Misconduct Database, MRAPS, and Helicopters

Dear ****************
I wanted to share with you just a few of POGO's accomplishments from this week.
Our General Counsel, Scott Amey, appeared before Congress yesterday to testify on federal contracting reform. In his testimony, Scott offered his analysis on several bills, including one that would replicate POGO's Federal Contractor Misconduct Database. POGO's recommendations, if enacted, would add much-needed competition, oversight and transparency to the federal contracting system.
Click here to read Scott's testimony before the House Subcommittee on Government Management, Organization, and Procurement.

Yesterday, a bipartisan group of senators wrote to Secretary of Defense Robert Gates calling for an investigation into the failures of the Pentagon's rapid acquisition system, which caused significant delays in the procurement of armored vehicles requested by Marines in Iraq. POGO and the Government Accountability Project (GAP) also wrote a letter to the the Senate Armed Services Committee, urging the Committee to hold hearings on this issue, and recommending that the Marine Corps be held accountable for retaliating against science adviser Franz Gayl.
As you may recall, POGO made publicly available for the first time last week an internal study, conducted by Gayl, showing that the Marine Corps "grossly mismanaged" Marines' requests for armored vehicles, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of U.S. servicemen and women.
Click here to read the letter from the bipartisan group of senators to Secretary of Defense Gates.
Click here to read the letter from POGO and GAP to the Senate Armed Services Committee.

POGO's recent investigative report on the Air Force's combat search and rescue helicopter replacement program (dubbed CSAR-X) has also generated a lot of attention this week. In the report, POGO revealed that Air Force officials weakened an essential weapons system requirement on the $15 billion contract. This week, the Pentagon's Office of Inspector General announced it will be conducting an audit to determine if these officials broke the Pentagon's rules when they changed the requirement. Although the Air Force has been attempting to discredit POGO's report in public, Kenneth Miller--an Air Force official responsible for acquisition governance and transparency--recently conceded to Congress that there was "insufficient tracking and documentation" of the requirement change.

Click here to read POGO's blog post on the Pentagon IG's investigation.
Click here to read POGO's blog post on a letter to Kenneth Miller from Rep. Vic Snyder (D-AR), Chairman of the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, discussing issues raised in POGO's CSAR-X report.

Sincerely,


Danielle Brian
Executive Director
Project On Government Oversight

Click here to view POGO's most recent press alerts.

Scare Tactics?
By Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball
Newsweek
Wednesday 27 February 2008

Are White House allies playing election-year hardball on eavesdropping?

