Over the last decade, the U.S. military has destroyed or failed to keep millions of field records from Iraq and Afghanistan. The lapse in recordkeeping has left soldiers struggling (sometimes for years) to prove their combat experiences to obtain medical benefits, awards or veteranbenefits. In one case, the father of a Kansas soldierwho died in Iraq nine years ago never got a casualty report that would provide answers about his son’s death.
Veteran reporter Peter Sleeth will be on Reddit Wed., Nov. 14, at 3 pm ET to answer your questions — who is affected, why the documents are missing in the first place, and what is being done about it.
To join the discussion, head over to Reddit’s IAMA forum tomorrow. You must click “register” in the upper right-hand corner of the page to post questions or comments.
Are you an Iraq or Afghanistan veteran who can't obtain your military field records? Tell us your story.
Back in August, the Federal Communications Commission forced the country's television stations to put their political advertising files — which reporters had been able to see only by visiting the stations — online.
With the help of more than 800 volunteers, we've spent months digging through the tens of thousands of documents the stations uploaded as part of our Free the Files project, and we've learned a great deal.
We uncovered a so-called dark money group, a "social-welfare nonprofit" not required to disclose its donors, that spent more than $1 million to air ads attacking Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown in Ohio. The group was run by a lobbyist who employed a former aide to Brown's rival. We also found a self-described "grassroots" group in Florida that was actually funded by big electric companies. And we used the files to track the influence of dark money groups in tight races in New Mexico and Nevada.
But the data also has some limitations. It only includes files from ABC, CBS, NBC and FOX affiliates in the nation's top 50 markets. (All stations will have to participate by 2014.) Here are four ways to make it better:
Create a Common Format: The biggest problem with the files at the moment is that they're not searchable. Stations simply upload the advertising contracts in PDF format, which means that in order to find out how much President Obama's campaign spent in, say, Denver, you have to click on each ad contract and add up the numbers. The data would be much more useful if the FCC required the stations to list the buyer, the price and the contract number for each ad buy in a searchable format, in addition to uploading the contracts.
Solve the Revisions Problem: With the help of our volunteers, we've tallied $753 million in ad buys so far. But that number is almost certainly too high. A lot of contracts are revised multiple times, and each version of the contract is uploaded to the FCC. Duplicates are sometimes uploaded, too. (One contract showed up 19 times.) When we went through the files and eliminated the duplicates for the Las Vegas market, the total ad buys dropped from about $133 million to $47 million. The FCC could require stations to flag the most recent version of the contracts so people can ignore the rest.
One Contract, One File: Some files we reviewed included multiple ad contracts. Other times, one ad contract was split into two separate files. We recommend one contract per file.
Set Deadlines for the Stations: The FCC doesn't specify how long stations can take to upload ad contracts — it simply requires they do it "as soon as possible." Some were still uploading contracts a week after the election. The FCC should set a reasonable, but short deadline to get it done.
This story was co-published with The New Yorker and is not subject to our Creative Commons license.
In 1987, when Judge Robert Bork was enmeshed in a partisan struggle over his Supreme Court nomination, a reporter for an alternative weekly in Washington, D.C., got a tip that the judge was a patron of a local video store. Michael Dolan went to Potomac Video, in the western corner of the capital, and asked the assistant manager for a list of videos the judge had checked out. "Cool," the assistant manager said. "I'll look."
Dolan's subsequent story, published in the Washington City Paper, caused a sensation, though not because of the judge's taste in videos, which, it turned out, was unremarkable. There were 146 rentals in less than two years, including lots of Hitchcock and Bond, as well as movies featuring Meryl Streep and Bette Midler. As Dolan wrote, "Despite what all you pervs were hoping, there's not an X in the bunch, and hardly an R."
After a bitter fight, the Senate rejected Bork's nomination. One thing everyone agreed on, however, was that Bork's privacy had been invaded. In 1988, Congress passed the Video Privacy Protection Act, making it illegal to release video lists without a customer's consent to anyone but law enforcement, and then only with an appropriate warrant. It is reasonable to note that the unusually rapid congressional action was perhaps aimed at protecting the privacy of Legislator X as much as Citizen Y. If a reporter could easily get the judge's video list, a senator's list would not be much harder to get, and would probably be a lot more lively.
Will the scandal surrounding David Petraeus, General John Allen, Paula Broadwell, Jill Kelley, and a shirtless F.B.I. agent turn into the same sort of eureka moment that Congress experienced when Bork was, as the saying now goes, "borked"? Although the lustful portion of the Petraeus scandal is hardly disappearing — who else will be drawn into it, and when will we read the emails? — attention is turning toward the apparent ease with which the F.B.I. accessed the electronic communication of Petraeus, Broadwell, Kelley, and Allen. The exact circumstances of how the F.B.I. got its hands on all this material remains to be revealed — for instance, whether search warrants were obtained for everything — but the bottom line appears to be that the F.B.I. accessed a vast array of private information and seriously harmed the careers of at least Petraeus and Broadwell without, as of yet, filing a criminal complaint against anybody. As the law professor and privacy expert James Grimmelmann tweeted the other day, "The scandal isn't what's illegal; the scandal is what's legal (or what the FBI thinks is legal)."
In recent years, a handful of privacy activists — led by the A.C.L.U., the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, and the Center for Democracy & Technology — have filed lawsuits and requested official documents in an effort to reveal and challenge the government's vast surveillance powers. For the most part, they have not succeeded in changing things; the Petraeus scandal appears to show just how much surveillance the F.B.I. and other law enforcement agencies can conduct without a judge or a company telling them "no, you can't have that."
For instance, in its semiannual transparency report, Google announced this week that it receives more requests for user data from the U.S. government than any other government in the world, and that those requests rose 26 percent in the latest six-month reporting period, to nearly 8,000; the company said that it complied with 90 percent of the requests, either fully or partially. As Chris Soghoian, the A.C.L.U.'s principal technologist and senior policy analyst, wrote this week:
"The guest lists from hotels, IP [computer] login records, as well as the creative request to email providers for 'information about other accounts that have logged in from this IP address' are all forms of data that the government can obtain with a subpoena. There is no independent review, no check against abuse, and further, the target of the subpoena will often never learn that the government obtained data."
It's not just email. In July, Rep. Edward Markey, a Democrat from Massachusetts, cajoled major cellphone carriers into disclosing the number of requests for data that they receive from federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies: In 2011, there were more than 1.3 million requests. As ProPublica reported at the time, "Police obtain court orders for basic subscriber information so frequently that some mobile phone companies have established websites — here's one— with forms that police can fill out in minutes. The Obama Administration's Department of Justice has said mobile phone users have 'no reasonable expectation of privacy.'"
There's a particularly cruel irony in all of this: If you contact your cell-phone carrier or Internet service provider or a data broker and ask to be provided with the information on you that they provide to the government and other companies, most of them will refuse or make you jump through Defcon levels of hops, skips, and clicks. Uncle Sam or Experian can easily access data that shows where you have been, whom you have called, what you have written, and what you have bought — but you do not have the same privileges.
The surveillance, which is being challenged in a number of suits, is conducted through an alphabet soup of laws, regulations, and loopholes, including the Wiretap Act, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (which extended the Wiretap Act to email, and added the Stored Communications Act for stored email), the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and the Patriot Act (which amended all the others). One of the remedies that's before Congress is a bill introduced by Senator Patrick Leahy, a Democrat from Vermont, to require that in most cases law-enforcement agents must obtain a search warrant from a judge before getting customer emails from an Internet company. It would also provide more guarantees that citizens be notified that their email is being surveilled. It's only a partial fix, of course; for instance, it does nothing about cell-phone surveillance.
Everyone has an opinion on what should be done, and one of the country's most famous judges is of two minds on the subject. "It seems to me we often hamper enforcement agencies so that they can't do their job, and when we aren't doing that we are cutting them loose so they can abuse their power," said Judge Bork, reached by phone at his home in northern Virginia. "Is there too much intrusion into private lives? I can't answer that very well, because sometimes there is, sometimes there isn't."
Until now, Congress has not stood in the way of the expanding surveillance, mainly because it was justified as part of the effort to prevent another 9/11. But the Petraeus case shows that among the people who have the most to lose from unchecked surveillance are the people who thought they would benefit from it—government elites who allocate the funding and make the laws and operate the bureaucracy of surveillance. Perhaps they will start worrying a bit more about becoming the next Petraeus or Bork. Our legislators, who are not all angels, now have real skin in the game, so to speak.
This story was co-published with The Chronicle of Higher Education.
The Education Department enacted a crucial reform on behalf of borrowers who become disabled, issuing new rules earlier this month that make it easier for these borrowers to get their federal student loans forgiven.
The rules, which the department has not publicly announced, for the first time recognize certain disability findings by the Social Security Administration as sufficient grounds to discharge student loans. This will allow many borrowers to avoid a lengthy double review to determine whether they are truly disabled. Under federal law, borrowers who develop severe and lasting disabilities are entitled to get their loans forgiven.
The reform came after an investigation early last year by ProPublica and the Chronicle of Higher Education found that the department's system for evaluating disability was erratic, duplicative and dysfunctional, and was keeping many genuinely disabled borrowers buried in student debt. The department subsequently promised to revamp the program, but had previously resisted the key reform of waiving a second review for borrowers who Social Security had already found to suffer from long-term disabilities.
"They are really trying to get this right," said Deanne Loonin, an attorney with the National Consumer Law Center and the director of its Student Loan Borrower Assistance program, who has been a persistent critic of the program.
Loonin said that the reforms made by the department are "all positive," but that the key question is whether the new rules are implemented effectively. She has estimated that two-thirds of her clients have some kind of Social Security determination.
The new guidelines establish an array of changes that, in combination with the acceptance of certain Social Security findings, represent a sweeping overhaul of the program. These include streamlining the application process by creating a single form and point of contact in the department, improving communication with applicants to better explain denials, and creating a new role for lawyers and family members of disabled borrowers who wish to serve as their representatives. The reforms will go into effect on July 1, 2013.
The department's reversal on Social Security findings came as a surprise to observers — and followed a lengthy campaign by advocates and lawmakers to convince the department to overhaul its process.
In May 2011, Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, chairman of the Senate's Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, and Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., the ranking Democrat on the House Committee on the Education and the Workforce, wrote a letter to the Education Department calling on it to fix the disability discharge program in light of the problems identified by ProPublica's investigation.
