QinetiQ Goes Kinetic: Top Rumsfeld Aide Wins Contracts From Spy Office He Set Up

by Tim Shorrock , Special to CorpWatch January 15th, 2008

A Pentagon office that claims to monitor terrorist threats to U.S. military bases in North America -- and was once reprimanded by the U.S. Congress for spying on antiwar activists -- has just awarded a multi-million dollar contract to a company that employs one of Donald Rumsfeld’s former aides. That aide, Stephen Cambone, helped create the very office that issued the contract.

On January 7, QinetiQ (pronounced “kinetic”) North America (QNA), a major British-owned defense and intelligence contractor based in McLean, Virginia, announced that its Mission Solutions Group, formerly Analex Corporation, had just signed a five-year, $30 million contract to provide a range of unspecified “security services” to the Pentagon’s Counter-Intelligence Field Activity office, known as CIFA.

According to Pentagon briefing documents, CIFA’s Directorate of Field Activities "assists in preserving the most critical defense assets, disrupting adversaries and helping control the intelligence domain.” Another CIFA directorate, the Counterintelligence and Law Enforcement Center, "identifies and assesses threats" to military personnel, operations and infrastructure from "insider threats, foreign intelligence services, terrorists, and other clandestine or covert entities," according to the Pentagon. A third CIFA directorate, Behavioral Sciences, has provided a "team of renowned forensic psychologists [who] are engaged in risk assessments of the Guantanamo Bay detainees."

The new CIFA contract with QinetiQ expands work that Analex has provided CIFA and its various directorates since 2003. Under its first contract, according to the QinetiQ website, Analex staffers were sifting through information “from traditional to non-traditional providers, ranging from unclassified through top secret classification using sophisticated information technologies and systems specifically designed by CIFA analysts.”

The CIFA contract was awarded just two months after QinetiQ hired Stephen Cambone, the former undersecretary of defense for intelligence and a longtime Rumsfeld aide, as its vice president for strategy. Cambone is the most senior of a savvy group of former high-ranking Pentagon and intelligence officials hired by QinetiQ to manage its expansion in the U.S. market. (See boxes.)

While he was at the Pentagon, Cambone oversaw CIFA and was deeply involved in the Pentagon’s most controversial intelligence programs. It was Cambone, for example, who reportedly issued orders to Major General Geoffrey Miller to soften up Iraqi prisoners for intelligence interrogators in Abu Ghraib in 2003. With Rumsfeld, he also set up a special unit within the Pentagon that alienated the CIA and the State Department by running its own covert actions without seeking input from other agencies.

Duane Andrews Duane Andrews, QNA’s CEO and Stephen Cambone’s boss, got his baptism in information technology during the first Gulf War in 1991, when he was assistant secretary of defense for communications, command, control and intelligence under Dick Cheney, then defense secretary. His job included managing the Pentagon’s Intelligence Surveillance and Reconnaissance operations.

“Too many people -- even today -- think of (information) as something IT guys worry about, when really it is something that warfighters and commanders need to worry about,” he told Government Computer News in 2002. “If they pick up the phone to give a command to go to war and there’s no dial tone, or they send an ops order and it gets garbled or misread or doesn’t go to its intended recipients, the war slows down.”

Andrews left the Pentagon in 1993 to become chief operating officer of Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC). During that time, he was a key figure in developing SAIC’s extensive business -- worth about $8 billion in 2006 -- with the intelligence community and the Pentagon.

Under Andrews, SAIC won several major contracts involving the management of huge IT systems. One of its largest was the NSA’s Trailblazer project, in which SAIC was hired to create the data-mining and link-analysis tools for the NSA to monitor the huge increase in cell phone and email traffic that occurred during the fiber-optic and communications revolution of the late 1990s. (The project turned out to be a $4 billion boondoggle and was scrapped in 2005, but SAIC was hired again to start building its replacement.)