An aggressive campaign by the White House and its allies to win approval of a new electronic spying bill is escalating partisan tensions on Capitol Hill. The contentious debate over the measure could spill over into this fall's election campaign.
The latest tactic employed by administration supporters involves a $2 million television advertising campaign featuring sinister images of Osama bin Laden that started running this week in the home districts of about 15 Democratic members of Congress who are potentially vulnerable this fall. The ads, funded by a newly formed conservative advocacy group called defenseofdemocracies.org, charge that House Democrats have allowed "surveillance against terrorists" to be "crippled" because they failed to approve a version of the spying bill supported by the Bush administration.
The group, run by Clifford May, a former communications director of the Republican National Committee, has not disclosed the names of its donors. May told NEWSWEEK that he launched the campaign for the express purpose of ratcheting up pressure on House Democrats. (The ads call on voters to contact specific Democratic members and demand that they vote "to keep us all safe.") "I think it's important for Democrats to hear from their constituents on this issue," May said. "This is a national security issue."
Democrats complain that the administration is trying to politicize the electronic surveillance issue and use it for partisan advantage this fall. "If you look at these ads, they are not too different from the ads they ran against Max Cleland in 2002," said Meredith Salsbery, press secretary to Minnesota Democratic Rep. Tim Walz, whose district has been targeted in the advertising campaign. (Those notorious ads impugned the patriotism and national security credentials of the Democratic senator from Georgia, a Vietnam veteran and triple amputee who wound up losing his re-election bid.) "To a lot of our constituents, these ads look like fear-mongering and scare tactics designed to persuade the public that the Democrats are soft on national security."
May's newly formed advocacy group operates out of the same offices as the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a nonprofit and historically nonpartisan think tank that May also heads. He confirmed Wednesday that partisan antagonisms on the issue have been so heated that a number of prominent Democrats - including Sen. Charles Schumer, Reps. Eliot Engel and Jim Marshall and veteran Democratic strategist Donna Brazile - have quit the foundation's board in protest over the ad campaign. The resignations were first reported by Spencer Ackerman in the Washington Independent. "I'm disappointed that the political pressures have been such that several Democratic members of FDD's board of advisers - including several who I'm pretty sure agree with us on the substance of the issue - have decided to resign. The Senate bill passed with overwhelming bipartisan support, which persuaded us this was not a partisan issue," May said.
Even some Senate Democrats who tried to arrange a compromise with the White House are now accusing the administration of acting in bad faith. As chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Sen. Jay Rockefeller, the West Virginia Democrat, guided an electronic spying bill through the Senate that included a key provision championed by the White House and the telecommunications industry: it would give telecom firms retroactive immunity against private lawsuits filed by civil liberties groups. The lawsuits seek damages from companies that secretly cooperated with the administration's warrantless wiretapping program in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.
The bill championed by Rockefeller and approved by a substantial Senate majority would essentially wipe out those lawsuits. But Democratic leaders in the House, under pressure from liberal activists and civil liberties groups, refused to include a retroactive immunity provision in their version of the bill. Democratic leaders say the administration has boycotted "multiple" meetings intended to find a compromise that would be acceptable to House and Senate leaders and the president. The administration's stand-tough attitude has so angered Rockefeller that he, along with House leaders, recently signed on to an op-ed article accusing the White House of exploiting an intelligence issue for political purposes. (Georgia Rep. Marshall, one of those who resigned from the Foundation for Defense of Democracies's board in protest over the ad campaign, wrote in a letter to May this week that "since the only real dispute involves retroactive immunity, I assume the Foundation's ads are funded by telecommunication companies or others seeking immunity." May, however, insisted that the money had come from individual donors, saying he had not received "one dime" from the telecom companies - though he did not rule out receiving money from them in the future to finance further ads.)
Some supposedly nonpolitical intelligence professionals and law-enforcement officials have also been drawn into the political fray. Late last week Attorney General Michael Mukasey and National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell sent (and then made public) a letter to senior House and Senate Democrats. In the letter they claimed that because Congress had allowed a temporary electronic spying law to lapse earlier this month, private sector "partners" had "reduced cooperation" with intelligence agencies.
Mukasey and McConnell did not name the "partners." But NEWSWEEK has learned that AT&T and Verizon both conveyed such concerns to the government. According to a knowledgeable industry source (who asked for anonymity when discussing sensitive material), AT&T told intelligence officials that because the temporary eavesdropping law, passed by Congress last summer, had expired, it would no longer help government agencies launch eavesdropping measures against new targets for fear the company could be exposed to new lawsuits. Another telephone giant, Verizon, expressed similar "concerns" about eavesdropping on new targets, although the source said that Verizon did not go so far as to refuse to comply with new government surveillance requests. A day after the letter was released, however, administration spokesmen backed away from much of its substance, acknowledging that all private sector partners had now agreed to continue working with U.S. intelligence agencies.
Even so, some administration officials continued to claim this week that intelligence agencies may have missed important terrorist communications during the six days AT&T (and possibly other unidentified firms) balked at initiating electronic surveillance of new targets. A spokesman for AT&T refused to confirm or deny whether the company had balked and later relented, saying only, "AT&T is fully committed to protecting our customers' privacy. We do not comment on matters of national security." A spokesman for Verizon declined to comment. Some industry and congressional officials believe the telecoms' threats not to cooperate were part of their own lobbying strategy to win the lawsuit immunity. Sources at both Verizon and AT&T said their companies had nothing to do with the new TV advertising campaign by the pro-administration group.
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Terror Watch, written by Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball, appears online weekly.
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CSAR.......Fraud in procurement?????
27-Feb-08 11:56 am


With all of the criticism the government is getting about everything that goes on in this country, let's give them credit for seeing where a possible crime was committed and their intent to pursue this and apprehend the perpetrators. Kudos to the Pentagon. Slowly our faith in government is being restored.

http://www.reuters.com/article/marketsNe...
http://www.pogo.org/p/defense/do-071113-...