This past summer, the department proposed new rules that revamped major elements of the program. But it insisted that its legal mandate did not allow it to accept disability findings by Social Security. It was not until nearly 3,000 public comments poured in, most of them including pleas for the department to recognize Social Security findings, that it began to reconsider its position. The comments included a letter signed by more than a dozen consumer and civil rights organizations and a letter-writing campaign organized by The Institute For College Access and Success.
After receiving the comments, the department opened talks with Social Security and became convinced that its standard for forgiving loans could be tied to the Social Security designation Medical Improvement Not Expected, which is used to denote long-term disabilities. "We needed a high comfort level," said Gail McLarnon, the director of policy coordination in the department's Office of Postsecondary Education. "These are student loans, there's a lot of money on the line here."
She said the department's decision to heed popular demand was an "example of public comments working exactly as it should."
When the new system comes into effect, disabled borrowers will be able to submit award letters from Social Security as proof of their disability. If the award letter says the beneficiary is not scheduled for a medical review for at least 60 months — five years — that means that the borrower has a long-term disability and is immediately eligible to discharge federal loans. (Social Security award letters simply tell you how long it will be until your next disability review, not that they have classified you as "Medical Improvement Not Expected.")
Borrowers with more frequent Social Security medical reviews — which correspond to the categories "Medical Improvement Expected" and "Medical Improvement Possible" — will still have to undergo a medical review by the Education Department in order to discharge their loans.
At 6:11 p.m. on September 6, 2011, San
Bruno, Calif. 911 received an urgent call. A gas station had just exploded and
a fire with flames reaching 300 feet was raging through the neighborhood. The
explosion was so large that residents suspected an airplane crash. But the real
culprit was found underground: a ruptured pipeline spewing natural gas caused a
blast that left behind a 72 foot long crater, killed eight people, and injured
more than fifty.
Over 2,000
miles away in Michigan, workers were still cleaning up another pipeline
accident, which spilled 840,000 gallons of crude oil into the Kalamazoo River
in 2010. Estimated to cost $800 million, the accident is the most expensive
pipeline spill in U.S. history.
Over the last
few years a series of incidents have brought pipeline safety to
national – and presidential – attention. As Obama begins his second
term he will likely make a key decision on the controversial Keystone XL pipeline,
a proposed pipeline extension to transport crude from Canada to the
Gulf of Mexico.
The
administration first delayed the permit for the pipeline on environmental
grounds, but has left the door open to future proposals for Keystone’s
northern route. Construction on the southern
route is already underway, sparking fierce
opposition from some landowners and environmentalists.
The problem, protesters
say, is that any route will pose hazards to the public. While pipeline operator
TransCanada has declared that Keystone will be the safest pipeline ever
built in North America, critics are skeptical.
“It's
inevitable that as pipelines age, as they are exposed to the elements,
eventually they are going to spill,” said Tony Iallonardo
of the National Wildlife Federation.“They’re
ticking time bombs."
Critics of the
Keystone proposal point to the hundreds of pipeline accidents that occur every
year. They charge that system wide, antiquated pipes, lax oversight and
inadequate precautions put the public and the environment at increasing risk.
Pipeline operators point to billions of dollars spent on new technologies and a
gradual improvement over the last two decades as proof of their commitment to
safety.
Pipelines are
generally regarded as a safe way to transport fuel, a far better
alternative to tanker trucks or freight trains. The risks inherent in
transporting fuel through pipelines are analogous to the risks inherent in traveling
by airplane. Airplanes are safer than cars, which kill about 70 times as many
people a year (highway accidents killed about 33,000 people in 2010, while
aviation accidents killed 472). But when an airplane crashes, it is much more
deadly than any single car accident, demands much more attention, and initiates
large investigations to determine precisely what went wrong.
The same holds
true for pipelines. Based on fatality
statistics from 2005 through 2009, oil pipelines are roughly 70 times as
safe as trucks, which killed four times as many people during those years,
despite transporting only a tiny fraction of fuel shipments. But when a pipeline
does fail, the consequences can be catastrophic (though typically less so than
airplane accidents), with the very deadliest accidents garnering media
attention and sometimes leading to a federal investigation.
While both air
travel and pipelines are safer than their road alternatives, the analogy only
extends so far. Airplanes are replaced routinely and older equipment is
monitored regularly for airworthiness and replaced when it reaches its safety
limits. Pipelines, on the other hand, can stay underground, carrying highly
pressurized gas and oil for decades – even up to a century and beyond. And
while airplanes have strict and uniform regulations and safety protocols put
forth by the Federal Aviation Administration, such a uniform set of standards
does not exist for pipelines.
Critics
maintain that while they’re relatively safe, pipelines should be safer. In many
cases, critics argue, pipeline accidents could have been prevented with proper
regulation from the government and increased safety measures by the industry. The
2.5 million miles of America’s pipelines suffer hundreds of leaks and
ruptures every year, costing lives and money. As existing lines grow
older, critics warn that the risk of accidents on those lines will only increase.
While
states with the most pipeline mileage – like Texas,
California, and Louisiana – also have the most
incidents, breaks occur throughout the far-flung network of
pipelines. Winding under city streets and countryside, these lines stay
invisible most of the time. Until they fail.
Since 1986,
pipeline accidents have killed more than 500 people, injured
over 4,000, and cost nearly seven billion dollars in property
damages. Using government data, ProPublica has mapped thousands of these
incidents in a new interactive news application, which provides
detailed information about the cause and costs of reported incidents going back
nearly three decades.
Pipelines break
for many reasons – from the slow deterioration of corrosion to
equipment or weld failures to construction workers hitting pipes with
their excavation equipment. Unforeseen natural disasters also lead to
dozens of incidents a year. This year Hurricane Sandy wreaked
havoc on the natural gas pipelines on New Jersey’s barrier islands. From
Bay Head to Long Beach Island, falling trees, dislodged homes and flooding
caused more than 1,600 pipeline leaks. All leaks have been brought
under control and no one was harmed, according to a New Jersey
Natural Gas spokeswoman. But the company was forced to shut down service to the
region, leaving 28,000 people without gas, and it may be months before they get
it back.
One of the
biggest problems contributing to leaks and ruptures is pretty
simple: pipelines are getting older. More than half of the nation's
pipelines are at least 50 years old. Last
year in Allentown Pa., a natural gas pipeline exploded underneath a
city street, killing five people who lived in the houses above and
igniting a fire that damaged 50 buildings. The
pipeline – made of cast iron – had
been installed in 1928.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.A fire rages through Allentown, PA, after a gas line explosion in Feb. 2011
Not all
old pipelines are doomed to fail, but time is a
big contributor to corrosion, a leading cause of pipeline
failure. Corrosion has caused between 15 and 20 percent of all
reported “significant incidents”,
which is bureaucratic parlance for an incident that resulted in a death,
injury or extensive property damage. That’s over 1,400 incidents since
1986.
Corrosion is
also cited as a chief concern of opponents of the Keystone XL
extension. The new pipeline would transport a type of crude called diluted
bitumen, or “dilbit.” Keystone’s
critics make the case
that the chemical makeup of this heavier type of oil is much
more corrosive than conventional oil, and over time could weaken the
pipeline.
Operator
TransCanada says that the Keystone XL pipeline will transport crude similar to
what’s been piped into the U.S. for more than a decade, and
that the new section of pipeline will be built and tested to meet all federal
safety requirements. And in fact, none of the 14 spills that happened in
the existing Keystone pipeline since 2010 were caused by corrosion,
according to an investigation by the
U.S. Department of State.
The specific
effects of dilbit on pipelines – and whether
the heavy crude would actually lead to more
accidents – is not definitively understood by scientists.
The National Academies of Science is currently in the middle of study on dilbit and pipeline corrosion,
due out by next year. In the meantime, TransCanada has already begun
construction of the southern portion of the line, but has no assurance it will
get a permit from the Obama administration to build the
northern section. (NPR has a detailed map of the existing and
proposed routes.)
Little
Government Regulation for Thousands of Miles
While
a slew of federal and state agencies oversee some aspect of America’s
pipelines, the bulk of government monitoring
and enforcement falls to a small agency within the Department of
Transportation called the Pipeline and Hazardous
Materials Safety Administration – pronounced“FIM-sa” by insiders. The agency only requires
that seven percent of natural gas lines and 44 percent of all
hazardous liquid lines be subject to their rigorous
inspection criteria and inspected regularly. The rest of the
regulated pipelines are still inspected, according to a PHMSA
official, but less often.
The inconsistent
rules and inspection regime come in part from a
historical accident. In the 60's and 70's, two laws established a
federal role in pipeline safety and set national rules for
new pipelines. For example, operators were required to conduct more
stringent testing to see whether pipes could withstand high pressures,
and had to meet new specifications for how deep underground pipelines
must be installed.
But the
then-new rules mostly didn’t apply to pipelines already built – such as
the pipeline that exploded in San Bruno. That pipeline, which burst open along
a defective seam weld, would never have passed modern high-pressure
requirements according
to a federal investigation. But because it was installed in 1956, it was
never required to.
"No one
wanted all the companies to dig up and retest their
pipelines," explained Carl Weimer, executive director of
the Pipeline Safety Trust,
a public charity that promotes fuel transportation safety. So older pipes
were essentially grandfathered into less testing, he said.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.A burned out car and charred remains of a home in San Bruno, C.A. after a pipeline explosion in Sept. 2010
Later reforms
in the 1990’s mandated more testing for oil pipelines, and
today PHMSA requires operators to test pipelines in "high
consequence" areas, which include population centers or areas near
drinking water. But many old pipelines in rural
areas aren’t covered by the same strict regulations.
Some types of
pipelines – such as the “gathering” lines that connect wells to process
facilities or larger transmission lines – lack any PHMSA regulation at
all. A
GAO report estimates that of the roughly 230,000 miles of gathering lines,
only 24,000 are federally regulated. Because many of these lines operate at
lower pressures and generally go through remote areas, says the GAO, the
government collects no data on ruptures or spills, and has no enforced
standards for pipeline strength, welds, or underground depth on the vast
majority of these pipes.
The
problem, critics argue,
is that today’s gathering lines no longer match their old
description. Driven in part by the rising demands of hydraulic fracturing,
operators have built thousands of miles of new lines to transport gas
from fracked wells. Despite the fact
that these lines are often just as wide as transmission
lines (some up to 2 feet in diameter) and can operate under the
same high pressures, they receive little oversight.
