This past summer, as the Syrian economy began to unravel and the military pressed hard against an armed rebellion, a Syrian government plane ferried what flight records describe as more than 200 tons of “bank notes” from Moscow.
The records of overflight requests were obtained by ProPublica. The flights occurred during a period of escalating violence in a conflict that has left tens of thousands of people dead since fighting broke out in March 2011.
The regime of Bashar al-Assad is increasingly in need of cash to stay afloat and continue financing the military’s efforts to crush the uprising. U.S. and European sanctions, including a ban on minting Syrian currency, have damaged the country’s economy. As a result, Syria lost access to an Austrian bank that had printed its bank notes.
“Having currency that you can put into circulation is certainly something that is important in terms of running an economy and more so in an economy that is become more cash-based as things deteriorate,” said Daniel Glaser, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Terrorist Financing and Financial Crimes. “It is certainly something the Syrian government wants to do, to pay soldiers or pay anybody anything."
According to the flight records, eight round-trip flights between Damascus International Airport and Moscow’s Vnukovo Airport each carried 30 tons of bank notes back to Syria. There are records relating to the flights in Arabic and English as well as copies of over-flight requests sent to Iran, which are in Farsi.
Syrian and Russian officials did not respond to ProPublica's questions about the authenticity and accuracy of the flight records. It is not possible to know whether the logs accurately described the cargo or what else might have been on board the flights. Nor do the logs specify the type of currency.
But ProPublica confirmed nearly all of the flights took place through international plane-tracking services, photos by aviation enthusiasts, and air traffic control recordings.
Each time the manifest listed “Bank Notes” as its cargo, the plane traveled a circuitous route. Instead of flying directly over Turkish airspace, as civilian planes have, the Ilyushin-76 cargo plane, operated by the Syrian Air Force, avoided Turkey and flew over Iraq, Iran, and Azerbaijan.
The flight path between Syria and Russia described in the manifests.
Tensions have been rising between Syria and Turkey since the spring. Last month, Turkey forced down a Syrian passenger plane traveling from Moscow. Turkey suspected the flight of carrying military cargo but officials have not said what, if anything, was confiscated.
If the flight manifests are accurate, a total of 240 tons of bank notes moved from Moscow to Damascus over a 10-week period beginning July 9th and ending on September 15th.
U.S. officials interviewed said evidence of monetary assistance, like military cooperation, point to a pattern of Russian support for Assad that extends from concrete aid to protecting Syria from U.N. sanctions.
In September, 2011, six months into the violence, the European Union imposed sanctions that prohibited its members from minting or supplying new Syrian coinage or banknotes. In a statement, the EU said the sanctions aimed “to obstruct those who are leading the crackdown in Syria and to restrict the funding being used to perpetrate violence against the Syrian people.” At the time, Syria’s currency was being minted by Oesterreichische Banknoten- und Sicherheitsdruck GmbH, a subsidiary of Austria’s Central Bank.
President Obama has issued five Executive Orders that prevent members of the Assad regime from entering the United States and accessing the U.S. financial system.
“Increasingly, it is more difficult to finance the war machine and the cost of the war is becoming more expensive for the Assad regime,” said one U.S. official who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “Targeted sanctions on those leading the violence are working and start to bite into their pocket books.”
Russia appears to be helping Syria blunt the impact of the sanctions.
This past June, Reuters reported that Russia had begun printing new Syrian pounds and that an initial shipment of bank notes had already arrived. The report was denied by the Syrian Central Bank, which claimed the only new money in circulation were bills that had replaced damaged or worn bank notes. Such a swap, the bank contended, would have no effect on the economy.
On August 3rd, the official Syrian news agency SANA, reporting from a news conference in Moscow with Syrian and Russian economic officials, quoted Syrian officials acknowledging that Russia is printing money. Qadr Jamil, Syria’s deputy prime minister for Economic Affairs, was quoted by SANA as calling the deal with Russia a “triumph,” over sanctions.
Syrian Finance Minister Mohammad al-Jleilati said that Russia was providing both replacement notes and additional currency to, as SANA put it, “reflect the country’s changing GDP.”
Al-Jleilati said the money would have no effect on inflation. Printing new notes beyond simply replacing old ones could undermine Syria’s already battered currency.
At the time of the meeting, at least 30 tons of currency had already been delivered, according to the flight records, and another 210 tons would be delivered in subsequent flights.
