way.”

Justice Anthony Kennedy, usually a swing vote on the court, compared the DNA swab to police patting a person down after an arrest, something they don’t need a warrant to do. “Does the justice system have an interest in knowing whether the person committed other crimes?” he asked Shanmugam several times. [I suspect they are referring to "Terry v Ohio" which allows the cops to search a person for weapons by patting them down. I think "Terry v Ohio" also flushed part of the 4th Amendment down the toilet!!!]

“They have that interest, but if they want to investigate other crimes, they have to do what they would have to do as to an ordinary citizen. They have to have a warrant or some level of individualized suspicion,” Shanmugam said.

Do Fingerprints Lie?

Annals of Crime

Do Fingerprints Lie?

The gold standard of forensic evidence is now being challenged.

by Michael Specter May 27, 2002

Late one afternoon in the spring of 1998, a police detective named Shirley McKie stood by the sea on the southern coast of Scotland and thought about ending her life. A promising young officer, the thirty-five-year-old McKie had become an outcast among her colleagues in the tiny hamlet of Strathclyde. A year earlier, she had been assigned to a murder case in which an old woman was stabbed through the right eye with a pair of sewing scissors. Within hours of the killing, a team of forensic specialists had begun working their way through the victim’s house. Along with blood, hair, and fibres, the detectives found some unexpected evidence: one of the prints lifted from the room where the murder took place apparently matched the left thumb of Detective McKie.

Crime scenes are often contaminated by fingerprints belonging to police officers, and investigators quickly learn to eliminate them from the pool of suspects. But McKie said that she had never entered the house. Four experts from the Scottish Criminal Record Office—the agency that stores and identifies fingerprints for Scotland’s police—insisted, however, that the print was hers. Though McKie held to her story, even her father doubted her. “I love my daughter very much,’’ Iain McKie, who served as a police officer in Scotland for more than thirty years, told me earlier this year. “But when they said the print was Shirley’s I have to admit I assumed the worst. My entire career I had heard that fingerprints never lie.”

Nobody actually suspected McKie of murder, and in fact the victim’s handyman, David Asbury, was charged with the crime. The sole physical evidence against him consisted of two fingerprints—one of his, lifted from an unopened Christmas gift inside the house, and one of the victim’s, found on a biscuit tin in Asbury’s home. The last thing prosecutors needed was for their own witness to raise questions in court about the quality of the evidence. Yet McKie did just that—repeating under oath that she had never entered the house. Asbury was convicted anyway, but Scottish prosecutors were enraged by McKie’s testimony. As far as they were concerned, McKie had not only lied; she had challenged one of the evidentiary pillars of the entire legal system. Despite their victory in the murder trial, they charged McKie with perjury.

Desperate, she went to the public library and searched the Internet for somebody who might help her. Among the names she came upon was that of Allan Bayle, a senior forensic official at New Scotland Yard and perhaps the United Kingdom’s foremost fingerprint expert. (It was Bayle’s expertise and supporting evidence that helped convict one of the principal Libyan suspects in the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, over Lockerbie, Scotland.) He agreed to review the prints, and what he saw astonished him. “It was obvious the fingerprint was not Shirley’s,’’ Bayle told me recently. “It wasn’t even a close call. She was identified on the left thumb, but that’s not the hand the print was from. It’s the right forefinger. But how can you admit you are wrong about Shirley’s print without opening yourself to doubt about the murder suspect, too?” Bayle posted a comment on Onin.com, a Web site trafficked regularly by the world’s fingerprint community. “I have looked at the McKie case,’’ he wrote. “The mark is not identical. I have shown this mark to many experts in the UK and they have come to the same conclusions.”

Bayle’s assertion caused a furor. He was threatened with disciplinary action, shunned by his colleagues, and, after a quarter century with the Metropolitan Police, driven from his job. But in the end McKie was acquitted, and Bayle’s statement helped challenge a system that had, until then, simply been taken for granted. For more than a century, the fingerprint has been regarded as an unassailable symbol of truth, particularly in the courtroom. When a trained expert tells a judge and jury that prints found at a crime scene match those of the accused, his testimony often decides the case. The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s basic text on the subject is entitled “The Science of Fingerprints,’’ and a science is what F.B.I. officials believe fingerprinting to be; their Web site states that “fingerprints offer an infallible means of personal identification.’’ The Bureau maintains a database that includes the fingerprints of more than forty-three million Americans; it can be searched from precinct houses and properly equipped police cruisers across the country. Fingerprints are regularly used to resolve disputes, prevent forgery, and certify the remains of the dead; they have helped send countless people to prison. Until this year, fingerprint evidence had never successfully been challenged in any American courtroom.

Then, on January 7th, U.S. District Court Judge Louis H. Pollak—a former dean of the law schools at Yale and at the University of Pennsylvania—issued a ruling that limited the use of fingerprint evidence in a drug-related murder case now under way in Philadelphia. He decided that there were not enough data showing that methods used by fingerprint analysts would pass the tests of scientific rigor required by the Supreme Court, and noted the “alarmingly high” error rates on periodic proficiency exams. Although Judge Pollak later decided to permit F.B.I. fingerprint experts to testify in this particular case, students of forensic science felt his skepticism was justified. “We have seen forensic disciplines which focus on bite marks, hair analysis, and handwriting increasingly questioned in the courts,” Robert Epstein, who had argued for the exclusion of fingerprint testimony in the case, told me. “But we have accepted fingerprinting uncritically for a hundred years.’’

Epstein, an assistant federal public defender in Philadelphia, was responsible for the first major court challenge to the discipline, in 1999, in U.S. v. Byron Mitchell. In that case, Epstein showed that standards for examiners vary widely, and that errors on proficiency tests—which are given irregularly and in a variety of forms—are far from rare. The critical evidence consisted of two fingerprint marks lifted from a car used in a robbery. To prepare for the trial, F.B.I. officials had sent the prints to agencies in all fifty states; roughly twenty per cent failed to identify them correctly. “After all this time, we still have no idea how well fingerprinting really works,’’ Epstein said. “The F.B.I. calls it a science. By what definition is it a science? Where are the data? Where are the studies? We know that fingerprint examiners are not always right. But are they usually right or are they sometimes right? That, I am afraid, we don’t know. Are there a few people in prison who shouldn’t be? Are there many? Nobody has ever bothered to try and find out. Look closely at the great discipline of fingerprinting. It’s not only not a science—it should not even be admitted as evidence in an American court of law.”

Fingerprints have been a source of fascination for thousands of years. They were used as seals on legal contracts in ancient Babylonia, and have been found embossed on six-thousand-year-old Chinese earthenware and pressed onto walls in the tomb of Tutankhamun. Hundreds of years ago, the outline of a hand with etchings representing the ridge patterns on fingertips was scratched into slate rock beside Kejimkujik Lake, in Nova Scotia.

For most of human history, using fingerprints to establish a person’s identity was unnecessary. Until the nineteenth century, people rarely left the villages in which they were born, and it was possible to live for years without setting eyes on a stranger. With the rise of the Industrial Revolution, cities throughout Europe and America filled with migrants whose names and backgrounds could not be easily verified by employers or landlords. As the sociologist Simon Cole made clear in “Suspect Identities,” a recent history of fingerprinting, felons quickly learned to lie about their names, and the soaring rate of urban crime forced police to search for a more exacting way to determine and keep track of identities. The first such system was devised in 1883 by a Parisian police clerk named Alphonse Bertillon. His method, called anthropometry, relied on an elaborate set of anatomical measurements—such as head size, length of the left middle finger, face height—and features like scars and hair and eye color to distinguish one person from another. Anthropometry proved useful, but fingerprinting, which was then coming into use in Britain, held more promise. By the eighteen-sixties, Sir William J. Herschel, a British civil servant in India, had begun to keep records of fingerprints and use them to resolve common contract disputes and petty frauds.

Fingerprinting did not become indispensable, however, until 1869, when Britain stopped exiling criminals to Australia, and Parliament passed the Habitual Criminals Act. This law required judges to take past offenses into account when determining the severity of a sentence. But in order to include prior offenses in an evaluation one would need to know whether the convict had a previous record, and many criminals simply used a different alias each time they were arrested. The discovery that no two people had exactly the same pattern of ridge characteristics on their fingertips seemed to offer a solution. In 1880, Dr. Henry Faulds published the first comments, in the scientific journal Nature, on the use of fingerprints to solve crimes. Soon afterward, Charles Darwin’s misanthropic cousin, Sir Francis Galton, an anthropologist and the founder of eugenics, designed a system of numbering the ridges on the tips of fingers—now known as Galton points—which is still in use throughout the world. (Ultimately, though, he saw fingerprints as a way to classify people by race.)

Nobody is sure exactly how Mark Twain learned about fingerprints, but his novel “Pudd’nhead Wilson,” published in 1894, planted them in the American imagination. The main character in the book, a lawyer, earned the nickname Pudd’nhead in part because he spent so much time collecting “finger-marks”—which was regarded as proof of his foolishness until he astounded his fellow-citizens by using the marks to solve a murder. If you were to walk into a courtroom today and listen to the testimony of a typical forensic expert, you might hear a recitation much like Pudd’nhead Wilson’s: Every human being carries with him from his cradle to his grave certain physical marks which do not change their character, and by which he can always be identified—and that without shade of doubt or question. These marks are his signature, his physiological autograph, so to speak, and this autograph cannot be counterfeited, nor can he disguise it or hide it away, nor can it become illegible by the wear and the mutations of time. . . . This signature is each man’s very own. There is no duplicate of it among the swarming populations of the globe!

Some things have changed since Pudd’nhead Wilson, of course. A few weeks ago, I visited the headquarters of the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification Systems, the F.B.I.’s billion-dollar data center, just outside Clarksburg, West Virginia—a citadel of the American forensic community. After driving past a series of shacks and double-wides and Bob Evans restaurants, you come upon a forest with a vast, futuristic complex looming above the trees. (I.A.F.I.S. moved from more crowded quarters in the Hoover Building in 1995, thanks to the influence of the state’s senior senator, Robert C. Byrd.)

Clarksburg is home to the world’s largest collection of fingerprints; on an average day, forty thousand are fed into the system. The I.A.F.I.S. computers, which can process three thousand searches a second, sort through the database in a variety of ways. For example, they compare complete sets of fingerprints in the files with new arrivals—as when a suspect is held in custody and the police send his “ten-prints” to I.A.F.I.S. The computer hunts for shared characteristics, and then attempts to match the prints to a record on file. “We identify about eight thousand fugitives per month here,’’ Billy P. Martin, the acting chief of the Identification and Investigative Services Section, told me. Martin said that eleven per cent of job applicants whose fingerprints are entered into the system—they could be day-care workers, casino staff, federal employees—turn out to have criminal records; as many as sixty per cent of the matches are repeat offenders.

The center looks like a NASA control room, with dozens of people monitoring the encrypted network of fingerprint machines sending in data from police stations throughout the country. The main computer floor is the size of two football fields and contains sixty-two purple-and-gray “jukeboxes,” each filled with two hundred compact disks containing fingerprints. (There are three thousand sets on each CD.) When someone is arrested, his prints are initially searched against a state’s computer files. If the search finds nothing, the information is forwarded to the federal database in Clarksburg. To make a match, the I.A.F.I.S. computer analyzes the many points on the ridges of every fingerprint it receives, starting with the thumb and working toward the pinkie; only when the data produce prints that match (or several prints that seem similar) is the original print forwarded to an analyst for comparison.

”We used to go to a file cabinet, pull out paper cards. If it was all loops—which is the most common type of print—you could spend an hour,’’ Martin said. “Now a computer algorithm does it in seconds. The system searches the electronic image against the database and pulls up the image onto the screen. The accuracy rate on first run is 99.97 per cent.’’ Still, this would mean that the I.A.F.I.S. computers make three hundred mistakes in every million searches. That is where trained examiners come in. The patterns on fingertips are more like topographical maps or handwriting than, say, bar codes. They can be so similar that even the most sophisticated computer program can’t tell them apart; it takes a trained human eye to detect the subtle differences.

I sat with one of the examiners in a dim, nearly silent room lined with what seemed like an endless series of cubicles. At each station, someone was staring at a monitor with two huge fingerprints on it. No two people—not even identical twins—have ever been shown to share fingerprints. The friction ridges that cover the skin on your hands and feet are formed by the seventeenth week in the womb; at birth they have become so deep that nothing can alter them, not even surgery. Look at your fingertips: the patterns resemble finely detailed maps of the bypasses and exit ramps on modern roads. Experts use the nomenclature of the highway to describe them: there are spurs, bifurcations, and crossovers. Some people have fingertips that are dominated by “loops,” others by “tented arches” or small circles that examiners call “lakes,” or smaller ones still, called “dots.” Collectively, these details are referred to as minutiae—an average human fingerprint may contain as many as a hundred and fifty minutia points. To identify fingerprints, an expert must compare these points individually, until enough of them correspond that he or she feels confident of a match.

When fingerprints are properly recorded (inked, then rolled, finger by finger, onto a flat surface, or scanned into a machine that captures and stores each finger as a digital image), identification works almost flawlessly. The trouble is that investigators in the field rarely see the pristine prints that can be quickly analyzed by a computer; most of the prints introduced at criminal trials are fragments known as “latent prints.” Crime scenes are messy, and the average fingerprint taken from them represents only a fraction of a full fingertip—about twenty per cent. They are frequently distorted and hard to read, having been lifted from a grainy table or a bloodstained floor. “It is one thing to say that fingerprints are unique and quite another to suggest that a partial latent print, often covered in blood or taken from an obscure surface, is unique, identical, or easy to identify,’’ Barry Scheck told me. In the past decade, Scheck, who directs the Innocence Project, has used DNA evidence to exonerate more than a hundred prisoners, some of them on death row. “We have always been told that fingerprint evidence is the gold standard of forensic science. If you have a print, you have your man. But it is not an objective decision. It is inexact, partial, and open to all sorts of critics.’’

Police use several methods to discover latent fingerprints. First, they shine a flashlight or a laser along the clean, solid surfaces on which a print may have been left by the perspiration and oil on a fingertip. When a print is discovered, detectives use a brush and powder to mark it, much as they did in the nineteenth century; the powder clings to the perspiration. (The method works best on smooth surfaces, like glass.) The print is then photographed and lifted with tape.

The technology for retrieving partial and obscure fingerprints keeps improving. On a recent episode of the television program “C.S.I.,” you might have seen detectives using a technique called superglue fuming to reveal the outline of a face on a plastic bag—an unconventional use of a common practice. In order to find difficult prints on an irregular surface, such as the human body, crime-scene investigators blow fumes of superglue over it. As the fumes adhere to the surface, the ridges of any fingerprint left there turn white and come clearly into view. Another common method involves ninhydrin, which works like invisible ink: when you douse paper with it, the chemical brings out any sweat that may have been left by fingertips. Ninhydrin is particularly useful with old prints or those covered in blood.

F.B.I. fingerprint examiners have a variety of computer tools—a sort of specialized version of Photoshop—to help them compare rolled prints with those in their system. In front of me, an I.A.F.I.S. examiner stared at his computer screen as a training instructor, Charles W. Jones, Jr., explained the process. “He is looking for ridges that form dots,’’ Jones said. “Bifurcations. Usually they look for six or seven of those.’’ The examiners work around the clock, in three shifts, and are required to evaluate at least thirty prints an hour. They know nothing about the people attached to the fingers on their screens; the prints could be those of a rapist, a serial killer, Osama bin Laden, a woman applying for a job in the Secret Service, or a bus driver from Queens. (“Yesterday I did fifty-one for a couple hours in a row,’’ an examiner told me proudly.)

At the bottom of the screen there are three buttons—”Ident,” “Unable,” and “Non-Ident”—and the examiner must click on one of them. If he identifies a finger, the print goes to a second analyst. If the two examiners independently reach the same conclusion, the fingerprint is considered to have been identified. If not, it gets forwarded to an analyst with more experience. “We have a pretty good fail-safe system,’’ Jones said. “Computers help immensely. But in the end they can’t pull the trigger. That’s our job.’’

Only a human being can make critical decisions about identity, and yet the talent, training, and experience of examiners vary widely. “The current identification system . . . is only as genuine as the knowledge, experience, and ability of the specialist carrying out the comparison,’’ David R. Ashbaugh, a staff sergeant with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, writes, in “Quantitative-Qualitative Friction Ridge Analysis,” which is considered the Bible of the field. And although fingerprint analysis has been in use for decades, there has never been any consensus about professional standards. How many distinct characteristics are necessary to prove that a latent fingerprint comes from a specific person? The answer is different in New York, California, and London. In certain states, and in many countries, fingerprint examiners must show that prints share a set number of Galton points before they can say they have made an identification. Australia and France require at least twelve matching Galton points; in Italy, the number is sixteen. In America, standards vary, even within a state. The F.B.I. doesn’t require a minimum number of points; all such regulations were dropped fifty years ago, because, according to Stephen B. Meagher, the chief of the Bureau’s latent-print unit, the F.B.I. believes that making an identification using Galton points alone can cause errors.

Meagher says that fingerprint analysis is an objective science; Robert Epstein, the Philadelphia attorney who has led the fight against presenting fingerprint evidence in court, says it is not a science at all. Neither is exactly right. Examining the many contours of a human finger is not as objective as measuring someone’s temperature or weight, or developing a new vaccine. But it’s not guesswork, either. It involves, inevitably, human judgment, and most people agree that when it is done well it is highly accurate. The difficulty is in determining whether it has been done well. Scientific methodology is based on generating hypotheses and testing them to see if they make sense; in laboratories throughout the world, researchers spend at least as much time trying to disprove a theory as they do trying to prove it. Eventually, those ideas that don’t prove false are accepted. But fingerprinting was developed by the police, not by scientists, and it has never been subjected to rigorous analysis—you cannot go to Harvard, Berkeley, or Oxford and talk to the scholar working on fingerprint research. Yet by the early twentieth century fingerprinting had become so widely accepted in American courts that further research no longer seemed necessary, and none of any significance has been completed.

David L. Faigman, who teaches at the Hastings College of the Law and is an editor of the annually revised forensic text “Modern Scientific Evidence,’’ has spent most of his career campaigning to increase the scientific literacy of judges and juries. Faigman likens the acceptance of fingerprint evidence to the way leeches were once assumed to be of great medical value. “Leeches were used for centuries,’’ he told me. “It was especially common for the treatment of pneumonia and it was considered an effective therapy. It wasn’t till late in the nineteenth century that they did the clinical tests to show that leeches did not help for pneumonia, and they may have actually hurt. Fingerprinting is like that in at least one crucial way: it is something we assume works but something we have never properly tested. Until we test our beliefs, we can’t say for sure if we have leeches or we have aspirin”—an effective remedy that was used before it was understood. “One of the things that science teaches us is that you can’t know the answers until you ask the questions.’’

The discussion of fingerprinting is only the most visible element in a much larger debate about how forensic science fits into the legal system. For years, any sophisticated attorney was certain to call upon expert witnesses—doctors, psychiatrists, Bruno Magli shoe salesmen—to assert whatever might help his case. And studies have shown that juries are in fact susceptible to the influence of such experts. Until recently, though, there were no guidelines for qualification; nearly anybody could be called an expert, which meant that, unlike other witnesses, the expert could present his “opinion” almost as if it were fact. Experts have been asked to testify about the rate at which a tire would skid, and the distance blood would splatter when a certain calibre bullet smashed into a skull. They have lectured scores of juries on the likelihood that a medicine could cause a particular side effect; they have interpreted polygraphs and handwriting, and have pronounced on whether a bite mark was made by one set of teeth to the exclusion of all others.

Although forensic evidence has proved particularly powerful with juries, it is particularly weak as a science. By the nineteen-eighties, the kind of evidence that was routinely admitted into court without any statistical grounding or rationale had earned a name: “junk science.” And junk science had become ubiquitous. With the problem growing out of control, in 1993 the Supreme Court took up a lawsuit called Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals. The case involved a child who suffered from serious birth defects. His lawyers claimed that the defects were caused by Bendectin, a drug that was for many years routinely prescribed for morning sickness, which his mother took while she was pregnant. The company argued that no valid evidence existed to support the claim. The Court’s decision set a new standard for scientific evidence in America: for the first time, it held that it was not permissible for expert witnesses to testify to what was “generally accepted” to be true in their field. Judges had to act as “gatekeepers,” the Court said; if an expert lacked reliability he was no longer allowed in the courtroom. The ruling, and others that expanded upon it, laid down clear guidelines for the federal bench, requiring judges to consider a series of questions: Could a technique be tested or proved false? Was there a known or potential error rate? (DNA identification has provided the model, because experts have gathered enough statistical evidence to estimate the odds—which are astronomical—that one person’s DNA could be traced to another.) The Court also instructed judges to consider whether a particular theory had ever been subjected to the academic rigor of peer review or publication.

The Daubert ruling forced federal judges to become more sophisticated about science, which has not been easy for them. “Daubert changed everything,” Michael J. Saks, a law professor at Arizona State University, who has written widely on the subject, told me. “And it is pretty clear when you look at those criteria that fingerprinting simply doesn’t satisfy any of them.’’ Since the Daubert ruling, federal courts have judged handwriting evidence and hair identification to be unscientific. The use of polygraph data has also been curtailed. Questions have been raised about ballistics—say, whether a bullet can be traced back to a particular gun. Somehow, though, until Judge Pollak came along, challenges to fingerprinting continued to be regarded as heresy.

Relying largely on testimony presented by Robert Epstein in U.S. v. Byron Mitchell, the first post-Daubert case involving fingerprint testimony, Judge Pollak ruled in January that an expert could say whether he thought fingerprints belonged to the people accused of the crime, but he could not say that the fingerprints he had examined were, beyond doubt, those of the defendant.

Pollak is one of the federal judiciary’s most respected judges. Federal prosecutors were so concerned that any ruling he issued would carry a significance even greater than its legal weight that they asked the Judge to reconsider his precedent-shattering decision. Pollak agreed.

Late in February, Pollak held a hearing on the reliability of fingerprint evidence. For three days, several of the world’s most prominent experts discussed their field in his courtroom. The F.B.I.’s Stephen B. Meagher testified that no Bureau analyst had ever misidentified a person in court, and that the Bureau’s annual proficiency test was among the reasons that the Judge should be confident about admitting expert testimony. Allan Bayle, the British forensic specialist, flew in from London at the request of the defense. He had a different view. He told Pollak that the F.B.I.’s proficiency test was so easy it could be passed with no more than six weeks of training. “If I gave my experts [at Scotland Yard] these tests, they would fall about laughing,” he told Pollak in court. Later, in conversation with me, he expanded on those comments. “The F.B.I. are conning themselves and they are conning everybody else,’’ he said. “They don’t even use real scene-of-crime marks for the fingerprint tests.” He pointed out that the fingerprints used in the exams were so different from each other that almost anybody could tell them apart. “Let’s say I asked you to look at a zebra, a giraffe, an elephant, and a lion. Then I asked you to find the zebra. How hard would that be? What the Bureau should be doing is comparing five zebras and selecting among them.” Bayle and other critics stopped short of calling fingerprint evidence junk science, but they noted that there are few data showing how often latent prints are properly identified.

By February 27th, the final day of the hearing, the fissures in an old and accepted discipline had become visible, and Judge Pollak promised to issue a final ruling within a couple of weeks. A few days after Pollak’s hearing ended, I flew to Cardiff to attend the annual meeting of the Fingerprint Society. It was raining in Wales, and the members of the society were deeply unsettled because their profession was under assault. Each year, the society gathers for a few days to listen to lectures and to talk about developments in the field. The society has always been a club—the type where you might expect to stumble upon Sherlock Holmes or G. K. Chesterton. The bar at the Thistle Hotel, where the conference was held, was filled with police officers from Sussex, Aberdeen, and most places in between. The conference was well attended by representatives of the United States Secret Service and the F.B.I. There were also a few stray academics interested in the latest obscure technology, such as magnetic nanoflake powders, which are able to capture fingerprints without disturbing whatever traces of DNA may be present. (With conventional methods, an investigator has to choose: either swab a mark to harvest the DNA or lift it to find the print.)

By the time I arrived, the society was preoccupied by two issues: the Pollak hearings and the lingering ill will from the McKie case, in Scotland. One of those in attendance was Meagher, the lead F.B.I. witness in Judge Pollak’s courtroom. I introduced myself, and told him that I understood he couldn’t discuss the Philadelphia case while it was under review, but asked if we could talk about the field in general. “No,’’ he said, without a moment’s hesitation.Iain McKie had also come to Cardiff that weekend, as had Allan Bayle. McKie, a tall, reedy man with a great nimbus of curly white hair, presented a lecture on the ethics of fingerprinting. He remained livid about the fact that a fingerprint had destroyed his daughter’s career; although she had been acquitted of perjury, she felt unwelcome on the police force after having been strip-searched and jailed by her colleagues, and had resigned soon after her trial. She never returned to work. Today, she spends much of her time trying to force Scottish authorities to admit that what they did to her was wrong. “I believe a person made a mistake, and instead of admitting it they were prepared to send me to jail,’’ Shirley McKie said after she was acquitted of perjury. “It ruined my life, and now I am trying to pick up the pieces.”

The Scottish Criminal Record Office has never acknowledged the error, nor has the Fingerprint Society issued any statement about the incident. (David Asbury, the man convicted of the murder, was released in August of 2000, pending an appeal. As expected, the judge in the case questioned the validity of the fingerprint evidence that had led to his conviction.) In Cardiff, McKie told the Fingerprint Society that the system they represented was “incestuous, secretive, and arrogant. It has been opened to unprecedented analysis and it’s sadly lacking. It pains me to say that, because I was a police officer for thirty years. You are indicted on the basis of a fingerprint. You are not innocent till proven guilty; if the police have a print, you are assumed to be guilty. We need to start a new culture. The view that the police and fingerprint evidence are always right, the rest of the world be damned, has to end.’’

Afterward, the corridors and conference rooms were buzzing; it was as if somebody had challenged the fundamentals of grammar at the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association. But McKie was far from the only speaker at the conference to raise questions about the field. Christophe Champod, who works for a British organization called the Forensic Science Service, has long attempted to apply rigorous statistical methods to fingerprinting. Champod spoke in an understated and academic manner, but what he had to say was even more forceful than McKie’s presentation. He told the audience that they had only themselves to blame for the state of the field, that for years they had resisted any attempts to carry out large trials, which would then permit examiners to provide some guidance to juries about the value of their analysis, as is the case with DNA. “What we are trying to do in this field is reduce, reduce, reduce the population so that there is only a single individual that can possess a set of fingerprints. . . . But we can never examine the fingerprints of the entire universe. So, based on your experience, you make an inference: the probability that there is another person in the universe that could have a good match for the mark is very small. In the end, it’s like a leap of faith. It’s a very small leap, but it is a leap nonetheless.”

Half an hour had been allotted for questions, but there was only silence. Afterward, one of the organizers explained it to me: “He was using the terms of religion to describe our science. That’s just not fair.” Allan Bayle invited me to visit him in London after the meeting. Bayle is six feet five with sandy hair and flecks of gray in his blue eyes. He had recently married and he lives with his wife, child, and mother-in-law just steps from the M1 motorway entrance in Hendon, on the northern edge of the city. We sat in his conservatory on a cloudy day while his five-month-old boy slept in a stroller beside us.