Operators
use a risk-based system to maintain their pipelines – instead
of treating all pipelines equally, they focus safety efforts on the lines
deemed most risky, and those that would cause the most harm if they failed. The
problem is that each company use different criteria, so
"it's a nightmare for regulators," Weimer said.
However, Andrew
Black, the president of the Association of Oil Pipe Lines, a trade group
whose members include pipeline operators, said that a one-size-fits-all
approach would actually make pipelines less safe, because operators (not to
mention pipelines) differ so widely.
"Different
operators use different pipe components, using different construction
techniques, carrying different materials over different terrains," he
said. Allowing operators to develop their own strategies for each pipeline
is critical to properly maintaining its safety, he contended.
Limited
Resources Leave Inspections to Industry
Critics say
that PHMSA lacks
the resources to adequately monitor the
millions of miles of pipelines over which it does have
authority. The agency has funding for only 137 inspectors, and often
employs even less than that (in 2010 the agency had 110 inspectors on
staff). A Congressional Research
Service report found a “long-term pattern of
understaffing” in the agency’s pipeline safety program. According to the
report, between 2001 and 2009 the agency reported a staffing shortfall of an
average of 24 employees a year.
A New York
Times investigation last year found that the agency is chronically short
of inspectors because it just doesn’t have enough money to
hire more, possibly due to competition from the pipeline companies themselves,
who often hire away PHMSA inspectors for their corporate safety programs,
according to the CRS.
Given the
limitations of government money and personnel, it is often the industry
that inspects its own pipelines. Although federal and state
inspectors review paperwork and conduct audits, most on-site pipeline inspections
are done by inspectors on the company’s dime.
"This
isn't like the fox guarding the hen house," said Weimer. "It's like
the fox designing the hen house."
Operators point
out that defining their own standards allows the inspection
system to tap into real-world expertise. Adopted standards go through
a rulemaking process that gives stakeholders and the public a chance to
comment and suggest changes, according to the agency.
How to
adequately maintain the diversity of pipelines has proved to be
a divisive issue – critics arguing for
more automatic tests and safety measures and companies pointing to
the high cost of such additions.
One such
measure is the widespread installation of automatic or remote-controlled
shutoff valves, which can quickly stop the flow of gas or oil in an emergency.
These valves could help avoid a situation like that after the Kalamazoo River
spill, which took operators 17 hours from the initial rupture to find and
manually shut off. Operators use these valves already on most new pipelines,
but argue that replacing all valves would not be cost-effective and false
alarms would unnecessarily shut down fuel supplies. The CRS estimates that even
if automatic valves were only required on pipelines in highly populated areas,
replacing manual valves with automatic ones could cost the industry hundreds of
millions of dollars.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.A worker on the Kalamazoo river, helping to clean up an oil spill of almost a million gallons from a ruptured pipeline in July 2010
Other measures
focus on preventing leaks and ruptures in the first place. The industry
already uses robotic devices called
"smart pigs" to crawl through a pipeline,
clearing debris and taking measurements to detect any problems. But
not all pipelines can accommodate smart pigs, and operators don’t routinely run
the devices through every line.
Just last
month, a smart pig detected a “small anomaly” in the existing
Keystone pipeline, prompting TransCanada to shut down the entire line. Environmentalists pointed out that this is not the first time TransCananda has called for a shut down, and won’t be
the last.
“The reason
TransCanada needs to keep shutting down Keystone,” the director of the
National Wildlife Federation contended in a statement,“is because pipelines are inherently dangerous.”
Last
January, Obama signed a bill that
commissioned several new studies to
evaluate some of these proposed safety measures, although his decision on extending
the Keystone pipeline may come long before those studies are
completed.
Every year the nation’s oil and natural gas pipelines suffer hundreds of ruptures and spills. We map major pipeline accidents from 1986 to the present.
Elaine Schmottlach has been a ballot clerk in the small southeastern New Hampshire town of Nottingham – population, 4,785 – for the last 25 years. Yet when it came time for her to vote on Nov. 6, she had to show valid photo identification as required under a new state law.
“My view is this is a horrendous law,” she told ProPublica. “I absolutely detest it. I hated having to ask my best friend to show an ID to prove that she is who she is.”
Schmottlach’s act of defiance didn’t have much effect – this time. Her vote still counted, she wasn’t handed a provisional ballot and she wasn’t required to return to the poll with ID. But that could change in future elections under New Hampshire’s plans to phase in the new law.
In the months leading up to the election, voter-ID laws were seen as the biggest threat to voter turnout: More than 30 states have passed such laws, which require voters to provide some type of identification at the polls (see our previous explainer).
But many of these laws, particularly the ones requiring strict photo identification, met setbacks ahead of the election. A state judge ruled in October that Pennsylvania’s law couldn’t be implemented this election, while federal judges refused to allow similar measures take effect this year in Texas and South Carolina.
A week before the election, the Brennan Center for Justice concluded that “for the overwhelming majority of those whose rights were most at risk, the ability to vote will not be at issue on November 6th.”
Experts agree that much-assailed voter ID laws were less an issue in this election than limited early voting hours, lengthy ballots and precincts shuttered after Hurricane Sandy. These issues contributed to long wait times, prompting some to simply throw up their hands and give up on voting.
“Of all the issues relating to voting rules, voter ID got the most attention but was probably the least significant, mainly because we didn’t have it in Pennsylvania,” said Rick Hasen, a professor at the University of California-Irvine who specializes in election law.
In Pennsylvania, where some feared the state’s continuing efforts to advertise the new law would confuse voters, election officials were required to ask voters for ID , but were not allowed to prevent anyone from casting a ballot for failure to produce one.
“On November 6, it was a dry run just as it was in the (April 24) primary,” said Ellen Kaplan, vice president and policy director at the Committee of Seventy, a non-partisan voter education group in Philadelphia. “We don’t know how many people might have been confused and didn’t show up. Among the people that did show up, there was certainly some confusion out there. But I wouldn’t characterize it as so overwhelming that it disrupted the voting process.”
In December, a state judge is expected to hear arguments to permanently block the controversial law.
In Virginia, which instituted a voter-ID lawapprovedby the Justice Department in August, watchdog groups reported few disruptions. (The state has a less stringent law, accepting non-photo IDs such as recent utility bills, bank statements or paystubs.)
The Virginia State Board of Elections estimated that there were 543 provisional ballots cast as a result of voters lacking valid ID – representing less than 5 percent of the total number of provisional ballots cast statewide.
In Tennessee, where a new photo voter-ID law went into effect this year, the Secretary of State’s Office reported no negative impact on turnout, reporting turnout rates “consistent with past presidential elections,” said Communications Director Blake Fontenay.
“If anything, the law may have encouraged more people to vote because they were more confident their ballots would not be cancelled out by ballots cast by ineligible voters,” Fontenay told ProPublica.
Out of 2.45 million ballots cast statewide, 674 Tennessee voters filled out provisional ballots for lacking acceptable photo ID.
New Hampshire Deputy Secretary of State Dave Scanlan said that while the state doesn’t have a final tally on voters who filled out challenged voter affidavit forms as a result of lacking ID, the number “appears to be quite low – possibly less than 1 percent.”
Elsewhere, there have been reports that momentum against voter-ID laws, seen by critics to disproportionately affect minority, elderly and poor voters, actually helped turnout, but the evidence is spotty.
According to a preliminary analysis by the Committee of Seventy, voter turnout in Philadelphia decreased from 61.6 percent in 2008 to 59.7 percent this year. The group’s data also shows that Barack Obama won the city by a comparable margin this year, 467,000 votes, as he did four years ago, when his edge was 461,670 votes.
As Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight’s blog notes, voter turnout across the county, particularly in states pushing for new voter-ID laws, was all over the map, according to the early estimates. Virginia saw a slight increase, New Hampshire stayed virtually the same, while Pennsylvania cast fewer votes than in 2008.
All this doesn’t mean that voting was problem-free. According to The Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, a national election law hotline fielded roughly 90,000 concerned calls this Election Day, down from 100,000 in 2008. Many of the calls related to antiquated voting machines, names not appearing on voter registration rolls, and polling place confusion.
“What we saw, by and large, was the same problems we’ve seen over the last 10 years,” said Eric Marshall, manager of legal mobilization for the Lawyers’ Committee. “The biggest theme was the recurring problems: the more things change, the more things stay the same.”
The agency says it hopes to someday deploy the warehoused machines, but even that prospect was thrown into doubt by allegations that the manufacturer, Rapiscan Systems, may have falsified tests of its experimental privacy software designed to eliminate explicit images of passengers' bodies.
The machines in the warehouse cost about $14 million total, or roughly $150,000 each.
The TSA began rolling out body scanners after the failed underwear bombing on Christmas Day 2009, one that uses X-rays and one that uses millimeter waves similar to those used for cell phones. The X-ray scanner has faced an outcry over passenger privacy and the risk that radiation could cause cancer.
ProPublica reported last month that the TSA was removing the X-ray body scanners from major airports — including Los Angeles, Chicago O'Hare and John F. Kennedy in New York — and replacing them with millimeter-wave machines.
The millimeter-wave machines made by L-3 Communications do not emit X-rays, which have been linked to cancer, and already feature privacy software that produces a generic cartoon image of passengers' bodies.
Rapiscan has been testing its privacy software with the TSA for detection capability and false alarms for about two years. But for now, its backscatter machines still produce filtered images of passengers' naked bodies. To protect passenger privacy, the TSA requires screeners to review the images in a separate room. That slows down lines, which was the reason the agency wanted to move them to smaller airports serving fewer passengers.
But there was one problem: Many smaller airports lack the space to accommodate a separate image-viewing room near security checkpoints. The TSA had hoped Rapiscan's privacy software would pass its tests in time to redeploy the backscatters this fall and winter, John Sanders, TSA's assistant administrator for security capabilities, testified at a House transportation security subcommittee hearing on Thursday.
"We had every belief that the contractor would be able to make the commitments, and we would have it in the field," he said.
But those plans have been thrown awry.
"According to the TSA, this is because the testing of backscatter privacy software suddenly failed," Rep. Mike Rogers of Alabama, the Republican chairman of the subcommittee said at the hearing, which was broadcast online.
On Tuesday, Rogers sent a letter to TSA administrator John Pistole, stating that the manufacturer "may have attempted to defraud the government by knowingly manipulating an operational test ... to have a successful outcome." The allegations were first reported by Bloomberg News.
Rapiscan disputed any wrongdoing.