Another SAIC contract of strategic importance to the U.S. military is its prime contract to run the Joint Intelligence Operations Centers (JIOCs). These centers were established throughout the U.S. military command system by Cambone in 2004 to manage the sharing of intelligence from agencies like the NSA and the NGA to commanders and warfighters on the ground in Iraq and the Horn of Africa as well as major commands in South Korea and elsewhere.

In 2006, Andrews quit SAIC to join QinetiQ. Shortly after Andrews was hired as QNA CEO, former CIA Director George Tenet was elected to QinetiQ’s board of directors. Tenet was undoubtedly brought on to help QinetiQ broaden its reach beyond the Pentagon and its intelligence units into the area of strategic and national intelligence represented by the CIA and the NSA.

Andrews remains close to Vice President Dick Cheney, his former boss at the Pentagon. In a 2002 interview with Government Computer News, he listed Cheney as his hero.

The new CIFA contract comes on the heels of a series of QinetiQ deals inked with the Pentagon in the booming new business of “network centric warfare” -- the space-age, technology-driven intelligence and warfighting policies established by Rumsfeld and Cambone during their six-year tenures at the Pentagon. Other Cambone-pioneered programs that QinetiQ has won (before he went to work at their Crystal City offices that lie just two miles from the Pentagon) include military drones and robots, low-flying satellites and jamming technologies.

Cambone’s appointment at QinetiQ reflects the “incestuous” relationships that exist between former officials and private intelligence contractors, said Steven Aftergood, the director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists and a long-time observer of U.S. intelligence. “It's unseemly, and what's worse is that it has become normal,” he told CorpWatch.

Aftergood pointed out the similarities between Cambone and the career trajectory of the current Director of National Intelligence, Michael McConnell. Following McConnell’s tenure as director of the National Security Agency, “he went on to receive a seven-figure salary at Booz-Allen Hamilton, a major intelligence contractor,” said Aftergood. “And now he's back at the helm of the intelligence community (IC). The problem is not so much a conflict of interest as it is a coincidence of interests -- the IC and the contractors are so tightly intertwined at the leadership level that their interests, practically speaking, are identical.”

QinetiQ Evolution

QinetiQ was created in 2001 when the British Ministry of Defense (MoD) split up the Defense Evaluation Research Agency (DERA), its equivalent to the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). One part of the company remained inside the MoD, but the other half was sold to the private sector and became QinetiQ.

For its first 18 months, QinetiQ was run by the MoD. But in February 2003, control slipped decisively out of government hands when 33 percent of its shares were acquired by the Carlyle Group, the powerful Washington-based private equity fund with close ties to the Bush administration. Carlyle invested $73 million in the company, and the MoD retained the other 66 percent. In an unusual arrangement, however, Carlyle was granted 51 percent of the voting shares, which meant that the investment fund and its appointed executives had effective control over the company. Carlyle sold off its remaining shares in February 2007, making a $470 million profit on its original investment.

Its initial expansion into the U.S. market was led by its first CEO, Graham Love. A ten-year veteran of DERA, where he rose to the position of finance director, Love had left DERA in the late 1990s by taking one of its divisions private. In 2003, he was brought back to head up QinetiQ’s North American operations. With assistance from Carlyle’s managers, Love went on the acquisition binge that made QinetiQ what it is today.

In November 2004, it bought Foster-Miller, which builds what it calls “mobile platforms” for the U.S. military, including the Talon robot, a battery-powered machine loaded with night-vision cameras and sensors that can fire both machine gun bullets and anti-tank weapons. Talons are also used on reconnaissance missions to detect mines and disarm roadside bombs in Iraq; more than 600 have been acquired by the Pentagon, according to Fortune magazine. The Foster-Miller website says Talon robots were initially developed with funds from DARPA and have been used in Special Operations missions in Afghanistan, Bosnia and Iraq.