Bayle was frustrated. For the past five years, he had worked mostly as a lecturer on fingerprints for the Metropolitan Police. “I taught advanced forensic scene examination, and I loved it. Once I said I would give evidence in the McKie case, though, I was no longer allowed to go to meetings. But that is not why I left. They did nothing about this mistake in identity. When you know something is wrong, how can you stay silent?” He told me he was particularly upset that Shirley McKie’s career as a police officer had ended for no reason. Bayle’s life, too, has changed. He now works as an independent consultant. Although he has been portrayed as a critic of fingerprint analysis, he is critical only of the notion that it should never be questioned. “It’s a valuable craft,” he said. “But is it a science like physics or biology? Well, of course not. All I have been saying is, let’s admit we make errors and do what we can to limit them. It is such a subjective job. The F.B.I. want to say they are not subjective. Well, look at what David Ashbaugh—certainly among the most noted of all fingerprint analysts—said when he testified in the Mitchell case.” Ashbaugh had clearly stated that fingerprint identification was “subjective,” adding that the examiner’s talents are his “personal knowledge, ability, and experience.”

Bayle took out a large portfolio containing dozens of fingerprints, as well as gruesome pictures of crime scenes. “Look at the mess,’’ he said. He showed me a series of photographs: jagged fingerprints—black smudges, really—recovered from the scenes of several murders he had investigated. “With all that information, you then come to your conclusions. You have to somehow match that to this clean image’’—he handed me a picture of a perfect print, taken at a police booking—”and say, finally, it’s one man’s print. You have got to look at everything, not just points. The Bureau has not had a missed ident in all their years of working, and I applaud that. But they are not testing their experts’ ability. And that is dangerous.’’

The following week, Stephen Meagher agreed to speak with me at the F.B.I. headquarters, on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington. Meagher is perhaps the best known and most forceful advocate for the view that fingerprint evidence is scientifically valid and that it ought to be welcome in courts.

”But is it really a science?” I asked as soon as we settled down to talk in his office. Meagher said that he didn’t think of science as a term that could be easily defined or tailored to fit all disciplines in the same way. “There is academic science, legal science, and forensic science,’’ he told me. “They are different. You can be an expert in the field and give testimony without having an academic level of scientific knowledge. . . . It is not achievable to take pure science and move it into a legal arena.’’ This seemed surprising, since Meagher had often argued that, when performed correctly, fingerprint analysis is an “objective’’ science. In 1999, when he was asked in court whether, based on the unique properties of fingerprints, he had an opinion of the error rate associated with his work, he said, “As applied to the scientific methodology, it’s zero.” (Scientists don’t talk this way; it is an axiom among biomedical researchers that nothing in biology is true a hundred per cent of the time.)

Later, when I asked David Faigman, the Hastings law professor, whether it made sense to divide science into legal, academic, and forensic subgroups, he laughed.

”Of course it makes no sense,’’ he said. “Mr. Meagher operates on a sixteenth-century notion—a Francis Bacon idea—of what science is all about. To me, the analogue for law is meteorology. It deals with physics and chemistry—the most basic sciences. Yet it has to make predictions and empirical statements regarding complex reality. That is because so many factors determine the weather that it’s really a probabilistic science. And I think fingerprinting is the same.”

”Most fields of normal science could pull from the shelf dozens or hundreds, if not thousands, of studies testing their various hypotheses and contentions, which had been conducted over the past decades or century, and hand them to the court,’’ Michael Saks wrote in “Modern Scientific Evidence.” For fingerprinting there was nothing. In 1999, the F.B.I. conducted its study in preparation for the Byron Mitchell trial. The study asked examiners to match the two actual latent prints taken from the car in the Mitchell case with the known set of fingerprints of the man on trial. Both sets of prints were sent to the crime laboratories of fifty-three law-enforcement agencies. Of the thirty-five agencies that examined them and responded, most concluded that the latent prints matched the known prints of the accused; eight said that no match could be made for one of the latent prints, and six said that no match could be made for the other print. The F.B.I., realizing it had a problem, sent annotated enlargements of all the prints to those examiners who had said the fingerprints couldn’t be matched. In these photographs, the points of similarity on the fingertips were clearly marked. This time, every lab adopted the F.B.I.’s conclusions.

When I asked Meagher about the study, he told me that the test was supposed to demonstrate the uniqueness of the prints; it was not meant to be a test of competency. He claimed opponents have used the data unfairly. At the same time, he conceded that it would not matter how clean a fingerprint was if the person examining it hadn’t been trained properly. “Our system is a huge statistical-probability model, but it doesn’t make identifications, because it doesn’t have all the information that is needed,” he said. “It’s a job for human beings.” On March 13th, Judge Pollak vacated his earlier order. He issued a new opinion, in which he stated that the defense had succeeded in raising “real questions about the adequacy of the proficiency tests taken annually by certified F.B.I. fingerprint examiners.” Yet he was persuaded by the F.B.I.’s record of accuracy, and wrote that “whatever may be the case for other law-enforcement agencies” the Bureau’s standards seemed good enough to permit F.B.I. experts to testify in his courtroom. “In short,’’ he concluded, “I have changed my mind.’’ It was, naturally, a blow to the opposition—though Pollak was careful to rule only on the case before him and only with regard to the F.B.I.

I met with the Judge shortly after he issued his decision. Having arrived early for our meeting, I watched as he led the jury-selection process in the case in which Meagher will now be permitted to testify. Like most courtrooms, it was decorated with an American flag, but it was filled with art as well: prints by Matisse, Cézanne, and Eakins and drawings by Victor Hugo lined the walls.

During the lunch break, we sat in his ramshackle office. The stuffing was falling out of both of our chairs. Pollak, a lively man in his late seventies, declined to talk specifically about the case, but was happy to consider the broader issues it raised. “The most important question here, of course, is, Am I the right person to be a gatekeeper?’’ he said. “I, who know little of science. . . . As society comes to rely more fully on technology, the question will become acute.’’ Pollak said that he found it worrisome that the Supreme Court ruling in the Daubert case meant that he could rule one way on an issue like fingerprints and another federal judge in a different jurisdiction could do the opposite, and neither ruling would be reversed (the Court will hear appeals only on procedure, not on the law). He was frank about how poorly prepared most judges are for making decisions based on scientific issues.

”I want to tell you that shortly after I got into this line of work there was no more unqualified district judge”—for making such decisions—”in the United States,’’ Judge Pollak said of himself. He told me that in the early nineteen-eighties he had met a former chief executive of DuPont at a reception. “He asked me how it can be that people like me are entrusted to make such major scientific decisions. He wasn’t questioning my good faith. But by virtue of my job I have been asked to make decisions that are out of the range of any competence that I have.” Pollak conceded that the DuPont chairman had a point. I asked if he felt scientifically competent to rule on the current case in Philadelphia. He laughed but didn’t answer. “I knew when I decided the thing there was going to be some surprise,’’ he said, referring to his initial opinion. “Honestly, I don’t think I had anticipated the degree to which people would be startled. . . . Other lawyers in fingerprint situations are now almost duty bound to raise these questions and challenges again. How could they in good faith act in any other way? This decision is certainly not the end. I think we can be certain of that.’’

Kyrsten Sinema campaigns for more military spending???

Kyrsten Sinema campaigns for more government pork and higher taxes???

Sinema used her five minutes to criticize the massive budget cuts as bad for Arizona.

Oddly Kyrsten Sinema whom I know from the anti-war movement and whom I suspect pretends to be an anti-war person sided with her pretend enemy John McCain and seems to support more military pork!!

“I stand with the dean of our state’s delegation, Sen. John McCain, when I say this sequester will be devastating, let’s roll up our sleeves together and get the job done.”

Arizona's Congress members return after budget cuts hit

By Rebekah L. Sanders The Republic | azcentral.com Sat Mar 2, 2013 1:16 AM

WASHINGTON - Arizona’s Congress members were packing their bags and boarding planes out of the capital this week as the deadline to avoid across-the-board federal budget cuts neared with no resolution in sight.

As negotiations continued between President Barack Obama and leaders of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, the state’s nine House members were headed home, unlikely to be needed for a vote anytime soon.

Republican Rep. David Schweikert, of Fountain Hills, who supported the sequestration cuts as a way to balance the nation’s budget, was going from one cliff to another. Schweikert planned to spend the weekend with his wife and staffers hiking to the bottom of the Grand Canyon.

Others lamented the House’s recess.

“I love to go home, but I’d much rather be here working on this problem with Congress members on both sides of the aisle,” Rep. Ron Barber, a Democrat, said hours before flying to Tucson. “I voted against all those adjournments because we should be here dealing with this issue.”

The Arizona Republic spent the week in Washington with members of the state’s delegation. The Arizonans were busy meeting with constituents, speaking on the House floor and voting on a controversial bill to extend funding for programs to address domestic violence.

Northern Arizona’s Democratic Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick was sitting down with members of the San Carlos Apache Tribe and Navajo Nation to talk about education funding, as well as members of the Grand Canyon National Park Foundation, who updated her on efforts to preserve the Arizona treasure.

Barber spent time with an award-winning Girl Scout who started an anti-bullying campaign, while Rep. Paul Gosar, a Republican based in Prescott, was meeting with military veterans.

Arizona’s one freshman representative, Kyrsten Sinema, delivered her first floor speech. Though she performed the symbolically powerful act before a nearly empty chamber, her words would be broadcast on C-SPAN and shared with constituents. Sinema used her five minutes to criticize the massive budget cuts as bad for Arizona.

“I stand with the dean of our state’s delegation, Sen. John McCain, when I say this sequester will be devastating,” she said. “Let’s roll up our sleeves together and get the job done.”

Political polar opposites, Rep. Trent Franks and Rep. Raul Grijalva, found themselves on differing sides of the debate, as usual.

Grijalva, a Democrat and co-chair of the Progressive Caucus, was championing an alternative budget-cutting plan that, among other things, would shutter the costly F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program in favor of building F-18s.

Franks, a Republican whose district includes Luke Air Force Base, whose survival depends on the F-35, called the proposal a threat to national security. He said it showed a lack of understanding of the military’s technological needs.

Mesa Republican Rep. Matt Salmon, meanwhile, was calling for entitlement reform and chairing his first Western Hemisphere subcommittee hearing, a position he hopes to turn into generating greater trade between the U.S. and Latin America.

The state’s longest-serving member, Rep. Ed Pastor, was asked to think about his legacy, as he appears to be under consideration to join the Obama administration.

The Phoenix Democrat said he was torn over the possibility of becoming Transportation secretary, a job which he acknowledges the White House is vetting plenty of candidates for.

“Do I really want to leave? It’s one of those things you think about. I’m not unhappy with the job. I’m still enjoying representing Arizona,” Pastor said. “Just to be considered is good.”

He said the prospect of securing federal funding to extend the Valley’s light rail for now is stalled due to the ongoing budget problems.

“We’re dealing with a crisis every 30 days,” Pastor said.

As if on cue, the first effects of the budget cuts were felt even before sequestration hit Friday at midnight.

The Republic’s flight was delayed, though the weather was fine, the United Airways pilot said.

Congress - It's secret, you can't sue us!!!!

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Supreme Court rules out secret surveillance lawsuits

By David G. Savage, Washington Bureau

February 26, 2013, 6:50 p.m.

WASHINGTON — No one can sue the government over secret surveillance because, since it's secret, no one can prove his or her calls were intercepted, the Supreme Court ruled Tuesday, throwing out a constitutional challenge to the government's monitoring of international calls and emails.

The 5-4 decision is the latest of many that have shielded the government's anti-terrorism programs from court challenge, and a striking example of what civil libertarians call the Catch-22 rule that blocks challengers from collecting the evidence they need to proceed.

Over the last decade, the justices or lower court judges have repeatedly killed or quietly ended lawsuits that sought to expose or contest anti-terrorism programs, including secret wiretapping, roundups or arrests of immigrants from the Mideast and drone strikes that kill American citizens abroad.

The court's conservative majority believes that matters of national security and the fight against terrorism are properly decided by the president and Congress, not through lawsuits. They have erected procedural barriers to block such suits. The only exception has been lawsuits brought on behalf of the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, which have won new appeal rights for inmates.

The intense wiretapping of international electronic traffic began shortly after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. President George W. Bush was determined to detect secret terrorist plots, if possible, and ordered the National Security Agency to intercept calls and messages coming into and out of the country. Bush chose to bypass a special court created to oversee "foreign intelligence surveillance."

When Bush's order was revealed, civil libertarians called the mass surveillance unconstitutional. But Congress, with the support of Democrats and Republicans, approved even broader electronic surveillance in 2008. By law, the targets of that surveillance must be outside the United States, but lawmakers acknowledged that calls and messages of some Americans would be inadvertently intercepted.

Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and other groups began a new challenge, suing on behalf of lawyers, journalists and human rights advocates. They argued the expanded surveillance was unconstitutional because it would chill free speech and permit illegal searches of "purely domestic communications."

They won a preliminary victory when the U.S. 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals in New York said they had standing to sue. Because the plaintiffs had clients and contacts abroad, they had a "reasonable fear" their calls would be intercepted, the appeals court said.

The Obama administration appealed last year, and the Supreme Court tossed out the suit Tuesday in the case of Clapper vs. Amnesty International.

Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. said the lawsuit was based on speculation, not evidence of how the program worked. The plaintiffs "have no actual knowledge of the government's targeted practices. Instead, [they] merely speculate and make assumptions," he said. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony M. Kennedy and Clarence Thomas joined his opinion.

Alito cited the Supreme Court's strict rules on standing, which hold that a case cannot go forward unless a complaining party can show he or she has suffered an "actual or imminent" injury. Alito said that this approach prevented judges from "usurping the powers of the political branches" of government.

In dissent, the court's four liberal justices said the lawsuit should have gone forward because the plaintiffs had to alter their work practices to avoid having their confidential calls overheard. "In my view, this harm is not 'speculative,'" Justice Stephen G. Breyer said.

The PEN American Center, which represents writers, called it a "Kafkaesque holding.... The U.S. government is running a secret program that monitors people. In order to challenge the legality of the program, the court's majority says you have to show that you're being monitored. You can't show this, of course, because the program is secret," said Peter Godwin, the group's president.

Jameel Jaffer, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union, called the decision disturbing. It "insulates the statute from meaningful judicial review and leaves Americans' privacy rights to the mercy of the political branches."

But a lawyer for six former U.S. attorneys general applauded the decision. It "sends a clear message that politically motivated litigation over national security is untenable," said Megan L. Brown, a Washington attorney who represented them. The courts should not "second-guess" the president and Congress on "sensitive national issues," she said.

david.savage@latimes.com

Afghanistan war - A government welfare program for American corporations???

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Dam and other Afghanistan projects being scaled back as U.S. picks up pace of withdrawal

By Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Published: March 4

When U.S. Marines surged into southern Afghanistan in 2010, one of their top priorities was to secure a towering dam on the Helmand River so the U.S. Agency for International Development could begin a construction project to provide much-needed electricity to Kandahar, the country’s second-largest city.

Simply reaching the outskirts of the Kajaki Dam was perilous. More than 50 American troops were killed in combat operations to evict the Taliban from areas along a 30-mile road leading to the structure.

Now that Marines and Afghan soldiers have seized the dam and the surrounding areas, USAID has decided not to complete the most critical part of the $266 million project. Instead, the agency intends to hand over to the Afghan government the challenging task of installing a large hydropower turbine.

The dam is one of many reconstruction projects, once deemed essential, that are being scaled back rapidly and redesigned in the waning days of America’s long war in Afghanistan as troop reductions, declining budgets and public fatigue force a realignment of priorities. But USAID’s decision to walk away from the turbine installation — one of the most important and symbolic development efforts associated with President Obama’s troop surge — is drawing unique scrutiny.

Several civilian experts who have served in southern Afghanistan contend that the Afghan government lacks the ability to manage thecomplex project, jeopardizing a vital initiative to increase electricity production, which they deem crucial to the region’s long-term stability.

The Kajaki Dam was built by U.S. engineers in the 1950s, and it has long been regarded by Afghans as a manifestation of American ingenuity and assistance. Should the Afghan-led installation fail, the civilian experts fear that the structure will come to represent American abandonment and weakness.

Military officers who lost comrades in the area see it in far more personal terms. “A lot of blood and treasure were wasted just to spike the ball at the 10-yard line,” said a senior Marine officer involved in the campaign to secure the dam, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

USAID officials insist that the U.S. government is not abandoning the turbine project. The agency, they noted, will still pay for the installation, estimated to cost $70 million. But instead of having a U.S. contractor perform the work, USAID intends to give the money directly to the Afghan state-run electricity company, which will be responsible for hiring experts and managing the construction.

Larry Sampler, a senior USAID official responsible for Afghanistan programs, said the agency believes that the Afghan electricity company, known by the acronym DABS, has developed the skills to take charge of the project. “We’re confident that DABS will be able to meet a timeline comparable to any Western contractor,” Sampler said.

At this stage of the war, he said, “everything we do should be done with an eye to getting the Afghans into the driver’s seat as fast as possible.”

Concern about security in the area and pressure from Afghan President Hamid Karzai also prompted the shift, according to U.S. officials involved in Afghanistan matters.

Obama’s decision to withdraw 34,000 troops over the next 11 months means there will be few, if any, Marines in the area around the dam after this summer. Security responsibility will fall to Afghan soldiers, police officers and government-hired security guards, raising the risks for foreign construction workers at the dam.

Karzai has long demanded that USAID channel more development assistance through his government instead of relying on foreign contractors. He specifically raised the Kajaki Dam during a visit in January with senior members of the Obama administration in Washington.

“It’s not AID’s preferred choice,” said a senior U.S. official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “But Karzai has been adamant.”

The dam, located along the headwaters of the Helmand River, about 100 miles northwest of Kandahar, was built in the early 1950s by the U.S. construction firm Morrison-Knudsen. In 1975, USAID installed two generators in the dam’s spillway, but they fell into disrepair after the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979.

By the time U.S. experts returned to the dam in 2002, it was barely running. The chief engineer cobbled together spare parts from scrap metal and used barbed wire to splice electrical lines.

Instead of installing the new turbine in the early years of the war, when the area was relatively safe, USAID waited. The agency eventually hired a state-owned Chinese firm to install the turbine, but the Chinese did not start work in earnest until 2007. By then it was too dangerous to move the parts up the 30-mile road to the dam, which USAID officials dubbed “Hell’s Canyon.”

In September 2008, before the Marines arrived, 4,000 British troops were reassigned to Kajaki to escort a convoy of trucks bearing turbine parts. After the British left, security deteriorated along the road, preventing delivery of the cement needed to install the turbine. The Chinese contractors soon departed.

In 2011, once the Marines started combat operations along the road, USAID awarded a $266 million contract to Black & Veatch, a large construction firm based in Overland Park, Kan. USAID now plans to reduce the contract, but the firm will continue work to install new power lines and substations between the dam and Kandahar, which has been a focus of U.S. military operations. American commanders have argued that increasing the electricity supply in Kandahar will build support for the Afghan government among the population.

Some civilian experts and military officers question USAID’s assessment that the Afghan electricity company is up to the challenge. In an audit last year, the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction noted that DABS lacked the “technical and operational capacity to properly install and manage” a far-less-complicated electricity-distribution project in Kandahar.

The inspector general, John F. Sopko, warned in a speech last month that providing development funds directly to the Afghan government means less accountability for how that money is spent.

“I fear many of our programs will be exposed to increased risk of theft and misuse,” he said.

But concerns about inefficiency, the senior U.S. official said, must be subordinated to the more pressing imperative from the White House to wind down the war and transfer responsibility to the Afghans.

“This decision serves our interests,” the official said. “It allows us to draw back.”

Julie Tate contributed to this report.

Researchers report sharp rise in ‘patriot’ groups

And I suspect the cops, like the ones that are paid to read this web page ever day also love it to because after all it gives them a lame excuse to hire more cops to oppress the people with under the guise of protecting us from these "patriot" groups.

As H. L. Mencken said:

"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."

Researchers report sharp rise in ‘patriot’ groups

Associated Press Tue Mar 5, 2013 12:51 PM

MONTGOMERY, Ala. — President Barack Obama’s administration and the gun control debate after the Connecticut school shooting have led to surging numbers of anti-government “patriot” groups, according to a civil rights group that tracks extremist groups.

The Southern Poverty Law Center reported the rising numbers on Tuesday in its annual report on extremist groups.

The number of anti-government patriot groups, one category tracked by the center, rose dramatically over the past four years, from 149 groups in 2008 to 1,360 today, researchers reported. That was up about 7 percent from the 1,274 active in 2011.

The election and re-election of the nation’s first black president and the rugged economy have fueled their growth, said Mark Potok, a senior fellow at the SPLC.

“The anger, angst, frustration, fear surrounding the economy have very much poured fuel on this fire,” Potok said.

On gun control, the debate following the Newtown, Conn., mass murder of schoolchildren has led to “a kind of white-hot rage unleashed on both the radical right and also within more mainstream political circles,” he said.

In the week following the Dec. 14 school shooting, the Federal Bureau of Investigation said it conducted more background checks for firearms sales and permits to carry than it has in any other one-week period since 1998.

In a letter today to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, the SPLC warned of the potential for domestic terrorism and urged the creation of a task force to assess whether there are enough federal resources devoted to the threat.

“As in the period before the Oklahoma City bombing, we now are seeing ominous threats from those who believe that the government is poised to take their guns,” wrote SPLC President Richard Cohen, a member of the Department of Homeland Security’s Countering Violent Extremism Working Group.

The SPLC found there were 1,360 Patriot groups in 2012 - an 813 percent rise since 2008, the year before Obama took office. The groups include 321 militias. These numbers far exceed the movement’s peak in the 1990s, when militias were inflamed by the 1993 Brady Bill and the 1994 assault rifle ban.

Some critics believe the SPLC is too broad in labeling hate and extremist groups, to the point of including legitimate political organizations that oppose illegal immigration, gun control, gay rights and other issues.

The center’s researchers say they use a variety of methods to track anti-government groups and compile their list from field reports, patriot publications, law enforcement sources and news reports. Potok said only active groups are included.

“We are not just looking at one man and a computer,” he said.

The report states: “Generally, Patriot groups define themselves as opposed to the ‘New World Order,’ engage in groundless conspiracy theorizing, or advocate or adhere to extreme anti-government doctrines.”

The FBI defines military extremists as anti-government groups often organized into paramilitary groups that follow a military-style rank hierarchy and typically engage in wilderness, survival, or other paramilitary training, according to a September 2011 FBI report on domestic terrorism.

U.S. Disavows 2 Drone Strikes Over Pakistan

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U.S. Disavows 2 Drone Strikes Over Pakistan

By DECLAN WALSH

Published: March 4, 2013 148 Comments

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — When news of the two latest drone strikes emerged from Pakistan’s tribal belt in early February, it seemed to be business as usual by the C.I.A.

Local and international media reports, citing unnamed Pakistani officials, carried typical details: swarms of American drones had swooped into remote areas, killing up to nine people, including two senior commanders of Al Qaeda.

In Islamabad, Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry lodged an official protest with the American Embassy.

Yet there was one problem, according to three American officials with knowledge of the program: The United States did not carry out those attacks.

“They were not ours,” said one of the officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the drone program’s secrecy. “We haven’t had any kinetic activity since January.”

What exactly took place in those remote tribal villages, far from outside scrutiny, is unclear. But the Americans’ best guess is that one or possibly both of the strikes were carried out by the Pakistani military and falsely attributed to the C.I.A. to avoid criticism from the Pakistani public.

E-mail and phone messages seeking comment from the Pakistani military were not returned.

If the American version is true, it is a striking irony: In the early years of the drone campaign, the Pakistani Army falsely claimed responsibility for American drone strikes in an attempt to mask C.I.A. activities on its soil. Now, the Americans suggest, the Pakistani military may be using the same program to disguise its own operations.

More broadly, the phantom attacks underscore the longstanding difficulty of gaining reliable information about America’s drone program in the remote and largely inaccessible tribal belt — particularly at a time when the program is under sharp scrutiny in Washington.

For the past month, John O. Brennan, President Obama’s counterterrorism adviser and nominee to lead the C.I.A., has been dogged by Congressional questions about the drone program’s lack of transparency, particularly when it comes to killing American citizens abroad.

The biggest obstacle to confirming details of the strikes is their location: the strikes usually hit remote, hostile and virtually closed-off areas. Foreign reporters are barred from the tribal belt, and the handful of local journalists who operate there find themselves vulnerable to pressure from both the military and the Taliban.

That murkiness has often suited the purposes of both the C.I.A. and the Pakistani military. It allows the Americans to conduct drone strikes behind a curtain of secrecy, largely shielded from public oversight and outside scrutiny. For the Pakistanis, it allows them to play both sides: publicly condemning strikes, while quietly supporting others, like the missile attack that killed the Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud in 2009.

Still, the information vacuum also places American officials at a disadvantage when it comes to answering accusations that the drone strikes kill large numbers of innocent civilians alongside bona fide militants. State Department officials have complained that they cannot effectively counter civilian death claims they believe are hugely inflated because the program is classified — a subject of lively debate inside the administration, one official said.

The private controversy over the latest strikes, however, suggested another phenomenon at work: the manipulation of the actual drone reports themselves.

The two strikes, which took place on Feb. 6 in North Waziristan and Feb. 8 in South Waziristan, went unremarked on largely because they appeared so run of the mill.

Small Pakistani news agencies and international television networks, including NBC and Al Jazeera, carried common-sounding details: accounts of multiple American drones hovering overhead, estimates of the number of missiles fired, accounts of the rescue effort by local civilians and quotes from Pakistani military officials in the tribal belt or nearby Peshawar.

“The compound was completely destroyed. The militants had surrounded the area after the attack,” one official told Agence France-Presse after the second explosion, in Babar Ghar, near Ladha, in South Waziristan.

Some reports, attributed to Pakistani officials, said the dead included two Qaeda commanders, identified as Abu Majid al-Iraqi and Sheikh Abu Waqas. Other reports said four Uzbek militants had died.

“The Pakistan Air Force does not generally undertake stand-alone strikes such as these because it is not equipped with the appropriate strike weapons,” a Pakistani military source said.

The American narrative of those strikes is very different.

Two senior United States officials said there had been no American involvement in the attacks. A third official said the C.I.A. had not paid the reports much attention because no American forces had been involved. But that official said American intelligence pointed to the Pakistan Air Force as having conducted the first strike, probably as part of a military operation against Pakistani Taliban militants in the neighboring Orakzai tribal agency.

The second attack was more mysterious. “It could have been the Pakistani military,” the official said. “It could have been the Taliban fighting among themselves. Or it could have been simply bad reporting.”

Few issues antagonize the relationship between Pakistan and the United States as much as the drone program does — or encapsulate the often contradictory, smoke-and-mirrors nature of the military-to-military relationship.