"At no time did Rapiscan Systems falsify test data or engage in any fraudulent conduct," the company said in a statement. Rapiscan said that it discovered the issue with its software while it was in development and brought the matter to the TSA's attention.
The company said it received a "show-cause letter" from the TSA within the last few days. Such letters are typically sent when the government is considering terminating a contract because a vendor has not delivered on its requirements, said Daniel Gordon, former head of procurement policy for the Obama administration and now an associate dean at George Washington University Law School. They are not necessarily an indication that a contractor did anything criminal, Gordon said.
At the House hearing, the TSA's Sanders said, "I wouldn't say that we have any evidence that documents that they absolutely did" manipulate tests. "We have information, and we have contacted the manufacturer to ask for additional information so that we can look into the matter further."
Sanders reiterated that the decision to shift X-ray body scanners to smaller airports was made for efficiency.
The replacement of backscatters with millimeter-wave machines means the TSA can scan an additional 180,000 passengers a day for explosives or other weapons hidden beneath clothes.
In addition, if a passenger either triggered the machine or opted out of the scanner for health or privacy concerns, a TSA officer would have to conduct a pat-down, which takes an average of 80 seconds. Screening with the millimeter-wave machine takes an average of 12 seconds.
By removing the X-ray scanners from the largest airports, the TSA is exposing far fewer passengers to radiation. While the dose from the backscatter is extremely small, radiation experts have concluded that there is no known dose at which the cancer risk is zero.
Some of the backscatters that were removed from major airports have been installed at airports in Mesa, Ariz., and Key West, Fla. But 91 will be stored in a warehouse until the issue with Rapiscan's privacy software is resolved, the TSA said.
The agency faces a congressional deadline to install the privacy software, known as automated target recognition (ATR), on all of its body scanners by June 1.
The TSA currently has about 150 backscatter machines without the software at airports, such as Seattle-Tacoma, Phoenix Sky Harbor and Washington Dulles.
"If we're not able to make the ..." Sanders said before rephrasing: "We are going to make the deadline of June 1, 2013 to have ATR on all the [body-scanning] machines in the field. So we will have to make business decisions with regards to that."
Rapiscan demonstrated its privacy software for ProPublica and PBS NewsHour last year at its headquarters in Torrance, Calif. The body scanner had a similar screen displaying a generic image of the passenger's body, though Rapiscan's version looked more like children's book illustrations of a boy and girl than the genderless Gumby figures currently on the L-3 machines.
In the few scans that were demonstrated to ProPublica, the software accurately detected a block of dummy plastic explosives hidden in the back waistband of a Rapiscan employee. But in two scans, it triggered a false alarm that something was on the employee's upper arm when nothing was there.
Even if Rapiscan doesn't succeed, the TSA could order X-ray body scanners from another manufacturer. American Science & Engineering, which also makes them, was one of three companies selected this fall as finalists for contracts worth up to $245 million for the next generation of body scanners.
This week, Pulitzer-Prize winning reporter Peter Sleethanswered questions from Redditors on the revelation that field reports have been lost or are missing for many Army units deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Below, highlights of that discussion.
Q: How far does this problem reach? Are you aware of any issues like this with the intelligence agencies? I find it funny/sad that veterans are losing benefits and care because the army couldn't get their version of Excel installed. But there are over 3,000 pages of documentation into the Petraeus affair. — TommyFoolery
A: Senior officers tend to keep their own records quite well, they are conscious of their own history, for certain. We are now exploring whether these missing field records are causing problems with intelligence activities, as a matter of fact.
Q: How the military has dealt with what I'm sure is a recurring problem over the last several decades? Is the problem better/worse?—amzam
A: My belief is that lost records are a constant in a large bureaucracy like the military since the beginning. However, what we are talking about in our story is a massive loss of field records in volumes never before seen. Understand that field records are a distinct category from medical or personnel records, which are kept in separate pipelines, so to speak.
Q: You document the impact on veterans seeking benefits. Are there implications for how the war is remembered? — collo229
A: Yes, history is written from these records.Field records are used by historians for their singular ability to go to an exact spot in time. For example, a few years back I was working on a book about a company of Civil War soldiers. Using field records they recorded, I was able to follow them campsite by campsite through three years of war. I mean, they were so detailed I could go to each site across the South.
Q: Were you really that surprised to find the largest bureaucracy in the U.S. federal government was so inefficient? I'm surprised they can find any records. — IhaveSomeQuestions56
A: I was surprised because the U.S. Army has an efficient track record in keeping field records back to the Revolutionary War. It only really fell apart with the onset of computers.
Q: Do you think this was the result of peacetime lack of diligence, and are veterans organizations going to coordinate a response, e.g. organize a massive organized march on the Pentagon? — MomsHugs
A: Yes, I do think this was a lack of planning during peacetime. It is terribly sad the money and time that was wasted. As to vets organizations, it is a strange mix, some are so tied up with the VA, in my opinion, they cannot afford to anger them. Yet plenty of the vets organizations are mad about this and I expect you will see them petitioning Congress.
Q: How much of the missing records do you believe are due to commanders covering their (or others) ass(es)?[TD1]— TommyFoolery
A: Good question, I imagine it happens occasionally, but in 10 months of reporting I did not find evidence of anything nefarious. Rather, it was a mix of poor training, worse execution and inexcusably sloppy behavior.
Q: That was my first reaction when I read that units were wiping hard drives before they left them for their replacements. Nothing says teamwork like making the new guys start from scratch. — TommyFoolery
A: What typically happened was the departing unit would clear the hard drive to make room for the new unit's data. So the departing unit would leave maybe the last 60 days activity, then clean the rest of the hard drive to allow for more storage capacity. Or, they cleaned them because they were ordered to for security reasons.
Q: Do you reckon some records may have been consciously "lost" to bury the truth, perhaps, on atrocities military personnel may have committed while on the tours? What happens to accountability where there are no records? Who takes the fall for this? — OjayisOjay
A: That is a popular thought out there; I really don't think it happened much, if at all. That said, it would be unwise to rule it out. Accountability is absent, in answer to your excellent question. As to who takes the fall, we shall see. We are going to keep pushing on this story. We think there is much more that is buried here.
Q: What do you think the best solution to this problem is? — IhaveSomeQuestions56
A: the best solution would be rigorous training of senior officers and penalties for not keeping records properly, like demotion.
Q: What advice would you give to active soldiers in order to lower their risk of falling victim to this when their time comes? — TommyFoolery
A: I would tell soldiers to get copies of everything from their deployment orders, to their medical records, to whatever field records they can that involve them and keep them safe, send them home, whatever. A soldier can always ask to see what relevant records they have through the U.S. Army's Joint Services Records Research Center, and for Marines, through the Marines. If there records are missing, field records in particular, make sure you keep a contact list for your commanding officers and other soldiers once you get home. You can use your comrades for "lay" testimony that will substitute for missing records.
Q: Given your line of work, how much do you wish your name was Peter Sleuth? It's only one letter away. —imnotyourbloke
A: I've been doing this work for nigh on 30 years. I have heard that, and much worse versions of my name. Although I am a fan of the PBS show "Sherlock Holmes" with Jeremy Britt.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.Peter Sleeth is a veteran investigative reporter who covered the Iraq war for The Oregonian and helped the paper win a Pulitzer Prize in 2007 for breaking news. Now freelancing, his most recent piece for the Oregon Historical Quarterly is a profile of progressive-era activist Tom Burns.
SHARE YOUR STORY: Are you a veteran who can't obtain your military field records? We want to hear from you.
WATCH: Peter Sleeth and Seattle Times reporter Hal Bernton discuss veteran benefits on Huffington Post Live.
BP agreed to plead guilty today to charges of manslaughter, environmental crimes, and lying to Congress in connection with the 2010 Deepwater Horizon drilling rig explosion, which killed 11 workers and sent as much as 200 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.
As part of a settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice, the company will pay $4.5 billion in what is the largest fine ever levied on a corporation in the United States.
The charges against the company stem from BP engineers' decision to ignore a critically important pressure test on the Macondo well structure that could have prevented the deadly blowout and explosion, and for misrepresenting the amount of oil leaking from the open well head after the mammoth drilling rig sank in nearly 5,000 feet of water.
In a separate and unexpected set of charges, three BP managers were indicted for their roles in operating the rig and for misrepresenting facts to Congress, marking the first time that any senior BP personnel have been criminally charged for their roles in the disaster.
According to a statement issued by the Department of Justice, Robert Kaluza and Donald Vidrine — the highest-ranking BP supervisors on board the Deepwater Horizon at the time of the accident — have been charged with gross negligence in their oversight of the safety tests being conducted on the Macondo well the night of the disaster.
Kaluza and Vidrine "observed clear indications that the Macondo well was not secure and that oil and gas were flowing into the well," the statement said, and then "chose not to take obvious and appropriate steps to prevent the blowout."
Each man has been charged with 11 counts of manslaughter, 11 counts of involuntary manslaughter and one violation of the Clean Water Act. The manslaughter counts each carry a maximum penalty of up to 10 years in prison.
In addition, BP's former deputy incident commander and the company's second-highest ranking person during the spill response, David Rainey, was charged with obstruction of Congress and making false statements to law enforcement officials.
According to the Department of Justice's statement, Rainey manipulated internal estimates to understate the amount of oil flowing from the well and withheld data that contradicted BP's public estimate of 5,000 barrels of oil per day, even though the company's internal calculations suggested a much higher amount.
Rainey could face up to 10 years in prison.
None of the men charged were available for comment, but lawyers for Kaluza and Vidrine told Bloomberg that their clients were innocent.
The Justice Department previously filed charges against a former BP employee, engineer Kurt Mix, alleging that he destroyed evidence in the early days of the disaster, but today's charges targeted higher-level employees with supervisory responsibility.
As part of the corporate agreement, BP pleaded guilty to 11 felony counts of misconduct or neglect relating to the 11 deaths and one felony count of obstruction of Congress, according to a statement issued by the company. It also pleaded guilty to two misdemeanor counts, one under the Clean Water Act, the other under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act.
"All of us at BP deeply regret the tragic loss of life caused by the Deepwater Horizon accident as well as the impact of the spill on the Gulf coast region," said Bob Dudley, BP's Group Chief Executive, in a statement issued by the company. "We apologize for our role in the accident, and as today's resolution with the U.S. government further reflects, we have accepted responsibility for our actions."