"A crucial weapons system requirement for the Air Force’s second highest procurement priority, a helicopter replacement program (dubbed CSAR-X) for its combat search and rescue mission, was significantly and inappropriately weakened by Air Force program officials to allow Boeing’s Chinook helicopter to compete. Boeing eventually won the CSAR-X contract, worth an estimated $10-15 billion. POGO’s findings indicate that the acquisition process was subverted, and the needs of the warfighter consequently undermined. As a result, the wrong helicopter for the mission may have been procured, possibly putting at risk the men and women in our armed forces who need to be rescued." -Caveman 2501

Simpson Responds to Rove
By Paul Kiel - February 26, 2008, 3:07PM

Yesterday we brought you Karl Rove's expansive denial of Republican lawyer Dana Jill Simpson's testimony to Congress and comments to 60 Minutes.
Simpson responded last night on MSNBC's Dan Abrams show: "Since Karl Rove has said that and he feels so good saying that, what I want him to do is go and swear before the United States Congress and swear what he's saying is true."
Simpson also responded to accusations from the Alabama Republican Party that Simpson had never worked for the party and no one had ever heard of her. She said that phone records would show conversations with party officials in Alabama and Washington, D.C. in 2002 and 2006.
During a House Judiciary Committee hearing on the Don Siegelman case in October, Rep. Artur Davis (D-AL) produced phone records showing that Simpson had spoken with William Canary, a Republican operative, on the day in 2002 that she said Canary had told her on a conference call that his wife and another U.S. attorney would "take care" of Siegelman.

OSC's lawbreaking failure to protect federal employees from PPP's, which is a result of significant deficiencies in the scope and implementation of legal ethics, enabled the politicalization of the Department of Justice on the Bush administration, which also illustrates significant deficiencies in the scope and implementation of legal ethics. The legal profession is the most self-regulating profession in America - a key reason OSC's lawbreaking has gone on for so long, is because "attorneys don't blow whistles on other attorneys, even when `the attorney' is a federal judge."

What we are doing with OSC Watch should result in a critical examination of how the legal profession, including judges, self-regulate - not dissimilar to what the Catholic Church has experienced in recent years due to the pediophile priest scandal.

Joe Carson

************ ********* ********* ********* ********* *********

NY TIMES

February 26, 2008
Editorial
A Little Help for His Friends
Congress is looking into the decision by the United States attorney for New Jersey, Christopher Christie, to hand former Attorney General John Ashcroft a hugely lucrative job monitoring a wayward company.

The issue, however, is larger than any one appointment. Congress should conduct a broader inquiry into prosecutors’ selection of richly rewarded monitors and require that appointments are made based on merit.

United States attorneys are supposed to be nonpartisan and beyond favoritism. But we have already seen how federal prosecutors appointed by the Bush administration used their offices to help Republicans win elections. Congress needs to ensure that they are not using their positions to throw patronage to friends and political allies.

The Ashcroft appointment came in a “deferred prosecution agreement,” a fast-growing arrangement ripe for abuse. Rather than file criminal charges against corporations, federal prosecutors looking to dispose of cases efficiently and to avoid damaging companies needlessly increasingly are striking deals. These agreements are done without court supervision and sometimes in secret.

In this particular case, Mr. Christie arranged for a medical supply company accused of fraud to hire his former boss to monitor its activities for a payment between $28 million and $52 million. There was no competitive bidding. If Mr. Christie runs for elected office in the future, Mr. Ashcroft could be an important supporter and fund-raiser. This isn’t the only time Mr. Christie’s appointment of a monitor has raised questions.

When he struck a deal in a 2005 case involving Bristol-Myers Squibb, the company was required to make a donation to Seton Hall University’s law school, Mr. Christie’s alma mater. In another case, Mr. Christie reached across the country to bestow a high-paid monitoring deal on Debra Wong Yang, a former federal prosecutor from Los Angeles who had close ties to former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

Mr. Ashcroft has reportedly agreed to testify before the House Judiciary Committee about the monitoring appointment. The committee should insist on hearing from both him and Mr. Christie, and it should inquire into other lucrative appointments made to former Justice Department insiders.

Congress also needs to reform the system. Representative Frank Pallone Jr., Democrat of New Jersey, has introduced a bill that would require that federal judges or magistrates choose monitors for deferred prosecution agreements from a pool of qualified firms. It would also require that monitors be paid according to a predetermined fee schedule set by the court.

United States attorneys have traditionally played an important role in rooting out patronage and corruption. Congress has to ensure that the prosecutors charged with stamping out these practices do not engage in them.