In January 2007, QinetiQ acquired Analex Corporation, an information technology and engineering company that earns 70 percent of its revenue from the Pentagon (after the acquisition, Analex was renamed the QNA Mission Solutions Group). Analex, which has received extensive funding from DARPA for its technologies, also holds contracts with SPAWAR, the U.S. Navy intelligence research center in San Diego, and with the U.S. Army’s First Information Operations Command. For the latter, according to Analex, it provides “subject matter experts” in psychological warfare, information security, electronic warfare and general tactics in the war on terror.

With $1.5 billion in defense revenue in 2006, QNA is now the 11th largest U.S. intelligence contractor. The QinetiQ story must be told without speaking to the company, however: QinetiQ officials were not available for comment on Cambone’s appointment or any other matter. As for the former undersecretary of defense, “Stephen Cambone is not interested in an interview at this time,” Sophie Barrett, QNA’s spokesperson, told CorpWatch on January 10.

Stephen Cambone

QinetiQ’s main reason for hiring Stephen Cambone was the fact that he had held the unprecedented job of commanding the full spectrum of defense intelligence agencies controlled by the Pentagon, under the 2002 legislation that created his position as the nation’s first undersecretary of defense for intelligence. For example he had direct line control over the three national intelligence collection agencies, the National Security Agency (NSA), the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGA) and the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO).

He also oversaw CIFA, which he helped set up in 2003 and transformed into one of the U.S. government’s largest collectors of domestic intelligence. Despite occasional criticism from the U.S. Congress for spying on ordinary U.S. citizens, it has thrived at the Pentagon during the administrations of both Donald Rumsfeld as well as Robert Gates, the current secretary of defense.

Cambone was the chief architect of Rumsfeld’s so-called “transformation” policies at the Pentagon, which fused data flowing from those agencies into the Pentagon’s high-tech war machine. The decisions he made greatly reduced the Pentagon’s acquisitions of large weapons systems like aircraft carriers and radically increased its purchases of space-age war technologies such as communications systems, sensors, robots, low-flying satellites and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs).

Other QinetiQ acquisitions

In 2005, QinetiQ made one of its most strategic acquisitions: Apogen Technologies, a McLean, Virginia, maker of optical sensors that was deeply involved in “black” (secret) military operations, including anti-submarine warfare and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance. At the time, Apogen’s chairman was Phillip Odeen, a longtime friend of Frank Carlucci, the Carlyle Group’s chairman emeritus. Odeen was a key figure in U.S. intelligence after serving in senior positions at the Pentagon and the National Security Council, where he led the Defense and Arms Control staff under Henry Kissinger. Odeen went on to become CEO of TRW and BDM Inc., two major intelligence contractors that were later acquired by Northrop Grumman.

After QinetiQ bought Apogen, it hired Odeen as CEO of its North American division. In 2006, while Cambone was still at the DoD, Apogen won an $11.3 million contract with the U.S. Marine Corps to provide engineering and technical support to Marine intelligence and reconnaissance operations. Other customers include the Department of Homeland Security and the U.S. Navy.

Other companies in the QinetiQ empire include ITS Corporation, which holds IT and engineering contracts with U.S. military and intelligence agencies, including DARPA, naval intelligence and the NRO; Planning Systems Inc., which calls itself a “leading network-centric technology company,” and includes among its product line ground-penetrating radar for the detection of IEDs; and Westar Aerospace, which specializes in network centric communications and interoperability systems.

It is precisely these technologies that QinetiQ produces. Its work for CIFA, the company said in the release announcing the deal, reflects QinetiQ’s role “as a pioneer in planning and executing the protection of government personnel, critical infrastructure and sensitive defense programs.” QinetiQ is the largest suppliers of UAVs and robots to the Pentagon and the U.S. intelligence community. It developed the Zephyr, the world’s most advanced UAV, a solar-powered drone that can transmit data and pictures continuously for periods up to three months. QinetiQ also specializes in a jamming technology (called “interference protection”) that protects satellite systems from outside activity. And the company is a major supplier of acoustic microsensors designed to track the movements of “insurgents” or “illegal immigrants.”