The criminal settlement is separate from the $7.8 billion agreement BP reached with Gulf plaintiffs earlier this year. It also does not resolve the outstanding civil suits brought against the company by states and the federal government, which could cost the company as much as additional $22 billion.
The charges for negligent interpretation of engineering tests on the ill-fated Macondo well set up the next battle for the company, as it prepares to defend against civil lawsuits and an assessment of fines under the Oil Pollution Control Act. A trial on that matter is expected to begin in February. It was not immediately clear whether today's settlement would trigger dramatically higher environmental fines — depending on the degree of negligence, BP could have to pay the government as much as $4,300 for each barrel of oil spilled in the Gulf.
The settlement also opens the door to debarment proceedings against the company — a possible ban on government contracts, including new leases, that is triggered by a criminal conviction. The Environmental Protection Agency has been evaluating BP for debarment since its deadly 2005 refinery explosion in Texas City, followed by an oil spill in Alaska in 2006. ProPublica reported extensively on the possibility of BP's debarment in 2010.
The agency had been awaiting a resolution in the Gulf matter before reaching a decision, sources tell ProPublica.
There was no immediate comment from EPA officials about debarment following today's announcement. In its statement, BP acknowledged the potential debarment consequences and said that it had not received word on whether debarment was still being considered.
The largest portion of BP's fine, almost $2.4 billion, will be paid to the National Fish & Wildlife Foundation over a period of five years, according to BP's statement. The National Academy of Sciences will receive $350 million. The rest will go mostly to cover criminal penalties, with another $525 million to go to the Securities and Exchange Commission to settle securities claims.
"We specifically structured this resolution to ensure that more than half of the proceeds directly benefit the Gulf Coast region so that residents can continue to recover and rebuild," said Attorney General Eric Holder, in a statement.
Over the last decade, scores of U.S. military units deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan have destroyed or failed to keep field reports of their activities, making it difficult for some soldiers to prove their combat experiences and obtain medical benefits or other veteran awards and services. ProPublica is interested in hearing from Iraq and Afghanistan veterans who have had difficulty locating their field records. Read the investigation, then tell us your story.
The U.S. Attorney for the
Northern District of Illinois filed a federal fraud lawsuit today against a Chicago psychiatrist profiled by ProPublica and the Chicago Tribune in 2009 for his excessive
prescribing of antipsychotic drugs to nursing home patients.
In a news release, the government says that Dr. Michael Reinstein“received illegal kickbacks from pharmaceutical companies and submitted at
least 140,000 false claims to Medicare and Medicaid for antipsychotic
medications he prescribed for thousands of mentally ill patients in area
nursing homes.”
ProPublica and the Tribune reported in 2009 that Reinstein
prescribed more of the risky antipsychotic clozapine to patients in Illinois’
Medicaid program in 2007 than all of the doctors in the Medicaid programs of
Texas, Florida and North Carolina.
The government accuses Reinstein of billing Medicare and Medicaid for managing his
patients’ medications, “knowing that he did not engage in substantive
evaluations of his patients’ medical and psychiatric conditions to properly
manage their medications,” the U.S. attorney’s office said in its release.“Instead, he allegedly prescribed medications to his patients based on his
receipt of kickbacks from pharmaceutical companies.”
Prosecutors allege that Reinstein’s
prescribing decisions were motivated by money and perks from pharmaceutical
companies. He allegedly switched patients from one brand of clozapine to
another based on money and other enticements he received from a pharmaceutical
maker.
Before August 2003, the
government alleged, Reinstein prescribed Clozaril, brand name for clozapine made by Novartis, which
paid him to promote the drug.
When the drug went off
patent in 1998, the lawsuit says, Reinstein resisted
attempts to switch his patients to cheaper, generic versions. But when Novartis
stopped paying Reinstein in 2003, the lawsuit says,
he switched his patients to a generic version made by IVAX Pharamceuticals.
That company had agreed to
pay him a consulting fee, pay his nurse to speak on the drug’s behalf and fund
a research study at an affiliated institute, according to the lawsuit.
“While generally only four
percent of schizophrenia patients who were prescribed antipsychotics received
clozapine, during the time Reinstein was allegedly
accepting kickbacks from IVAX, more than 50 percent of his patients were
prescribed IVAX’s clozapine,” the U.S. Attorney’s office said in its news release.“At one nursing home, Reinstein had 75 percent of the
400 residents on IVAX’s clozapine.”
Ivax paid other perks to Reinstein and his associates, including airfare,
entertainment expenses, a fishing trip, a boat cruise and a golf outing, the lawsuit
says.
In 2006, Reinstein began switching to clozapine made by a different
company but moved some patients back when he received additional perks and
funds, the lawsuit says.
In an interview, federal
prosecutor Eric Pruitt would not comment on whether his office would pursue
criminal charges against Reinstein or whether any
legal action would be taken against the pharmaceutical companies that allegedly
paid the physician kickbacks.
A call left at the office
of Reinstein’s attorney was not immediately returned.
The 2009 investigation by
ProPublica and the Tribune showed that Reinstein’s
high prescribing had serious consequences for his patients. Autopsy and court records showed that by 2009 at least
three patients under Reinstein’s care had died of
clozapine intoxication. One of them, a 50-year-old man, had five times the
toxic level of clozapine in his blood when he died, according to his medical
records.
Reporters
determined that, based on his Medicaid prescribing alone, Reinstein
he would have to work 21 hours a day,
seven days a week to see each of his patients for 10 minutes. Research has
found that the typical U.S. psychiatrist sees about 35 patients per week; Reinstein was seeing 60 each day, he wrote in an audit
report in 2007.
In the
2009 investigation, Reinstein strongly defended his
reliance on clozapine, saying the medication is underprescribed
and is the most effective in its class for schizophrenic patients.
Several opinion columns praising Russia and published in the last two years on CNBC’s web site and the Huffington Post were written by seemingly independent professionals but were placed on behalf of the Russian government by its public-relations firm, Ketchum.
The columns, written by two businessmen, a lawyer, and an academic, heap praise on the Russian government for its “ambitious modernization strategy” and “enforcement of laws designed to better protect business and reduce corruption.” One of the CNBC opinion pieces, authored by an executive at a Moscow-based investment bank, concludes that “Russia may well be the most dynamic place on the continent.”
There’s nothing unusual about Ketchum’s work on behalf of Russia. Public relations firms constantly peddle op-eds on behalf of politicians, corporations, and governments. Rarely if ever do publications disclose the role of a PR firm in placing an op-ed, so it’s unusual to get a glimpse behind the scenes and see how an op-ed was generated.
What readers of the CNBC and Huffington Post pieces did not know — but Justice Department foreign agent registration filings by Ketchum show — is that the columns were placed by the public-relations firm working on a contract with the Russian government to, among other things, promote the country “as a place favorable for foreign investments.”
In at least one case, a Ketchum subcontractor reached out to a writer and offered to place his columns in media outlets. The writer, Adrian Pabst, a lecturer in politics at the University of Kent, said that his views were his own and that he was not influenced or paid by Ketchum.
A spokesman for CNBC, which published the pieces on the Guest Blog section of its website, declined to comment. A Huffington Post spokesman said the column placed by Ketchum did not violate the site’s policy.
Ketchum spokeswoman Jackie Burton told ProPublica that when the firm corresponds with experts or the media on behalf of Russia, “consistent with Ketchum’s policies and industry standards, we clearly state that we represent the Russian Federation.”
Russia, often criticized for human rights abuses and corruption, paid handsomely for the public-relations work. From mid-2006 to mid-2012, Ketchum received almost $23 million in fees and expenses on the Russia account and an additional $17 million on the account of Gazprom, the Russian state-controlled energy giant, according to foreign agent filings.
Op-ed editors interviewed by ProPublica said they work to include full disclosure of relevant financial interests or conflicts — or decline to run pieces that read like advertorial.
“People write op-eds because they have agendas. Separating out what’s an ethical agenda from an unethical agenda is really tough,” says Sue Horton, op-ed editor of the Los Angeles Times.
Horton said the role of the Russian government’s public-relations firm in placing the CNBC and Huffington Post op-eds "absolutely seems like something the reader would want to know.”
The op-eds placed by Ketchum for Russia, according to the filings, are:
A March 2010 CNBC piece by Peter Gerendasi, then managing partner of PricewaterhouseCoopers Russia, that praises the government of then-President Dmitry Medvedev for its “strategic priorities [of] diversification, innovation, promoting small business, supporting families and strengthening the country's financial system so that it can provide the investment capital that will enable business to grow and people to realize their potential.” Gerendasi declined to comment on the piece and PricewaterhouseCoopers said it did not pay Ketchum to place the piece and declined to comment further.
An April 2010 CNBC piece by Kingsmill Bond, then chief strategist at the Moscow investment bank Troika Dialog, that ran under the headline “Russia—Europe's Bright Light of Growth.” It called Russia possibly “the most dynamic place on the continent” for investors. Bond, now at Citigroup, told ProPublica he could not recall Ketchum’s role in the piece.
A September 2010 Huffington Post piece, titled “President Medvedev's Project Of Modernization,” by Pabst, the University of Kent academic. While acknowledging human rights and corruption problems, the thrust of Pabst’s op-ed was praise for Medvedev’s “transformational vision for Russia's domestic politics and foreign policy.” Pabst told ProPublica he was contacted by a Kethcum subcontractor, Portland Communications, and that he was not paid to write the piece. The piece, as well as another he wrote for a web site run by Ketchum, “reflect my own ideas and arguments,” he said in an email.
A January 2012 CNBC piece by Laura Brank, the head of the Russia practice for the international law firm Dechert. Brank praised the Russian government for working to overcome the perception of an inhospitable investment climate “through the implementation and enforcement of laws designed to better protect business and reduce corruption.” Brank did not respond to requests for comment.
While Ketchum maintains it always identifies its client when dealing with the media, the 2010 email sent by Ketchum to Huffington Post pitching the Pabst column did not mention that Russia was the firm’s client. (See the full email.)
“Below is a piece from Adrian Pabst, a leading Russia scholar in Europe,” wrote then-Ketchum Vice President Matt Stearns, who is now at UnitedHealth Group.
Ketchum says that Stearns had in previous correspondence identified Russia as his client to the Huffington Post editor, including to set up "a blog on the editor’s site for a member of the Russian government." The company did not provide that correspondence.
Huffington Post spokesman Rhoades Alderson said the site has a policy requiring bloggers to disclose any financial conflicts of interest related to the issue they are writing about, but Pabst did not violate the policy.
