The Project On Government Oversight (POGO) Blog

Bad News in MOXville

On Christmas eve's eve there's bad news from the Energy Department Inspector General (pdf) on its Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility (or "MOX Facility") at the National Nuclear Security Administration's (NNSA) Savannah River Site in Georgia.  The key finding:

The cost of the MOX Facility will significantly exceed the amounts reported to Congress in 2002.  As of July 2005, NNSA's unvalidated estimate for the design and construction of the MOX Facility was about $3.5 billion, which is $2.5 billion more than it had previously estimated.  Further, as of July 2005, NNSA had spent $453 million – nearly half of the $1 billion design and construction budget – on just design activities and had only completed 70 percent of the design work.

The MOX Facility is intended to help the U.S. and Russia meet an agreement to dispose of 68 metric tons of surplus plutonium by turning it into a fuel for nuclear reactors.

Lost Accountability at Los Alamos

POGO's not too happy about the Energy Department's decision to keep Los Alamos National Laboratory under University of California management.  POGO's Executive Director Danielle Brian said, "What does it take for UC to suffer the consequences of screwing up?  Lockheed wasn't a great alternative, but it is hard to see how UC could possibly have been given a vote of confidence.  We expect a continuation of the era of chaos at Los Alamos."

For a sampling of problems, see POGO's Homeland Security archives on Los Alamos.  And for the latest safety snafu, see this blog entry from last night.

A No-Bid Contract to Watch

Today, we made publicly available a letter we sent yesterday to the Acting Commissioner of a little-known agency called the US section of the International Boundary and Water Commission (USIBWC) (The USIBWC is a semi-autonomous agency in the State Department and has a Mexican government counterpart).  This letter raises concerns about an up to $600 million, no-bid contract awarded by the USIBWC to the Bajagua Project LLC, a small San Diego area company owned by investors who are hoping to turn a profit off of treating Mexican wastewater.  The company, Bajagua, has friends in Congress who have helped make the deal happen through legislation and other sources of pressure to the USIBWC.

For example, Representative Bob Filner (D-CA) who tailored part of Public Law 106-457 to mirror Bajagua's proposal for an international wastewater treatment plant, wrote in a letter dated January 10, 2001 to the USIBWC (pdf):

Congress was briefed on, and supportive of, the Bajagua proposal at the highest levels. Congress intentionally exempted the owners of the proposed ‘Mexican facility’ from federal procurement law anticipating that Aqua Clara, LLC would be the owner of that facility, Mr. Oberstar writes.

(Bajagua is a subsidiary of Aqua Clara LLC.  Oberstar is Congressman James Oberstar (D-MN), the Ranking Democratic Member of the House of Representatives Transportation and Infrastructure Committee.)

Later Filner and former Representative Brian Bilbray (R-CA) wrote a letter to the USIBWC dated December 4, 2000 (pdf) telling them to view Mexican procurement laws as "not relevant."

The Mexican facility is not a public project in Mexico. Therefore, public contracting law in Mexico is not relevant. USIBWC has no responsibility to investigate public contracting law in Mexico with the Mexican section of the IBWC regarding contract issues. USIWBC should focus on Treaty issues. It is the responsibility of the owner of the Mexican facility to develop the project in Mexico, and therefore, comply with Mexican law with regard to its project.

But as we reveal in a letter dated July 28, 2005 from the Mexican government (pdf), the Mexican government felt that it was being left out of the process, even though the project was to be built in Mexico.  This letter is also labeled "sensitive but unclassified" by the USIBWC, despite the fact that the author writes that Mexico's "points [were] made known to the public."

Bajagua's principals (and at least one principal's wife) gave thousands of dollars to Filner, Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-CA) and other political campaigns.  But there's more to this story, stay tuned.

UC, Bechtel win Los Alamos Competition

It's official: Department of Energy Secretary Sam Bodman has just announced that the University of California and the Bechtel Corporation alliance has won the competition for management of Los Alamos National Laboratory.  The University of California has managed Los Alamos since its inception over 60 years ago.  Under UC, Los Alamos has seen many security, safety and management problems which led to the competition for the nuclear laboratory for the first time ever.  The University of Texas and Lockheed Martin lost to the UC/Bechtel team.

The Los Alamos Petri Dish

On the eve of the announcement of the new Los Alamos contract (it is going to be announced tomorrow at 2:00 by Energy Secretary Bodman – bets are on that Lockheed will get it), there is ANOTHER safety screw up there. POGO has learned that late Monday, there was another serious plutonium contamination of five workers at the TA-55 facility at Los Alamos. 

