FEBRUARY 27, 2007
False Claims Act the Subject of Senate Hearing

WASHINGTON- The Senate Judiciary Committee is set to hear testimony today regarding legislation to amend the False Claims Act ("FCA"), an anti-fraud law which has been responsible for the recovery of tens of billions of dollars for the United States government. The hearing will take place at 10:00AM in Room 226 of the Senate Dirksen Office Building. (Blog post and link to official notice here ) The False Claims Correction Act of 2007 is designed to sure up the law, which has been weakened by court decisions over the past several years. These decisions have made it easier for government contractors to escape liability under the FCA.Stephen M. Kohn, the President of the National Whistleblower Center, submitted written testimony in support of the Correction Act (available here in PDF). In part, Kohn said:"The Correction Act is essential legislation for protecting the integrity of procurement andcontracting process. It is narrowly designed to correct a number of judicial interpretations whichundermined the original intent of the False Claims Act." -end---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Since 1988 the NWC has championed whistleblower protection. The NWC is currently supporting FBI Whistleblower Bassem Youssef, who has reported serious misconduct in the War on Terror, and the NWC is currently assisting Bunnatine Greenhouse (the former Army Corps of Engineers top contracting officer who opposed the no-bid multi billion dollar contracts awarded to Halliburton for the reconstruction of Iraq) For more information, please visit www.whistleblowers.org and www.whistleblowersblog.org.

Airport Screeners Safer from Reprisals
New Appeal Venue for Whistleblowers

( Well... kinda sort of )

By RON MARSICO

Wednesday, February 27, 2008

The federal government increased whistleblower protections for more than 40,000 airport screeners yesterday, following years of complaints from screeners and other staffers who claimed they were harassed, demoted, or even fired for publicly disclosing problems within the nation's airport se curity system.

But whistleblower advocates and the New Jersey congressman who demanded increased protection for screeners said the action still falls well short of providing full coverage under the U.S. Whistleblower Protection Act.

The U.S. Transportation Security Administration signed an agreement that for the first time allows screeners to appeal cases to the U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board if their initial complaints of reprisal are dismissed. Screeners previously were limited to bringing cases to a government investigative agency, which only was allowed to issue recommendations that were not binding on the TSA.

"Transportation security officers are on the front lines, protecting the traveling public," said TSA Administrator Kip Hawley in a statement. "For their sake and the sake of security, this agreement with MSPB provides TSA officers another independent avenue for whistleblower concerns."

Hawley's action came after he was grilled at a hearing last fall by Rep. William Pascrell (D-8th Dist.), a House Homeland Security committee member who was concerned about an October article in The Star-Ledger that outlined the TSA's reprisals against current and former employees who spoke out about security. Pascrell urged Haw ley to take action, and the administrator promised that he would.

But some critics said the policy announced yesterday would increase screeners' protections only marginally.

"This improves TSA employees from fourth-class rights to third- class," said Tom Devine, legal director for the Government Accountability Project, a nonprofit group that lobbies on behalf of whistleblowers. "It would be second-class if they could have appeal rights to the federal court."

Devine said the new agreement appears meaningful in the abstract, but in reality is of little help be cause the MSPB has "only ruled in favor of a whistleblower on the merits once" since 2003. An MSPB official declined to characterize the accuracy of Devine's assessment, saying the agency is working to better tabulate and categorize its case numbers.

Before yesterday's action, screeners first and only recourse was to bring a complaint to the U.S. Office of Special Counsel, which reviewed cases but only rarely issued non-binding recommendations in the employee's favor.

Screeners -- unlike most government workers -- still will not be able to appeal a negative MSPB finding to the U.S. Federal Circuit Court of Appeals in Washington D.C. because that requires a statute passed by Congress.

Overall, TSA employs 48,000 screeners, with 37,000 holding full- time jobs and 11,000 in part-time posts, according to an agency spokeswoman.

Like the TSA's Hawley, MSPB Chairman Neil A.G. McPhie also issued a statement praising the cooperative efforts of the two agencies.

"This third-party review should increase the confidence of security officers to make these disclosures and contribute to the traveling public's sense of safety," said McPhie.

Rep. Pascrell also was disappointed with the TSA's action.

"It still falls short of whistleblower protections available to other federal employees," said Pascrell. "We want full whistleblower protection. ... They're trying to give me half a loaf here."

Efforts to extend full whistleblower protection rights to screeners also have had a difficult time in Congress.

Rep. Henry Waxman, a California Democrat, successfully got a bill through the House of Representatives in early 2007 that would significantly strengthen the U.S. Whistleblower Protection Act, while also providing coverage for the first time to screeners. But a similar measure passed in December by the U.S. Senate to strengthen the act does not include coverage for screeners.

Even if the eventual reconciliation bill includes protection for TSA screeners, the measure still must head to the White House for consideration by President Bush, who is expected to veto it on various grounds. Last year, administration officials issued a statement opposing Waxman's bill, saying, "it could compromise national security, is unconstitutional, and is overly burdensome and unnecessary."