“The job of our blog editors is to make sure all of our posts add value for our readers,” Alderson said in a statement. “Part of that is making judgment calls about the transparency of each blogger's motive, even in cases when there is no technical violation of the disclosure policy. A submission by a PR firm raises flags but is not automatically disqualified if the blog adds value and is in keeping with our guidelines.”
Placement of op-eds is a standard part of the influence game, but it’s rare for readers ever to find out who is behind the curtain.
In 2011, top public-relations firm Burson-Marsteller came under criticism after it asked a blogger to author an op-ed criticizing Google’s privacy standards. Burson was working on a contract for Facebook at the time.
Public-relations firms have also been known to write op-eds and have them placed under the byline of a third party, and even to pay experts to write favorable op-eds. There’s no evidence Ketchum paid any of the authors of the Russia op-eds or that it ghost-wrote them.
Update: This post has been updated with more detail on Ketchum's correspondence with Huffington Post.
ProPublica today is updating our Nursing Home Inspect tool,
which now includes details of more than a quarter-million deficiencies
identified by government regulators at U.S. nursing homes over the past three
years.
Since releasing this information on its website
this summer, the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has added
details of historical violations found in nursing homes. The agency now
releases narrative reports of these problems from a home’s last three
inspection cycles — or about three years.
ProPublica created Nursing Home Inspect to allow users to
easily search through the reams of reports, looking for trends or particular
problems. Earlier
this month, we used the tool to find examples of homes that had been cited
for violating residents’ voting rights. We also came up with a tipsheet for how to best search the records.
Nursing homes are inspected annually, called a standard
survey, and when there is a complaint. Inspectors typically work for state
agencies paid by Medicare. If they find problems, known as deficiencies, they
rank them on a scale of A to L, the most severe. The vast majority are either
labeled D or E.
Of the 262,500 deficiencies in our database, here are the 10
regulations most commonly violated by nursing homes:
Facility is Free of Accident Hazards: 17,331
Facility Establishes Infection Control Program: 14,186
Provide Necessary Care for Highest Practicable Well-Being: 13,401
Store/Prepare/ Distribute Food Under Sanitary Conditions: 11,746
Develop Comprehensive Care Plans: 9,070
Services Provided Meet Professional Standards: 8,986
Clinical Records Meet Professional Standards: 7,962
Not Employ Persons Guilty of Abuse: 7,288
Drug Regimen is Free from Unnecessary Drugs: 7,040
Missing military records from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — detailed in a ProPublica-Seattle Times investigation over Veterans Day — will be the subject of a congressional hearing next month, the spokeswoman for a House Veterans' Affairs subcommittee said today.
Separately, Rep. Michael Michaud, D-Maine, today called on Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta and Veteran's Administration Secretary Eric Shinseki to respond to findings of the investigation, which detailed how dozens of Army units and U.S. Central Command destroyed or failed to keep field reports.
Michaud sits on the House Veterans' Subcommittee on Disability Assistance and Memorial Affairs, which added the topic to a Dec. 4 session about the Department of Veterans Affairs effort to move its claims and benefit recordkeeping systems into the digital era.
ProPublica and the Times found that some veterans were denied disability benefits or faced delays in some cases because field records were unavailable to prove that injuries were combat-related. The stories focused on missing Army and Centcom field reports rather than those created and kept by the VA.
Michaud called for a joint study by the VA and the Pentagon into the impact of missing field records on veterans' benefit claims and the ability to study war time health risks, such as concern about exposure to toxic particulates from open-air burn pits used to incinerate garbage in Iraq and Afghanistan.
"We cannot allow these lost records to lead to the same gaps in knowledge and care that our Vietnam veterans face with Agent Orange and our First Gulf War veterans face with medically unexplained illnesses," wrote Michaud. "We need to get to the bottom of this in order to understand the full scope of the problem and ensure it doesn't happen again."
Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., has also asked Panetta's office to report on the status of efforts to find and collect field records from Iraq and Afghanistan. A spokesman for Murray, who chairs the Senate Committee on Veterans' Affairs, said Panetta has not yet responded.
Among the witnesses being called to the Dec. 4 hearing are representatives from the Department of Defense, the VA, the National Archives and Records Administration and veterans' advocates, a subcommittee spokeswoman said.
The final list of witnesses will be released later, but David Hobson, executive director of the National Organization of Veterans' Advocates, said he had been asked to testify about specific examples of veterans who have had to deal with lost field records and the impact it had on them.
Despite assurances from the VA that veterans can work around missing field records, Hobson said, "oftentimes the other methods don't work out so well, if at all."
Below is the full text of Michaud's letter to Panetta:
November 16, 2012
Dear Secretary Panetta and Secretary Shinseki,
I am writing to express my concern with recent reports that the military has been destroying or failing to keep records from the field in Iraq and Afghanistan. I am very worried that the lack of records will have serious consequences for current and future veterans of these wars.
According to investigative reporting done by ProPublica, the Pentagon was aware of this serious crisis in unit level recordkeeping as early as 2005, but multiple units are unable to produce any records through 2008. These records include after-action write-ups, intelligence reports and on-the-ground accounts, including information on fighting, casualties, prisoners, battle damage, pictures and maps. The lack of these records for the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan will have far reaching implications for both our understanding of these wars and the ability of veterans to get the care and benefits they have earned through their service.
Since October 1, 2001, 1,515,707 veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars have become eligible for VA health care, and that number will grow as the remaining Afghanistan force is drawn down. It is critical that Congress, the Department of Defense and the Department of Veterans Affairs work together to improve the record keeping process and protect the rights of our veterans going forward. In order to ensure that all necessary remedies are put in place, I request information on the Department of Defense and the Department of Veterans Affairs' joint efforts to address the impact the loss of these records will have on individual veterans filing benefit claims and the impact on the efforts of researchers examining war time health risks and patterns.
In addition, I request that the Department of Defense provide information on the steps taken to ensure that military units are submitting field reports and any evidence that demonstrates improvement in the collection of these records. I request that the Department of Veterans Affairs provide information on how often these types of records are used by veterans to establish a disability claim, including claims where a witness affidavit is submitted in place of an official military record.
Our service members and veterans depend on your agencies and Congress to protect them in battle and to care for them at home. We cannot allow these lost records to lead to the same gaps in knowledge and care that our Vietnam veterans face with Agent Orange and our First Gulf War veterans face with medically unexplained illnesses. I appreciate your attention to this important matter and look forward to working with you both as we continue to care for those who have served our country.
Sincerely,
MIKE MICHAUD
Member of Congress
Hal Bernton of The Seattle Times contributed reporting.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.Peter Sleeth is a veteran investigative reporter who covered the Iraq war for The Oregonian and helped the paper win a Pulitzer Prize in 2007 for breaking news. Now freelancing, his most recent piece for the Oregon Historical Quarterly is a profile of progressive-era activist Tom Burns.
In a trial closely watched by the insurance industry, Rhode Island attorney Joseph Caramadre and his former employee Raymour Radhakrishnan pleaded guilty today to charges that they conspired to steal the identities of the terminally ill.
ProPublica wrote about Caramadre's scheme last August in "Death Takes a Policy." He recruited the terminally ill to sign up for products such as variable annuities and bonds that, upon the death of participants, could pay out handsome benefits to Caramadre, his family members and outside investors. Acting on Caramadre's behalf, Radhakrishnan signed up the people whose deaths would trigger the benefits.
In interviews with ProPublica before the trial, Caramadre described the scheme as a win-win. Caramadre or his investors put up the money and reaped the reward, but he paid the terminally ill several thousand dollars or more to participate. They themselves usually could not afford the annuities and bonds he purchased. In Caramadre's view, he was offering money to the needy that they had not expected to receive. Some family members of the terminally ill agreed, while others felt exploited.
The two men pleaded guilty to identity theft and wire fraud, two counts in a 66-count indictment a grand jury returned against them last year. As part of the plea deal, prosecutors will not ask for more than 10-year sentences for each man. Ultimately, it will be up to the judge's discretion how much prison time they receive. Sentencing is scheduled for Feb. 8.
As part of the plea agreement, Caramadre and Radhakrishnan agreed that the object of the scheme was to defraud the insurance companies and bond issuers. The two men did so by obtaining the identity information of terminally ill individuals through false explanations as to why their signatures were required. They also took steps to prevent the terminally ill from understanding the documents they were signing. In some cases, the signers never even saw the full documents to which Caramadre attached their signatures.
As part of the bond purchasing part of the scheme, the two men opened a brokerage account with T.D. Ameritrade. They transferred $280,000 into the account, which constituted wire fraud, according to the plea agreement.
"This is a significant case of identity theft on a grand scale," says Jim Martin, a spokesman for the United States Attorney in Rhode Island.
In remarks outside the court house, U.S. Attorney Peter Neronha told the Associated Press that "today's message is that greed is not good."
A spokesman for Caramadre released a statement that he "has made a decision that acceptance of this plea agreement is in his best interests and the best interests of his family."
The plea agreement came unexpectedly on the second week of a trial that was expected to last for months.
It’s been two weeks since Election Day, but it’s not all over in Arizona. Thousands of early and provisional ballots remain uncounted. These votes aren’t actually expected to impact any more races – just one state legislative race is too close to call – but the prolonged vote count has drawn national attention.
So what’s the reason for the delay, who have been the most vocal critics and why did so many ballots take so long to be counted? We take a closer look:
Exactly how many provisional and early ballots were there in Arizona this year?
Out of an estimated 2.3 million votes cast, more than half consisted of early ballots. More than 400,000 of these weren’t actually turned in close to or on Election Day, catching county elections officials off guard. Arizona voters cast roughly 171,000 provisional ballots this year.
How many votes were left uncounted following Election Day?
About 602,334 votes in all, which includes those early and provisional ballots. The vast majority of these ballots came out of Maricopa County, Arizona’s largest county and voting district. There, nearly 440,000 early ballots were still uncounted the day after Election Day. And at least 115,000 provisional ballots were issued in polling locations across the county.
As of Tuesday morning, Maricopa County was still counting roughly 34,450 of ballots. The state has until Dec. 3 to certify final election results.
Were there more provisional ballots in Arizona than past years?
Yes, but it’ll be roughly the same proportion. In 2008, voters cast 151,799 provisional ballots – or about 5 percent of the total vote. That’s about the same percentage the state will see this year, according to the Arizona secretary of state’s office.