In public, both Pakistani military and government officials routinely and vehemently condemn the strikes. But in private, a handful of senior Pakistani generals are “read into” the program, according to American officials.

The United States gives the Pakistani military 30 minutes’ advance notice of drones strikes in South Waziristan. However, it gives no notice in North Waziristan, considered a bigger hub of Taliban and Qaeda militancy, and also a major base for the Haqqani Network, which carries out attacks in Afghanistan, one senior American official said.

If American claims are correct, the United States has not conducted a drone strike in Pakistan since Jan. 10, marking the longest pause of the campaign since November 2011, when the C.I.A. stopped strikes for 55 days after American warplanes killed 24 Pakistani soldiers in a disputed border clash.

Some analysts believe the lull may be connected to Mr. Brennan’s nomination, pointing to a similar slowdown in Yemen, the other major theater of American drone operation. Others point to more prosaic explanations, like intelligence delays or bad weather.

“The whole thing seems to be on pause at the moment,” said Chris Woods of the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, a watchdog group that tallies the drone strikes, mostly using news reports.

If one thing is clear about the drones, it is that all sides — Pakistanis, Americans and the Taliban — have an interest in manipulating reports about their impact.

Mr. Woods said he would take American claims of noninvolvement in the February attacks “with a pinch of salt,” citing the details about the Qaeda deaths as potential evidence of C.I.A. involvement.

But, Mr. Woods added, his group had earmarked reports of about a dozen drone strikes as suspicious in recent years, and had marked them as such on its Web site.

Viewed from Washington, a handful of erroneously reported strikes may seem inconsequential. According to most estimates, the C.I.A. has carried out about 330 drone strikes in Pakistan’s tribal belt since 2004, the vast majority of them in the past five years. (Though the American military also operates drones, officials insist that the program in Pakistan is solely conducted by the C.I.A.)

Yet in Pakistan, they carry greater significance, igniting huge and sometimes violent anti-American demonstration that make drones a toxic subject for generals and politicians alike. But the American claims about the two attacks this month suggest that they may, also, be trying to have the best of both worlds.

Iraq war - a dismal failure??? Yea, kind of like the drug war!!!!

Report: Too much US taxpayer money spent in Iraq for too few results

By Lara Jakes

AP National Security Writer

Posted: 03/05/2013 09:01:00 PM PST

WASHINGTON -- Ten years and $60 billion in American taxpayer funds later, Iraq is still so unstable and broken that even its leaders question whether U.S. efforts to rebuild the war-torn nation were worth the cost.

In his final report to Congress, Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction Stuart Bowen's conclusion was all too clear: Since the invasion a decade ago this month, the U.S. has spent too much money in Iraq for too few results.

The reconstruction effort "grew to a size much larger than was ever anticipated," Bowen told The Associated Press in a preview of his last audit of U.S. funds spent in Iraq, to be released Wednesday. "Not enough was accomplished for the size of the funds expended."

In interviews with Bowen, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said the U.S. funding "could have brought great change in Iraq" but fell short too often. "There was misspending of money," said al-Maliki, a Shiite Muslim whose sect makes up about 60 percent of Iraq's population.

Iraqi Parliament Speaker Osama al-Nujaifi, the country's top Sunni Muslim official, told auditors that the rebuilding efforts "had unfavorable outcomes in general."

"You think if you throw money at a problem, you can fix it," Kurdish government official Qubad Talabani, son of Iraqi president Jalal Talabani, told auditors. "It was just not strategic thinking."

The abysmal Iraq results forecast what could happen in Afghanistan, where U.S. taxpayers have so far spent $90 billion in reconstruction projects during a 12-year military campaign that, for the most part, ends in 2014.

Shortly after the March 2003 invasion, Congress set up a $2.4 billion fund to help ease the sting of war for Iraqis. It aimed to rebuild Iraq's water and electricity systems; provide food, health care and governance for its people; and take care of those who were forced from their homes in the fighting. Fewer than six months later, President George W. Bush asked for $20 billion more to further stabilize Iraq and help turn it into an ally that could gain economic independence and reap global investments.

To date, the U.S. has spent more than $60 billion in reconstruction grants to help Iraq get back on its feet after the country that has been broken by more than two decades of war, sanctions and dictatorship. That works out to about $15 million a day.

And yet Iraq's government is rife with corruption and infighting. Baghdad's streets are still cowed by near-daily deadly bombings. A quarter of the country's 31 million population lives in poverty, and few have reliable electricity and clean water.

Overall, including all military and diplomatic costs and other aid, the U.S. has spent at least $767 billion since the American-led invasion, according to the Congressional Budget Office. National Priorities Project, a U.S. research group that analyzes federal data, estimated the cost at $811 billion, noting that some funds are still being spent on ongoing projects.

Sen. Susan Collins, a member of the Senate committee that oversees U.S. funding, said the Bush administration should have agreed to give the reconstruction money to Iraq as a loan in 2003 instead as an outright gift.

"It's been an extraordinarily disappointing effort and, largely, a failed program," Collins, R-Maine, said in an interview Tuesday. "I believe, had the money been structured as a loan in the first place, that we would have seen a far more responsible approach to how the money was used, and lower levels of corruption in far fewer ways."

In numerous interviews with Iraqi and U.S. officials, and though multiple examples of thwarted or defrauded projects, Bowen's report laid bare a trail of waste, including:

--In Iraq's eastern Diyala province, a crossroads for Shiite militias, Sunni insurgents and Kurdish squatters, the U.S. began building a 3,600-bed prison in 2004 but abandoned the project after three years to flee a surge in violence. The half-completed Khan Bani Sa'ad Correctional Facility cost American taxpayers $40 million but sits in rubble, and Iraqi Justice Ministry officials say they have no plans to ever finish or use it.

--Subcontractors for Anham LLC, based in Vienna, Va., overcharged the U.S. government thousands of dollars for supplies, including $900 for a control switch valued at $7.05 and $80 for a piece of pipe that costs $1.41. Anham was hired to maintain and operate warehouses and supply centers near Baghdad's international airport and the Persian Gulf port at Umm Qasr.

-- A $108 million wastewater treatment center in the city of Fallujah, a former al-Qaida stronghold in western Iraq, will have taken eight years longer to build than planned when it is completed in 2014 and will only service 9,000 homes. Iraqi officials must provide an additional $87 million to hook up most of the rest of the city, or 25,000 additional homes.

--After blowing up the al-Fatah bridge in north-central Iraq during the invasion and severing a crucial oil and gas pipeline, U.S. officials decided to try to rebuild the pipeline under the Tigris River at a cost of $75 million. A geological study predicted the project might fail, and it did: Eventually, the bridge and pipelines were repaired at an additional cost of $29 million.

--A widespread ring of fraud led by a former U.S. Army officer resulted in tens of millions of dollars in kickbacks and the criminal convictions of 22 people connected to government contracts for bottled water and other supplies at the Iraqi reconstruction program's headquarters at Camp Arifjan, Kuwait.

In too many cases, Bowen concluded, U.S. officials did not consult with Iraqis closely or deeply enough to determine what reconstruction projects were really needed or, in some cases, wanted. As a result, Iraqis took limited interest in the work, often walking away from half-finished programs, refusing to pay their share, or failing to maintain completed projects once they were handed over.

Deputy Prime Minister Hussain al-Shahristani, a Shiite, described the projects as well intentioned, but poorly prepared and inadequately supervised.

The missed opportunities were not lost on at least 15 senior State and Defense department officials interviewed in the report, including ambassadors and generals, who were directly involved in rebuilding Iraq.

One key lesson learned in Iraq, Deputy Secretary of State William Burns told auditors, is that the U.S. cannot expect to "do it all and do it our way. We must share the burden better multilaterally and engage the host country constantly on what is truly needed."

Army Chief of Staff Ray Odierno, who was the top U.S. military commander in Iraq from 2008 to 2010, said "it would have been better to hold off spending large sums of money" until the country stabilized.

About a third of the $60 billion was spent to train and equip Iraqi security forces, which had to be rebuilt after the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority disbanded Saddam's army in 2003. Today, Iraqi forces have varying successes in safekeeping the public and only limited ability to secure their land, air and sea borders.

The report also cites Defense Secretary Leon Panetta as saying that the 2011 withdrawal of American troops from Iraq weakened U.S. influence in Baghdad. Panetta has since left office when former Sen. Chuck Hagel took over the defense job last week. Washington is eyeing a similar military drawdown next year in Afghanistan, where U.S. taxpayers have spent $90 billion so far on rebuilding projects.

The Afghanistan effort risks falling into the same problems that mired Iraq if oversight isn't coordinated better. In Iraq, officials were too eager to build in the middle of a civil war, and too often raced ahead without solid plans or back-up plans, the report concluded.

Most of the work was done in piecemeal fashion, as no single government agency had responsibility for all of the money spent. The State Department, for example, was supposed to oversee reconstruction strategy starting in 2004, but controlled only about 10 percent of the money at stake. The vast majority of the projects -- 75 percent -- were paid for by the Defense Department.

------

Online:

Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction: www.sigir.mil/learningfromiraq/index.html

------

Follow Lara Jakes on Twitter at twitter.com/larajakesAP

Congress gave the President the power to murder anybody he wants???

Source

Administration debates stretching 9/11 law to go after new al-Qaeda offshoots

By Greg Miller and Karen DeYoung, Published: March 6

A new generation of al-Qaeda offshoots is forcing the Obama administration to examine whether the legal basis for its targeted killing program can be extended to militant groups with little or no connection to the organization responsible for the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, U.S. officials said.

The Authorization for Use of Military Force, a joint resolution passed by Congress three days after the strikes on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, has served as the legal foundation for U.S. counterterrorism operations against al-Qaeda over the past decade, including ongoing drone campaigns in Pakistan and Yemen that have killed thousands of people.

Optimism gives way to realism as diplomats ponder long odds of reaching agreement with country.

But U.S. officials said administration lawyers are increasingly concerned that the law is being stretched to its legal breaking point, just as new threats are emerging in countries including Syria, Libya and Mali.

“The farther we get away from 9/11 and what this legislation was initially focused upon,” a senior Obama administration official said, “we can see from both a theoretical but also a practical standpoint that groups that have arisen or morphed become more difficult to fit in.”

The waning relevance of the 2001 law, the official said, is “requiring a whole policy and legal look.” The official, like most others interviewed for this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal administration deliberations.

The authorization law has already been expanded by federal courts beyond its original scope to apply to “associated forces” of al-Qaeda. But officials said legal advisers at the White House, the State Department, the Pentagon and intelligence agencies are now weighing whether the law can be stretched to cover what one former official called “associates of associates.”

The debate has been driven by the emergence of groups in North Africa and the Middle East that may embrace aspects of al-Qaeda’s agenda but have no meaningful ties to its crumbling leadership base in Pakistan. Among them are the al-Nusra Front in Syria and Ansar al-Sharia, which was linked to the September attack on a U.S. diplomatic post in Benghazi, Libya. They could be exposed to drone strikes and kill-or-capture missions involving U.S. troops.

Officials said they have not ruled out seeking an updated authorization from Congress or relying on the president’s constitutional powers to protect the country. But they said those are unappealing alternatives.

AUMF and the war on terror

The debate comes as the administration seeks to turn counterterrorism policies adopted as emergency measures after the 2001 attacks into more permanent procedures that can sustain the campaign against al-Qaeda and its affiliates, as well as other current and future threats.

The AUMF, as the 2001 measure is known, has been so central to U.S. efforts that counterterrorism officials said deliberations over whom to put on the list for drone strikes routinely start with the question of whether a proposed target is “AUMF-able.”

The outcome of the debate could determine when and how the war on terrorism — at least as defined by Congress after the Sept. 11 attacks — comes to a close.

“You can’t end the war if you keep adding people to the enemy who are not actually part of the original enemy,” said a person who participated in the administration’s deliberations on the issue.

Administration officials acknowledged that they could be forced to seek new legal cover if the president decides that strikes are necessary against nascent groups that don’t have direct al-Qaeda links. Some outside legal experts said that step is all but inevitable because the authorization has already been stretched to the limit of its intended scope.

Optimism gives way to realism as diplomats ponder long odds of reaching agreement with country.

“The AUMF is becoming increasingly obsolete because the groups that are threatening us are harder and harder to tie to the original A.Q. organization,” said Jack Goldsmith, an expert on national security law at Harvard University and a former senior Justice Department official.

He said extending the AUMF to groups more loosely tied to al-Qaeda would be “a major interpretive leap” that could eliminate the need for a link between the targeted organization and core al-Qaeda.

The United States has not launched strikes against any of the new groups, and U.S. officials have not indicated that there is any immediate plan to do so. In Libya, for example, the United States has sought to work with the new government to apprehend suspects in the Benghazi attack.

Still, the administration has taken recent steps — including building a drone base in the African country of Niger — that have moved the United States closer to being able to launch lethal strikes if regional allies are unable to contain emerging threats.

The administration official cited Ansar al-Sharia as an example of the “conundrum” that counterterrorism officials face.

The group has little if any established connection to al-Qaeda’s leadership core in Pakistan. But intercepted communications during and after the attack in Benghazi indicated that some members have ties to al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, the terrorist network’s main associate in North Africa.

“Certainly there are individuals who have an affiliation from a policy, if not legal, perspective,” the official said. “But does that mean the whole group?”

Other groups of concern include the al-Nusra Front, which is backed by al-Qaeda in Iraq and has used suicide bombings to emerge as a potent force in the Syrian civil war, and a splinter group in North Africa that carried out a deadly assault in January on a natural-gas complex in Algeria.

A focus on Sept. 11

The debate centers on a piece of legislation that spans a single page and was drafted in a few days to give President George W. Bush authority to “use all necessary and appropriate force” against al-Qaeda.

The law placed no geographic limits on that power but did not envision a drawn-out conflict that would eventually encompass groups with no ties to the Sept. 11 strikes. Instead, it authorized the president to take action “against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks.”

The authorization makes no mention of “associated forces,” a term that emerged only in subsequent interpretations of the text. But even that elastic phrase has become increasingly difficult to employ.

In a speech last year at Yale University, Jeh Johnson, who served as general counsel at the Defense Department during Obama’s first term, outlined the limits of the AUMF.

“An ‘associated force’ is not any terrorist group in the world that merely embraces the al-Qaeda ideology,” Johnson said. Instead, it has to be both “an organized, armed group that has entered the fight alongside al-Qaeda” and a “co-belligerent with al-Qaeda in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners.”

Optimism gives way to realism as diplomats ponder long odds of reaching agreement with country.

U.S. officials said evaluating whether a proposed target is eligible under the AUMF is only one step. Names aren’t added to kill or capture lists, officials said, unless they also meet more elaborate policy criteria set by Obama.

If a proposed a target doesn’t clear the legal hurdle, the senior administration official said, one option is to collect additional intelligence to try to meet the threshhold.

Officials stressed that the stakes of the debate go beyond the drone program. The same authorities are required for capture operations, which have been far less frequent. The AUMF is also the legal basis for the CIA’s drone campaign in Pakistan, although the agency compiles its own kill list in that operation with little involvement from other agencies.

The uncertainty surrounding the AUMF has already shaped the U.S. response to problems in North Africa and the Middle East. Counterterrorism officials concluded last year that Mokhtar Belmokhtar, a militant leader in Algeria and Mali, could not be targeted under the AUMF, in part because he had had a falling out with al-Qaeda’s leadership and was no longer regarded as part of an associated group.

Belmokhtar was later identified as the orchestrator of the gas-plant attack in Algeria in which dozens of workers, including three Americans, were killed.

Obama’s decision to provide limited assistance to French air attacks against Islamist militants in Mali this year was delayed for weeks, officials said, amid questions over whether doing so would require compliance with the AUMF rules.

Some options beyond the 2001 authorization are problematic for Obama. For instance, he has been reluctant to rely on his constitutional authority to use military force to protect the country, which bypasses Congress and might expose him to criticism for abuse of executive power.

Working with Congress to update the AUMF is another option. The Senate Intelligence Committee has already begun considering ways to accomplish that. But Obama, who has claimed credit for winding down two wars, is seen as reluctant to have the legislative expansion of another be added to his legacy.

“This is an ongoing discussion, which we’ll probably continue to engage on the Hill,” the senior administration official said. “But I don’t know that there’s a giant desire to have ‘Son of AUMF’ now.”

Secret Police in Phoenix????

Phoenix Police to encrypt radio transmissions making them secret

Of course the cops will use any lame excuse to justify their actions, and that excuse is always that it making it safer for the children or some other lame excuse along those lines.

I suspect the reals reason for this is to make the police less accountable for their actions and prevent the public from knowing bad things the police do.

As the cops say when they question us, we must have something to hide if we exercise our constitutional rights take the 5th Amendment and refuse to answer police questions.

So I suspect the police have something to hide from the public if they want to make their radio transmissions secret.

Source

Phoenix to shield police radio traffic

Officials: Rise in listeners jeopardizing crime scenes

By JJ Hensley The Republic | azcentral.com Thu Mar 7, 2013 11:25 PM

When Mike Ormandy was growing up in Indiana in the 1970s, it was not uncommon for the adults to gather at a home on a weekend evening to play cards and have a few drinks with an odd soundtrack in the background: police-scanner traffic.

The sounds of static and police-radio transmissions infected Ormandy with the scanner bug, and he brought it with him to Arizona, where he invested in high-powered antennas and radios to capture the sounds of emergency responders communicating in the field.

The proliferation of websites and smartphone applications that stream police-radio traffic to hundreds of thousands of users, and a handful of recent instances in which scanner listeners have beaten police to crime scenes, are threatening what Ormandy and others view as a hobby — one that is as much about public safety as it is about infotainment.

“It’s kind of nice for safety reasons to know when there’s something major going on. ... I think it keeps officers honest, and I really think the public listening allows them to have a respect for the kind of danger these guys face every day,” Ormandy said.

“Police want you to share what you see and not get involved. That’s where the smartphone users get it wrong. From what I’ve found, the biggest culprit is people listening on smartphones and hearing something big going on and running out to the scene.”

Phoenix police last month decided to encrypt emergency police-radio traffic related to crimes in progress, a move that will reduce by about 18 percent the agency’s scanner traffic audible to the public, said Sgt. Trent Crump, a department spokesman.

The decision for Phoenix to encrypt more dispatch calls and conversations between officers comes after recent incidents:

About an hour after a Jan. 30 office shooting in central Phoenix, police broadcast over their radios the address of a possible suspect’s home.

The information was picked up by media outlets and others monitoring scanners, and some posted the address on social-media sites. Media crews and others arrived at the home before police tactical teams could get there, Crump said, setting up to wait for the shooter, Arthur Harmon.

Police believe media coverage of his home may have caused Harmon to flee as he was on his way there, spurring a manhunt that ended the following morning when he was discovered dead in a Mesa parking lot. However, evidence found in Harmon’s rental car, including cash, hygiene products and clothes, could indicate that he had intended to go on the run after his carefully planned murders.

On Feb. 8, police responded to a home-invasion call in west Phoenix where the suspects turned out to be juveniles, including a 16-year-old boy who was fatally shot by the homeowner. Police broadcast information about the suspects, including the school they attended, over their radios, prompting some media members to go to the school and attempt to interview students and staff even before investigators had arrived, Crump said.

On Feb. 11, police broadcast information about tactical positions and response plans as they closed in on a man suspected of robbing more than a dozen pharmacies and grocery stores, potentially jeopardizing their ability to capture the “Calligraphy Bandit,” Crump said. Tomas Garcia-Mancinas was arrested without incident. That day, police administrators made the decision to move more calls to encrypted channels, Crump said.

The California manhunt for fugitive ex-police officer Christopher Dorner brought the issue into sharp focus nationally on Feb. 12, after police were reportedly heard on radios discussing plans to burn the cabin Dorner was hiding in. A California sheriff later denied that the fire was intentionally set and said police used pyrotechnic tear gas called “burners” in an attempt to flush Dorner from the cabin.

“I think a lot of police agencies looked at that in horror realizing that this website Radio Reference had their agency on a worldwide Internet feed,” Ormandy said. “The natural response is to go ahead and encrypt it and keep it all secret.”

Crump said the Phoenix police decision was simply about safety for officers and the public.

“There are several large agencies across the nation that have gone completely encrypted, and more agencies are going in this direction because of the low cost and the ease for suspects to (otherwise) have this access,” he said.

The digital system that opened up a host of new radio channels for Phoenix police and fire agencies and allowed for easy encryption was part of a $120 million upgrade in 2004.

Other Valley cities acquired similar systems at the same time, and many took advantage of the new technology to begin securing calls on crimes in progress, conversations between detectives and tactical calls on private frequencies.

It was a sign of things to come.

“Back when they had the old system and you could put an antenna up and hear basically everything that happened — detectives doing surveillance, car-to-car stuff — I’m sure they longed for the day when they had more security,” Ormandy said.

Phoenix initially followed the lead of other agencies and encrypted those same calls at the time, Crump said, but it opened up some calls shortly after. Still, a lot has changed in the past nine years, he said.

“A scanner used to sit on a desktop and have an antenna on the roof. Now, everyone is on the move with us with their smartphone,” Crump said. “Those that we’re fighting against have the same access.”

Lindsay Blanton, founder and president of a company that broadcasts police-radio traffic over the Internet, wrote on his website that police arguments about emerging technology interfering with their work have been around for decades.

“In the ’90s, when an agency did go encrypted and members of the media and public complained, the standard response from the agencies was, ‘Hey, any criminal can go down to Radio Shack and purchase a scanner to listen to all our comms,’” Blanton wrote. “Now, that argument has just shifted to ‘Anyone with a smartphone can.’”

But as emerging technology threatens to close one door that allowed public access to what police are doing on a day-to-day basis, it will likely open others, though the access won’t be as instant as scanners.

Police departments in Phoenix, Mesa, Surprise and Peoria are among the agencies testing or implementing digital cameras that officers wear to record virtually everything an officer does during a shift.

And police-scanner traffic will still be available several weeks or months after most incidents through Arizona’s Public Records Law.

“Everything techwise has gotten more and more efficient for the user. But by the same token, we can’t have it jeopardizing our work,” Crump said. “This doesn’t eliminate transparency. You can still ask for any radio tape you want.”

Politicians making it harder for us to recall them?

Politicians passing a retroactive law making it harder to recall Sheriff Joe Arpaio?

But when you look at how our government masters actually operate, it looks more like they consider themselves royal rulers who have a God given right to micromanage our lives and steal our money.

In this article it sounds like these royal rulers are attempt to change the recall process making it more difficult for us serfs to recall them.

This law also seems to be an attempt by our royal rulers to prevent us from recalling Sheriff Joe, or to help Sheriff Joe get reelected if he is recalled.

Source

Arizona recall bill could aid targeted politicians

By Mary Jo Pitzl The Republic | azcentral.com Fri Mar 8, 2013 12:44 AM

Arizona’s recall elections would take on a partisan cast that could help the targeted politician survive under a bill approved by the state House of Representatives on Thursday.

According to its critics, House Bill 2282 also could cut a break to Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who is the target of an ongoing recall drive. A last-minute amendment would make the changes retroactive to Jan.1, which would cover the period within which the Arpaio recall was launched.

The bill would carve out a primary and general election from the recall process, which currently consists of a single election in which all candidates compete and all voters cast ballots.

Most political observers believe the two-step process would help the recalled official, since a primary election could clear out the challenger most likely to appeal to voters from all parties. For example, former Senate President Russell Pearce, R-Mesa, lost in a 2011 recall election to a more moderate Republican who had Republican and Democratic support. It was widely believed a Democrat could not defeat him, given the political makeup of his legislative district.

Republican lawmakers argued the bill simply makes recall elections mirror the same process by which other candidate elections are conducted.

Rep. John Kavanagh, R-Fountain Hills, who added the retroactive clause, said the failure last fall of the single-primary ballot measure only reinforces the argument for the bill. Proposition 121 would have scrapped partisan primaries and made all candidates compete in the same election, regardless of party. Voters rejected it by a ratio of 2 to 1.

“This is just an extension of that mandate,” Kavanagh said.

But Democrats argued the framers of Arizona’s Constitution carefully considered the issue and decided a single recall election was needed.

That’s because in a recall election, voters are deliberating whether to retain a given politician, and not doing a rerun of a candidate vs. candidate competition, said Rep. Andrew Sherwood, D-Tempe.

“It is sufficiently difficult to recall an official,” he said, noting only one lawmaker — former Senate President Pearce — has been recalled in the state’s 101 years. There’s no need to change the process, he said.

Besides, the bill doesn’t address what would happen if the recalled official loses in a primary, Sherwood said. Would that person’s name advance to the general election ballot, so all voters could decide? If so, isn’t that what the recall system does already? he asked.

Rep. Steve Smith, R-Maricopa, introduced the bill this year after seeing it fail to become law last year. In 2012, the bill passed both the House and Senate, but foundered in a conference committee, where lawmakers tried to reconcile differences in their respective versions of the bill.

This year’s version passed the House on a 36-23 party-line vote, with Republicans in support and Democrats opposed. It now moves to the Senate for consideration.

Reach the reporter at 602-444-8963.

Dope smugglers are targets on Obamas drone murder list???

The Drone Question Obama Hasn’t Answered

By RYAN GOODMAN

Published: March 8, 2013

THE Senate confirmed John O. Brennan as director of the Central Intelligence Agency on Thursday after a nearly 13-hour filibuster by the libertarian senator Rand Paul, who before the vote received a somewhat odd letter from the attorney general.

“It has come to my attention that you have now asked an additional question: ‘Does the President have the authority to use a weaponized drone to kill an American not engaged in combat on American soil?’ ” the attorney general, Eric H. Holder Jr., wrote to Mr. Paul. “The answer to that question is no.”

The senator, whose filibuster had become a social-media sensation, elating Tea Party members, human-rights groups and pacifists alike, said he was “quite happy with the answer.” But Mr. Holder’s letter raises more questions than it answers — and, indeed, more important and more serious questions than the senator posed.

What, exactly, does the Obama administration mean by “engaged in combat”? The extraordinary secrecy of this White House makes the answer difficult to know. We have some clues, and they are troubling.

If you put together the pieces of publicly available information, it seems that the Obama administration, like the Bush administration before it, has acted with an overly broad definition of what it means to be engaged in combat. Back in 2004, the Pentagon released a list of the types of people it was holding at Guantánamo Bay as “enemy combatants” — a list that included people who were “involved in terrorist financing.”

One could argue that that definition applied solely to prolonged detention, not to targeting for a drone strike. But who’s to say if the administration believes in such a distinction?

American generals in Afghanistan said the laws of war “have been interpreted to allow” American forces to include “drug traffickers with proven links to the insurgency on a kill list,” according to a report released in 2009 by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, then led by John Kerry, now the secretary of state.

The report went on to say that there were about 50 major traffickers “who contribute funds to the insurgency on the target list.” The Pentagon later said that it was “important to clarify that we are targeting terrorists with links to the drug trade, rather than targeting drug traffickers with links to terrorism.”