In its regional economic outlook released earlier this month, the International Monetary Fund noted that Syria’s currency has lost 44 percent of its value since March 2011, trading for about 70 pounds to the dollar compared with about 47 pounds when the conflict began.
Ibrahim Saif, a political economist based in Jordan and a resident scholar at the Carnegie Middle East Center said 30 tons of bank notes twice a week is a significant amount for a country like Syria.
“I truly believe it’s not only that they’re exchanging old money for new notes. They are printing money because they need new notes,” Saif said.
“Most of the government revenue that comes from taxes, in terms of other services, it’s almost now dried up,” noted Saif. Yet, “they continue to pay salaries. They have not shown any signs of weakness in fulfilling their domestic obligations. The only way they can do this is to get some sort of cash in the market.”
Before the unrest broke out, Syria had about $17 billion in foreign currency reserves. Saif said he and other economists in the region estimate they now have about $6-8 billion in reserves, dwindling about $500 million a month for salaries and supplies to keep the government running.
In Moscow, the Syrian finance minister had said that his country required additional foreign currency reserves, which Russia may provide in the form of loans.
“It’s possible the Syrians are acquiring foreign currency reserves, either Euros or US dollars, which they would need to conduct any serious commerce,” said Juan Zarate, who served as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Terrorist Financing and Financial Crimes during the Bush administration.
Zarate noted that other countries, when faced with economic sanctions, have leaned on allies for foreign currency reserves. China supplied North Korea with such funds in the past and Venezuela agreed to sell reserves to Iran.
Syria’s currency is still traded on open markets, but there is limited on-the-ground information about the economy, including inflation.
Officials at the IMF “have not been able to get direct information about Syria for at least a year,” Masood Ahmed, director of the group’s Middle East and Central Asia department, told reporters at a conference in Tokyo last month.
Glaser, at Treasury, declined to put a figure on Syria’s current reserves but said the Syrian economy is suffering in part from a lack of tourism and a ban on oil sales, both of which provided Damascus with foreign currency. “There is significant inflation in the country. It can be caused by adding new currency or not having foreign reserves to prop up the existing currency.”
On Sunday the New York Times reported that the Obama administration, prompted by the possibility of losing the election, has been developing a “formal rule book” to govern the use of drone strikes, which have killed roughly 2,500 people under President Obama.
One aspect of the piece in particular caught our eye: While administration officials frequently talk about how drone strikes target suspected terrorists plotting against the U.S., the Times says the U.S. has shifted away from that. Instead, it has often targeted enemies of allied governments in countries such as Yemen and Pakistan. From the Times:
[F]or at least two years in Pakistan, partly because of the C.I.A.’s success in decimating Al Qaeda’s top ranks, most strikes have been directed at militants whose main battle is with the Pakistani authorities or who fight with the Taliban against American troops in Afghanistan.
In Yemen, some strikes apparently launched by the United States killed militants who were preparing to attack Yemeni military forces. Some of those killed were wearing suicide vests, according to Yemeni news reports.
To learn more about this underappreciated aspect of U.S. drone policy, I spoke to Micah Zenko, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who has been critical of U.S. drone policy and was quoted in the Times piece. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
You were quoted over the weekend arguing that the U.S., with the campaign of drone strikes, is acting as the “counterinsurgency air force of Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia.” How did you come to this conclusion?
Under the Obama administration, officials have argued that the drone strikes are only hitting operational Al Qaeda leaders or people who posed significant and imminent threats to the U.S. homeland. If you actually look at the vast majority of people who have been targeted by the United States, that’s not who they are.
There are a couple pieces of data showing this. Peter Bergen of the New America Foundation has done estimates on who among those killed could be considered “militant leaders” — either of the Pakistani Taliban, the Afghan Taliban, or Al Qaeda. Under the Bush administration, about 30 percent of those killed could be considered militant leaders. Under Obama, that figure is only 13 percent.
Most of the people who are killed don’t have as their objective to strike the U.S. homeland. Most of the people who are killed by drones want to impose some degree of sharia law where they live, they want to fight a defensive jihad against security service and the central government, or they want to unseat what they perceive as an apostate regime that rules their country.
Why does this distinction matter so much?
This is a huge outstanding dilemma. Is the primary purpose of the drone attacks counter-terrorism, or is it counter-insurgency? If it’s counter-insurgency, that is a very different mission, and you have to rethink the justifications and rethink what the ultimate goal is of using lethal force.