For QinetiQ and Cambone, therefore, this is a match made in heaven. Cambone’s insights into “national security affairs and priorities,” said CEO Duane Andrews, will help shape QinetiQ’s ability “to rapidly deliver solutions to the complex challenges that face our defense and intelligence customers.” In other words, there was a natural fit between QinetiQ’s products and Cambone’s inside knowledge of the future plans and strategies behind the U.S. “intelligence enterprise.”

Re-Inventing the Pentagon

Cambone’s early career was shaped by his deep involvement with technologies associated with missile defense. His first job out of school was as a staffer for the director of Los Alamos National Laboratory, the defense and nuclear power research center in New Mexico. After that, he worked for SRS Technologies, a defense consultancy that worked closely on missile defense.

From 1990 to 1993, Cambone worked under Duane Andrews, his future boss at QinetiQ, as director for strategic defense policy in the office of Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney. There, he advocated for building a laser- and satellite-based missile defense system known derisively by its opponents as Star Wars, a cause he also took up during the Clinton administration as a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

During the 1990s, Cambone joined the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), the core advocacy group for the cause of neoconservatism, a radical philosophy that views the U.S. as the political savior of humankind, supposedly through “exporting democracy,” and advocates the use of force to expand U.S. power and influence around the world. There, he associated with many of the officials he would later serve with in the George W. Bush administration, including Rumsfeld (another Star Wars fan), Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz, who was deputy secretary of defense from 2001 to 2005.

In 1998, Rumsfeld hired Cambone as staff director of a commission he chaired to study the foreign ballistic missile threat. The commission was created by the Republican-led U.S. Congress specifically as a counterpoint to the CIA, which had downplayed the foreign missile threat in a 1997 National Intelligence Estimate. Among the commission’s members were Wolfowitz and former CIA director R. James Woolsey, a prominent necon with close ties to the defense intelligence industry. The final report, largely drafted by Cambone, flatly contradicted the CIA by warning of an imminent threat from North Korea and Iran, and became the centerpiece of the Bush administration’s initial defense policies.

After Rumsfeld became defense secretary in 2001, he selected Cambone as his special assistant. Cambone quickly became his most trusted trouble-shooter. And in the initial months of the Bush administration, there was plenty of trouble.

Rumsfeld, with Cheney’s support, set out from the beginning to “transform” the U.S. military into a high-tech, computerized fighting force designed specifically to shoot down missiles from “rogue states” and defeat counterinsurgencies and other “low intensive” threats to U.S. national security, primarily in the Middle East. None of this sat very well with the uniformed military and the defense industry, both of which were slow to embrace Rumsfeld’s network centric policies and the accompanying cuts imposed on Cold War-era weapons such as aircraft carriers and artillery systems. But the grumbling stopped after September 11, which provided the opening for Rumsfeld and his allies in the administration to make intelligence the centerpiece of their new “war on terror.”

In 2002, the U.S. Congress embraced a proposal backed by Cheney and Rumsfeld to create a new undersecretary slot at the Pentagon specifically for intelligence, and Cambone was given the job. The position provided enormous powers: under the law, he exercised the Secretary of Defense’s “authority, direction and control” over all DoD intelligence, counterintelligence and security policy, plans and programs. That included the key national agencies, which Rumsfeld and Cambone tenaciously fought to keep within the Pentagon’s command and control system (for more on this struggle, see Foreign Policy in Focus http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/4795). By 2004, according to a profile in the New York Times, Cambone was presiding biweekly conference calls that included the three-star generals and an admiral who ran the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the NGA, the NRO and the NSA. In theory, they also reported to Rumsfeld and Tenet. But Cambone, the newspaper noted, “has made himself their most active overseer.”

With their newfound power, Rumsfeld and Cambone set about to give the Pentagon greater authority in the area of human intelligence, traditionally dominated by the CIA. In 2005, Rumsfeld created a new clandestine espionage branch called the Strategic Support Branch, run out of the DIA and under Cambone’s control, to end what he called his “near total dependence” on the CIA. By 2005, under the command of Cambone’s controversial deputy, Army Lieutenant General William G. “Jerry” Boykin, the support branch was deploying small, covert teams of case officers, interrogators and special operations forces to places like Somalia, Iran and the Philippines, sometimes without contacting the U.S. ambassador or the CIA station chief, to launch covert military operations and prepare for future U.S. action.