That statement, however, was not very clarifying, and did not seem to appease NATO allies who raised serious legal concerns about the American targeting program. The explanation soon gave way to more clues, and this time it was not simply a question of who had been placed on a list.

In a 2010 Fox News interview, under pressure to explain whether the Obama administration was any closer to capturing or killing Osama bin Laden, Mr. Kerry’s predecessor, Hillary Rodham Clinton, said that “we have gotten closer because we have been able to kill a number of their trainers, their operational people, their financiers.” That revelation — killing financiers — appears not to have been noticed very widely.

As I have written, sweeping financiers into the group of people who can be killed in armed conflict stretches the laws of war beyond recognition. But this is not the only stretch the Obama administration seems to have made. The administration still hasn’t disavowed its stance, disclosed last May in a New York Times article, that military-age males killed in a strike zone are counted as combatants absent explicit posthumous evidence proving otherwise.

Mr. Holder’s one-word answer — “no” — is not a step toward the greater transparency that President Obama pledged when he came into office, but has not delivered, in the realm of national security.

By declining to specify what it means to be “engaged in combat,” the letter does not foreclose the possible scenario — however hypothetical — of a military drone strike, against a United States citizen, on American soil. It also raises anew questions about the standards the administration has used in deciding to use drone strikes to kill Americans suspected of terrorist involvement overseas — notably Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born cleric who was killed in a drone strike in Yemen in 2011.

Is there any reason to believe that military drones will soon be hovering over Manhattan, aiming to kill Americans believed to be involved in terrorist financing? No.

But is it well past time for the United States government to specify, precisely, its views on whom it thinks it can kill in the struggle against Al Qaeda and other terrorist forces? The answer is yes.

The Obama administration’s continued refusal to do so should alarm any American concerned about the constitutional right of our citizens — no matter what evil they may or may not be engaged in — to due process under the law. For those Americans, Mr. Holder’s seemingly simple but maddeningly vague letter offers no reassurance.

Ryan Goodman is a professor of law and co-chairman of the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at New York University.

Richard Nixon wished for total handgun ban

Of course the reason the Founder created the Second Amendment was to protect us from tyrants like Nixon, Bush and Obama.

Source

Richard Nixon wished for total handgun ban

Associated Press Sat Mar 9, 2013 11:24 AM

WASHINGTON — Few presidents in modern times have been as interested in gun control as Richard Nixon, of all people. He proposed ridding the market of Saturday night specials, contemplated banning handguns altogether and refused to pander to gun owners by feigning interest in their weapons.

Several previously unreported Oval Office recordings and White House memos from the Nixon years show a conservative president who at times appeared willing to take on the National Rifle Association, a powerful gun lobby then as now, even as his aides worried about the political ramifications.

“I don’t know why any individual should have a right to have a revolver in his house,” Nixon said in a taped conversation with aides. “The kids usually kill themselves with it and so forth.” He asked why “can’t we go after handguns, period?”

Nixon went on: “I know the rifle association will be against it, the gun makers will be against it.” But “people should not have handguns.” He laced his comments with obscenities, as was typical.

Nixon made his remarks in the Oval Office on May 16, 1972, the day after a would-be assassin shot and paralyzed segregationist presidential candidate George Wallace. As president, Nixon never publicly called for a ban on all handguns. Instead, he urged Congress to pass more modest legislation banning Saturday night specials, which were cheaply made, easily concealed and often used by criminals.

Not all of the president’s men appeared to share his passion on the issue. The recordings and memos show that Nixon administration officials saw gun control as a political loser.

Nixon, a Republican, did say publicly that if Congress passed a ban on Saturday night specials, he would sign it. But in a sign of how potent the NRA was even 40 years ago, this narrow piece of legislation never made it to his desk, and there is no sign that he ever sent a draft bill to Capitol Hill.

Today, President Barack Obama faces similar hurdles in trying to ban assault weapons and large-capacity ammunition magazines. Gun control advocates say no one needs such powerful weapons to kill an intruder or take down an animal. In Nixon’s time, the argument of such advocates was that Saturday night specials were too poorly made to be relied on for self-defense or hunting.

“Let me ask you,” Nixon said to Attorney General John Mitchell in June 1971, “there is only one thing you are checking on, that’s the manufacture of those $20 guns? We should probably stop that.” Saturday night specials sold for $10 to $30 at the time. Mitchell responded that banning those guns would be “pretty difficult, actually,” because of the gun lobby.

“No hunters are going to use $20 guns,” Nixon countered.

“No, but the gun lobby’s against any incursion into the elimination of firearms,” said Mitchell.

The term Saturday night special originated in Detroit, where police observed the frequency with which the guns were used to commit weekend mayhem. Lynyrd Skynyrd memorialized the weapon in its 1975 song, “Saturday Night Special,” in which the Southern rock band sang: “Ain’t good for nothin’/But put a man six feet in a hole.”

Nixon’s private comments were not always supportive of gun control, particularly measures that would go beyond handguns. For example, in a taped conversation just a few days after saying that people shouldn’t have handguns, the president asked rhetorically, “What do they want to do, just disarm the populace? Disarm the good folks and leave the arms in the hands of criminals?”

But most of his comments on the tapes, available at the websites of the National Archives and of the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, were in favor of stronger gun control.

At a June 29, 1972, news conference, about six weeks after Wallace’s shooting, Nixon said he’d sign legislation banning Saturday night specials. Later that year, the Senate did pass such a bill, but the House never acted on the legislation.

The bill’s sponsor, Indiana Democrat Birch Bayh, said in a recent interview that the NRA helped prevent his bill from getting through Congress. The Nixon administration supported an unsuccessful Republican alternative Senate bill on Saturday night specials that had a definition the NRA preferred.

The shooting of another politician put gun control back on the radar the following year. On Jan. 30, 1973, two robbers shot Sen. John Stennis, D-Miss., and surgeons initially thought he would die. Stennis survived and lived until 1995.

The day of the shooting, Nixon told White House special counsel Charles Colson, “At least I hope that Saturday night special legislation, at least we’re supporting that, you know. We’re not for gun control generally, but we are for that. God damn it that ought to be passed. Or was it passed?”

When Colson told him it hadn’t, Nixon instructed his counsel, “We better damn well be for it now, huh?”

At a news conference the next day, the president repeated his call to ban Saturday night specials. He also volunteered a comment that few national politicians would make today: “Let me say, personally, I have never hunted in my life. I have no interest in guns and so forth.”

By March 1973, aide John Ehrlichman was telling Nixon that gun control was a “loser issue for us.”

“You’ve got a highly mobilized lobby,” he told the president. “I think what we have to do is carve out a little piece of it, and Saturday night specials, of course, has been our tactic.”

Other White House officials also argued against doing much, including Tom C. Korologos, a White House deputy assistant for legislative affairs who later was an outside lobbyist for the NRA and ambassador to Belgium under President George W. Bush.

“The thing that worries me is that the president’s hard-core support comes from the gun-folk and obviously we need support these days,” Korologos wrote in an Aug. 31, 1973 memo, referring to the Watergate scandal that would undo Nixon’s presidency.

“Lurking in the background is the president’s personal statement: ‘I’m a liberal on gun control,’” Korologos said. Nixon might have made this statement privately; there is no record of him saying it publicly.

Korologos’ conclusion: “I vote for a ‘talk’ meeting and then ‘tough it out’ by doing nothing and hope nobody gets shot in the next three years.”

The effort to ban Saturday night specials receded in recent decades as the focus of gun control advocates shifted to rein in more powerful weapons.

Nixon’s focus soon shifted, too.

In June 1972, a little over a month after his chat about banning handguns, Nixon had a recorded conversation that showed him trying to get the FBI to stop investigating the break-in at Democratic offices at the Watergate office building by burglars tied to his re-election committee.

Few remember the tapes about handguns. History forever remembers the tape that gave Nixon’s Watergate pursuers their “smoking gun.”

———

Follow Fred Frommer on Twitter: http://twitter.com/ffrommer

Google says the FBI is spying on some of you

Google says the FBI is spying on some of you

By Chris Gayomali | The Week

For millions of Americans, Google is the fabric that weaves the various threads of our digital lives together: Gmail, Gchat, Google Voice, search queries, YouTube, Maps, Chrome — you name it. So it shouldn't really come as a surprise that the Federal Bureau of Investigation has repeatedly tapped the tech company for otherwise-private information concerning a small percentage of Google's users.

But let's put it more plainly: The FBI has been spying on some of you.

In a new Transparency Report announced in an official blog post, Google has released previously unseen information about the number of National Security Letters (NSLs) it has received from the FBI in the past couple of years. According to Wired, these letters "allow the government to get detailed information on Americans' finances and communications without oversight from a judge." Needless to say, the FBI sends NSLs out all the time — hundreds of thousands of them, in fact — to internet service providers, banks, credit companies, and other businesses. Unsurprisingly, organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union have accused the FBI of abusing the letters' power post-9/11.

Until recently, it's been unlawful for a company to disclose when it has received an NSL. Now, thanks to a new deal with the Obama administration, Google is able to publish a broad range of instances in which it has received such FBI requests.

The table below provides a range of how many National Security Letters (NSLs) we've received and a range of how many of the uers/accounts were specified each year since 2009. For more information about NSLs, please refer to our FAQ. These ranges are not included in the total sum of user data requests that we report biannually

As you can see, Google says it receives between 0 and 999 NSLs from the government each year. In 2009, those letters contained requests asking for information concerning between 1,000 and 1,999 users/accounts. In 2010, the FBI was slightly busier — 2,000 to 2,999 different users/accounts were requested. Then in 2011 and 2012, that range dipped back down.

The search giant doesn't comply with every NSL it receives, and claims to carefully vet each request. "We review it carefully and only provide information within the scope and authority of the request," writes Google. "We may refuse to produce information or try to narrow the request in some cases." Google also says that the standard practice is to notify users when an NSL has been received concerning them, although the FBI has the power to nullify the disclosure if it may result in "a danger to the national security of the United States, interference with a criminal, counterterrorism, or counterintelligence investigation, interference with diplomatic relations, or danger to the life or physical safety of any person."

You can read Google's Transparency Report for yourself here.

And it's worth remembering: The FBI and other government agencies can still access your email without a warrant as long as the information been stored on a third-party server for 180 days or more (per a convoluted and terribly antiquated 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act). A new email and phone tracking bill introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives yesterday seeks to make it harder for authorities to snoop around without a judge's order.

AG Holder - Obama OK to murder Americans with drones!!!!!

Source

Holder letter ignites new debate on drones

By Richard A. Serrano, Washington Bureau

March 6, 2013, 7:07 p.m.

WASHINGTON — Can the president legally order a drone strike to kill an American on U.S. soil?

Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. wrote this week in a letter to Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) that he could envision "an extraordinary circumstance in which it would be necessary and appropriate" to use such lethal force.

Those words touched off a heated debate Wednesday in the Senate over when and where the president can order the killing of U.S. citizens designated as "enemy combatants."

President Obama and his aides have said that targeted killings of Americans must be governed by some due process. But they have resisted public disclosure of their rules. Until this week, the administration had refused to allow even members of the Senate Intelligence Committee to read most of the legal opinions that justified the one known drone killing of an American, the attack on Anwar Awlaki in 2011 in Yemen.

The debate burst into public view on Capitol Hill. On the Senate floor, Paul filibustered the nomination of John Brennan to be the new director of the CIA, imploring colleagues to join him in criticizing Obama for refusing to rule out the use of lethal force against terrorism suspects in this country. Brennan has been a chief architect and defender of the administration's drone program.

"Are we so complacent with our rights that we would allow a president to say he might kill Americans?" Paul asked. "No one person, no one politician should be allowed … to judge the guilt of an individual and to execute an individual. It goes against everything we fundamentally believe in our country."

Paul showed no sign of giving up, holding the floor for more than eight hours and continuing to talk into the night. He demanded a public promise from the White House to never target drones against Americans in the United States. Paul said that he was not objecting to the use of lethal force to repel an attack, but that the administration was claiming a far broader power.

"Do we want martial law in this country?" Paul asked, mocking the claim that the entire world could be considered a battlefield in the war against Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups. "The hell this is a battlefield! This is our country."

"If there was an ounce of courage in this body, I would be joined by others in telling the president that no president has the authority to kill Americans without trial," Paul declared to a near-empty chamber. As the afternoon wore on, his words appeared to have had an effect, as several Republican colleagues and Democrat Ron Wyden of Oregon joined the filibuster, delaying a final vote on Brennan's nomination at least until Thursday.

Simultaneously, Holder was testifying to the Senate Judiciary Committee, where senators tried to pin him down about the limits of the power the government was claiming.

In his letter, Holder had said he hoped "no president will ever have to confront" the need to order the killing of an American on U.S. soil.

But, he added, "it is possible, I suppose, to imagine an extraordinary circumstance in which it would be necessary and appropriate under the Constitution and applicable laws for the president to authorize the military to use lethal force within the territory of the United States." He mentioned the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001, as a possible example.

That explanation did not satisfy several members of the committee. The letter "raises many questions for citizens on when the government can kill them," said Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa). Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) demanded to know what in the Constitution gives the president or anyone else the power to kill an American terrorist suspect "sitting quietly in a cafe in the U.S." who at that time is not posing an immediate threat.

After initially saying only that killing a suspect in that sort of circumstance would not be "appropriate," Holder eventually told Cruz that such an attack would not be constitutional. He also said that he expected Obama to speak more publicly about the issue soon. "I think there is a greater need for transparency —a greater need for appropriately sharing information — and we are struggling with how to do that, but it is something that the president feels strongly about," he said.

Although Republicans asked most of the questions, the issue did not break down cleanly on partisan lines.

Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) applauded the administration's drones policy. "In every war we've had, unfortunately, American citizens have sided with the enemy. They've been few in number, but that does happen," he said.

A battery of Patriot missiles now guards the U.S. Capitol against attack, he noted. "Let's go back in time," he said. "What would we all give to have those Patriot missile batteries available" on Sept. 11?

Using them to blow up one of the airliners aimed at the World Trade Center or the Pentagon "would have meant that we would have lost a planeload of American citizens, but we'd save thousands more. That's the world in which we live in," Graham said.

"I want to stand by you and the president to make sure that we don't criminalize the war and that the commander in chief continues to have the authority to protect us all," he told Holder. "And I've got a lot of my colleagues who are well-meaning, but there is only one commander in chief in our Constitution."

Holder, appearing uncomfortable before the committee, repeatedly told its members that his letter merely dealt with the unlikely possibility of an extreme event. He emphasized that there was no plan to broaden the administration's drone program to aim at targets inside the U.S.

"It's hard for me to imagine a situation where that would occur," he said.

Finding and isolating terrorists abroad is much harder than in the U.S., often making capturing a suspect impractical, he said. In the U.S. many law enforcement tools exist that allow officials to capture suspects without killing them.

"Thus the use of drones is entirely, entirely hypothetical" for this country, he said.

Holder added, "The government has no intention to carry out any drone strikes in the United States."

richard.serrano@latimes.com

Michael A. Memoli of the Washington Bureau contributed to this report.

Afghan leader alleges US, Taliban are colluding

Afghan leader alleges US, Taliban are colluding

RAHIM FAIEZ, Associated Press, By RAHIM FAIEZ and KIMBERLY DOZIER, Associated Press

Updated 9:57 am, Sunday, March 10, 2013

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — Afghan President Hamid Karzai on Sunday accused the Taliban and the U.S. of working in concert to convince Afghans that violence will worsen if most foreign troops leave — an allegation the top American commander in Afghanistan rejected as "categorically false."

Karzai said two suicide bombings that killed 19 people on Saturday — one outside the Afghan Defense Ministry and the other near a police checkpoint in eastern Khost province — show the insurgent group is conducting attacks to demonstrate that international forces will still be needed to keep the peace after their current combat mission ends in 2014.

"The explosions in Kabul and Khost yesterday showed that they are at the service of America and at the service of this phrase: 2014. They are trying to frighten us into thinking that if the foreigners are not in Afghanistan, we would be facing these sorts of incidents," he said during a nationally televised speech about the state of Afghan women.

Karzai is known for making incendiary comments in his public speeches, a tactic that is often attributed to him trying to appeal to Taliban sympathizers or to gain leverage when he feels his international allies are ignoring his country's sovereignty. In previous speeches, he has threatened to join the Taliban and called his NATO allies occupiers who want to plunder Afghanistan's resources.

U.S. and NATO forces commander Gen. Joseph Dunford said Karzai had never expressed such views to him, but said it was understandable that tensions would arise as the coalition balances the need to complete its mission and the Afghans' move to exercise more sovereignty.

"We have fought too hard over the past 12 years, we have shed too much blood over the last 12 years, to ever think that violence or instability would be to our advantage," Dunford said.

The Karzai government's latest comments and actions come during U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel's first visit to Afghanistan since becoming the Pentagon chief, a trip made in part to meet with Karzai. Hours after Karzai's speech, their joint news conference was canceled by officials citing security concerns, though officials said the two men still planned to meet privately.

The two men had plenty of contentious issues to discuss. The Afghan and U.S. government are negotiating a security pact for the long-term presence of American forces in Afghanistan — the difficulty illustrated when a deal to transfer a U.S. prison outside of Kabul to Afghan authority on Saturday fell through at the last moment.

U.S. and Afghan officials are also at odds over a Karzai demand that U.S. special operations forces withdraw from a province neighboring Kabul by Monday over allegations they participated in torture and extrajudicial killing — charges U.S. officials deny. As the deadline approached, Dunford told reporters he spoke to Karzai about the issue on Saturday and told him the U.S. is working on a plan to hand over security in the Wardak region to Afghan forces. He would not directly say whether the commandos will stay in Wardak when the deadline to leave comes on Monday.

Karzai raised another difficult issue when he denounced the alleged seizure of a university student Saturday by Afghan forces his aide said were working for the CIA. It was unclear why the student was detained.

Presidential spokesman Aimal Faizi said in an interview with The Associated Press that the CIA freed the student after Karzai's staff intervened, but that Karzai wants the alleged Afghan raiders arrested. The president issued a decree on Sunday banning all international forces and the Afghans working with them from entering universities and schools without Afghan government permission.

The CIA declined to comment. NATO spokesman Lt. Col. Les Carroll said that no NATO forces "harassed a university student" as described by the President's office.

In the incident at the Kandahar university Saturday, presidential spokesman Faizi said the raiders fired shots as they grabbed student Abdul Qayoum, and blindfolded him before taking him for interrogation at a CIA post that Taliban leader Mullah Omar once used as a home.

The CIA has trained an Afghan counterterrorist force several thousand strong, known as the Counterterrorism Pursuit Team, which works mostly in insurgent strongholds in southern and eastern Afghanistan. U.S. officials say they work in concert with the Afghan intelligence service, but Karzai frequently complains he lacks oversight over their operations.

Karzai said in his speech that any foreign powers that want to keep troops in Afghanistan need to do so under conditions set forward by Afghanistan.

"We will tell them where we need them, and under which conditions. They must respect our laws. They must respect the national sovereignty of our country and must respect all our customs," Karzai said.

Karzai offered no proof of coordination, but said the Taliban and the United States were in "daily negotiations" in various foreign countries and noted that the United States has said that it no longer considers the insurgent group its enemy. The U.S. continues to fight against the Taliban and other militant groups, but has expressed its backing for formal peace talks with the Taliban to find a political resolution to the war.

Karzai said he did not believe the Taliban's claim that they launched Saturday's attacks to show they are still a potent force fighting the United States. "Yesterday's explosions, which the Taliban claimed, show that in reality they are saying they want the presence of foreigners in Afghanistan," Karzai said.

____

Associated Press writers Lolita C. Baldor and Heidi Vogt contributed to this report from Kabul.

Follow Dozier on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/KimberlyDozier; Baldor at http://twitter.com/lbaldor; and Vogt at http://twitter.com/HeidiVogt.

How do you spell military pork?? F-35’s

F-35’s ability to evade budget cuts illustrates challenge of paring defense spending

By Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Published: March 9

At EGLIN AIR FORCE BASE, Fla. — With an ear-ringing roar, the matte-gray fighter jet streaked down Runway 12 and sliced into a cloudless afternoon sky over the Florida Panhandle. To those watching on the ground, the sleek, bat-winged fuselage soon shrank into a speck, and then nothing at all, as Marine Capt. Brendan Walsh arced northward in America’s newest warplane, the F-35 Lightning II.

The F-35 has features that make pilots drool. It is shaped to avoid detection by enemy radar. It can accelerate to supersonic speeds. One model can take off and land vertically. Onboard electronic sensors and computers provide a 360-degree view of the battlefield on flat-panel screens, allowing pilots to quickly identify targets and threats.

Conceived in the 1990s, the F-35 program was supposed to use the same airframe to produce planes for the Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps, with only modest modifications. Instead of meeting the original plan of being 70 percent similar, the three versions now are about 70 percent distinct. Here are the key differences among the three airplanes:

Conceived in the 1990s, the F-35 program was supposed to use the same airframe to produce planes for the Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps, with only modest modifications. Instead of meeting the original plan of being 70 percent similar, the three versions now are about 70 percent distinct. Here are the key differences among the three airplanes:

But its greatest strength has nothing to do with those attributes. The Defense Department and Lockheed Martin, the giant contractor hired to design and build the plane, also known as the Joint Strike Fighter, have constructed what amounts to a budgetary force field around the nearly $400 billion program.

Although it is the costliest weapons system in U.S. history and the single most expensive item in the 2013 Pentagon budget, it will face only a glancing blow from the sequester this year. And as the White House and Congress contemplate future budgets, those pushing for additional cuts may find it difficult to trim more than a fraction of the Pentagon’s proposed fleet, even though the program is years behind schedule and 70 percent over its initial price tag.

The reasons for the F-35’s relative immunity are a stark illustration of why it is so difficult to cut the country’s defense spending. Lockheed Martin has spread the work across 45 states — critics call it “political engineering” — which in turn has generated broad bipartisan support on Capitol Hill. Any reduction in the planned U.S. purchase risks antagonizing the eight other nations that have committed to buying the aircraft by increasing their per-plane costs. And senior military leaders warn that the stealthy, technologically sophisticated F-35 is essential to confront Iran, China and other potential adversaries that may employ advanced anti-aircraft defenses.

The biggest barrier to cutting the F-35 program, however, is rooted in the way in which it was developed: The fighter jet is being mass-produced and placed in the hands of military aviators such as Walsh, who are not test pilots, while the aircraft remains a work in progress. Millions more lines of software code have to be written, vital parts need to be redesigned, and the plane has yet to complete 80 percent of its required flight tests. By the time all that is finished — in 2017, by the Pentagon’s estimates — it will be too late to pull the plug. The military will own 365 of them.

By then, “we’re already pregnant,” said Air Force Lt. Gen. Christopher Bogdan, who oversees F-35 development for the Pentagon.

When the F-35 finishes testing, “there will be no yes-or-no, up-or-down decision point,” said Pierre Sprey, who was a chief architect of the Air Force’s F-16 Fighting Falcon. “That’s totally deliberate. It was all in the name of ensuring it couldn’t be canceled.”

The Pentagon has long permitted equipment to be produced while it is still being tested, with the intent of getting cutting-edge gear to warriors more quickly, but senior military officials said the F-35 takes the approach to new extremes. Doing so has served as more than a hedge against cuts — it has also driven up the overall price. The 65 aircraft that already have been built, and those that will be assembled over the next few years, will require substantial retrofits that could cost as much as $4 billion as problems are uncovered during testing, the officials said.

Initial tests already have yielded serious problems that are forcing significant engineering modifications. The entire fleet was grounded earlier this year because of a crack in the fan blade in one jet’s engine. The Marine Corps’ version has been prohibited from its signature maneuver — taking off and landing vertically — because of a design flaw. And the Navy model has not been able to land on an aircraft carrier because its tailhook, an essential feature to alight aboard a ship, needs to be redesigned. The Pentagon’s top weapons tester issued a scathing report on the F-35 this year that questioned the plane’s reliability and warned of a “lack of maturity” in performance.

Conceived in the 1990s, the F-35 program was supposed to use the same airframe to produce planes for the Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps, with only modest modifications. Instead of meeting the original plan of being 70 percent similar, the three versions now are about 70 percent distinct. Here are the key differences among the three airplanes:

When the F-35 program was first approved by the Pentagon, Lockheed Martin said it could develop and manufacture 2,852 planes for $233 billion. The Pentagon now estimates the total price tag at $397.1 billion. And that is for 409 fewer planes.

The overall program is almost four times more costly than any other weapons system under development. Taxpayers have already spent $84 billion on the plane’s design and initial production. By contrast, the production of 18,000 B-24 bombers during World War II cost less than $60 billion, in inflation-adjusted dollars.

To the plane’s backers, including senior leaders of the Air Force and Marine Corps, the benefit is worth the cost. Unlike the infantry, which still accepts battlefield casualties as part of war, military aviators have grown accustomed to a different risk calculus since the 1991 Persian Gulf War, when U.S. warplanes quickly established air superiority over Iraq with minimal losses: They want to ensure that, whatever the future conflict, their planes are packed with enough offensive and defensive measures to accomplish the mission and avoid getting shot down.

“This aircraft reinforces the way Americans go to war. . . .We don’t want to win 51-49. We want to win 99 to nothing,” said Lt. Gen. Frank Gornec, the assistant vice chief of staff of the Air Force. He said he is convinced the F-35 “will become a superstar in the arsenal of the United States.”

Many independent defense analysts do not share that conviction. To them, the plane’s political engineering and buy-before-you-fly procurement mask deep problems with performance and affordability.

“It was a bait-and-switch operation; we were overpromised benefits and under-promised costs,” said Chuck Spinney, a former Pentagon analyst who gained widespread attention in the 1980s for issuing pointed warnings about the military’s pursuit of unaffordable weapons. “But by the time you realize the numbers don’t add up, you can’t get out of the program.”

A turbulent takeoff

The F-35 program, which commenced 12 years ago, was intended to be a model of how to build a modern fighter. The same airframe would be used to produce planes for the Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps, with only modest modifications to address service-specific needs, hence the name Joint Strike Fighter. The commonality, proponents argued, would allow the three services to mount more coordinated wartime missions, and, perhaps more important, it would drive down development, assembly and maintenance costs.

Conceived in the 1990s, the F-35 program was supposed to use the same airframe to produce planes for the Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps, with only modest modifications. Instead of meeting the original plan of being 70 percent similar, the three versions now are about 70 percent distinct. Here are the key differences among the three airplanes:

That was essential because the Pentagon needs a lot of F-35s. It is supposed to replace thousands of legacy aircraft including the F-16, a workhorse of the Air Force fleet, and every fighter jet owned by the Marine Corps. The F-35 was pitched as the answer because it was supposed to be affordable — in the relative terms of fighter jets — and could be acquired in larger quantities than the F-22 Raptor, the Air Force’s new high-performance fighter.

Pentagon officials accepted Lockheed’s claim that computer simulations would be able to identify design problems, minimizing the need to make changes once the plane actually took to the sky. That, in turn, led to an aggressive plan to build and test the aircraft simultaneously.

Cautioning that all of those assumptions were flawed, Spinney and other defense analysts urged the Pentagon to see the plane in flight before committing to buy it. But senior Defense Department officials in the George W. Bush administration did not heed the warnings.