What is notable is the concentration of the overall bump in provisional ballots. They’ve largely originated out of Maricopa County, where in 2008, voters cast 99,826 provisional ballots (compared with 115,000 this year) and neighboring Pima County, where in 2008, voters cast 17,912 provisional ballots (compared with 26,194 such ballots this year.)
Is that why it’s taking so long to count these votes?
That’s one reason. Before they can be tabulated, provisional ballots have to be checked to confirm a voter’s eligibility and that they were cast in the correct precinct. For early ballots, the signature on the envelope must be independently verified. Arizona has also seen a decreased number of polling locations this year as the result of redistricting. The delay is not new to this election. “The media seems to believe that things are taking longer than four years ago, but they aren’t,” Arizona secretary of state spokesman Matthew Roberts told ProPublica. “Our counties completed their work in 15 or so days last time, and that’s what we are expecting this year.”
How many state races are still pending?
As of Tuesday, the local media reported that just one state House seat remained too close to call as the result of Maricopa County’s untabulated votes. But that’s hardly been the only – or most significant – delay. It took nearly a week for the state’s 9th U.S. congressional district to see a winner. And it took until just this past weekend for a victor to be declared in the seat once held by Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. Democrat Ron Barber edged out his opponent, Republican Martha McSally, by just 1,402 votes.
Despite the fact that the most crucial races are settled, the vote count continues for other reasons. “We wouldn’t want to disenfranchise Arizona’s voters that cast a ballot,” Roberts said. “We don’t necessarily have any value on who’s winning or who’s losing – we just want to make sure they’re accurate.”
So why have some Arizona groups been vocal in protesting the delays?
Because they contend that provisional ballots were issued to a disproportionate number of minority Hispanic voters – many of whom are first-time voters. Petra Falcon, president of the voter advocacy group Promise Arizona, told ProPublica her organization helped register 34,000 new Latino voters this year in Maricopa County alone.
However, Falcon said some of those registered reported never receiving a free voter registration card or a requested early ballot in the mail. Others showed up at their polling location only to be told they were not on the voter registration list and that they’d have to cast a provisional ballot instead. (Falcon said she didn’t have exact figures on the number of complaints.)
A national voter rights hotline illustrates the kinds of problems voters encountered this year. One person called to report that a polling location in South Phoenix was “running out of provisional ballots because they are providing so many.”
Another caller in Maricopa County reported that many voters “were denied provisional ballots even when provisional ballots were requested. Ran out of provisional ballots and people were turned away.”
The outcry in the election aftermath led Pima County to assure voters that “provisional voting is designed as a ‘fail-safe’ method to allow voters to participate in an election even if problems occur.”
What else led to these snafus?
According to Matt Roberts, the secretary of state’s spokesman, voter error can’t be ruled out. “It’s possible they didn’t receive an early ballot, or far more likely they lost or misplaced it,” he said. As far as the missing names on voter registration lists, he said: “It’s hard to say why that would occur. Would I tell you the system is 100 percent every time? Of course not, there’s not a system that’s going to function perfectly every time. That’s why we have provisional ballots.”
Yet Falcon says the day before the election, at least 6,800 voters signed up by Promise Arizona were not appearing in the state’s official voter database. “How do we know that all of our voter registrations were accounted for on their end with so many new ones coming in?” she said. “These are the questions we’re asking because there’s obviously something broken in that part of the system.”
What’s the objection to provisional ballots? Aren’t they guaranteed to count?
No. There could be any number of reasons for them to be rejected, but Arizona has a few extra. In 2008, about 29,531 of provisional ballots in Maricopa County were rejected because voters cast ballots in the wrong precinct – the leading reason why such ballots were invalidated. That’s why some voter advocates are concerned by the especially high number of provisional ballots this year in Maricopa County, whose elected sheriff, Joe Arpaio, is a controversial figure. He was a vocal proponent of the controversial state law that authorizes police to question one’s immigration status when a “reasonable suspicion” of illegal status exists.
“If you’re a voter, you at the very least should expect not only that your vote is counted, but that it’s done in a timely manner. Not doing it in a timely manner shakes peoples’ confidence in the process,” said James E. Garcia, spokesman for ACLU of Arizona, which is calling for a deeper investigation into the state’s election delays.
It hasn’t helped that in the run-up to the election, Arizona saw several hiccups. For instance, on Spanish-language election pamphlets, officials in Maricopa County indicated that Election Day was on Nov. 8 (when it was actually Nov. 6).
And aren’t other states are still counting provisional ballots at this point?
Yes. Ohio is still counting provisional ballots– but unlike Arizona, Ohio doesn’t typically begin its provisional vote count until 10 days after the election.
Why is Arizona’s delay potentially significant?
Activists are worried it could be a harbinger of future problems in a state with a shifting demographic. According to the research organization, the Morrison Institute for Public Policy, the number of voting-age Latino citizens in Arizona is expected to increase by 178 percent between 2010 and 2030. The Pew Hispanic Center projects that the number of eligible Hispanic voters nationwide will increase by 40 percent in that same time frame.
Big gains were seen just in the last four years. According to the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials, the number of Latinos registered to vote nationwide increased by 40 percent from 410,000 in 2008 to 576,000 in 2012.
National exit polls show that Latinos nationwide favored President Obama by 71 percent to 27 percent for Mitt Romney this election. While the state’s unofficial results show that Arizona voters on a whole voted for Romney over Obama, 54 percent to 44 percent, the state’s Latino population favored Obama with 74 percent over Romney’s 25 percent share.
Some national polls also indicate that Latinos in Arizona generally lean Democrat: A June 2012 poll by Latino Decisions found that 53 percent identify as Democrat, 9 percent as Republican and 27 percent as Independent.
What, if anything, is the federal government proposing to fix these issues?
Concern with long voting wait times this election sparked response from the president himself. Last week, during a symposium at George Washington University Law School, Tom Perez, assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s civil rights division, proposed several reforms, including allowing same-day voter registration, making voter registration automatic and reducing the number of provisional ballots. We’ve asked DOJ for more details. They’ve yet to respond.
Dr. Rahmatollah Sedigh Sarvestani is dying. The Iranian sociologist, recently retired from a long teaching career at the University of Tehran, suffers from prostate cancer and a pelvic tumor. With his kidneys failing after chemotherapy, doctors in Tehran have stopped treating him.
His last hope is to come to the U.S., where his wife and children are, and where doctors say he could receive potentially life-saving treatment.
But the U.S. won't let him in. And they won't say why.
In March, Sarvestani's visa request was denied. The consulate cited a clause in the Immigration and Nationality Act: Activity "relating to espionage or sabotage." No further information is provided.
"We were absolutely shocked," said his daughter Sahra. "My father is a sociologist. He has cancer."
Sarvestani, who is 64, has recently been confined to a wheelchair and weakened by severe anemia. Sahra says she can barely hear him on the phone: "I would assume he would need to talk and move to spy on the U.S."
The family has made a last-ditch effort to bring him here on humanitarian parole — a short-term, discretionary travel permit for extraordinary circumstances. The family has collected dozens of letters of support from academic colleagues and family members in the U.S., as well as one from his daughter Soureh's congressman, André Carson, D-Ind.
The U.S. could have incriminating information on Sarvestani. But without knowing the details, the family doesn't know how to respond to them.
Instead, they are left to speculate. Sarvestani studied at University of Akron, in Ohio in the 1970s. Two of his daughters were born in the U.S. Like many Iranian students at the time, he supported the overthrow of the Shah and the Iranian Revolution. He belonged to a student group that organized protests in support of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
But traveling to the U.S. hadn't been a problem before — Sarvestani spent a sabbatical year in California in 1994. And more recently, Sarvestani has been an open critic of the Iranian government.
"I can't believe they are dismissing his application over something that happened three or four decades ago," said his son, Hadi, who works at a law firm in Indiana. "It's at the point where he's so ill it takes multiple people to care for him, multiple people to get him out of bed. It's baffling." (ProPublica was not able to speak directly with Sarvestani. We reviewed supporting documents and interviewed former colleagues, students and others.)
In denying a visa, the State Department is required only to cite the relevant provision of the law, not provide evidence or rationale. That is the case for all denials, not just those related to national security.
There is also almost no way to appeal a visa decision. A precedent known as the doctrine of consular non-reviewability holds that they can rarely be challenged in court.
Spokesmen for the State Department and the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services told ProPublica they could not comment on individual cases.
Sarvestani was known for his work on poverty, drug addiction, and urban spaces. His students recall him as religious and politically moderate. His ties to officialdom, according to his family, are limited to work for the Iranian Olympic Committee, and acquaintances among the upper echelons of academia in Iran, such as Mohammed Javad Zarif, a former colleague at the University of Tehran and previously Iran's envoy to the U.N.
His son Hadi said that if his father felt a sense of duty, "it was to the academic world in Iran, to the doctoral students he was close to, and to his position of academic leadership."
According to Sarvestani's wife, Mahboobeh Ayatollahzadeh, Islamic student groups regularly criticized him as pro-Western. In 1985, a hardline Islamic student group campaigned against Sarvestani's appointment as dean of social sciences at his university. The group circulated pamphlets tying him to the U.S. and mentioning his family, who are Baha'i, a persecuted religious minority in Iran. He was forced to step down, eventually returning as a regular faculty member. (Ayatollahzadeh is a school psychologist in Indianapolis, but is currently in Tehran, caring for her husband.)
Sarvestani began keeping a blog in August 2008, where he wrote academic and social commentary, including often barbed invectives directed at members of the Iranian government.
Reza Akbari, who chronicled the Iranian blogosphere on the website InsideIran, characterized Sarvestani's stance as liberal for Iran.
"He could express critical views of the government because of his academic credentials, because he was very well respected," said Dr. Zohreh Bayatrizi, a former student who is now an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Alberta.
"During the election it got so dangerous. I would call him, crying, and say please don't post anything about this on the blog," recalled Sarvestani's daughter Sahra.
The government shut down the blog in July 2009, shortly after Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won re-election. (The disputed vote sparked widespread protests from the reformist opposition, which came to be known as the Green movement. Bayatrizi remembered Sarvestani coming to class with a green armband.)
Last year, Sarvestani was pressured into retiring early from the university. After 2009, said Abbas Milani, director of Iranian Studies at Stanford University, the government "went methodically through and purged members of the Green movement." Iran has also made a concerted effort to rid the educational system of Western influences.