Spying on Anti-War Activists

In 2003, the Pentagon’s CIFA launched an electronic database called Talon to collect and circulate unverified reports about people and organizations that allegedly threatened Pentagon facilities. These reports were then fed into a database managed by the agency.

The database was first revealed in December 2005 when NBC News discovered that Talon had collected data on anti-military protesters and peaceful demonstrators. In 2007, the American Civil Liberties Union released an internal Pentagon report showing that Talon (which stands for Threat and Local Observation Notices) had about 13,000 entries, of which 2,821 involved reports on U.S. citizens.

For example a February 5, 2005, planned protest against recruiting at New York University by Army Judge Advocate General personnel, was listed by Talon as a "threat.” Another entry, concerning February 14, 2005, involved a demonstration planned outside the gates of the base at Fort Collins, Colorado.

The Talon program was shut down in early 2007, shortly after Rumsfeld and Cambone left the Pentagon, by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and his undersecretary for intelligence, retired Air Force General James Clapper. CIFA itself, however, remains in business.

Those were heady days for Cambone: in May 2006, the New York Times would comment that Cambone’s “low public profile masks his status as one of the most powerful intelligence officials in the United States.” But other publications weren’t so kind. Within days of the Times piece, C4ISR Journal, a military publication, described Cambone as a grim and determined ideologue. “’Unpleasant,’ ‘deeply unpleasant,’ ‘doesn’t joke much’ and ‘Rumsfeld without the personality’ are just some of the ways other reporters and analysts” describe Cambone, the Journal said.

In expanding the power and influence of the Pentagon’s special forces, Cambone pushed for policies and technologies that would later make him so useful to QinetiQ, which by 2003 was beginning its expansion in the defense intelligence market. Throughout his tenure at the Pentagon, for example, Cambone pushed for increased spending on satellites, lasers and computer networks that would link the national collection agencies with soldiers and commanders on distant battlefields. In 2004, one year into the intensifying war in Iraq, Cambone proposed spending $30 billion -- one-third of the Pentagon budget for information technology -- on what he called a “transformational satellite system.” This was a laser-based project run by the Air Force that would allow the national agencies and the military to share intelligence data and speed its delivery to bomber pilots and ground troops.

During this time, Cambone was also deeply involved in Pentagon planning for a multi-billion dollar “Space Radar” project, a constellation of satellites designed to detect moving and stationary objects from the skies in any weather condition and in darkness. The U.S. Congress only approved a portion of what Cambone wanted for the Air Force and Space Radar projects, however.

In 2006, Cambone presided over an intelligence community review of major intelligence and reconnaissance programs. It concluded that the Pentagon should increase its use of UAVs such as the Global Hawk, which operated at altitudes of 60,000 feet and could stay in the air for 24 hours and more. By this time, the Pentagon was also operating secret “stealth” UAVs as a substitute for satellites. (By 2008, the Associated Press reported in January, the military’s reliance on UAVs “that can watch, hunt and sometimes kills insurgents” had soared to more than 500,000 hours in the air, mostly in Iraq. Between January and October 2007 alone, AP found, the Pentagon had more than doubled its monthly use of drones).

Revolving Door

When Cambone’s tenure at the Pentagon drew to a close, shortly after the resignation of Donald Rumsfeld in late 2006, the future course of defense spending had already been set: the big money was going to UAVs and low-orbit satellites for the transmission and sharing of intelligence data. (These projects became more crucial in 2007, when the Space Radar was declared a failure and scrapped by Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell.) And, in response to the increasingly sophisticated tactics of the Iraqi insurgents, millions of dollars were plowed into robots and other technologies aimed at curbing the deadly effects of homemade roadside bombs, that the military has dubbed improvised explosive devices (IEDs).