Within months, the program began veering off course.

The Air Force, Marines and Navy all sought additional modifications to meet their needs, reducing commonality among the three models. A bigger problem was the fundamental concept of building one plane, with stealth technology, that could fly as far and fast as the Air Force wanted while also being able to land on the Navy’s carriers and take off vertically from Marine amphibious assault ships.

Instead of meeting the original plan of being about 70 percent similar, the three versions now are 70 percent distinct, which has increased costs by tens of billions and led to years-long delays. “We have three airplane programs running in parallel,” Bogdan said. “They are very, very different airplanes.”

Even with three variants, the plane’s design has forced serious compromises. To remain stealthy, bombs and missiles must be placed inside a weapons bay, which limits the volume of munitions that can be carried. The use of a single engine, required for the Marine version, restricts speed.

With an even more complex engineering challenge than initially envisioned, Lockheed and the Pentagon took a hands-off approach to managing the program, according to several people involved in the process.

An electrical engineer who worked as a manager at Lockheed’s F-35 program headquarters in Fort Worth beginning in 2001 said the development effort was beset with “tremendous organizational inadequacies” and “schedule and cost expectations that never were achievable.” In his unit, he said, there were no firm development timetables and no budgets. “It was all on autopilot,” he said. “It was doomed from the beginning.”

In 2005, the engineer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of concerns he will risk job opportunities in the close-knit aviation industry, participated in a two-week-long assessment of the program.“There were reds and yellows across the board,” he recalled. But when he briefed his superiors, “nobody was interested,” he said. And when he gave a copy of the assessment to those at the Pentagon office responsible for the plane, he said, “they didn’t want to hear it.”

A senior Defense Department official acknowledged the office “didn’t have the capacity or the understanding to manage such a complicated program” at the time. Lockheed executives also make little excuse for those years. “It was a very different program from what we are executing today,” said Steve O’Bryan, Lockheed’s vice president of F-35 business development.

Conceived in the 1990s, the F-35 program was supposed to use the same airframe to produce planes for the Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps, with only modest modifications. Instead of meeting the original plan of being 70 percent similar, the three versions now are about 70 percent distinct. Here are the key differences among the three airplanes:

With wars raging in Iraq and Afghanistan, and military budgets growing year over year, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld paid little attention to the program. His successor, Robert M. Gates, took the same approach during his first few years on the job. In 2007, the Defense Department permitted Lockheed to begin producing the fighter — before the first flight tests had even begun. Frank Kendall, who is now the Pentagon’s chief weapons buyer, has called that decision “acquisition malpractice.”

Early tests uncovered flaws unnoticed by the computer simulations. Key engineering tasks, including the vertical takeoff and landing system, were taking much longer to complete. All the while, costs were rising at supersonic speeds.

In 2009, Gates grasped the dysfunction. The following year, he withheld $614 million in fees from Lockheed, fired the two-star Marine general in charge of the program and brought in a Navy vice admiral, David Venlet, to clean house. In 2011, Gates placed the Marine plane on probation, warning that it would be killed if problems with its propulsion system were not fixed quickly.

Bogdan, who served as Venlet’s deputy until December, when he took charge of the development effort, was astounded by what he found when he delved into the program.

“It was an unimaginable mess,” he said.

Taking countermeasures

An imposing former test pilot who wears an olive flight suit to his office in Crystal City, Bogdan spent his first two years on the job analyzing virtually every aspect of how the plane is designed and built. He and Venlet adjusted schedules and assumptions, and they implemented changes that brought the Marine version off probation. New goals call for aggressive testing and modifications over the next five years, and the start of full-rate production by 2018.

Bogdan thinks the program cannot afford another do-over. “There is no more money and there is no more time,” he said.

To stay on track, he has adopted a get-tough approach with Lockheed and Pratt & Whitney, the contractor building the plane’s engine. Instead of allowing Lockheed to manage the development of millions of lines of software code for the plane — one of the most vexing technical challenges — his office, which has now grown to 2,000 people, is taking charge. “We have forced discipline on them,” he said of Lockheed.

Until recently, he said, Lockheed’s software developers worked at computers that were not connected to each other. “I couldn’t believe it,” he said. Changes imposed by his office have reduced software revision cycles from 27 days to three.

Although enormous technical hurdles remain — designing the tailhook on the Navy’s model, for instance, and writing software to instantaneously fuse reams of data from the plane’s electronic sensors — Bogdan said none of that keeps him up at night. His nightmares are all about the cost: what it costs to design and build the plane, but also what it will cost to operate it over the next 50 years.

Conceived in the 1990s, the F-35 program was supposed to use the same airframe to produce planes for the Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps, with only modest modifications. Instead of meeting the original plan of being 70 percent similar, the three versions now are about 70 percent distinct. Here are the key differences among the three airplanes:

He has pushed Lockheed to pay for all cost overruns — in the past, the government picked up the tab — and he has insisted that the company share in the expense of modifications to planes that are being built during the testing phase.

“What I see Lockheed Martin and Pratt & Whitney doing today is behaving as if they are getting ready to sell me the very last F-35 and the very last engine and are trying to squeeze every nickel of that last F-35 and that last engine,” Bogdan said earlier this month during a visit to Australia, which plans to buy 100 F-35s. “I want them both to start behaving like they want to be around for 40 years. I want them to take on some of the risk of this program. I want them to invest in cost reductions. I want them to do the things that will build a better relationship. I’m not getting all that love yet.”

Lockheed and Pratt executives insist they are trying to drive down expenses and increase reliability. “We’ve made enormous progress over the past few years,” said Lockheed’s O’Bryan. “When the professionals look at the facts and they talk to the pilots, they see a program that is accelerating with costs that are rapidly decreasing.”

O’Bryan said Lockheed and its suppliers are “committed to working in close partnership” with Bogdan’s office.

For Bogdan, an even bigger challenge involves the cost of flying and maintaining the F-35. The Pentagon estimates it could reach as much as $1.1 trillion over the life of the plane. Although unknown variables such as the cost of fuel could drive that figure down, Bogdan said the jet has serious sustainability problems. Chief among them are a greater need for maintenance and replacement parts than projected. “If we don’t do things now to change the game, this airplane will be unaffordable to fly,” he said.

He is pushing suppliers to make parts more reliable, and he has put Lockheed and Pratt & Whitney on notice that they should not assume they will be selected to fill the operations and maintenance contracts, which could be worth as much as $500 billion. He wants other firms to compete for parts of the work, reasoning that it will bring down costs.

To reinforce his seriousness, he has told Lockheed and Pratt not to wait him out. Unlike other senior officers, who change assignments ever few years, he intends to stay for 10 years. “The only way I’m leaving this program,” he said in the interview, “is if I’m fired.”

A dogfight no one wants

But Bogdan’s leverage is limited. Behind his feisty language lies an inescapable reality: The services don’t want to shrink their orders, and Congress doesn’t want to clip the F-35’s wings.

For many legislators, the F-35 is as much about employment as it is about air superiority. Lockheed has repeatedly emphasized to legislators, particularly those who sit on appropriations committees, that the plane supports 133,000 jobs, many of them at 1,300 subcontractors and parts suppliers spread across 45 states. When full-rate production begins, likely in 2018, the company says the employment figure will grow to 260,000.

A Web site established by Lockheed for the plane provides a sample letter for constituents to send to lawmakers. “The F-35 program is a win-win proposition for our national security and our nation’s declining manufacturing base,” the letter states.

Despite the lobbying, a few members have spoken out. One of them was Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), a former Navy pilot. In December 2011, he took to the floor of the Senate to lambaste the development effort. “In a nutshell, the JSF program has been both a scandal and a tragedy,” he said.

The following November, the Marines established their first F-35 squadron in Yuma, Ariz. They invited McCain to the inauguration ceremony.

“I am — after many years of frustration and setbacks — encouraged that the overall program is moving in the right direction,” McCain said at the event. He said the program was on track “to produce more achievable and predictable outcomes.”

For the generals who lead the Marines, the F-35 is a must-win fight. There is no alternative fighter readily available to replace the service’s current jets, which will soon become too obsolete to fly.

“It’s essential for us,” said Lt. Gen. Robert Schmidle, the Corps’ deputy commandant for aviation. “We don’t have another option.”

Thus far, there has been little discussion within the Pentagon or on Capitol Hill about whether the Marines, which are organized to travel by sea and fight small wars, require such a sophisticated aircraft. Compared with the Air Force and Navy versions, the Marine variant has the most engineering challenges and the largest price tag. But the Marines, the smallest service, have long wielded disproportionate influence on the Hill and in the Pentagon.

“Nobody wants to say no to the Marines,” a senior Army officer said on the condition of anonymity to speak candidly about the program. “Nobody around here is asking the fundamental question: Why does the Navy’s army need its own air force?”

Avoiding a death spiral

The Pentagon’s latest five-year budget plan, released last year, calls for a smaller volume of annual purchases to save money. Sequestration-related cuts this year also will defer a few more planes. But the overall purchase of 2,443 jets remains unchanged.

Though the F-35 is rarely mentioned by those seeking to rein in federal spending on Capitol Hill, sotto voce discussions are beginning within the walls of the Pentagon. Some senior officers, even those who are enamored of the plane, worry that footing the $400 billion tab in an era of declining defense budgets will require too many other sacrifices and trade-offs.

“This aircraft does everything better than anything ever flown,” a three-star general said on the condition of anonymity. “But how many can we afford? How many of them do we really need?”

Although Air Force and Marine leaders have held fast, an unofficial reexamination is occurring within the Navy, which is not as desperate for the F-35 because it possesses a relatively new fleet of F/A-18 Super Hornets. While toeing a public line of support for the F-35, some Navy experts are looking at whether it makes sense to reduce its planned order and plow some of the savings into high-speed drones that can operate off aircraft carriers, according to senior military officials.

Should that occur, or should Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel decide to shrink the overall purchase, it could prompt howls from key U.S. allies, including Britain, Italy and Norway, which all have contributed to the development of the aircraft. Their purchase price has been based on a U.S. order of about 2,500 jets. If that number drops, the per-plane cost will rise for the allies, possibly leading them to buy fewer then planned.

For some of them, cost increases and delays over the past decade have been significant enough to prompt a reexamination. Australia is deciding whether to halve its 100-plane order and Canada is reconsidering its plan to buy 65.

A smaller total purchase, of course, further increases unit costs for the United States, which likely would increase pressure to cut more. Procurement officers have a term for the phenomenon, borrowed from the world of aviation: a death spiral.

That’s what happened to the Air Force’s F-22. The original plan, set in 1991, was to buy 750 of them for $132 million apiece. Increased development costs and budget cuts in the 1990s sent that program into a tailspin. The Air Force eventually wound up with just 187 — at a cost of $422 million per plane.

That is why Bogdan is pressing Lockheed so aggressively to reduce costs. He knows the F-35 — despite the jobs it fuels, regardless of the needs of the Marines and Air Force — is a giant, unstealthy presence in the federal budget.

His best defense against cuts, he figures, involves showing that the long-troubled program can finally meet its targets — and that more reductions will just mean more-expensive aircraft.

“We have to understand there are trade-offs every time we cut spending on the F-35,” he said. “And none of them are very good.”

Gabrielle Giffords' husband, Mark Kelly buys AR-15

More of the old "Do as I say, not as I do" from our government masters???

Our royal government rulers and bureaucrats like former Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and astronaut Mark Kelly seem to think it's OK for them to have guns, but want to prevent the rest of us serfs from having guns.

Sorry guys, but I am sure the reason the Founders created the Second Amendment was to allow us serfs to protect ourselves from royal government rulers.

Source

Giffords' husband buys assault weapon to make point

By Catalina Camia USA Today Mon Mar 11, 2013 1:54 PM

Retired astronaut Mark Kelly, husband of former congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, recently purchased an assault weapon to make a point about the ease of background checks for gun owners.

Kelly posted on his Facebook page on Friday that he bought an AR-15, one of the 157 military-style weapons that would be banned under a bill pending before the Senate Judiciary Committee. The panel is set to consider three gun bills Tuesday, including the proposed assault weapons ban authored by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif.

"Even to buy an assault weapon, the background check only takes a few minutes," Kelly said. "Scary to think of people buying guns like these without a background check at a gun show or the Internet. We really need to close the gun show and private seller loophole."

Kelly, who is also a retired Navy captain, and Giffords are both gun owners who have been outspoken about the need for new gun-control measures. Americans for Responsible Solutions, their super PAC, has been running ads featuring Giffords that tout the proposed assault weapons ban and universal background checks.

Kelly said on his Facebook page that he plans to give the AR-15 to the Tucson Police Department when he receives the weapon.

Giffords was shot in the head January 2011 in a Tucson rampage that left six people dead. President Obama and others have been pushing for new gun legislation in the wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Conn., in December that left 20 students and six of their educators dead.

'Truth serum' may be used to assess Holmes' sanity

Like lie detector tests I suspect getting a doped up person to talk MIGHT uncover some truths, but I also suspect that like a lie detector test the results are pretty unreliable.

Source

'Truth serum' may be used to assess Holmes' sanity, court says

By Dan Elliott and P. Solomon Banda, The Associated Press

Posted: 03/12/2013 09:29:49 AM PDT

DENVER -- The defendant in the deadly Colorado theater shooting could be given "truth serum" under a court order issued Monday to help determine whether he is insane if he pleads not guilty by reason of insanity.

Suspect James Holmes could be required to submit to a "narcoanalytic interview" as part of an evaluation to determine if he was legally insane at the time of the July 20 shootings, Arpahoe County District Judge William Sylvester said.

A narcoanalylitic interview is a decades-old process in which patients are given drugs to lower their inhibition. Academic studies have shown that the technique has involved the use of sodium amytal and pentothal, sometimes called truth serum.

The prospect of such interviews that may ensue under such a plea alarmed defense attorneys, who filed documents opposing the technique.

Holmes, 25, is scheduled to enter a plea Tuesday to multiple counts of murder and attempted murder. He is charged with killing 12 people and injuring 70 at a midnight showing of "The Dark Knight Rises" in the Denver suburb of Aurora.

If Holmes pleads not guilty by reason of insanity, he would be examined by doctors at the state mental hospital.

In an advisory that Holmes would have to sign if he enters an insanity plea, Sylvester didn't specify what type of drugs would be used but said the examination could include "medically appropriate" ones.

Sylvester said Holmes also could be given a polygraph examination as part of the evaluation.

After reading a draft of the advisory, Holmes' lawyers objected, saying a narcoanalytic interview and a polygraph would violate their client's rights.

In the final version of the advisory, Sylvester said he had incorporated some suggestions from the defense and the prosecution, but he did not address the defense objections to a narcoanalytic interview and polygraph.

Karen Steinhauser, a former prosecutor who is a law professor at the University of Denver and a defense attorney, said she could not find any case law about use of the narcoanalytic interview.

"It comes up so rarely," she said, adding she knows nothing about it.

She noted the technique is clearly allowed by Colorado law.

------

Associated Press writer Nicholas Riccardi contributed to this report

Ewald-Heinrich von Kleist - Freedom fighter or criminal???

Last survivor of plot to kill Hitler dies at 90

By David Rising Associated Press Tue Mar 12, 2013 12:48 PM

BERLIN — As a 22-year-old German army lieutenant, Ewald-Heinrich von Kleist volunteered to wear a suicide vest to a meeting with Adolf Hitler and to blow himself up along with the Nazi dictator.

The assassination didn’t come to pass, but von Kleist went on to play a key role in the most famous attempt on Hitler later that same year, and was the last surviving member of the group of German officers who tried and failed to kill the Fuehrer on July 20, 1944.

Von Kleist died Friday at age 90 at his home in Munich, his wife Gundula von Kleist told The Associated Press.

Von Kleist was born July 10, 1922, on his family estate Schmenzin in Pommerania in an area of northeastern Germany that is today Poland.

The von Kleist family was a long line of Prussian landowners, who had served the state for centuries in high-ranking military and administrative positions.

Von Kleist’s father, Ewald von Kleist, was an early opponent of Hitler even before he came to power, and was arrested many times after the Nazi dictator took control in 1933. The elder von Kleist famously traveled to England in 1938, the year before World War II broke out, to try and determine whether other Western nations would support a coup attempt against Hitler, but failed to get the British government to change its policy of appeasement.

Despite his family’s opposition to the Nazis, younger von Kleist joined the German army in 1940, and was wounded in 1943 in fighting on the Eastern Front.

During his convalescence, he was approached in January 1944 by Col. Claus von Stauffenberg, another officer from an aristocratic family, and presented with a plan to kill Hitler. Von Kleist had been chosen as the officer to model a new uniform for Hitler, and von Stauffenberg proposed that he wear a suicide vest underneath, and detonate it when he stood next to the dictator.

Years later von Kleist remembered explaining the suicide plot to his father, who paused only briefly before telling his 22-year-old son: “Yes, you have to do this.”

“Fathers love their sons and mine certainly did, and I had been quite sure he would say no,” von Kleist recalled. “But, as always, I had underestimated him.”

The suicide attack plan never came to fruition.

Months later, however, von Kleist was approached again by von Stauffenberg to take part in what would become known as the July 20 plot — for the day in 1944 that the assassination was attempted — which was brought to the big screen in 2008 in “Valkyrie,” starring Tom Cruise as von Stauffenberg.

Von Kleist was supposed to play a key role as the person who was to carry a briefcase packed with explosives to a meeting with Hitler. In a change of plans, however, von Stauffenberg decided to plant the bomb himself.

Von Stauffenberg placed the bomb in a conference room where Hitler was meeting with his aides and military advisers at his East Prussian headquarters. Hitler escaped the full force of the blast when someone moved the briefcase next to a table leg, deflecting much of the explosive force.

Von Kleist remained in Berlin, charged with overseeing the arrest of officers and officials loyal to Hitler in the city.

But when news spread that Hitler had survived, the plot crumbled and von Stauffenberg, von Kleist’s father, and scores of others were arrested and executed in an orgy of revenge killings. Some were hanged by the neck with piano wire. Von Stauffenberg was shot by firing squad.

Von Kleist himself was arrested, questioned at length by the Gestapo, and sent to a concentration camp, but then inexplicably let go and returned to combat duty.

Following the war, von Kleist founded the Ewald von Kleist publishing house, and became involved in public education on security issues and trans-Atlantic relations. In 1952 he founded the independent defense affairs association known as the Society for Military Studies, and the European Military Studies magazine in 1954.

In 1963 he founded what would become the annual Munich Security Conference — a forum that still today brings together the world’s top diplomats and defense officials, in an informal setting for talks on global security policy, and has long been considered the preeminent conference on NATO issues.

Von Kleist served as the conference’s moderator until 1998, before handing it over to Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s longtime foreign policy adviser Horst Teltschik, who has also since stepped down.

For his efforts leading the Munich Security Conference, von Kleist was awarded the U.S. Department of Defense’s Medal for Distinguished Public Service in 1991, its highest award for a civilian.

His other decorations include Germany’s Federal Order of Merit and France’s Officier de la Legion d’Honneur.

His wife said funeral services would be private.

“My husband didn’t want anything big,” she said.

How do you spell hypocrite - Gun grabber Mark Kelly

Source

Mark Kelly’s purchase of rifle draws criticism

Associated Press Tue Mar 12, 2013 4:50 PM

The husband of former U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords generated nearly 4,000 comments on Facebook from people on both sides of the gun debate after he posted a photo of himself buying a military-style rifle — a purchase he made to demonstrate how easy it is to obtain the kind of firearms he’s lobbying Congress to ban.

A background check took only a matter of minutes to complete, Mark Kelly said in the Facebook post, adding that it’s scary to think people can buy similar guns without background checks at gun shows or on the Internet.

It didn’t take long for gun-rights supporters to accuse Kelly of being a hypocrite for buying an AR-15-style rifle and a 45.-caliber handgun. Many of the Facebook comments focused on his motivations and the rules for purchasing such guns.

Kelly and Giffords started a gun control advocacy group, Americans for Responsible Solutions, amid the wave of recent mass shootings. They have been touring the country in recent months in support of expanded background checks for gun purchases.

Kelly bought the guns at a Tucson shop the day before he appeared with his wife at the supermarket where she was wounded during a shooting rampage that left six dead and 12 others injured two years ago.

The public event last week was the first time the survivors had come together since the January 2011 shooting.

Giffords resigned from Congress last year as she continues to recover from her injuries.

The AR-15 is among 157 military-style weapons that would be banned under a bill pending before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee. Kelly, a former astronaut, said he intends to eventually hand in the rifle to Tucson police.

Doug MacKinlay is the owner of Diamondback Police Supply, the shop where Kelly bought the guns. He said Kelly bought the rifle on March 5 but couldn’t immediately take possession of it because the shop had bought it from a customer. As a result, the store is required by a Tucson ordinance to hold the gun for 20 days to give the city enough time to make sure the weapon wasn’t used in a crime, MacKinlay said.

MacKinlay said Kelly never revealed to the store’s staff why he was buying the guns and added that it would be wrong to refuse to sell a gun to someone because of their personal views.

“He is a U.S. citizen, an Arizona citizen and expressing his Second Amendment right to purchase and own a firearm,” MacKinlay said.

Todd Rathner, a lobbyist for the National Rifle Association’s affiliate in Arizona and a national NRA board member, questioned the point that Kelly was trying to make in buying the guns, saying a model citizen such as Kelly should be able to buy a gun relatively quickly. He also noted that such a purchase could have been a good investment as the value of those types of weapon soars amid heightened demand from gun owners.

“If you believe him, it’s a cheap publicity stunt,” Rathner said. “If you don’t, then he was speculating on the value of the rifle because he knew the prices would be inflated.”

The advocacy group started by Giffords and Kelly had no immediate comment Tuesday on Kelly’s gun buys.

But the group released a statement from Kelly on the Senate Judiciary Committee’s approval Tuesday of a proposal to expand federal firearms background checks to nearly all gun purchases. Kelly said the 10-8 vote was a huge step in keeping guns out of the hands of criminals and mentally ill people. Kelly’s statement didn’t address the controversy over his own gun buys.

Kelly, a former astronaut who plans to keep the handgun, told CNN on Monday that it was important for him to have firsthand information on the ease of buying guns such as the AR-15 and that he looks forward to buying a firearm at a gun show in the future. Kelly and Giffords have long been supporters of gun rights and owned handguns themselves.

3 'killer' dolphins go AWOL during exercises

3 'killer' dolphins go AWOL during exercises

USA Today Tue Mar 12, 2013 2:44 PM

Three Ukrainian commando dolphins trained to search for mines, attack divers and plant explosives have escaped from their handler in the Crimea, Russia's RIA Novosti news agency reported Tuesday.

The news agency, citing the Ukrainian media, said only two of five military-trained "killer" dolphins returned to their base in the port city of Sevastopol after recent exercises.

RIA Novosti said the Ukrainian defense ministry denied the reports of killer dolphins going AWOL, but also even refused to confirm the existence of such a program.

Dolphins were trained for commando missions at Sevastopol for the Soviet navy as far back as 1973, but Ukraine took over the unit after the Soviet breakup and the splitting of the Black Sea fleet into the Ukrainian and Russian fleets.

To keep the unit intact, the dolphins were trained for civilian tasks such as working with disabled children.

A military source in Sevastopol told RIA Novosti last year, however, that the Ukrainian navy had restarted training dolphins for commando operations, such as attacking enemy combat swimmers using special knives or pistols fixed to their heads.

They were also being trained to plant explosives, carried on their heads, on enemy ships, the unidentified source is quoted as saying.

Even in the past, training could go awry at certain times of the year, a former Soviet naval trainer told the news agency, and may account for the latest defections.

"If a male dolphin saw a female dolphin during the mating season, then he would immediately set off after her, Yury Plyachenko, a former Soviet naval anti-sabotage officer told RIA Novosti."But they came back in a week or so."

CBS Seattle reports that other militaries, including the U.S. Navy, also use dolphins, but that the U.S. trains them not for attack but for intelligence gathering. CBS reports dolphins were used in the Iraq War.

Contributing: Doug Stanglin, USA TODAY

No ethics for Phoenix City Council members???

Experts: Phoenix ethics rules for elected leaders lag

By Dustin Gardiner The Republic | azcentral.com Wed Mar 13, 2013 11:02 PM

Phoenix’s ethics rules for its elected leaders significantly lag the best practices of large U.S. cities, a task force of legal experts has found.

That’s the conclusion reached by a group of prominent attorneys and judges who spent four months reviewing the city’s ethics policies, also determining that Phoenix employees are often held to a “higher standard” than City Council members.

Topping the group’s list of concerns is Phoenix’s lack of a legal mechanism to investigate or sanction council members who potentially violate its conflict-of-interest or gift policies.

On Wednesday, former Maricopa County Attorney Rick Romley, who led the task force, gave the critique to a subcommittee of City Council members. He said that “most levels of government,” including the state, already have processes to sanction elected officials through a vote of their peers.

“The area of greatest weakness is with the elected officials,” Romley said of the city’s ethics safeguards. “We were quite surprised that there was nothing in place (to enforce rules) on elected officials.”

Phoenix’s Ethics Review Task Force, which Mayor Greg Stanton created last fall, has released 27 recommendations to improve overall policies for elected officials, board members, employees and volunteers.

Perhaps the most controversial measure calls for the creation of an independent ethics commission to oversee investigations of potential violations by elected officials. Residents would have to approve the move through a ballot measure because it requires an amendment to the City Charter.

Task-force members said other shortcomings they found were inconsistencies between the city’s rules for elected officials and general employees, who can be fired or disciplined for violations.

For example, state laws restrict council members from participating in deals in which a relative’s involvement could present a conflict of interest. But employees are restricted from directly doing business with anyone with whom their relationship “may create the appearance of a conflict.”

Council members so far haven’t been overtly enthusiastic about the task force’s recommendations. Wednesday’s subcommittee praised the group’s work but wanted more time to mull the issue before deciding whether to advance it to the full council for a vote.

“I know that from experience it sounds simple, but it’s not,” Councilwoman Thelda Williams said. “Ethics is kind of a personal perception for me and most people, I truly believe.”

Councilmen Daniel Valenzuela said he supports the aim of the task force but wants to ensure there’s no ambiguity in defining “unprofessional conduct” of elected officials, which could be investigated by the ethics panel. He said he does not want it to become an “overused tool” for tarnishing city leaders.

Romley said the task force hopes the council will approve the recommendations and convene another group to flesh out guidelines for elected officials.

“The City Council has the opportunity to walk the walk,” said Ernest Calderon, a task- force member and longtime Phoenix attorney. “I believe that the citizens of Phoenix don’t want a good council. They want a great council.”

Meanwhile, Stanton told The Arizona Republic that he will not take a stance on the specific recommendations until the subcommittee acts, though he supports the overall message.

Although the lack of a way to investigate council ethics violations was the task force’s main concern, it seeks other changes. Other key recommendations:

Require elected officials and board members to report within 48 hours gifts, including food, that exceed $50. Gifts that create an appearance of undue influence or conflict of interest would be banned entirely.