We have been told that the workers were opening a container of plutonium. When the cover came off, a puff of plutonium escaped.  There were nine workers in the area, and five suffered a significant “nose count” (plutonium in their nostrils).  Plutonium is one of the most carcinogenic substances known to man. 

In July of 2004, Los Alamos was shut down until February of 2005 to get their act together on both safety and security issues.  This shut down cost the taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars. Not surprisingly, Los Alamos lowballed it as $121 million, the government has estimated it cost about $370 million, and POGO has estimated it cost over $500 million, but the GAO came out this week saying no one knows how much it cost (pdf).

Since the startup earlier this year, when new safety measures were allegedly in place, there has been a series of safety debacles (pdf).

EVERYONE who has looked at Los Alamos says “the culture has to change.”  But how do you do that? We were excited to see the contract go up for bid for the first time in 60 years, so at least there was SOME reason for management to worry about making mistakes.  But the reality is that only a handful of people will change, even if the contract goes to the Lockheed/UT team. As we learn of new whistleblowers coming forward with concerns that Los Alamos regularly schedules meetings over lunch time so they could charge their (often very elegent) lunches to the government, with the auditors that wanted to look into it get fired – we also want to say that this aspect of Los Alamos' culture has to change too.

Prox Remembered

Martin Lobel, a lawyer and former legislative assistant to Senator William Proxmire (D-WI), writes:

I worked for Senator Proxmire from 1968 to 1972 as his Legislative Assistant trying to eliminate corporate subsidies at the expense of ordinary taxpayers. He really believed in the free enterprise system, but in the 4 ½ years I worked for him I never met a businessman who didn't believe in the free enterprise system, but who had a special case that demanded either a government subsidy or protection from competition. Prox would have none of that and took on the most powerful groups in those days – the oil industry and the military industrial complex. Interestingly, his attempts to keep the free market free from government interference caused him to become an arch enemy of many so-called capitalists. He didn't care because his idea of a fun evening was to go to Brookings and discuss arcane economic topics so he knew he was right.

Although he used the press to draw the public's attention to some of the more egregious abuses of the public, the more telling stories about his concern for the public were ones that never made it to the press. Two examples: During the Vietnam war he would regularly go out to Walter Reed and Bethesda Naval Hospital to visit with wounded soldiers but we were under strict orders not to let anyone in the press know about it because he thought it might embarrass the wounded and he wanted to keep doing
it.

The second, and funnier, story occurred during the Cuban missile crisis, when the Wisconsin National Guard was nationalized and sent to Oregon. The office kept getting complaints that there were  inadequate blankets and intolerable food, even for the army. Well, Prox being Prox, decided to
investigate and, without telling anyone, got on a plane to Oregon, took a taxi to the base where they were stationed and, because it was late when he arrived, he asked the duty sergeant whether he could have a bunk for the night. The sergeant, of course, recognized him, gave him his bunk and duly
noted it in the duty log. The next morning Prox was in the enlisted men's chow line when around the corner at a dead run came the base commander and his staff who had just discovered by reading the duty log that he had a United States Senator on his base. He suggested they go over to the officer's club for  breakfast but Prox said, "No. Why don't you join me here? I want to try the food here." That afternoon truckloads of unavailable blankets started  arriving, more than enough to double the
normal allotment of blankets for  the troops and, surprisingly, the quality of the food improved too.

Can you imagine any of the current Senators doing that? A giant has passed from the scene. Who will replace him?

Remembering Jack Anderson

(Right: A photograph Dan E. Moldea took of Jack with many of his former associates, including POGO Senior Investigator Peter Stockton and POGO Board Vice Chairman Jack Mitchell, at his surprise 80th birthday party in 2002.)

Author Dan E. Moldea writes:

I didn't know Jack Anderson very well, but, as a young independent writer, I received three assignments from him, all related to my four-year investigation of the disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa during the mid-1970s. I'll always remember Jack at his 16th-Street office, wearing a pair of slippers and coolly marking up copy at his desk. Whenever I saw Jack, he appeared in control of everything around him. If one of his associates was having difficulty getting a tight-lipped source to talk, all he/she would have to do is tell Jack. He would simply pick up the phone and make the call. Within seconds, the source, awed by Jack and his reputation, would be telling him whatever he wanted to know. Somehow, nearly everyone who came in contact with Jack--even some of his targets--wanted his approval.