By joining QinetiQ, less than a year after he resigned from the Pentagon, Cambone has been hired to implement the very policies he helped pioneer at the Pentagon, not as a public servant but as a private businessman benefiting from taxpayer dollars. And with Cambone in the driver’s seat in northern Virginia, QinetiQ is set to build on its already thriving business to become one of the premier suppliers of technology to the “intelligence enterprise” that Cambone built.

Tim Shorrock’s book on the outsourcing of U.S. intelligence, Spies for Hire, will be published in May by Simon & Schuster.

Whistleblower's Email Tracked
By Angus Loten

January 11, 2008

Senate lawmakers are calling for stronger employee protections at the Small Business Administration after a government report found agency managers had tracked emails from a staff whistleblower.

The agency says it has already taken steps to limit access by managers to employee email.

According to the SBA Inspector General, managers in the agency's Office of Disaster Assistance last year monitored emails from a staffer who served as a confidential source for the Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship. The employee had recently submitted anonymous testimony for a committee hearing, the report said.

"I am extremely concerned that the SBA's unchecked power to arbitrarily monitor its employees' emails will discourage potential whistleblowers from reporting agency misconduct to Congress," Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), the committee chairman, said in a statement on Friday.

In a letter to SBA Administrator Steven Preston, Kerry said monitoring employee emails prevented them from speaking out and undermined the committee's oversight role. He said the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 gives federal agency employees the right to provide information to congressional committees without interference.

SBA spokesperson Mike Stamler said the agency had implemented a policy to protect employee emails in wake of the inspector general's report back in December. Stamler said he didn't know the details of the case mentioned in the report.

The Federal Employee Protection of Disclosure Act, which was approved unanimously by the Senate last year, is currently before the House.

http://www.nytimes.com/inc_com/inc1199710983718.html?ref=smallbusiness

Someone emailed this to me this morning from another Whistleblower Group. I share it here with all of you. Please click on the link, or if it doesn't work on this site, type in address and view the video. It is quite interesting and worth the effort. VM
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Hi all,

An American employed by BBC as an Investigative journalist emailed this video to Jim because he knew what I was going through and has asked me to help spread the word. Robert F Kennedy who is featured as the last speaker email Jim directly. I beg each and everyone of you to watch this hour long video of factual evidence in the Karl Rove missing emails and cover ups by our own reporting news agency: CNN, FOX, ABC, CBS, NBC, etc. These journalist have received death threats for what they disclosed and they want their stories to be spread throughout our country.

Click on the link to watch the video. It really opened up my eyes and I hope other investigative journalist follow their path.

http://fluffybunnies.wordpress.com/2008/01/09/investigative-journalists-found-missing-emails-from-karl-rove-and-more

In Unity,
Traci

White House Secrecy Starts to Give
As Congress Intensifies Efforts for Openness, Administration Accedes
By Elizabeth Williamson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, January 13, 2008; A05