Create a uniform gift policy that applies to elected officials and employees, banning gifts that create an appearance of undue influence and gifts of entertainment, such as tickets to sporting or cultural events.

Establish ethics policies for the use of social media by elected officials and employees. These policies would likely vary for the two groups.

Conduct a city review and update of ethics policies at least every four years. The city’s policies haven’t been updated since 2005.

Pakistani soldier stoned to death over romance

OK, the article didn't once mention the word religion, Muslim or anything else, but I suspect this was a result of religious superstitions.

I suspect religion was involved first because the Old Testament, which Christians, Jews and Muslims believe in orders people to be stoned to death for many religious crimes, which are often victimless crimes such as adultery or homosexuality.

Source

Pakistani soldier stoned to death over romance

Associated Press Wed Mar 13, 2013 9:43 AM

PESHAWAR, Pakistan — Tribesmen tied a Pakistani soldier to the hood of a car and stoned him to death in the country’s restive northwest for allegedly having a romantic relationship with a local woman, government officials and a tribal elder said Wednesday.

The grisly incident took place Tuesday in Parachinar, the capital of the Kurram tribal area. Kurram is part of Pakistan’s semiautonomous tribal region, which runs along the country’s border with Afghanistan and is dominated by conservative Pashtun tribesmen.

The soldier, Nooruddin Aalam, allegedly began his relationship with the woman during a previous posting in the area, said a local government official. He was transferred elsewhere three months ago but returned to see the woman in recent days, said the official.

Residents allegedly caught the couple dating, said a local tribal elder. Leaders of various tribes met Monday and decided the soldier should be executed according to Islamic law, said the elder.

A second government official said locals took Aalam to a graveyard, tied him to the hood of a car and stoned him to death, then shot him.

One resident also shot the soldier, said the tribal elder. The woman allegedly involved in the incident is with the family of a local tribal elder, and her fate will be decided later, he said.

The government officials and tribal elder spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution from local tribesmen.

A military official confirmed the death of the soldier but did not provide any additional details. He spoke on condition of anonymity in line with official policy.

It is quite rare for people to be stoned to death in Pakistan, but when it does occur, the victim is more often a woman than a man.

VA suppresses and manipulates health data???

Researcher alleges VA covered up adverse consequences to toxic exposures

Posted by Steve Vogel on March 13, 2013 at 3:04 pm

A senior epidemiologist for the Department of Veterans Affairs who resigned in December told a congressional committee Wednesday that the agency has covered up data showing adverse consequences for veterans who were exposed to toxic materials from burn pits and other environmental hazards in Iraq, Afghanistan and the first Gulf War.

Steven S. Coughlin testified that he resigned from the VA’s Office of Public Health in December “because of serious ethical concerns” about the agency’s conduct, which he said included not releasing study results that point to a connection between environmental exposures and illnesses.

“On the rare occasions when embarrassing study results are released, data are manipulated to make them unintelligible,” Coughlin said in his testimony to the House Committee on Veterans Affairs’ oversight and Investigations subcommittee.

Coughlin said during his work studying the relationship between exposure to burn pits and asthma and bronchitis among Iraq and Afghanistan veterans, his supervisor told him not to look at data regarding hospitalizations and doctors’ visits.

“When I advised him I did not want to continue as a co-investigator under these circumstances, he threatened me,” Coughlin said.

Secretary of Veterans Affairs Eric Shinseki has directed the Office of Research Oversight to review the allegations, according to the VA.

“Research on the health of Gulf War Veterans has been and continues to be a priority for VA,” the agency said in a statement. “The Department depends on this research to inform our decisions and guide our efforts in caring for Gulf War Veterans. All allegations of malfeasance are taken seriously and are investigated fully.”

During the hearing, several speakers said the VA has been slow to clearly acknowledge research that has validated Gulf War illnesses as a serious medical condition.

“There are many examples large and small of the VA minimizing Gulf War illness,” said Lea Steele, a professor of biomedical studies and director of the Veterans Health Research Program at Baylor University.

Victoria Davey, chief officer for the VA’s Office of Public Health and Environmental Hazards, told the subcommittee that the department takes the ailment seriously.

“We do not believe it is psychological,” she said.

VA doctor: Health data suppressed, manipulated

VA doctor: Health data suppressed, manipulated

By Patricia Kime - Staff writer

Posted : Wednesday Mar 13, 2013 21:25:01 EDT

The Veterans Affairs Department has suppressed and manipulated data that would support claims from Iraq, Afghanistan and Persian Gulf veterans that they’ve contracted illnesses from environmental pollution while serving in theatre, a high-level whistleblower told a House Veterans Affairs panel on Wednesday.

Dr. Steven Coughlin, an epidemiologist formerly with the VA’s Office of Public Health, told the House Veterans Oversight Committee that when results of research he conducted didn’t gel with unwritten department policies on the health consequences of oil-well fires, burn pits, pesticides, nerve agents and other pollutants, the information disappeared.

“This applies to data regarding adverse health consequences of environmental exposures, such as burn pits in Iraq and Afghanistan, and toxic exposures in the Gulf War. On the rare occasions when embarrassing study results are released, data are manipulated to make them unintelligible,” Coughlin said.

Coughlin worked on two large population studies for VA, including a Gulf War study and the National Health Study of a New Generation before he resigned in protest last December over the handling of his work, he said.

Coughlin’s laundry list of charges against the Office of Public Health also included the loss of data from a congressionally-mandated study on Gulf War family members and the failure of VA to reach out to 2,000 participants of the New Generation survey who, in the course of the survey, said they’d experienced suicidal thoughts in the weeks preceding the survey.

“Some of those veterans are now homeless or deceased,” he charged.

Coughlin was not alone in testifying that VA is failing to serve Gulf War veterans and their successors.

Similar to the government’s long battle against acknowledging the health consequences of Vietnam veterans’ exposure to Agent Orange, VA still “ignores the science of research” into Gulf War Illness that it is a serious medical condition with neurological and physical components, said Lea Steele, a professor of biomedicine at Baylor University.

She said VA’s survey of 30,000 Gulf War veterans included scores of questions on psychological stress, substance abuse and alternative medicine but none on basic symptoms of the illness, which include memory and processing difficulties, pain, fatigue and digestive disorders.

“This pattern of chronic symptoms has been well documented. … We also know that Gulf War Illness is not a stress-induced or psychiatric disorder,” Steele said.

About a third of the nearly 700,000 U.S. troops who deployed to Operation Desert Shield and Desert Storm in 1991 suffer from an array of symptoms of unknown origin. Once referred to as Gulf War Syndrome, it now commonly is known as Gulf War Illness, although the Institute of Medicine and Veterans Affairs call it Chronic Multisymptom Illness.

Coughlin told the panel that the VA’s obfuscation of data includes information on troops who deployed in the past decade. He said he was asked to include additional information when compiling tables to downplay the prevalence of respiratory illnesses like asthma and chronic bronchitis in those who served near open air burn pits.

“I urge you to initiate legislation to cure the epidemic of serious ethical problems in the VA’s Office of Public Health,” Coughlin told the congressional oversight committee.

VA officials did not respond directly to the explosive allegations. Victoria Davey, chief officer for public health at the Veterans Health Administration testified that the department has a 22-year history of treating Gulf War veterans and is committed to serving those with Gulf War Illness.

“Veterans with CMI, like all veterans enrolled in VA care, receive personalized, proactive patient-centered care,” she said.

She added that VA’s three War-Related Illness and Injury Study Centers provide specialized care tailored specifically to individual patients. More than 130,000 Gulf War veterans have received health exams under the department’s Gulf War registry program, Davey said.

Rep. Michael Coffman, R-Colo., subcommittee chair and retired a Marine who served in the Gulf War, promised further investigation.

“I find the conduct of the Veterans Administration embarrassing on this issue in terms of their treatment. If there were any Gulf War veterans in senior positions at VA, I don’t’ think we’d be here today,” he said.

Anthony Hardie, a Gulf War veteran who serves in an advisory capacity with the congressionally directed Gulf War Illness Research Medical Program, said new laws are needed to force VA to release findings, improve research and ensure that affected veterans receive the benefits and treatment they rate.

“Help right these ongoing wrongs, including comprehensive legislation and criminal sanctions for such behavior,” Hardie, who suffers from ongoing ailments related to service, said.

Researcher says officials covered up vets' health data

Researcher says officials covered up vets' health data

Kelly Kennedy, USA TODAY5:52p.m. EDT March 13, 2013

WASHINGTON — Department of Veterans Affairs officials purposely manipulate or hide data that would support the claims of veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan to prevent paying costly benefits, a former VA researcher told a House subcommittee Wednesday.

"If the studies produce results that do not support the office of public health's unwritten policy, they do not release them," said Steven Coughlin, a former epidemiologist in the VA's public health department.

"This applies to data regarding adverse health consequences of environmental exposures, such as burn pits in Iraq and Afghanistan, and toxic exposures in the Gulf War," Coughlin said. "On the rare occasions when embarrassing study results are released, data are manipulated to make them unintelligible."

Coughlin testified before the House Committee on Veterans Affairs that VA routinely minimizes research that would bolster the claims of veterans suffering from the series of symptoms associated with Gulf War illness, as well as health issues linked to exposure to large burn pits and dust in Iraq.

Victoria Davey, chief officer of VA's office of public health and environmental hazards, told the committee that veterans receive personalized, proactive care. She did not directly address critics' accusations, and instead talked about the VA's care for veterans and the "cutting-edge" research it has conducted.

Rep. Mike Coffman, R-Colo., and a Marine who served during 1991 war, called VA's handling of Gulf War illness "embarrassing." He asked VA why they changed Congress's charge to ask the IOM to do research on treatments, to which she said VA let the experts decide what should be looked at. He also asked why VA had spent money meant for Gulf War vets on other programs, but Davey said she was not prepared to respond to that question.

"If you had anyone on your panel who was a Gulf war vet, I don't think we'd be here today," Coffman said.

Lea Steele, a researcher at the Veterans Health Research Program at Baylor University, backed Coughlin's claims, saying, "In some sectors within VA, there appears to be backward movement."

Steele also charged that VA has used money meant for Gulf War illness to fund other programs. For example, $1 million went to a Lou Gehrig's disease post-mortem brain bank. The majority of samples are not from Gulf War vets, she said.

VA spent $120 million on Gulf War illness, but just five programs focused on treatments, and two of those were for psychiatric care.

"Studies consistently show Gulf War illness is not due to war trauma," she said. She told the committee that VA has not managed an effective program.

Coughlin's allegations echo previous cases in which the VA was slow to respond to health problems in veterans, ranging from exposure to the chemical defoliant Agent Orange in Vietnam, to Gulf War illness, to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and traumatic brain injury from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In 2010, Coughlin participated in a study of recent veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan that linked exposure to burn pits to greater incidences of asthma or bronchitis. His request to see their medical records was denied, Coughlin said, and the results of the study were never published.

"I was very concerned they were withholding data or misleading people," he told USA TODAY. "I don't want to speculate about why."

Coughlin said a 2012 panel of outside experts hired to help the Institute of Medicine study neurological connections to Gulf War illness was stacked in favor of those who believed the disease is psychological.

"There was no one to present the opposing side — that it's neurological," Coughlin said. "Science is self-correcting, but if people don't publish data that doesn't support an opposing hypothesis, then it's a huge problem."

The IOM research included veterans from the past 20 years, rather than just Gulf War veterans, and "lumped" their symptoms together, according to Steele. Bernard Rosof, head of the IOM committee, said they found no one cause to what they called "chronic multisymptom illness," and that there was no one treatment for all of those veterans.

Steele agreed that VA excluded data from the research, and that it was "akin to medical malpractice."

It's doubly important because today's veterans are coming back with the same symptoms as the Gulf War veterans did, he said.

"Anything that supports the position that Gulf War illness is a neurological condition is unlikely to ever be published," Coughlin said.

Anthony Hardie, a Gulf War veteran and appointed member of the Congressionally Directed Gulf War Illness Research Medical Program, said Coughlin's testimony confirms what veterans have been saying for years.

"There are staff within VA who are working against Gulf War veterans," Hardie said. "It puts focus on the specifics and details on the generalities that were already clear."

Hardie said he knows and respects VA Chief of Staff John Gingrich, and he feels, based on Coughlin's testimony, that Gingrich was lied to by his staff. Those people should be "punished with criminal sanctions," he said.

"I hope there's a shake-up at VA," said Hardie, who has been completely disabled by Gulf War illness. "I hope the leadership takes this seriously."

Coughlin will also testify that after a study determined that more than 2,000 Iraq and Afghanistan veterans said they had considered suicide during the previous two weeks, no VA official had reached out to them.

"Some of them are now deceased or homeless," Coughlin said. "No one reached out to them to see how they could help them."

Coughlin said he complained about the veterans' treatment to his supervisor, who did nothing. He then took the matter to the VA's inspector general, who decided not to pursue the case.

After the 1991 Gulf War, a series of research reports raised concerns that the veterans' children were more likely to be born with defects, and that veterans' spouses were also becoming ill. Congress mandated that the VA maintain a registry of Gulf War veterans' family members. The data has never been released, and Coughlin said he has "been advised that these results have been permanently lost."

He said his supervisors told VA's chief of staff that restructuring a survey for Gulf War veterans so it did not focus on psychosomatic issues would cost more than $1 million and delay the study for a year — neither of which was true.

Coughlin said he was told to retract his claims and admit that he had made a mistake.

He refused, adding that he kept a document trail of e-mails and reports to support his claims. "I thought, 'I don't want to work for these people,' so I left."

Coughlin, who was a senior cancer epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the director of the public health ethics program at Tulane University, said continuing to work for the VA was "against my conscience."

Whistleblower: VA Hiding Veteran Health Data

Whistleblower: VA Hiding Veteran Health Data

Mar 14, 2013

Military.com

by Bryant Jordan

A former epidemiologist for the Department of Veterans’ Affairs told lawmakers on Wednesday that the agency’s Office of Public Health buries or obscures research findings on veterans exposed to environmental toxins and hazards going as far back as the Persian Gulf War.

Steven Coughlin, who had worked more than four years for the VA before quitting over “serious ethical concerns” in December, said in testimony that leadership in the agency’s public health office did not want to find or reveal evidence that Gulf War illness and other sicknesses were linked to troops’ military experience.

"On the rare occasions when embarrassing study results are released, data are manipulated to make them unintelligible,” he told the House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations. Coughlin said his former office never released findings of a $10 million study that produced data on 60,000 Iraq and Afghan war vets – of which up to 30 percent were Gulf War vets – that revealed exposures to pesticides, oil well fires and more.

He said the results of a congressionally mandated study on Gulf War veterans and their family members also was never released, and claims he was advised that “these results have been permanently lost.”

“Anything that supports the position that Gulf War illness is a neurological condition is unlikely to ever be published,” he said. One of Couglin’s former supervisors, Dr. Aaron Schneiderman, threatened retaliation against him after he balked at the idea of deliberately leaving out certain relevant data in a research project, Coughlin said.

Victoria Davey, chief of the VA’s public health and environmental hazards office, told lawmakers that the office follows strict guidelines in analyzing and publishing its work. However, but she never directly addressed Coughlin’s allegations.

In a statement released after the hearing on Wednesday, the VA said VA Secretary Erik Shinseki has ordered the VA’s Office of Research Oversight to review Coughlin’s claims, including the alleged threat.

Any retaliation against VA employees is against the law and is not tolerated, the statement said.

“The Department of Veterans Affairs has a decade’s long history of conducting world-class research studies that meet accepted and rigorous scientific standards,” the statement read. “All allegations of malfeasance are taken seriously and are investigated fully.

Coughlin said Schneiderman told him not to look at data regarding hospitalizations and doctors’ visits while he was working on research into the health effects of burn pits on troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars have reported serious respiratory problems that they believe are connected to inhaling smoke from the massive trash burn pits found in combat zones.

Coughlin told the House panel that when he said he did not want to continue in the project under those conditions, Schneiderman threatened him.

As with Vietnam veterans before them, large numbers of Gulf War veterans became ill in the years following the 1991 war. Those Gulf War veterans were told their problems were psychological.

The VA has said it does recognize there are health issues associated with Gulf War service, and notes that Shinseki formed a task force to conduct a comprehensive review of VA programs to help improve care and services for Gulf War vets.

The VA says in 2010 it recognized nine diseases linked to experience in the Gulf War.

According to Lea Steele, an epidemiologist with the Institute of Biomedical Studies at Baylor University, the VA still has serious problems in its approach – and funding – of Gulf War research.

She told Congress on Wednesday that scientific advances over the past 10 years have provided important insights into Gulf War illness. Steele has been studying Gulf War illness since 1998.

“After so many years of waiting, there is finally some hope for Gulf War veterans,” she said. “Hope that they will have answers that are long overdue and hope that treatments will be found that can meaningfully improve their health and their lives.”

“What is not acceptable is federal research that is poorly informed, based on notions developed in the early years after the Gulf War rather than on the scientific evidence now available,” she said.

VA has reportedly spent $120 million over the past decade on Gulf War illness research, but some of that money never went to Gulf War research, Steele said.

In one instance, $10 million was earmarked for something called a “Gulf War Biorepository Trust” that had nothing to do with Gulf War veterans. It was, instead, used to fund a brain bank for veterans who had ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s disease.

As of 2010, only one of the 60 brains in the brain bank had come from a Gulf War veteran, Steele said. The others were those of older veterans.

VA Covered Up Data on Mental Health

Whistleblower: Veterans Affairs Covered Up Data on Mental Health, Gulf War Syndrome

Mar 13, 2013 1:09 PM EDT

A former Veterans Affairs researcher turned whistleblower tells Congress the department repeatedly withheld data on Gulf War syndrome and neglected suicidal vets. Jamie Reno reports.

The Department of Veterans Affairs routinely disseminated false information about the health of America’s veterans, withheld research showing a link between nerve gas and Gulf War syndrome, rushed studies out the door without taking recommended fixes by an independent board, and failed to offer crucial care to veterans who came forward as suicidal.

These are the allegations of Steven Coughlin, an epidemiologist who worked at the VA’s Office of Public Health until he resigned last year, citing “serious ethical issues.” On Wednesday Coughlin will testify at a congressional hearing on the health of Gulf War veterans.

“What I saw [at VA] was both embarrassing and astonishing. I couldn’t stay any longer,” says Coughlin, who left the VA in December, just four and a half years into the job.

Coughlin was previously associate professor of epidemiology and director of the program in public-health ethics at Tulane University and is a former chair of the writing group that prepared the ethics guidelines for the American College of Epidemiology.

In an interview with The Daily Beast, Coughlin said that whenever he spoke out about any alleged unethical activity, his bosses “intimidated and admonished” him. He says they first tried to silence him after he spoke out about a major health study of 60,000 Iraq and Afghanistan veterans. Coughlin believed that the nearly 2,000 subjects who self-identified as suicidal should have been checked up on afterward by mental-health clinicians. Instead, he says, the researchers interviewed them and moved on.

Coughlin says his supervisors also frequently “obscured the facts” about the impact of toxic exposures on troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and the causes of Gulf War illness.

“Many of those veterans are now homeless or deceased,” he says. “It’s very unfortunate. My supervisors did all they could to block my efforts.”

After getting nowhere with his superiors, Coughlin says, he contacted the chairman of the VA’s Institutional Review Board and the VA inspector-general to request that the study be put on hold until his supervisors could identify clinicians to call back suicidal veterans.

“That’s when all hell broke loose,” he says. “My supervisors tried to remove me from the study, and I received a written admonition. It was shocking. All I was trying to do was help ensure the safety of the veterans participating in our study.”

Coughlin says he was unsuccessful in getting OPH to address the problem in the study of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans, but he managed to incorporate clinician callbacks in a separate Gulf War survey, and he says those calls “saved lives.”

The VA declined to comment specifically for this story, but in a statement released Wednesday, it said the department has a "decades long history of conducting world-class research studies that meet accepted and rigorous scientific standards." The statement, which noted that "all allegations of malfeasance are taken seriously and are investigated fully," also said that the Obama Administration in 2010 recognized nine new diseases as associated with Gulf War Illness.

"VA agrees with Gulf War veterans that there are health issues associated with service in the Gulf War," the statement read. "That is why Secretary (Eric) Shinseki formed a Task Force to conduct a comprehensive review of VA's programs to help improve the care and services we provide to Gulf War Veterans. We will continue to learn and examine ways to improve treatment, process claims, and better care for these veterans.”

Coughlin says his supervisors also frequently “obscured the facts” about the impact of toxic exposures on troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and the causes of Gulf War illness, which afflicted as many as 250,000 veterans, according to the Institute of Medicine.

While the cause of Gulf War illness has been debated for years, a number of peer-reviewed scientific studies have concluded that it is a neurological condition caused by exposure to nerve gas, pesticides, and other toxic elements.

However, says Coughlin, “the people I worked for refuse to release any information to the public that reaches that conclusion. They insist on holding on to the outdated theory that Gulf War illness is psychosomatic.”

He says there is VA data on adverse health consequences of toxic exposures in the Gulf War that “the public has never seen, and I’m sure will never see.”

He says his supervisors paid the Institute of Medicine $1 million to review the latest literature on Gulf War illness, but the first five outside experts they invited to the IOM committee all reported that it was psychiatric and not neurological. “This understandably outraged Gulf War advocates,” Coughlin says. “It was so obviously biased.”

Anthony Hardie, a Gulf War veteran and advocate who will also be testifying at the congressional hearing, tells The Daily Beast that Coughlin’s story “only confirms what Gulf War veterans have believed all along: this cabal of federal bureaucrats and contractors who continue to obfuscate, manipulate, and lie remain a serious obstacle to ill Gulf War veterans’ legitimate quest for treatments and justice.”

Coughlin says the OPH’s 2009–10 National Health Study of a New Generation of U.S. Veterans, which targeted 60,000 post-9/11 veterans, cost $10 million, plus the salaries of those who worked on it. He says 20 percent to 30 percent of these veterans were also Gulf War veterans, and the study produced data regarding their exposures to pesticides, oil-well fires, and pyridostigmine-bromide pills.

OPH never released any data from the study, or even the fact that it exists, Coughlin says. The VA’s official position on pyridostigmine-bromide pills, which the Department of Defense says Gulf War veterans took as protection against nerve gas, did not cause Gulf War illness. But a 2008 study by Beatrice Golomb at the University of California, San Diego, “thoroughly, conclusively shows that this class of chemicals actually are a cause of illness in Gulf War veterans.”

Coughlin also says the OHP released a major survey on Gulf War veterans without fixing it as recommended by the Research Advisory Committee on Gulf War Veterans’ Illnesses, which was mandated by Congress in 2002. Coughlin says his supervisors told the VA that implementing the fixes would cost the government $1 million and delay the study for a year or longer.

“None of this was true. It would not have cost nearly that much to restart the study,” Coughlin says. “But as a result of the false statements made by my supervisors, the chief of staff ordered the survey to proceed without the changes.”

Coughlin says he’ll ask Congress to initiate legislation to cure the “epidemic” of ethical problems at the OPH and urge the committee to direct the VA to identify procedures to ensure that veterans who participate in large-scale epidemiologic studies receive appropriate follow-up care to prevent possible suicides.

“The VA is the nation’s largest health-care provider, and these large studies cost taxpayers tens of millions of dollars and are so important to veterans’ health,” says Coughlin, who is currently looking for another job. “My only motivation for coming forward is to help veterans. That’s the only reason I paid for my own flight to come to Washington. I think the attention from the House committee and the media will lead to positive changes. It will hopefully help veterans.”

Like The Daily Beast on Facebook and follow us on Twitter for updates all day long.

Jamie Reno, an award-winning correspondent for Newsweek for 17 years, has also written for The New York Times, Sports Illustrated, Rolling Stone, People, Men’s Journal, ESPN, Los Angeles Times, TV Guide, MSNBC, Newsmax, Entertainment Weekly, and USA Today. Reno, who’s won more than 85 writing awards, was the lead reporter on a Newsweek series on the 9/11 terrorist attacks that earned him and his colleagues the National Magazine Award for General Excellence, the highest award in magazine journalism. Reno, who’s also an acclaimed author, singer-songwriter, and 15-year cancer survivor, lives in San Diego with his wife, Gabriela, and their daughter, Mandy.

For inquiries, please contact The Daily Beast at editorial@thedailybeast.com.

Phoenix Mayor Greg Stanton is a gun grabber???

Source

Phoenix Mayor Stanton outlines aggressive plan to fight gun violence

By Dustin Gardiner and Amy B Wang The Republic | azcentral.com Fri Mar 1, 2013 4:42 PM

Phoenix Mayor Greg Stanton on Thursday outlined an aggressive plan to combat violence in the city, vowing to stage what he called the largest gun buyback in Arizona history and double the number of police officers in schools citywide.

The mayor’s comments during his second State of the City speech stoked the debate over firearm safety a month after a string of deadly shootings killed four people and thrust Phoenix into the national news.

“Recently, we have felt pain and grief too often and too deeply,” Stanton said, naming several shooting victims, including a lawyer and businessman. “Violence has no place in our city.”

Police Chief Daniel V. Garcia said Phoenix will destroy the guns, an approach often criticized by gun-rights groups. A state law that took effect in August is designed to prohibit Arizona police agencies from destroying weapons they confiscate, but Garcia said the law does not apply to voluntary gun buybacks.

Jennifer Longdon, a gun-violence survivor who is paralyzed from a spinal cord injury, was sitting in the audience for Stanton’s speech. She wrote on Facebook that she began to sob “like a baby” when he made the announcement.

“Every gun we take off the streets is one gun that won’t rob a son like mine of his healthy, able-bodied mother,” wrote Longdon, who uses a wheelchair. “I wonder how different my life would be if I had been attacked by knives or bats or fists. (Guns) do damage that no other tool or weapon can ever hope to inflict.”

Stanton noted the politics surrounding such a hotly contested issue — his speech instantaneously sparked protests from gun-rights advocates on social media. He said the buyback effort would make the city safer without curtailing the Second Amendment rights of responsible gun owners.

“Why risk the controversy?” Stanton asked. “Because I respect Chief Garcia, who told me, ‘Every unwanted gun we take off the street is one less gun out there to harm our officers or hurt our residents.’”

Gun violence and school safety were just a piece of Stanton’s speech, which focused on Phoenix’s need to develop a modern, diverse economy that can weather the ups and downs of the real-estate market. He spoke about other familiar hurdles: building a vibrant downtown, larger transit system and skilled workforce.

But the emphasis on gun violence was the mayor’s boldest new policy initiative debuted for the year ahead. It will likely continue to draw jeers from some right-leaning leaders who view buybacks as an ineffective tool for reducing violence.

“These criminals are really going to be running down there to turn in their guns for a Safeway card,” joked Charles Heller, spokesman for the Arizona Citizens Defense League, a non-profit that advocates for gun rights. “What the city of Phoenix is doing is interfering in the market.”

The buyback program, a partnership between Phoenix police and the non-profit Arizonans for Gun Safety, allows residents to drop off unwanted weapons with no questions asked. The effort is being funded with $100,000 from an anonymous donor, Stanton said.