Ron Marsico can be reached at RMarsico@starledger.com or (973) 392-7860.

http://www.nj.com/news/ledger/index.ssf?/base/news-13/1204090580125670.xml&coll=1

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Contact Nick Schwellenbach, 202-347-1122

Senators Urge the Defense Secretary to Investigate Rapid Acquisition Failures

POGO and GAP Also Recommend Senate Armed Service Hearing
Washington , D.C. - A bi-partisan group of senators sent a letter to Secretary of Defense Robert Gates today urging a Pentagon-wide investigation of failures in the Defense Department's rapid acquisition system. Senators Kit Bond, Joe Biden, Edward Kennedy and John Rockefeller cite problems in the Marine Corps and the Army on various systems, including delays in the procurement of significant numbers of Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles (MRAPs) and heightened vehicle protection against Explosively Formed Penetrators (EFPs). Though they laud the decision by the Pentagon inspector general to investigate delays in the MRAP program, the senators do not believe that review will be broad enough.
POGO and the Government Accountability Project also wrote the Senate Armed Services Committee today and recommended hearings into these issues and into the reprisals taken against Marine Corps science advisor Franz Gayl, who has suffered retaliation for disclosing problems with the Marine Corps' rapid acquisition system (http://pogoarchives.org/m/ns/mrap/sasc-letter-20080227.pdf). http://pogoarchives.org/m/ns/mrap/letter-gates-20080227.pdf For more information about Franz Gayl's criticisms see: http://www.pogo.org/p/defense/da-080220-mrap.html
"These Senators should be commended for exercising their constitutional obligation to oversee the executive branch during this time of war, when hard questions are needed most," stated Nick Schwellenbach, POGO's national security investigator. "The Senate Armed Services Committee needs to take the next step and ratchet up the heat by investigating these issues, so we can avoid these fatal mistakes in the future."
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Founded in 1981, the Project On Government Oversight is an independent nonprofit which investigates and exposes corruption and other misconduct in order to achieve a more accountable federal government.

Independent.co.uk
The drug industry's long and ignoble history of secrecy
By Jeremy Laurance, Health Editor
Wednesday, 27 February 2008

Discovering, testing and bringing a new drug to market can take more than a decade and cost as much as £500m. Over the past 30 years, as the costs have mounted, so have the pressures to protect new chemical agents which could become potential blockbusters.
Secrecy became the pharmaceutical industry's watchword as it sought to control publication of trials and even manipulate results. Cancer drugs introduced in the 1990s claimed to offer major benefits which later turned out to be more apparent than real. Evidence published in The Journal of the American Medical Association showed that 38 per cent of independent studies of the drugs reached unfavourable conclusions about them, compared with just 5 per cent of studies funded by the pharmaceutical industry.
In 2004, UK researchers commissioned by Nice to develop guidelines for prescribing antidepressant drugs to children tried to obtain unpublished trials from the drug companies. They were refused. They then contacted the individual researchers who had worked on the trials. Only then did a picture emerge of increased risk of attempted suicide, and a lack of efficacy. Nice concluded by banning the drugs for under-18s with the exception of Prozac.
Yesterday's report suggesting that modern antidepressants offer no significant clinical benefit over placebo has been dismissed by the drug industry as "just one study" which should not be allowed to undermine the wealth of research showing that the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) antidepressants are effective.
But that is to miss the point. The Hull University researchers have demonstrated how partial access to research can give a distorted view of a drug. The non-disclosure of data on the SSRIs has raised doubts about the trustworthiness of all research on antidepressants.
We should be relieved that the licensing authorities have an absolute right to see all trial data, positive and negative, before approving a drug. But, bizarrely, Nice, with the responsibility for deciding which drugs should be used by the NHS, only gets what the drug companies agree to give it. The Health Select Committee has called for action to remedy this omission. Ministers must respond.

WHNT's Technical Glitches
The New York Times | Editorial
Wednesday 27 February 2008

In 1955, when WLBT-TV, the NBC affiliate in Jackson, Miss., did not want to run a network report about racial desegregation, it famously hung up the sign: "Sorry, Cable Trouble." Audiences in northern Alabama might have suspected the same tactics when WHNT-TV, the CBS affiliate, went dark Sunday evening during a "60 minutes" segment that strongly suggested that Don Siegelman, Alabama's former Democratic governor, was wrongly convicted of corruption last year.
The report presented new evidence that the charges against Mr. Siegelman may have been concocted by politically motivated Republican prosecutors - and orchestrated by Karl Rove. Unfortunately, WHNT had "technical problems" that prevented it from broadcasting a segment (the problems were resolved in time for the next part of the show) that many residents of Alabama would no doubt have found quite interesting.
After initially blaming the glitch on CBS in New York, the affiliate said it learned "upon investigation," and following a rebuke from the network, that "the problem was on our end." It re-broadcast the segment at 10 p.m., pitting it against the Academy Awards on rival ABC, before Daniel Day-Lewis won the best actor Oscar. As public criticism grew, it ran it again at 6 p.m. on Monday.
Stan Pylant, WHNT's president and general manager, assured viewers that "there was no intent whatsoever to keep anyone from seeing the broadcast."
WHNT is owned by Oak Hill Capital Partners, a private equity firm whose lead investor is one of the Bass brothers of Texas. The brothers are former business partners of George W. Bush and generous contributors to Republican causes.
In 1969, the F.C.C. revoked the license of WLBT in Jackson after the commission established a systematic effort by the broadcaster to suppress information about the civil rights movement. Today, broadcast rules have changed, giving stations more leeway to decide what to air. Dropping a single report is unlikely to set the regulators in motion. Still, it would be deeply troubling if a partisan broadcaster could suppress information on the public airwaves and hide behind a technical fig leaf.
In this case, if the blackout was intentional, it may also have been counterproductive. Rather than take attention away from allegations that Mr. Siegelman was the victim of a partisan campaign, WHNT's technical glitch seems to lend support to the charge.