After years of hammering on the walls of secrecy surrounding the Bush White House, activists and Congress have begun, slowly, to open some cracks.
A federal magistrate on Tuesday ordered the administration to reveal by this week whether it has backup copies of millions of missing White House e-mails, which may describe decisions related to the Iraq war.
Last month, a federal judge ruled that lists of presidential visitors that President Bush has kept secret are in fact public records.
On New Year's Eve, Bush bowed to lawmakers in his own party and signed a bill speeding the release of millions of government documents requested by Americans under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), a measure he has opposed.
In the waning days of an administration marked by a penchant for confidentiality, open government groups and Congress have redoubled efforts to ensure that the written record of the Bush presidency is not lost to history. They say recent developments show growing irritation with a president who has used national security concerns to draw a veil over the workings of the executive branch and to hoard power for the White House.
Those developments include the declassification of the nation's intelligence budget and new recommendations that the president's daily intelligence briefings be saved as presidential records.
"They're getting exactly the open government results they labored to prevent, and in part because they so overreached," said Thomas Blanton, who heads the National Security Archive at George Washington University. "They could have gotten 90 percent of the extra power they wanted if they went to Congress and the public, but by going for 100 percent and doing it in total secrecy, they undermined their own legitimacy and left the presidency weaker than when they started."
White House spokesman Tony Fratto responded that "we are simply trying to preserve national security information, because that's in the best interests of the country; we are indeed protective of the prerogatives of the executive branch."
Fratto said the administration is working to resolve the missing e-mails issue, and that Bush's concerns about the FOIA requests centered on the resources required, not the release of information.
The line was drawn early in the Bush administration, when Vice President Cheney stiff-armed lawmakers and environmentalists who requested records from his energy policy task force, a battle the White House won in the Supreme Court.
As the executive branch tightened its grip on information, even the Department of Health and Human Services was provided new power to classify its work. In 2001, Bush issued an executive order giving past presidents and their families the authority to stall release of presidential papers indefinitely.
When Bush in 2002 invoked executive privilege and the "national interest" in refusing a subpoena from Rep. Dan Burton (R-Ind.), then the chairman of the House Government Reform Committee, for Justice Department documents relating to a decades-old murder investigation, Burton complained about a "veil of secrecy that is descending around the administration."
But most of the secrecy measures emerged from the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, when efforts to keep government decision-making closely held drew few objections from Congress and a frightened public.
Early in 2002, then-Attorney General John D. Ashcroft issued a memo urging government agencies to use whatever legal means necessary to reject requests for public documents allowed by the FOIA. Later, then-White House Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. directed agencies to restrict access to "sensitive but unclassified" information.
Days after Democrats took control of Congress in January 2007, the House and Senate passed H.R. 1, which implemented the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission. The bill includes a provision to improve congressional oversight of the intelligence community by making the nation's annual intelligence budget figure public. The Directorate of National Intelligence released the $43.5 billion figure Oct. 30.
Congress subsequently revived efforts to speed up the release of public documents and activists used lawsuits in an attempt to pry loose White House correspondence and other material, particularly related to the war.
"The administration has brought these challenges on itself," said Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), ranking minority member of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, who favored the disclosure of the intelligence budget. "By trying to keep secret information that doesn't need to be secret, it invites skepticism of all of its secrecy claims."
This year, Congress took aim at a years-old logjam created by delays in responding to public records requests. The White House opposed the Open Government Act of 2007 and enlisted allies in Congress to block it. But in December, Senate Minority Whip Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) lifted his hold on the bill. On New Year's Eve at his ranch in Crawford, Tex., Bush signed it.
The law penalizes agencies that take months or years to meet FOIA requests by denying them the right to charge research or copy fees for documents released after the 20-day deadline, among other provisions.
In 2006, Sens. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) and Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) drafted a bipartisan bill requiring the White House budget office to put government contract information online. The bill eventually passed, and Bush signed it. The site, USASpending.gov, went online last month.
The administration, however, has won other battles over secrecy.
Last month, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court rejected a request by the American Civil Liberties Union to release documents on the administration's warrantless wiretapping program. A bill overturning Bush's executive order on the release of presidential records remains mired in Congress. And the White House continues to refuse congressional demands for information about detainee interrogation methods.
Open government advocates see last week's court order that the White House reveal whether it has backup records of millions of deleted e-mails as the next big battle in the disclosure war.
The National Security Archive and Citizens for Ethics and Responsibility in Washington, which are seeking the records, say they cover about 10 million e-mails deleted from White House databases from 2003 to 2005. Federal law requires the White House to retain such records.
Fratto said the e-mails were inadvertently deleted, and their number is uncertain. "It was a problem we announced, admitted to and will remedy," he said.
By attacking White House efforts at secrecy now, advocates also hope to put such tactics beyond the reach of future administrations.
"Once a precedent is set and an administration not sufficiently rebuked, this kind of secrecy becomes a permanent option," said Steven Aftergood, director of the project on government secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists.