Police officers will host the buybacks every Saturday during May, except Memorial Day weekend. The city will return stolen guns to their owners, and the police will keep those they suspect were used in a crime for investigation.

The program will compensate gun owners for their weapons, but officials have not yet determined the form and amount of payment. With past buybacks in Phoenix, Garcia said owners typically received about $100 per firearm.

Stanton also announced a new school-safety program that seeks to double the number of police officers in public, private and charter schools across the city.

“Education can only succeed if kids feels safe at school,” Stanton said, adding that he and Garcia had met with Phoenix-area superintendents and other education leaders earlier in the week. “We heard them loud and clear. The risk of school violence is one we cannot take.”

Under the program, each Phoenix police precinct commander would meet with superintendents in their district at least twice a year. The plan also proposes that districts hire off-duty police officers to patrol their schools as “school safety officers,” less expensive alternatives to traditional school-resource officers.

“We don’t need Steven Seagal to keep our kids safe,” said Stanton, a jab at Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who recently announced that the action star would help train his volunteer posse to patrol schools.

According to the city, school-safety officers would cost less than half of what traditional resource officers would — about $42,000 per year to staff a high school and $35,000 a year to staff a middle or elementary school. These costs would include coverage for seven hours a day, five days a week. That sounds like an outright LIE!!!!! Most Phoenix area police officers start at about $50,000 a year, which is about $25/hr, before benefits. And of course many cops make $100,000 or more a year, before you add in the benefits.]

Like traditional school-resource officers, school-safety officers would be responsible for monitoring student activity, training staff on safety mandates and enforcing criminal laws on campus. [Do we really need a FULL TIME cop on every high school and elementary school campus who is making between $50,000 and $100,000 a year before benefits to enforce the law??? I doubt it. Even if we do need one we could certainly get by with a rent-a-cop that is being paid $10 an hour, instead of a full time Phoenix police officer who is being paid between $25 and $75 an hour]

“This is no-nonsense community policing — boots on the ground ... We need real cops doing real police work,” Stanton said. [And real police work is NOT handcuffing 10 year olds for chewing bubble gum or talking in class. Real police work is hunting down dangerous criminals, something these Phoenix police officers who are working at their cushy school resource officer job won't be doing]

US citing security to censor more public records

US citing security to censor more public records, analysis finds

Published March 11, 2013

Associated Press

The U.S. government, led by the Pentagon and CIA, censored in the name of national security files that the public requested last year under the Freedom of Information Act more often than at any time since President Barack Obama took office, according to a new analysis by The Associated Press.

Overall, the Obama administration last year answered its highest number of requests so far for copies of government documents, emails, photographs and more, and it slightly reduced its backlog of requests from previous years. But it more often cited legal provisions allowing the government to keep records or parts of its records secret, especially a rule intended to protect national security.

The AP's analysis showed the government released all or portions of the information that citizens, journalists, businesses and others sought at about the same rate as the previous three years. It turned over all or parts of the records in about 65 percent of requests. It fully rejected more than one-third of requests, a slight increase over 2011, including cases when it couldn't find records, a person refused to pay for copies or the request was determined to be improper.

The government's responsiveness under the FOIA is widely viewed as a barometer of the federal offices' transparency. Under the law, citizens and foreigners can compel the government to turn over copies of federal records for zero or little cost. Anyone who seeks information through the law is generally supposed to get it unless disclosure would hurt national security, violate personal privacy or expose business secrets or confidential decision-making in certain areas.

The AP's review comes at the start of the second term for Obama, who promised during his first week in office that the nation's signature open-records law would be "administered with a clear presumption: In the face of doubt, openness prevails." The review examined figures from the largest federal departments and agencies. Sunday was the start of Sunshine Week, when news organizations promote open government and freedom of information.

White House spokesman Eric Schultz said in a statement that during the past year, the government "processed more requests, decreased the backlog, improved average processing times and disclosed more information pro-actively." Schultz said the improvements "represent the efforts of agencies across the government to meet the president's commitment to openness. While there is more work to be done, this past year demonstrates that agencies are responding to the president's call for greater transparency."

In a year of intense public interest over deadly U.S. drones, the raid that killed Usama bin Laden, terror threats and more, the government cited national security to withhold information at least 5,223 times — a jump over 4,243 such cases in 2011 and 3,805 cases in Obama's first year in office. The secretive CIA last year became even more secretive: Nearly 60 percent of 3,586 requests for files were withheld or censored for that reason last year, compared with 49 percent a year earlier.

Other federal agencies that invoked the national security exception included the Pentagon, Director of National Intelligence, NASA, Office of Management and Budget, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, Federal Communications Commission and the departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Energy, Homeland Security, Justice, State, Transportation, Treasury and Veterans Affairs.

U.S. courts are loath to overrule the administration whenever it cites national security. A federal judge, Colleen McMahon of New York, in January ruled against The New York Times and the American Civil Liberties Union to see records about the government's legal justification for drone attacks and other methods it has used to kill terrorism suspects overseas, including American citizens. She cited an "Alice in Wonderland" predicament in which she was expected to determine what information should be revealed but unable to challenge the government's secrecy claim. Part of her ruling was sealed and made available only to the government's lawyers.

"I find myself stuck in a paradoxical situation in which I cannot solve a problem because of contradictory constraints and rules — a veritable Catch-22," the judge wrote. "I can find no way around the thicket of laws and precedents that effectively allow the executive branch of our government to proclaim as perfectly lawful certain actions that seem on their face incompatible with our Constitution and laws, while keeping the reasons for their conclusion a secret."

The AP could not determine whether the administration was abusing the national security exemption or whether the public was asking for more documents about sensitive subjects. Nearly half the Pentagon's 2,390 denials last year under that clause came from the National Security Agency, which monitors Internet traffic and phone calls worldwide.

"FOIA is an imperfect law, and I don't think that's changed over the last four years since Obama took office," said Alexander Abdo, an ACLU staff attorney for its national security project. "We've seen a meteoric rise in the number of claims to protect secret law, the government's interpretations of laws or its understanding of its own authority. In some ways, the Obama administration is actually even more aggressive on secrecy than the Bush administration."

The Obama administration also more frequently invoked the law's "deliberative process" exception to withhold records describing decision-making behind the scenes. Obama had directed agencies to use it less often, but the number of such cases had surged after his first year in office to more than 71,000. After back-to-back years when figures steadily declined, the government cited that reason 66,353 times last year to keep records or parts of records secret.

Even as the Obama administration continued increasing its efforts answering FOIA requests, people submitted more than 590,000 requests for information in fiscal 2012 — an increase of less than 1 percent over the previous year. Including leftover requests from previous years, the government responded to more requests than ever in 2012 — more than 603,000 — a 5 percent increase for the second consecutive year.

The Homeland Security Department, which includes offices that deal with immigration files, received more than twice as many requests for records — 190,589 new requests last year — as any other agency, and it answered significantly more requests than it did in 2011. Other agencies, including the State Department, National Transportation Safety Board and Nuclear Regulatory Commission performed worse last year. The State Department, for example, answered only 57 percent of its requests, down from 75 percent a year earlier.

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services drove a dramatic increase in the number of times DHS censored immigration records under exceptions to police files containing personal information and law enforcement techniques. The agency invoked those exemptions more than 136,000 times in 2012, compared with more than 75,000 a year earlier. Even though USCIS is not a law-enforcement agency, officials used the exceptions specifically reserved for law enforcement.

The AP's analysis also found that the government generally took longer to answer requests. Some agencies, such as the Health and Human Services Department, took less time than the previous year to turn over files. But at the State Department, for example, even urgent requests submitted under a fast-track system covering breaking news or events when a person's life was at stake took an average two years to wait for files.

Journalists and others who need information quickly to report breaking news, for example, fared worse last year. The rate at which the government granted so-called expedited processing, which moves an urgent request to the front of the line for a speedy answer, fell from 24 percent in 2011 to 17 percent last year. The CIA denied every such request last year.

Under increased budget pressure across the government, agencies more often insisted that people pay search and copying fees. It waived costs in 59 percent of requests, generally when the amount was negligible or the release of the information is in the public interest, a decline from 64 percent of cases a year earlier. At the Treasury Department, which faced questions about its role in auto bailouts and stimulus programs during Obama's first term, only one in five requests were processed at no charge. A year earlier, it granted more than 75 percent of fee waivers. The CIA denied every request last year to waive fees.

The 33 agencies that AP examined were: Agency for International Development, CIA, Agriculture Department, Commerce Department, Consumer Product Safety Commission, Defense Department, Education Department, Energy Department, Department of Health and Human Services, Department of Homeland Security, Department of Housing and Urban Development, Interior Department, Justice Department, Labor Department, State Department, Transportation Department, Treasury Department, Department of Veterans Affairs, Environmental Protection Agency, Federal Communications Commission, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, Federal Election Commission, Federal Trade Commission, NASA, National Science Foundation, National Transportation Safety Board, Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Office of Management and Budget, Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Securities and Exchange Commission, Small Business Administration, the Social Security Administration and the U.S. Postal Service.

Four agencies that were included in AP's previous analysis of FOIA performance did not publicly release their 2012 reports. They included the Office of National Drug Control Policy, the Office of Science and Technology Policy, the Council on Environmental Quality and the Office of Personnel Management.

White House censors more public records, citing security concerns

Mar 11, 2013, 1:15pm EDT Updated: Mar 11, 2013, 1:30pm EDT

White House censors more public records, citing security concerns

Staff Washington Business Journal

The Obama administration is citing security concerns more often as a reason to keep the public in the dark, according to a new analysis by The Associated Press, Federal News Radio reports.

The Pentagon, intelligence community, NASA, Office of Management and Budget and several other agencies invoked the national security exemption last year in rejecting Freedom of Information Act requests.

The government is answering more open-records requests overall, having released two-thirds of the documents requested by the public last year. The other third included cases where agencies couldn't find records, a person refused to pay for copies or the request was improper.

Media blackout: Obama censors more documents, citing national security

Media blackout: Obama censors more documents, citing national security

By Susan Crabtree

The Washington Times

Monday, March 11, 2013

Amid intense public interest over drones, the Osama bin Laden raid and other terrorism-related news, the U.S. government cited national security as its reason for refusing to release documents requested by the public last year more often than in any year since President Obama took office, according to a study released Monday.

The Associated Press reviewed and analyzed the Obama administration’s level of responsiveness to Freedom of Information Act requests, giving the administration credit for answering its highest number of requests for copies of government files and slightly reducing the backlog of requests from previous years.

But the survey also faulted government agencies, led by the Pentagon and the CIA, for increasing the number of times they invoked legal reasons to keep records secret or redact them.

According to the AP analysis, the U.S. government last year turned over all or parts of the records requested in roughly 65 percent of requests, while rejecting more than one-third of requests, a slight increase over 2011. Over the last fiscal year, the government cited national security to withhold information at least 5,223 times — an increase over 4,243 such cases in 2011 and 3,805 cases in 2010.

Not surprisingly, the CIA was the most secretive agency. It denied 60 percent of 3,586 requests for information, compared to 49 percent a year earlier.

The stepped-up secrecy flies in the face of Mr. Obama’s pledge during his first week in office to run the “most transparent government in history.” He promised at the time that the nation’s open-records law would be “administered with a clear presumption — in the face of doubt, openness prevails.”

Watchdogs organizations and others who regularly make FOIA requests offered some praise for the Obama administration’s progress on open-government issues, but they say government agencies still have an abysmal record when it comes to responding to public requests for information.

Tom Blanton of the National Security Archive at George Washington University said Mr. Obama has declassified such items as the national intelligence budget, the so-called “torture memos” and information about the Justice Department’s warrantless wiretapping program. But the openness on big issues has not filtered down to the agencies dealing with FOIA requests.

“We have just not seen the agencies respond to the Obama and [Attorney General] Eric Holder presumption of disclosure. … You see a real hangover of regular bureaucratic behavior,” he said.

Others point to a growing trend among government agencies to refuse to waive the costs of responding to request, even for those applicants whose eligibility for a public-interest fee waiver seems clear.

The Obama administration “has been responsible for a growing trend in which agencies issue baseless denials of public-interest fee waiver requests,” said Julie Murray, an attorney at the watchdog group Public Citizen.

Melanie Ann Pustay, who heads the Justice Department’s Office of Information Policy, on Monday defended the administration’s record on transparency.

Even though agencies received more requests than in previous years, Ms. Pustay said, government officials “rose to the challenge” and processed more requests than ever before. The government as a whole processed more than 665,000 request in fiscal year 2012, which is 34,000 more than they processed in fiscal year 2011 and 65,000 more than they processed two years ago.

As a result, the government reduced its backlog of pending requests by 14 percent over the last fiscal year and 45 percent since Mr. Obama took office, she said.

Detective Saldate gets confessions from unconscious people on hospital gurneys???

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Convictions of woman on Ariz. death row overturned

By Michael Kiefer The Republic | azcentral.com Thu Mar 14, 2013 10:39 PM

Debra Milke was a celebrated villain of 1989, a woman accused and convicted of dressing up her 4-year-old son to see Santa Claus and, instead, sending him off to be shot execution-style in a desert wash.

She is one of three women on Arizona’s death row.

But on Thursday, a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals threw out her death sentence and murder conviction because the trial court refused to let her introduce evidence that might have discredited her supposed confession.

The Phoenix police detective who claimed Milke confessed to him had a history of lying to grand juries and extracting confessions even from unconscious suspects on hospital gurneys, according to the court opinion. There were no witnesses to the confession, and it was not recorded. Milke denied she ever confessed.

The 9th Circuit asked the U.S. District Court to send the case to the Arizona court system for a new trial and ordered that the detective’s personnel files be made available for Milke’s defense.

Assistant Arizona Attorney General Jeffrey Zick said his office will likely ask a larger panel of 9th Circuit judges to rehear the appeal before taking it to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Milke was tried and convicted in Maricopa County Superior Court, but a spokesman for the County Attorney’s Office said it would defer to the Arizona attorney general pending the appeal.

According to Milke’s attorney, Lori Voepel, Milke’s response when she heard of the opinion was, “Are you kidding?”

Milke, 49, was charged with first-degree murder, accused of conspiring with two acquaintances to kill her son Christopher in 1989.

According to court records and media accounts, Milke found the child to be an inconvenience and asked James Styers, her roommate, to kill him. She dressed the child in his favorite clothes and cowboy boots and told him that he was going to Metrocenter mall to see Santa Claus, court records said.

Another man, Roger Scott, drove Christopher and Styers to a pizzeria, and then to the desert near 99th Avenue and Happy Valley Road, where Styers shot the boy three times in the back of the head, according to court records.

Milke, Styers and Scott were each sentenced to death — and all three cases have languished in the federal court system. Styers’ conviction and sentence are pending before the appellate court. Scott lost his case in the 9th Circuit and is appealing to the U.S. Supreme Court, but he is near the end of his appeals.

At issue in Milke’s case is the confession supposedly obtained by now-retired Phoenix police Detective Armando Saldate. According to the 9th Circuit opinion, Saldate claimed Scott implicated Milke in the murder. Saldate then arrested Milke, and after a one-on-one interrogation that was not recorded, Saldate claimed he had extracted a confession. Milke always denied having confessed. Neither Scott nor Styers testified against Milke.

During her trial, Milke’s attorneys tried to subpoena Saldate’s personnel record, but the subpoena was quashed by the court. [So much for your right to a fair trial]

What the personnel record would have shown was that Saldate had a history of misconduct that could have been used to call into question his credibility.

According to the 9th Circuit ruling, he had falsified information to a grand jury, extracted confessions from people drifting in and out of consciousness in hospital rooms and continued to interrogate suspects even after they invoked their Miranda rights to an attorney. [That is a rather routine violation by the police of our Constitutional rights. Every time I am stop by the police I take the 5th and refuse to answer police questions. And every time the police respond by telling me I don't have any 5th Amendment rights. The police are corrupt to the core!!!!]

Once, he stopped a female motorist for a faulty taillight and then “took liberties” with her, letting her go without a citation after she promised to meet him later for sex. She didn’t show up for the arranged date and, instead, reported Saldate.

Saldate could not immediately be reached for comment.

The case was tried by now-retired Deputy County Attorney Noel Levy, the prosecutor who sent alleged “Snaggletooth Killer” Ray Krone to death row. Krone was exonerated after 10 years in prison. [Ray Krone was the 100th person in which DNA testing proved he was framed by the Phoenix Police for murder. Ray Krone did not take the 5th and talked to the Phoenix Police in an attempt to prove his innocence. I talked to Krone about this when he spoke at the ASU College of Law and Ray Krone told me the police twisted his words around claiming he was guilty. Ray told me he would never talk to the police again in an attemp to prove his innocence because the police are corrupt. He will always take the 5th now.]

In the 9th Circuit opinion handed down Thursday, written by Chief Judge Alex Kozinski, the court ruled that Milke’s confession to Saldate was illegally extracted.

The court did not throw out the confession altogether but ordered that the potentially exculpatory material in Saldate’s file be provided so that the jury can weigh it against the supposed confession.

The military's Chicken Littles want you to think the sky is falling

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Think Again: The Pentagon

The military's Chicken Littles want you to think the sky is falling. Don't believe them: America has never been safer.

BY THOMAS P.M. BARNETT | MARCH/APRIL 2013

"The Pentagon Is Always Fighting the Last War."

Just the opposite. The Pentagon, as former U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates derisively pointed out, has a bad case of "next-war-itis." With Iraq now ancient history and Afghanistan winding down, all four of the major U.S. military services today prefer to imagine distant, future, high-tech shoot-'em-ups against China (er, well-equipped adversaries) over dealing with the world as we find it, which is still full of those nasty little wars. As Marine Corps general and outgoing Central Command boss James Mattis once told me, "I find it intellectually embarrassing that people want to hug the Chinese [and exclaim], 'Oh, thank God we have another peer competitor at last! Now we can go back to building the weapons that we always wanted to build.'"

Some of these efforts can verge on the ridiculous. I recently sat through an Air Force briefing during which super-empowered individuals were portrayed as thiiiiiis close to being able to wipe out humanity with a genetic weapon or to kill off -- get this -- more than half the U.S. population through electromagnetic-pulse attacks that send us collectively back to subsistence farming (think of the TV drama Revolution). Another scenario posited a "one-machine" future when, naturally, the "beast" starts thinking for itself and can turn on humanity (here, take your pick of Terminator's Skynet or the Matrix trilogy). That's the beautiful thing about Armageddon-like future wars: They could happen tomorrow, or they could never happen. The only thing we know for sure is that we're totally unprepared!

If you thought all these plotlines portray a Pentagon in search of the right justifying villain, then you'd be right. But remember, amid all this institutional angst, what's really being fought over are slices of a $530 billion budgetary pie that many experts think should be shrunk by one-fifth over the rest of this decade.

The first services to be infected were "Big War Blue" -- the Navy and Air Force -- as both felt slighted in the post-9/11 long war against radical terrorist networks, seeing in its unfolding an existential threat: a long-term emphasis on "Small Wars Green" involving mainly the Army, the Marine Corps, and special operators like SEAL Team 6. Now, however, even the Army and the Marine Corps are beginning to catch the fever. So while the Navy and Air Force have been fighting harder for longer because they've gotten the short end of the stick for the last decade, the Army and Marine Corps are now running hard from the long war too, looking to make sure they don't get discarded like Iraq and Afghanistan.

After years of acting like it was on top of everything, the U.S. military is back in Chicken Little mode and, man, is that sky ever fallin'. According to Andrew Krepinevich, a longtime advisor to the Pentagon, America either stands up militarily to the Chinese now or risks a "latter-day Chinese Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere of Influence." How does the Pentagon find those dollars? Krepinevich is blunt: "The big bill payer here is the ground forces."

All those gripes aside, next-war-itis is a good thing. After all, no American interests are served by having the U.S. military be the last to wake up to a genuine national security threat. And because these crystal-ball exercises are far more art than science, a certain number of bad bets will be placed. But those cost a great deal less than wars the military is ill-prepared to fight -- which is why the Pentagon is always fighting the wars yet to come, and the wars that will never be.

"The U.S. Military Still Needs to Be Able to Wage Two Wars at Once."

Not anymore. Or at least not for the foreseeable future. The two-wars concept, on some level, echoes World War II's European and Pacific theaters. During the Cold War, it became a matter of keeping the Soviets boxed in on both ends, lest the dominoes fall (as the United States feared in Southeast Asia). When the Reds went away, the Pentagon started calling them "major regional contingencies," but everyone soon realized that was just a bureaucratic euphemism for North Korea and Iraq (then later Iran) -- not exactly your daddy's world war.

So why has this Cold War artifact lasted so long inside the Pentagon? It created a force-sizing principle -- America needs X many troops/ships/aircraft/etc. -- that could be presented to Congress to justify a defense budget "floor" once the all-mighty Soviets were no more. Until the 9/11 attacks, it was just a theory. Now, after the United States just spent the better part of a decade waging two modest-sized wars and saw how they burned out the force, neither Congress nor the American people is in the mood to entertain the fantasy of simultaneously toppling Iran's mullahs in the Persian Gulf and duking it out with the Chinese in East Asia. So consider this one dead and buried until the United States reaches some semblance of fiscal order.

America's "pivot" from Southwest Asia (so long, Iraq and Afghanistan!) to East Asia (hello, China!) represents more than just Barack Obama's strategic rationale for tying off his predecessor's military adventures. In concluding two land wars that enlarged his two armies -- the Army and the Marine Corps -- the president can reduce their superexpensive manpower (keeping just one soldier in Afghanistan costs roughly $1 million a year) even as he shifts U.S. military and diplomatic efforts toward the Pacific.

All that "supplemental" spending on the Army and the far smaller Marine Corps to fund Iraq and Afghanistan depressed the Navy and Air Force shares of the procurement budget throughout the 2000s. For example, the Air Force's share of the defense budget across the 1990s averaged 31 to 32 percent. Now it stands just above 27 percent. Meanwhile, the Army picked up almost 2 percentage points that it's now sure to lose. For the services, the "pivot" has a wholly different meaning.

Plus, slotting in still-reddish Beijing for the old Red Menace is a stone that kills two birds: A Democratic administration avoids the "weak-on-defense" charge (see, we're standing up to those dastardly Chinese!) while sidestepping any serious military responsibility for what remains of, or is still to come from, the so-called Arab Spring (Syria, anyone?).

Obama's new secretaries of state and defense -- both Vietnam War veterans turned anti-war senators -- could not send a clearer signal in this regard: America doesn't do land wars (read: quagmires) anymore. Instead, the country returns to what scholars call "offshore balancing" and occasionally striking from a safe distance. "And how many troops/ships/aircraft/etc. does that take?" asks Congress. "Ah," says the Pentagon, "have we briefed you recently on Chinese military developments?"

Of course, the Pentagon will never admit exactly what is going on. No, that would be perceived as giving a green light to Antagonist B if America ever tussled with Antagonist A. Check out the recent tap dance by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin Dempsey, over the White House's 2013 budget submission:

There's been much made -- and I'm sure will be made -- about whether this strategy moves away from a force structure explicitly designed to fight and win two wars simultaneously. Fundamentally, our strategy has always been about our ability to respond to global contingencies wherever and whenever they occur. This won't change.… We can and will always be able to do more than one thing at a time. More importantly, wherever we are confronted and in whatever sequence, we will win.

Got that Beijing/Tehran/Pyongyang?

"The U.S. Navy Is Too Small."

Not necessarily. Yes, the U.S. Navy has dwindled greatly from the Reagan-era dream of a "600-ship navy," but its slow slide to today's approximately 290 "battle-force ships" is no cause for alarm -- even with all that talk about the future of American power being in the South China Sea. To paraphrase Obama's election-debate comeback, "This ain't your grandfather's 1917 navy." The combined agility, firepower, and operational reach of today's seaborne force dwarf anything America enjoyed in the last century. Military expert John Pike notes that current U.S. aircraft carriers are 10 times more powerful than they were just two decades ago, thanks to precision munitions.

So, yeah, when you can deliver that much force that accurately -- and from such incredible distances -- the notion of steaming into some rogue regime's inner harbor to teach it some manners is excruciatingly quaint. And if Beijing wants to stockpile budget-draining capital ships -- even aircraft carriers -- then Mao bless 'em, because the U.S. Navy is already evolving past last century's paradigm toward this century's version of the many, the cheap(er), and the unmanned.

The Navy's latest vision of war, concocted with the help of D.C. think tanks and the Air Force, is the Air-Sea Battle concept. It says, in so many words, that the Navy won't let China's military prevent it from accessing some future East Asian crisis or war. So when China starts fielding its first aircraft carrier (a Soviet retread built in the 1980s) and its superscary carrier-killing missiles, the U.S. Navy starts testing its first carrier-capable unmanned combat aircraft (what else to call it when it sports an F-16's engine?). And if China forces the Navy into a standoff posture, then guess what? America comes up with a technological breakthrough that turns every carrier-launched strike force into another Doolittle raid -- as in, No pilots? No return? No problem. We'll become the kamikazes, only there won't be any "we" inside our "suicide" drones.

As for the Navy's pitch in recent years about needing to police the "global commons," let's be honest and say that bad-actor behavior on the high seas doesn't amount to much. Heck, put two former special-ops snipers fore and aft of a cargo ship, and that's all the security you need to handle your average Somali pirate crew -- as in, bang, bang, you're dead.

So have no fears about the Navy. It'll remain "big" enough.

"So the Wars of the Future Will Be Unmanned."

I didn't say that. Yes, deep inside the Pentagon, some 50-pound brains are dreaming up the Terminator-style wars of tomorrowland (typically waged against the Chinese hoards … of robots and unmanned vehicles). And yes, drones increasingly rule the skies. But seriously, think about that for a minute. What exactly do such forces fight over -- decisively -- in this rock 'em, sock 'em manner? Other than just blowing up each other's high-tech toys? If, at the end of the day, there's something truly valuable to contest, a country's manned forces still need to occupy and control it; otherwise, nothing is achieved. Wake me up when drones can set up local government elections in Afghanistan or reconfigure Mali's judicial system.

So, yes, drones are spectacular for finding and targeting bad actors (and other drones, eventually), but if your robot war requires a no man's land to unfold (say, the tribal regions of Pakistan), then all you can "control" in this manner are no man's lands -- or patches of ocean. If you really want to get your hands on what lies below (hydrocarbons, minerals, arable land), you still have to send in some bodies -- eventually. That's why they call it blood and treasure.

That's not to say all these new aerial drones don't strike fear into the hearts of America's enemies, not to mention the U.S. Air Force. I mean, you couldn't even squeeze a pilot in many of the newest drones, some of which are so slight they can be launched with a flick of the wrist. And with the Army now proposing a 5-pound bullet of a drone (the Lethal Miniature Aerial Munition System) to shoot individual enemy soldiers from half a dozen miles away, the youngest of the four services correctly spots an existential threat amid all those toggling joysticks. Indeed, four years ago, the Air Force published a report that suggested the service could eventually get rid of two-thirds (or more) of its 13,250 pilots. No wonder the Air Force is talking so much about its indispensable role combating the hazards of space and cyberwar these days.