Sarvestani has also experienced personal tragedy. In 2006, his mother was found murdered in her home. No investigation was conducted, but the family believes it was because she led Baha'i prayer meetings.
His family has not yet told Sarvestani that the U.S. denied his visa because of "espionage."
He is "weak and highly vulnerable, both physically and emotionally," his daughter Soureh wrote in a letter submitted with his parole application.
After the 9/11 attacks, the U.S. began to treat immigration and visas as a front line in counterterrorism. Iranians, whose country has long been designated a state sponsor of terrorism, have faced particular scrutiny.
Trita Parsi, founder and president of the National Iranian American Council, said that his organization frequently receives complaints from Iranians perplexed by visa denials. "You've already got Iranian passport. That's a red flag," Parsi said. "Then you have something in the past, and that's another red flag. Too many red-flags and that's it."
Last year, the State Department denied 268 visas under the espionage clause, more than double the number from five years ago. In 2001, there were just 19 such denials. The State Department doesn't provide denial statistics by nationality. But earlier this year, Bloomberg reported at least six Iranian engineering students denied visas under the espionage clause.
If a consular officer has concerns about an application, the officer requests input from intelligence agencies. Consulates now request these reviews with increasing frequency, according to Edward Alden, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. Before 9/11, he says, there were a few thousand a year. In the financial year 2011, there were 366,000, according to figures provided to Congress by the State Department this March.
The review, which must be repeated each time a visa is sought, also often causes delays in visa decisions.
Sarvestani has waited nearly nine years. He first applied for permanent residence through his daughter Soureh, a U.S. citizen, in 2003. In 2009, finally, the application was approved — a good sign, the family thought. But after an interview with a State Department official in Turkey, and more waiting, the denial arrived this March.
Sarvestani's lawyer, Denyse Sabagh, has represented several other clients whose visas were denied under other national security grounds, such as material support for terrorism. In most cases, she said, it was near-impossible to figure out what the exact issue could be, let alone challenge it.
This spring, Sarvestani's family filed Freedom of Information Act requests to try to determine the block on his record. In September, the FBI wrote to say it had more than 2,000 pages of potentially responsive documents. They haven't been released yet, but there is evidence that the agency has long investigated the student group that Sarvestani belonged to in the U.S.
Sarvestani arrived in the U.S. in 1977, a tumultuous period in U.S.-Iranian relations. The shah — who had come to power in a U.S.-backed coup — faced mounting protests. He fled the country in January 1979, and by the end of that year Iran was an Islamic republic under Khomeini.
During these years, Sarvestani belonged to the Muslim Students Association Persian Speaking Group (MSA-PSG), comprised mostly of Iranian Shiite Muslims in the U.S. (and sometimes known as Anjoman Islami, the Farsi phrase for an Islamic student group). According to Sarvestani's family, he went to demonstrations, ran a call-in news hotline, distributed Iranian media to the diaspora, and organized sales of religious books. He also acted as a liaison between bickering factions of Iranian students, traveling frequently to other centers of Iranian life to mediate confrontations.
In August 1980, as the hostage crisis at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran stretched on, Sarvestani joined about 50 members of MSA-PSG staging a hunger strike in front of the White House. They were protesting alleged mistreatment of pro-Khomeini demonstrators arrested in D.C. in late July.
Federal investigators told reporters at the time that the demonstrations were funded by Iran, which MSA-PSG denied.
Hamid Algar, a professor at University of California, Berkeley, who has written on Iranian Islamic groups, says that MSA-PSG did not have formal ties to the government, but was "thoroughly in support of the revolution."
According to the family, most of Sarvestani's colleagues in MSA-PSG returned to Iran, and Sarvestani had only periodic contact with the U.S. group once he left. The Sarvestani children all went to Catholic school in the U.S., where Sarvestani's wife had the children attend Mass daily, though the school did not require it. (She has long worked on interfaith educational initiatives.)
Today, MSA-PSG continues to hold a yearly conference. A photo of Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Khameini adorns one corner of its website, an Iranian flag the other. The most recent public statement from a government official on the group is Senate testimony by then-FBI Director Louis Freeh in 1999. He described it as "comprised almost exclusively of fanatical, anti-American Iranian Shiite Muslims," which "the Iranian government relies heavily upon...for low-level intelligence and technical expertise." In 2004, the New York Times profiled an Iranian-American couple that was fired from government jobs after failing a security check, apparently because they had attended MSA-PSG conferences in the late 90s. Beyond Freeh's statement, there is no public evidence linking MSA-PSG to criminal activity.
When Sarvestani returned to school in Akron after the White House demonstration, his department chair told him the FBI had questioned them about his activities. Sarvestani assured his boss he had done nothing illegal.
Shortly before Sarvestani returned to Iran in 1984, according to his family, he was also approached by U.S. government officials who said they had observed his work as a student organizer and would like for him to stay in the U.S. Sarvestani skipped a follow-up meeting at the Chapel Hill Mall, in Akron, and returned to Iran as planned. Soon after, Sarvestani's in-laws received an envelope from the U.S. addressed to Sarvestani. Inside was a greeting card with the printed line, "hope we get together real soon." Beneath it, written in block letters: "AT CHAPEL HILL MALL." Sarvestani still has the card.
None of this seemed to matter in 1994. That year, Sarvestani returned to the U.S. for a yearlong sabbatical in California, during which he translated a book on coaching strategies into Farsi. (Gary Walton, the book's author, remembers him fondly. Sarvestani arranged for Walton to give a seminar to Iranian Olympic coaches in 1997, Walton says, but the State Department advised against it.)
Sarvestani's wife, Ayatollahzadeh, says that when processing their visas for the sabbatical, their consular office said that her husband was "on a list," but that he would approve their visa anyway. Sarvestani returned to Iran the following year, leaving behind Ayatollahzadeh, who was by that time pursuing her own PhD, and all of the children.
The plan was for Sarvestani to join them after a few more years. It has been 17.
Ayatollahzadeh and the children now take turns traveling to Iran to care for Sarvestani. They worry constantly about their safety or that one of them will be stranded in Iran with visa troubles of their own. They have nearly exhausted leaves from work, says Sarvestani's eldest daughter Sahra, who is a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the Missouri University of Science and Technology. (A permanent resident of the U.S., she has done work for the Department of Defense.)
After doctors in Iran found the pelvic tumor this summer and ceased treating either cancer, the family sought out second opinions in the U.S. Several oncologists reviewed his case and said Johns Hopkins in Baltimore could offer, as one doctor wrote, "novel treatments unavailable in Iran or neighboring countries." Postponing treatment "will significantly reduce this patient's chance of survival."
Humanitarian parole is a discretionary, temporary permit based on either extreme need or pressing public interest, to be turned to if no ordinary visa is available. It is not the same as asylum, or refugee status. There is no appeal, and no reason given for a decision. Roughly 25 percent of the humanitarian parole requests received each year are approved, according to a Citizenship and Immigration Services spokesman. Last year, there were 1,500 applications.
The family applied for parole right after his visa was denied, on the basis of financial and emotional hardship, but was denied. They applied again last month, citing urgent medical need.
For now, Sarvestani waits in Iran. His daughter Soureh, who recently returned from a visit, says he is receiving only minimal medical attention, as his doctors consider him "incurable." On top of the cancers, Sarvestani is an amputee and now suffers blood clotting. Obtaining prescriptions and medical equipment in Tehran can be a costly bureaucratic nightmare. Back in the U.S., Soureh, who is a computer specialist for Indianapolis Public Schools, says it fills her with guilt to "simply pull up to a CVS drive-thru window. Medical care in Iran and the U.S. is like night and day."
Soureh brought her two-year-old daughter Fatimah with her to Iran — Sarvestani's only grandchild. They spent long hours together in Tehran. Now, Internet bans have made video chats difficult, so Soureh lets Fatimah chatter on the phone with him.
"My father is a gentleman and a scholar," Soureh wrote in a letter alongside photos of Sarvestani and Fatimah. "This is a plea for human dignity."
Getting the
agencies responsible for national security to communicate better was one of the
main reasons the Department of Homeland Security was created after the Sept.
11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
But
according to a recent report from the department’s
inspector general, one aspect of this mission remains far from accomplished.
DHS has
spent $430 million over the past nine years to provide radios tuned to a
common, secure channel to 123,000 employees across the country. Problem is, no one seems to know how to use them.
Only one
of 479 DHS employees surveyed by the inspector general’s office was actually
able to use the common channel, according to the report. Most of those surveyed— 72 percent — didn’t even know the common channel existed. Another
25 percent knew the channel existed but weren’t able to find it; 3 percent were
able to find an older common channel, but not the current one.
The
investigators also found that more than half of the radios did not have the
settings for the common channel programmed into them. Only 20 percent of radios
tested had all the correct settings.
The
radios are supposed to help employees of Customs and Border Patrol, the
Transportation Security Administration, the Coast Guard, Immigration and
Customs Enforcement, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Secret
Service, and other agencies with DHS communicate during crises, as well as
normal operations.
DHS
officials did not immediately respond to questions from ProPublica about what
effect the radio problems could have on how the agency handles an emergency.
The $430 million paid for radio infrastructure and maintenance as well as the actual radios.
In a
response letter to the report, Jim H. Crumpacker, the
Department of Homeland Security’s liaison between the Government Accountability
Office and the inspector general, wrote that DHS had made “significant strides”
in improving emergency communications since 2003. But he acknowledged that DHS“has had some challenges in achieving Department-wide interoperable
communications goals.”
The
recent inspector general’s report is the latest in a string of critical
assessments DHS has received on its efforts to improve communication between
federal, state and local agencies. The Government Accountability Office reported in 2007 that the Department of Homeland Security had “generally
not achieved” this goal.
DHS has assigned
a blizzard of offices and committees to oversee its radio effort since 2003, which
the inspector general’s report claimed had “hindered DHS’ ability to provide
effective oversight.”
Also, none
of the entities “had the authority to implement and enforce their
recommendations,” the report concluded. Tanya Callender,
a spokeswoman for the inspector general, said the current office overseeing the
effort hadn’t been given the authority to force agencies to use the common
channel or even to provide instructions for programming the radios.
The
inspector general recommended DHS standardize its policies regarding radios,
which DHS agreed to do. But it rejected a second recommendation that it
overhaul the office overseeing the radios to give it more authority.
“DHS
believes that it has already established a structure with the necessary
authority to ensure” that its various agencies can communicate, Crumpacker wrote in his response letter.
Image may be NSFW.