US Attorney's Office Accused of Anthrax Case Leaks
By David Willman
The Los Angeles Times

Saturday 12 January 2008

An Army doctor, a "person of interest" never charged in the deadly 2001 mailings, names three federal officials.
Washington - Attorneys for the former Army physician who was branded a "person of interest" in the deadly 2001 anthrax mailings named three federal officials Friday who they said leaked investigative details that harmed their client.

The physician, Steven J. Hatfill, has not been charged with a crime and maintains his innocence. Hatfill is suing the FBI, the Justice Department and a handful of present and former law enforcement officials. He alleges that the leaks were illegal, damaged his reputation and violated his right to privacy.

"We have identified three of the leakers who were previously anonymous," one of Hatfield's attorneys, Mark A. Grannis, said near the outset of a sparsely attended hearing in federal court. "Some of the most damaging information leaked in this case [came] straight out of the U.S. attorney's office."

The anthrax mailings killed five people and sickened about 20 others from Florida to Connecticut. Coming on the heels of the suicide attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City and on the Pentagon, the mailings led to the shutdown of a Senate office building and heightened the nation's fear of prolonged terrorism.

Hatfill's attorneys alleged that the three officials who leaked investigative details to the media were: Roscoe C. Howard Jr., who from 2001 to 2004 served as U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia; Daniel S. Seikaly, who served as Howard's criminal division chief; and Edwin Cogswell, who formerly served as a spokesman for the FBI.

One of Hatfill's attorneys said during the hearing that he would soon seek "sanctions" relating to Howard's additional role in leading the government's defense in 2003 and 2004 against the lawsuit. Hatfill's attorneys named the three purported leakers after questioning six reporters under oath. Howard, Seikaly and Cogswell had released reporters from their earlier pledges of confidentiality, according to a lawyer familiar with the matter. Neither the reporters nor their organizations were named in Friday's hearing, held to discuss the status of Hatfill's nearly 5-year-old lawsuit.

Howard and Seikaly, who now practice privately at the same Washington law firm, did not return messages seeking their comment. Cogswell, who is employed by the FBI but in another capacity, could not be reached. His successor said the bureau would not comment because it concerned a matter of ongoing litigation.

An attorney with the Justice Department, Elizabeth J. Shapiro, did not confirm nor deny the alleged leaking during the court hearing. However, Shapiro asked the judge to direct the parties to try to settle out of court.

U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton ordered the attorneys for the government and for Hatfill to seek mediation over the next two months. The prospects of a mediated settlement notwithstanding, Walton said he expected that a trial on the lawsuit could begin in December. Hatfill's attorneys, Grannis and Thomas G. Connolly, did not speculate in court on the likelihood for a settlement. Afterward, Grannis said: "The court has set a schedule for bringing this case to trial this year, and we're very pleased at the prospect that Dr. Hatfill will finally have his day in court."

Hatfill's lawsuit seeks unspecified monetary damages. It alleges that the defendants' actions impeded his ability to secure full-time work and that he suffered "severe emotional distress." Hatfill, 54, formerly held government positions at the Army's medical research institute for infectious diseases and at the National Institutes of Health. He did not appear in court Friday.

A settlement of the case could carry political implications: On Aug. 6, 2002, then-Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft, first identified Hatfill as a "person of interest" in the anthrax mailings.

By settling with Hatfill, the government would all but dispel the possibility that he might ever be charged for the deadly mailings. And - in an election year when fear of terrorism looms an important issue - Hatfill's exoneration would remind voters that no suspect has been caught.

The anthrax investigation has been one of the largest in the FBI's history. Based on summaries described publicly by members of Congress, the "Amerithrax" investigation as of late 2006 had led to 9,100 interviews, 67 searches and 6,000 grand jury subpoenas.

Hatfill's lawsuit argues that officials' determination to appear in command of the unsolved case drove their efforts against him - resulting in "a sustained course of willful and intentional misconduct by law enforcement officials who placed the public image of their agencies above their duty to respect the privacy and liberty of an innocent U.S. citizen."

-------