"America Doesn't Need the Marines Anymore."

Hold on there, soldier! The Marines go into survival mode just about every other decade, all the way back to when they lost their jobs as snipers lodged in the masts of ships after the Civil War. Troop numbers were decimated after World War I, and the Marine Corps was almost swallowed whole by the Army after World War II. Then came the post-Vietnam funk and the relegation to a mere amphibious feint in the Army's lightning-fast liberation of Kuwait in 1991's Operation Desert Storm. So no, the Marines' latest bout of angst is nothing new. Sure, there wasn't really any difference between how the United States deployed Marine Corps and Army units in Iraq and Afghanistan, the clearest evidence being their frequent relief of one another. And with the special-ops community stealing a good chunk of the Marines' thunder recently, it's only natural to wonder whether America's most iconic service has reached its own Zero Dark Something.

Still, it's never going to happen.

First of all, no other service can match the Marine Corps' outsized reputation (hell, mystique) or its connections on Capitol Hill. Americans simply expect that there will always be a Marine Corps. Logic doesn't enter into it.

Plus, an essential division of labor has settled in since 9/11: While the special operators handle the low end of the spectrum (killing bad guys discretely) and the Army stands ready for the Big One, the Marine Corps, which alone among the services is back up to its Cold War fighting strength (of 200,000), exists to respond to everything in between -- at the drop of a helmet. That's why it was the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit that swooped into Japan after the big 2011 earthquake and tsunami, not the 1st Armored Division. So, no, forget about furloughing America's global emergency-response force, because -- unlike in Armageddon -- bad things happen to good people(s) all the time.

If the Marine Corps is reaching for a new combat image, it's best captured in the emerging Navy concept of the Single Naval Battle -- a ship or two, a few good men, and something to fight over on the water, like an oil rig. Yes, that sounds like it's ripped from today's headlines (e.g., China and Japan's ongoing tussle over islets in the East China Sea), but toss in a future ice-free Arctic Ocean, where one-fifth of the world's known hydrocarbon reserves lie largely unexploited, and who knows? A British firm just announced that it's launching Britain's first private navy in two centuries to fight those nasty Somali pirates, so maybe the Marines' new survival strategy makes sense, even if -- again -- the overall market likely remains small.

"The U.S. Army Is Far Too Big."

Bingo. Today's Army declares that it exists to win land wars in a decisive fashion. The key word is "decisive": While Army generals don't advertise it anymore, that means occupying the defeated power and overseeing its stabilization and reconstruction for a significant period of time. But let's get real: Does anyone really think the American people will tolerate another Iraq or Afghanistan?

Compared with the past, today's wars are waged decidedly faster and thus are dramatically shorter. (Yes, by that I mean America should stop calling its subsequent military occupations and counterinsurgency campaigns "wars.") They're also far less lethal thanks to smarter bombs and better emergency care. Point being: America doesn't need today's Army if the next Iraq war is a Vietnam syndrome away from happening. The U.S. government is simply too broke.

At roughly 560,000 men and women, the Army is bigger than it has been since 1994, when it was still crashing from its Reagan-era Cold War heights of 780,000. Later in the 1990s, the Army bottomed out at 480,000, and there's no reason it can't go back to that level, given that none of the fabulously high-tech wars being dreamed up by Pentagon planners calls for multiyear occupations of distant California-size countries.

The Army's just-issued "Capstone Concept" -- its vision of how it sees the wars of the future and the Army's role in them -- tried its best to be coy on this subject. But come on: When the first serious scenario mentioned is the "implosion" of the North Korean regime, then, buddy, that is one bare cupboard. After the steep cuts of the 1970s and 1990s (and before that the demobilizations following World War I and World War II), the Army should be used to this budgetary sine wave by now. The republic will survive.

"Cyberwar Is the Next Big Thing."

You bet. That is, at least as far as D.C.'s Beltway bandits are concerned. There is only one great growth area in the U.S. defense budget today -- besides health care, which now eats up roughly 10 percent of the Pentagon's spending each year. Spending on cyberweapons and network defense has been skyrocketing for years. Over the next five years, the Pentagon alone is set to spend $18 billion on cyber (it requested $3.4 billion for fiscal year 2013), and the Obama administration's 2009 decision to set up U.S. Cyber Command sanctified that emerging "war-fighting domain" and its budgetary standing. Washington's small army of IT contractors couldn't be happier.

But is this a good use of taxpayer money? There's no question that the U.S. government and national security establishment in general are pretty bad at network security, and by that I mean both fall far below the standards of the world's best corporations and banks. Most Silicon Valley experts will tell you that, but you'll never hear it from D.C.'s many contractors or the national security cyber offices they serve in parasitic symbiosis. As far as they are concerned, it's the private sector that's light-years behind.

As for cyber serving as a stand-alone war-fighting domain, there you'll find the debates no less theological in their intensity. After serving as senior managing director for half a dozen years at a software firm that specializes in securing supply chains, I'm deeply skeptical. Given the uncontrollable nature of cyberweapons (see: Stuxnet's many permutations), I view them as the 21st century's version of chemical weapons -- nice to have, but hard to use. Another way to look at it is to simply call a spade a spade: Cyberwarfare is nothing more than espionage and sabotage updated for the digital era. Whatever cyberwar turns out to be in the national security realm, it will always be dwarfed by the industrial variants -- think cyberthieves, not cyberwarriors. But you wouldn't know it from the panicky warnings from former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and the generals about the imminent threat of a "cyber Pearl Harbor."

Please remember amid all this frenetic scaremongering that the Pentagon is never more frightened about our collective future than when it's desperately uncertain about its own. Given the rising health-care costs associated with America's aging population and the never-ending dysfunction in Washington, we should expect to be bombarded with frightening scenarios of planetary doom for the next decade or two. None of this bureaucratic chattering will bear any resemblance to global trends, which demonstrate that wars have grown increasingly infrequent, shorter in duration, and diminished in lethality. But you won't hear that from the next-warriors on the Potomac.

For many, Iraq War was costly mistake

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For many, Iraq War was costly mistake

By Dan Nowicki The Republic | azcentral.com Sun Mar 17, 2013 12:08 AM

WASHINGTON - A U.S.-led coalition attacked Iraq with “shock and awe” 10 years ago this week, launching a war that lit up Baghdad with torrential explosions and toppled dictator Saddam Hussein. But for many Americans, the war’s faulty premise that Iraq was stockpiling deadly weapons of mass destruction continues to make the decision to invade difficult to justify.

Few, if any, at the time expected that Operation Iraqi Freedom, which President George W. Bush announced on March 19, 2003, as military strikes began, would lead to an extended military presence that would last nearly nine years. The United States would suffer more than 4,480 deaths through the Iraq War’s official end on Dec. 15, 2011. More than 32,000 others would be wounded. More than 100,000 Iraqi civilians would die violently, according to the website Iraq Body Count.

The price tag for the war, according to nonpartisan congressional researchers, was at least $806 billion, although that figure doesn’t take into account related expenses such as coming decades of veterans benefits and other costs including medical treatment and job retraining for wounded soldiers. [That $806 billion figure is about $2,700 for every man, woman and child in America or about $5,400 for every adult in America.] The massive spending contributed to the nation’s current financial troubles and limits U.S. ability to respond robustly, if needed, to other international threats.

While history’s verdict is not yet in, the new Iraq so far hasn’t turned out to be the stable, strategic ally in the region that U.S. officials envisioned, despite the $60 billion that taxpayers spent on reconstruction. Greatly weakened, Iraq now is viewed as vulnerable to influence from neighboring Iran as well as internal sectarian violence.

In 2005, many Iraqis proudly flashed ink-stained purple fingers and thumbs after they voted in free elections, but today, the dream of democracy taking hold in Iraq is questionable at best. Corruption is rampant, and confidence in the country’s institutions, such as its law-enforcement and legal systems, is low. Even the Iraq War’s staunchest defenders are pessimistic about the country’s postwar outlook.

“We went into Iraq without properly anticipating the consequences of being there and without properly understanding the culture of Iraq,” said Gordon Adams, a professor of foreign policy at American University in Washington. “Poor planning and poor knowledge combined to prolong that conflict way past what it should have been. ... We created a lot of damage and didn’t leave anything terribly healthy behind.”

Back home, partisan emotions remain raw.

Democrats tend to characterize the war as a misadventure from the start, instigated by Bush administration officials spoiling for a fight with Saddam and willing to use the flimsiest evidence to exploit the American public’s anxiety about terrorism after al-Qaida’s Sept. 11, 2001, strikes on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Some Republicans counter that the world is well rid of Saddam, who was captured and eventually hanged in 2006, while blaming Democratic President Barack Obama, who had opposed the war from the start, for frittering away the success achieved by Bush’s 2007 surge strategy that is credited with turning the war around.

Others, from former Vice President Dick Cheney to former Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, have suggested that the Iraq War and the fall of Saddam may have helped spawn the so-called Arab Spring movement that swept across the Middle East and North Africa in nations such as Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, although most foreign-policy analysts see no evidence of that.

Coming in the aftermath of 9/11, the Bush White House’s case for war, particularly the argument about weapons of mass destruction, or WMDs, initially won widespread public and political support. In October 2002, the House of Representatives voted 296-133 and the Senate voted 77-23 to authorize the use of force against Iraq. A March 2003 Pew Research Center poll indicated that 72 percent of U.S. adults supported the decision to attack Iraq. But that opinion changed dramatically as the war dragged on. By February 2008, Pew had found that 58 percent believed it was the wrong decision.

For the war-weary American public, the most lasting legacy may be lingering cynicism and a loss of trust in government authorities as well as a reluctance to intervene militarily on such a scale or undertake nation-building in the future.

Questions remain

Ten years after the Iraq War’s start, questions still smolder, including the major one about the stunning intelligence failure with regard to the weapons of mass destruction.

War supporters struggle to come to grips with the bad information, while critics remain suspicious about the motives of the Bush administration officials involved.

“In anyone’s candid moments, they will tell you were it not for the WMD, we wouldn’t have authorized use of force there,” said Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., who as a member of the House voted in support of the joint resolution that led to the Iraq invasion. “I don’t attribute any nefarious motives to President Bush or those involved. I think we were just wrong. Sometimes, you’re wrong.”

Then-Secretary of State Colin Powell presented the Bush White House’s case on Iraq’s alleged biological- and chemical-weapon stockpile in a dramatic Feb. 5, 2003, speech to the U.N. Security Council.

“My colleagues, every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources,” Powell said. “These are not assertions. What we’re giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence.”

Then-CIA Director George Tenet was quoted in a 2004 book by veteran Washington journalist Bob Woodward as having told Bush it was a “slam dunk” that Iraq had WMDs, although Tenet later complained that the quote’s context was imprecise.

But the conclusions presented by Powell were based not on “solid intelligence” but on shoddy intelligence.

In a recent interview with The Arizona Republic, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., said in retrospect there is little doubt the Bush administration’s position on Iraq WMDs “probably was not correct” and that Powell delivered “false information” to the U.N.

McCain, then and now a senior GOP member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, backed the decision to invade and, when the going got rough, he was an early champion of the surge, or troop escalation, led by Gen. David Petraeus.

Perhaps more than most Capitol Hill supporters of the Iraq War, McCain paid something of a political price. His 2008 campaign for the presidency was hobbled by war fatigue and Bush’s war-related unpopularity.

McCain said he regrets the way Obama wrapped up the war without reaching an agreement with the Iraqi government that would have kept some U.S. troops in the country during the transition.

“Was Saddam Hussein a long-term threat to the United States and his neighbors? Of course,” McCain said. “Was that justification to go to war? It’s very difficult to assess that. But the tragedy of Iraq is that we had it won, thanks to the surge that began with David Petraeus in 2007, but this administration willfully arranged it so that there was no residual force left behind, and we are now seeing the unraveling of Iraq.”

A fear of WMDs

Former Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., who sat on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence during most of the run-up to the Iraq War, said the consensus in the intelligence community was that Saddam had chemical weapons and some capacity to quickly convert biological materials into weapons. He dismissed the “Bush lied, people died” bumper-sticker slogan of war opponents as “silly” and superficial.

“I happen to know that our guys went to a lot of trouble wearing chemical protection when they got to within 22 miles of Baghdad because their intel said they were going to start using it against them,” said Kyl, who did not seek re-election in 2012. “And they really believed it. And they were surprised when he didn’t use it. And they were eventually surprised when they couldn’t find the WMD.”

But Rep. Ed Pastor, D-Ariz., said he was skeptical of the Bush administration’s claims at the time and now believes the whole argument was just “a pretext” to go to war to oust Saddam, whom Bush’s advisers viewed as a tyrant. Saddam had been effectively contained since the end of the Persian Gulf War in 1991, Pastor said. Pastor voted against authorizing the use of force against Iraq, seeing it as a distraction from the war in Afghanistan against the terror network that had attacked the United States on 9/11.

“In those years (after the Gulf War), there was constant surveillance,” said Pastor, who is the most senior member of Arizona’s House delegation. “There was no way that they (Iraqis) could develop that armament and have it ready or move it and all of that stuff. I think they (members of Bush’s team) were just itching to go to war.”

The second-guessing and recriminations over the reason for the war have led to an overall erosion of public trust in elected leaders when it comes to weighty issues, several lawmakers and experts told The Republic.

“I think people are now skeptical, and my sense is this is a bipartisan skepticism,” said Adams, of American University. “Part of the Obama administration’s extreme reluctance to engage major American military forces or American credibility in regional struggles like (the civil war in) Syria is the domestic unpopularity of doing so. Iraq and Afghanistan became very unpopular wars, and as a result, I don’t see much appetite in either political party for the massive engagement of American military force.”

‘A very sad situation’

Just as reverberations from the bungled WMD intelligence are still felt in U.S. politics, the initial poor prosecution and management of the war and the postwar reconstruction likely will continue to affect U.S. credibility in the Middle East.

Iraq remains under tremendous pressure from internal strife, and its future is uncertain.

“It’s a very sad situation, in my view, particularly in light of the sacrifice of so much American blood and treasure,” McCain said.

The war’s cost in dollars and lives can’t be justified “by saying that we have a strong partner or a meaningful strategic relationship” with Iraq — two main goals that have not been accomplished, said Anthony Cordesman, a national-security analyst at the bipartisan Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.

“There are not that many parallels between Afghanistan, Iraq and Vietnam as countries, but there are a lot of parallels in the mistakes we made,” said Cordesman, a former McCain aide who also served in the administrations of Presidents Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. “In trying to impose too many of our values too quickly. In assuming that we could do this quickly and underestimating the cost. In reacting slowly to military and insurgent developments. In creating a structure which we hoped would bring unity, but because of the way that the constitution and politics worked out, created significant sectarian and ethnic divisions in each country.”

If the United States has learned lessons from those conflicts, “it certainly has not been clear to date,” he added.

The war also did nothing to curb Iran’s ambitions, and Iraq, with its strength considerably diminished, no longer is in a position to act as a regional counterbalance. Iran and Iraq previously fought each other to a standstill in a protracted war in the 1980s.

“The Iranians, I think, were the winners out of this whole thing,” Pastor said. “They ended up with their military intact and probably emboldened. Now, Iran is screwing around with all these countries around it, including Iraq. So, what did we gain? Very little.”

Arab Spring links doubted

Some observers have attempted to link the Arab Spring that began in late 2010 to the war and U.S. attempts to foster democracy in Iraq, but policy makers and experts contacted by The Republic largely dismissed that theory as wishful thinking. They tended to agree that the seeds of revolution were sown in the Middle East long before the war started.

McCain said he has seen no connection between the war and the Arab Spring movement, which included, among other developments, the overthrow of longtime Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.

A potential downside to the suggested Iraq War/Arab Spring theory is that some of the new leaders may actually turn out to be worse to U.S. national interests than the dictators they supplanted, said Patrick James, a professor of international relations and director of the Center for International Studies at the University of Southern California. He pointed to the rise of Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi, who has been dubbed “the new pharoah” by critics because of his strongman tactics.

“Instead of having a corrupt, appalling dictator like Mubarak, we have a corrupt, appalling Islamicist activist who wants to spread a radicalized form of Islam throughout the world,” James said. “So, who were you better off with?”

Rep. Raúl Grijalva, D-Ariz., predicted history will judge the Iraq War “as one of the last muscle shows by the United States that actually didn’t work in our favor.”

He said the war has made lasting Middle East peace even more elusive.

“You remember World War II, Korea, all the major wars of this nation,” Grijalva said. “This is one that slips into the background, and people are comfortable with it slipping into the background. I think the legacy of this is always going to be that it was a mistake, that it was pre-emptive, that it wasn’t based on real information, and that the whole struggle could have been handled differently.”

Strikers bills - how our elected officials prevent us from knowing what they are doing.

OK, I guess if you spend 20 hours a day monitoring these striker bills you could figure out what the crooks in the Arizona legislator are doing, but for most of us that takes too much time.

Source

It’s 'striker' season at the Capitol

By Alia Beard Rau The Republic | azcentral.com Sat Mar 16, 2013 10:18 PM

Watch out, it’s striker season.

No, that’s not some obscure reference to spring training or a new term for haboobs, but a favorite subversive tactic of Arizona lawmakers at the Capitol this time of year.

About halfway through the legislative session, as proposed bills get bogged down in the politics or lawmakers come up with a bold new idea they neglected to introduce in January, they begin to file what are called strike-everything, or “striker,” amendments.

Lawmakers take a bill that offers only a technical change or that they don’t mind sacrificing and propose an amendment that strikes out all the existing language and replaces it with an entirely different proposal.

The motivation varies. Strikers can revive an idea that was voted down in its original bill form, introduce an entirely new idea or allow a controversial idea to skip parts of the public-hearing process.

House Minority Leader Chad Campbell, D-Phoenix, is critical of the tactic.

“One strike-everything is one too many,” he said. “I don’t think it’s an appropriate way to do business. It’s not a transparent process.” [Well then why haven't you introduced a bill to out law this practice??? Probably because you like this tactic because it keeps the people you pretend to represent from knowing what you are doing!!!!]

But Rep. Debbie Lesko, R-Glendale, said the tool has value, such as in a situation where a particular committee chairman refuses to hear a bill that’s vital to a lawmaker’s constituents. [Well if that is the case then the system is NOT working and needs to be change!!!]

Striking that bill for another that’s been past the chairman can keep the bill alive.

“It’s kind of like attorneys. You don’t always like them until you need one,” she said. “In some cases, it’s not fair that one person can block an important bill. A striker allows you to get around that person and get a fair hearing.” [Again, if that is the case then the system is NOT working and needs to be change!!!]

Lawmakers introduce dozens of strikers each year.

This year, 75 have already been approved, covering topics that include boosting campaign contributions, establishing a Cowboy Day, creating tax incentives for employers and tax exclusions for religious institutions, and banning goldfish prizes at school fairs.

The Cowboy Day striker appears to be a case of timing as opposed to trying to avoid a public hearing or certain committee. [What rubbish!!! That is the whole purpose of these "striker bills", to keep the public from hearing about the bills] Senate Bill 1139 started out proposing technical changes to existing state law regulating the sending of unsolicited goods.

At some point after the session deadline for introducing new bills, Republican lawmakers decided they wanted legislation honoring cowboys as a symbol of Arizona’s culture.

Sen. Gail Griffin, R-Hereford, allowed a striker to SB 1139 declaring the fourth Saturday of July as Cowboy Day during a Senate Government and Environment Committee hearing.

The revised bill passed that committee, the full Senate and then the House Energy, Environment and Natural Resources Committee. It still needs a final vote of the full House before going to the governor.

If the trend follows prior sessions, hundreds more strikers will be introduced over the next month. All but two striker bills already approved belong to Republicans.

So far, nothing enormously controversial has emerged. But that’s not always the case.

Last year, Sen. Kimberly Yee, R-Phoenix, then a state representative, and Sen. Steve Yarbrough, R-Chandler, replaced a House bill addressing attorney fees with a striker making numerous changes to state abortion laws.

They added the striker after the more mundane bill had already passed the House Government Committee and the full House, meaning the more controversial abortion bill only had a public hearing in the Senate instead of both chambers.

Strike-everything amendments

Arizona lawmakers each session propose dozens of strike-everything, or "striker," amendments. The amendments propose to replace all of the wording in an unrelated bill with an entirely different proposal. This year, lawmakers have already approved 75 strikers. Here are some of them:

Tax credits: Converted House Bill 2037 from making technical corrections to malpractice law to a proposal to allow school tax-credit money be spent on certain sports programs.

Animal prizes: Converted HB 2121 from funding security barriers at the Capitol to banning live-animal prizes.

Tax incentives: Converted HB 2264 from making technical corrections to mobile-home-park law to creating tax benefits for businesses that create new jobs and for the self-employed.

Drones: Converted HB 2269 from a technical correction on liquor-supplier law to a proposal creating a study committee on the use of drones.

HOAs: Converted HB 2371 from a technical correction on construction materials to proposing numerous changes to homeowners-association regulations, including limiting local government ability to require planned communities, allowing HOAs to vote by e-mail and prohibiting HOAs from charging extra fees to renters.

Special education: Converted HB 2395 from a technical correction on medical-malpractice laws to proposing limits on civil lawsuits based on negligence by private schools that provide special-education services.

Religious exemption: Converted HB 2446 from a technical correction on limited partnership laws to proposing property-tax exemptions for religious institutions.

Contribution limits: Converted HB 2593 from technical correction on veterans issues to proposing an increase on campaign-contribution limits.

Early ballots: Converted Senate Bill 1003 from a technical correction on agricultural regulations to proposing restrictions on who can return an early ballot for another person.

Cowboy Day: Converted SB 1139 from a technical correction on unsolicited merchandise to a proposal to make the fourth Saturday of July Cowboy Day.

Adoption subsidies: Converted SB 1062 from a technical correction on boating laws to proposing expanded behavioral-health services for adoptees.

Independent expenditures: Converted SB 1336 from regulating the election commission to a proposal to make it a felony to violate independent-expenditure regulations.

Army staff sergeant Tonya Long steals $1 million+

Army staff sergeant says she betrayed country in $1-million scam

By David Zucchino, Los Angeles Times

March 16, 2013, 5:50 p.m.

ELIZABETH CITY, N.C. — In Afghanistan, , a 13-year Army veteran, approved military cash payments to Afghan drivers of "jingle trucks," the colorful transport trucks that carry supplies to U.S. bases.

Last week, Staff Sgt. Long stood in the dock in a federal courtroom here and read aloud from a statement she had written on notebook paper:

"I cannot express how sorry I am … I chose to betray my country and my family." She did not ask for mercy, she told a judge, "because I don't deserve it."

Long, 30, had pleaded guilty to stealing at least $1 million and shipping the cash in hundred-dollar bills to the U.S. in the guts of hollowed-out VCR players.

Long's scam is part of a pattern of fraud and theft among U.S. soldiers responsible for paying Afghans who support U.S. forces. Last year, 18 U.S. soldiers were charged with such thefts, according to the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction. Nine U.S. contractors also were charged.

The inspection agency is now investigating 80 bribery and corruption cases, "and the Tonya Long case is a prime example," said Special Inspector General John F. Sopko.

Recent prosecutions have described U.S. soldiers creating elaborate schemes to pocket piles of cash, often with the complicity of corrupt Afghans.

Last June, investigators seized $23,000 sewn inside a teddy bear at a base in Afghanistan. The sergeant who had tried to mail the bear to the U.S. told them he was returning cash sent to him to buy carpets, but couldn't explain why he sewed it inside the bear. The case is under investigation.

In September, a disbursing agent at Bagram Airfield, Sgt. Nancy Nicole Smith, pleaded guilty to forging documents and stealing $100,000 intended for U.S. military operations. Smith stuffed the money in a backpack before her flight to the U.S. at the end of her tour.

In October, Sgt. Christopher Weaver pleaded guilty to his part in a scheme to steal more than $1 million in fuel intended for U.S. forces and sell it to an Afghan. Weaver was paid $5,000 for every 5,000-gallon truck he allowed to illegally leave a U.S. base near Jalalabad.

In December, Staff Sgt. Philip Stephen Wooten, a paying agent, pleaded guilty to stealing about $225,000 by falsifying receipts for money intended for reconstruction efforts. Sgt. 1st Class Mauricio Espinoza, who contracted with Afghan vendors, was charged in the same case.

At least two other U.S. Army officers are under investigation in Long's scam, and federal prosecutors say more indictments are likely. As part of a plea deal, Long agreed to testify against others allegedly involved.

At Long's hearing March 4, U.S. District Judge Terrence Boyle called the case "a critically symbolic prosecution," and speculated that Long and her suspected allies might have actually stolen $10 million or more. The judge suggested that such thefts have been going on since the U.S. mission in Afghanistan began more than a decade ago.

"I can't disagree with that," said FBI Special Agent Timothy G. Gannon, who investigated Long.

Long, also known as Tonya Long Keebaugh, was caught after a tipster alerted investigators that the U.S. was paying Afghan trucking companies for phantom deliveries from Kandahar Airfield. The companies gave cash kickbacks to Long and other soldiers, prosecutors said.

In court, prosecutors described how Long loaded the VCRs stuffed with cash into footlockers and cleared them for shipment to the U.S., affixing a seal to the cargo container.

The seal meant the container would not be inspected by customs officers upon entering the U.S. The items were claimed at Pope Field, N.C., by a captain working with Long, according to prosecutors. He locked the money in safes inside his apartment near Ft. Bragg, the prosecution said.

A married mother of three, Long admitted to having sexual relations with the captain and with a second captain, later promoted to major, who was also accused in the scam.

After the first captain gave Long "a large amount of money," the two ended their affair, Long's lawyer, Edwin C. Walker, told the judge. But Long continued to receive cash because the captain "wanted to keep her quiet," Walker said.

Long spent more than $500,000 on a car, an 18-wheel tractor-trailer, vacations and cosmetic surgeries, prosecutors said.

Confronted by investigators, Long cooperated with the FBI. She recorded phone calls with the captain and wore a recording device at face-to-face meetings with him, her lawyer said.

"Those meetings were dangerous," Walker told the judge. "She took a great risk."

The judge said Long cooperated only because she had been caught. She faced no danger by wearing a wire, Boyle said.

"She's stealing from the government and complaining that her confederate put her at risk? How ridiculous is that?" Boyle said.

Long's theft undermined America's mission in a country where the Afghan government is routinely accused of rampant corruption and bribery, he said.

"There were tens of thousands of other soldiers … under 24-hour-a-day threat of death," the judge told Long. "Where is your sympathy for them while you were stealing? What a betrayal!"

Under Long's plea agreement, Boyle could not sentence her to more than five years in prison. He told her he was imposing the full five years, plus three years of supervised release — and ordered restitution of $1 million.

Long turned to her lawyer, tears streaming down her cheeks. "I'm gonna die, Mr. Walker.... I can't go to prison."

The judge brought his gavel down, ending the hearing.

The defendant wailed. She reached down, pulled off her pumps, and bolted from the courtroom, her cries echoing through the courthouse hallways.

david.zucchino@latimes.com

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