I can still sense the respect that Jack's presence commanded, as well as the extent to which people, like me, would go to earn his respect. He could make a young associate's day by simply flashing his wry smile and saying, "Good job." To be sure, Jack, in his familiar role as mentor, kept a watchful eye over all the young journalists in his stable. He wanted them to succeed beyond their work for him.

One of those young reporters, Ed Henry, now a respected on-camera reporter with CNN, filed the following brief story on the night of Jack's death last Saturday. Henry interviewed investigative-journalist Mark Feldstein, another accomplished and well-known Anderson-associate, who now teaches journalism at George Washington University and is current finishing his widely-anticipated biography of Jack, Poisoning the Press: Richard Nixon, Jack Anderson, and the Rise of the White House Attack Machine.

Henry and Feldstein, both of whom really knew Jack, speak for those of us who didn't know Jack very well but always looked up to and respected him.

Domestic Spying: "Where are the results?"

Over the weekend, President Bush launched an offensive to defend his authorization of domestic spying by the National Security Administration as well as the Patriot Act which has been put on hold by Senate filibuster. But 17-year FBI veteran Mike German questions the idea that domestic spying has significantly helped in the War on Terrorism in an excellent article by Congressional Quarterly’s Jeff Stein:

“Where are the results?” he asks. “If we’re recording thousands of people and secretly collecting documents regarding tens of thousands of people, why aren’t thousands of people going to jail?

“Even with the possibility that people are being bundled off to [Guantanamo],” he added, “we’re still only talking about hundreds of people, not thousands.”

Even given those relatively paltry numbers, how many cases were busted by the feds? A number of terrorism cases in the list of 10 that President Bush boasted about months ago “were not stopped as the result of good intelligence work,” German said. It was fellow airline passengers who jumped on would-be shoe bomber Richard Reid four years ago this month. And last summer, a gang of prison jihadists weren’t busted “by NSA wiretaps, or Patriot Act powers, but by the Torrance Police robbery squad,” German pointed out.

The article adds: “Meanwhile, numerous commissions, studies and congressional hearings have concluded that U.S. intelligence isn’t suffering from a lack of information, it’s drowning in it.”

Secrecy With A Smile?

Yesterday President Bush issued a new executive order on the Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA).    Overall, the order:

• Enhances the profile of FOIA within government agencies by making a senior official within each agency in charge of FOIA;
• Emphasizes more of a customer service approach with information requestors; and
• Directs agencies to review and plan to address deficiencies in processing requests (e.g. speed, reducing backlog). 

It doesn't go as far as Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) and Patrick Leahy's (D-VT) legislation, the OPEN Government Act.

Also, the executive order doesn't address former Attorney General John Ashcroft's memo which, in 2001, stated that the Department of Justice would defend agency decisions to withhold information "unless they lack a sound legal basis."  The Ashcroft Memo superseded former Attorney General Janet Reno's FOIA memo in 1993, which stated that "it shall be the policy of the Department of Justice to defend the assertion of a FOIA exemption only in those cases where the agency reasonably foresees that disclosure would be harmful to an interest protected by that exemption."

As attorney Stephen Gidiere has written, "The Ashcroft Memo with its 'sound legal basis' standard encourages (or at least supports) greater use of FOIA exemptions by federal agency personnel."  However, the National Security Archive found in 2003 that the Ashcroft Memo may actually be "more thunder than lightning" because only a relative handful of agencies at the time of the Archive's audit did anything different in response to the Memo.

Furthermore, the executive order does not seek to curb the over-broad use of and the proliferating number of FOIA exemptions.  Nor, as Mark Tapscott of the Heritage Foundation has pointed out, does it impose penalties for agency or individual violation of FOIA.

While this new executive order is a positive step, POGO hope its result isn't just secrecy with a smile.

The Price of Telling the Truth

Today’s Washington Post reports on the Grassley/Schumer letter and the situation with Mr. Hikmat "Joe" Mansour. Below is a statement from Mr. Mansour telling his story.

THE PRICE OF TELLING THE TRUTH

September 11, 2001 - what a tragic day for our country. Like all Americans, I was deeply moved by its sounds and images. The voices of overwhelmed emergency workers and photos of innocent victims brought tears to my eyes. But they were also a call to action. You see, I am an American citizen not through accident of birth, but by choice. I took a solemn oath to "defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic." And although some look for reasons to doubt my allegiance (I am a first-generation Arab American, born in Lebanon), I will fulfill my oath, whether by "bear[ing] arms on behalf of the United States" (as the Oath of Citizenship states) or through telling uncomfortable truths.

Since 1995 I have worked for the Federal Bureau of Prisons, part of the United States Department of Justice. As citizen and employee, it is my responsibility to find ways to perform my duties better, and suggest ways for the Bureau to better achieve its mandate. These sometimes take the form of memos to my superiors, intended to help achieve the Bureau's goals more effectively and efficiently.

One area in which I observed problems was the lack of Arab language translators. As one of the few Arab-Americans in the Bureau, I have sometimes translated Arabic letters written by inmates. After 9/11, the number of these increased dramatically; some detailed threats to the United States and its allies. In response to this apparent national security problem, I wrote a memo to the national office of the Bureau of Prisons in the summer of 2003 detailing the need for translators. It eventually made its way to the United States Senate, to the Inspector General of the Department of Justice, and to the media. I am pleased that the Bureau now employs one Arabic translator, and I hope that my letter helped initiate this important first step.

Unfortunately, in the process several groups of people have targeted me for unfair and illegal treatment. One group considers me a threat due to my ethnic and religious background. Another distrusts me because I am a "whistleblower" who has publicly questioned Bureau policies and decisions. A third group apparently consists of Islamist radicals who consider me a threat because I have assisted the U.S. government.

Muslim inmates have been overheard discussing retaliation. Recently, a person who had telephoned me with a death threat was arrested in Brooklyn and found in possession of my personal information. And, although I have applied for well over 60 transfers to other positions and other facilities within the Bureau I have not received a single transfer. My employers even went as far as to provide false information about me to other federal agencies.

Clearly, my safety and professional integrity require that I be allowed to continue my work in another, less hostile location. However, my requests for transfer have consistently been denied.

Thank you,

Joe Mansour

Congressional Probe Into Cunningham Scandal May Turn Towards Staffers

The investigation into the fallout from the Duke Cunningham scandal may turn towards congressional intelligence staff, according to people familiar with the matter.

In particular, senior government officials are concerned that the House Intelligence Committee’s independent oversight responsibility of the CIA was compromised by staff members’ relationships with a senior CIA officer who is life long friends with one of the co-conspirators in the Cunningham case, Brent Wilkes. The friend: CIA Executive Director Kyle Dustin "Dusty" Foggo who was “very chummy” with the staff of previous Intelligence Chairman and current CIA Director Porter Goss and with some current staff who were on board when Goss ran the committee, sources told POGO.

The San Diego Union-Tribune ran a devastatingly good profile of Wilkes earlier this month detailing his political connections and scores. Cunningham, who served on the House Intelligence Committee before resigning from Congress earlier this month, could face 10 years in prison after pleading guilty on federal graft charges.

Josh Marshall, writing for The Hill, notes, "Foggo reportedly also dissented from some of the contracting reforms initiated by his predecessor under George Tenet."

The House Intelligence Committee is currently investigating what, if any, undue influence Cunningham used to secure CIA contracts for his benefactors, like Wilkes. But this new twist could impugn that probe, if conflicts of interest arise at the staff level.

Another Kind of Prison Torture

According to a letter yesterday from Senators Charles Grassley (R-IA) and Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY), the Justice Department's Federal Bureau of Prisons has refused to help a security officer whose life has been threatened for blowing the whistle. Prison inmates at the facility where the officer works as well as individuals outside the government have threatened to kill or otherwise harm him. According to the letter:

In August, [NAME REDACTED] received a phone call from Brooklyn, New York, from an individual who threatened his life as a result of his whistle-blowing activities. We understand that the FBI has apprehended this individual and confirmed that he had [NAME REDACTED]'s personal information in his possession.

Despite this, the Bureau of Prisons has refused to take steps to protect the employee from possible harm by relocating him to another facility where he would be less likely to be found and harmed. According to the Senators:

We do not understand why a transfer request would be denied under these circumstances..The repeated denials for a requested transfer raise serious questions about the appearance of whistleblower retaliation.

We believe that this issue may warrant further investigation, analysis, and Congressional oversight.

Even by the standards of these dark days when federal bureaucrats have free reign to retaliate against whistleblowers, this is one of the most extraordinary cases we have seen. Senators Grassley and Schumer deserve kudos for standing up for this whistleblower. Please send them a note of thanks on their web sites here and here. This kind of grueling work protecting whistleblowers never gets enough appreciation from the public.

Let the uncaring bureaucrats know that you are outraged about this case -- please send an email to Harley G. Lappin, Director of Federal Bureau of Prisons, his email is Hlappin@bop.gov, and post a copy here too if you'd like to share.