There was a February article in the New York Times reporting that the goal of U.S. policy in Yemen was to kill about two dozen Al Qaeda leaders. There’s been about 50 drone strikes in Yemen since that article. Meanwhile, according to U.S. government statements, the size of AQAP has grown from “several hundred” to “a few thousand members.” So the question is, who is actually being targeted, and how does this further U.S. counterterrorism objectives?
Is this use of drone strikes to kill people who are not imminent threats to the U.S. new?
No. The marked shift was in summer 2008 when the Bush administration decided to significantly lower the threshold of who could be attacked.
The purpose of this change was to reduce threats to U.S. servicemembers in southern Afghanistan and to intervene where some suicide attacks were organized in the tribal areas of Pakistan. This was the time when the “signature strikes” really became ingrained. Bush administration officials called this the “‘reasonable man’ standard,” and if you were displaying what are called “patterns of behavior,” you could be killed.
People mistakenly think that this policy started under Obama, but it didn’t. It did accelerate markedly under Obama. He has had more drones to do this, was much more vigorous about authorizing their use, and expanded the signature strikes into Yemen.
How does this use of drone attacks square with official administration statements describing the policy?
They will never say that the United States uses drones to fight local insurgencies. If they made that case, they would have to create a new bastion of justifications. The current stated justifications are very carefully thought out and very deliberate to loosely adhere to the post-9/11 Authorization to Use Military Force and principles of Article 51 of the UN Charter, governing the use of force.
There has been a long-term fight with people within the administration who want to reform the policy and think the U.S. needs to be more transparent — both for domestic reasons and because of the precedents being set for the use of drone strikes. If other countries follow our practice in how they will use drone strikes, that would be a very unstable, dangerous world to live in.
***
Note: We asked White House spokesman Tommy Vietor to respond the notion that drones strikes often involve those who are not a threat to the U.S. He declined to comment.
When the multibillion dollar medical device maker Synthes enticed doctors to use its bone cement on people’s spines, patients died on the operating table. The company’s actions led to indictments and prison time for executives.
Journalist Mina Kimes of Fortune magazine investigated how it all happened, talking to doctors who performed the treatments, former company employees and the families of patients who died. Her report, “Bad to the Bone: A Medical Horror Story,” lays out in detail how the company navigated around Food and Drug Administration rules meant to inform and protect patients.
As part of our ongoing interest in patient safety, ProPublica health reporter Marshall Allen interviewed Kimes at ProPublica’s New York office for the #MuckReads podcast. The interview has been edited for clarity and length.
ProPublica: You use the term “human experimentation” to describe what was happening in this story. That sure gets people’s attention.
Kimes: I think that’s what it was. The company held unauthorized clinical trials and released and promoted a product for a use that was unapproved [by the FDA] without informing patients that the product was unapproved. People participate in clinical trials all the time, but they do so knowingly, and I think that's the core transgression here: Some people had knowledge and some people didn't. And ultimately, the people who did not were the patients.
ProPublica: Tell us about the company and the product.
Kimes: Synthes is a Switzerland-based device company that was bought earlier this year by Johnson & Johnson for about $20 billion, the biggest acquisition in J&J's history. Before they were acquired they developed a product called Norian, which is a calcium phosphate bone cement. Many people described the product as miraculous because it had properties that enabled it to stimulate the growth of actual human bone. Norian was approved for use in the skull and the arm.
The story is about the company’s efforts to convince doctors to use the product in the spine as a treatment for vertebral compression fractures – painful fissures in the spine that are a common side effect of osteoporosis. But Norian was never approved for vertebral compression fractures, and the FDA specifically forbade the treatment. So over the course of a couple of years, the company made a series of ill‑fated decisions that led to them promoting it for that use even after some alarming scientific results and patient deaths.
ProPublica: What happened when they used Norian in the spine?
Kimes: Well, this is really at the heart of what they did wrong: They never did a clinical trial on people. When a medical device maker wants to introduce a device for a new purpose, there's a variety of ways in which they can get approval for it. If it's an untested high-risk device, often what they'll have to do is obtain something called Premarket Approval, or PMA, which requires clinical trials. These trials can be long and costly. Some employees estimated that it would take about three years and cost over $1 million. They would have had to convince a large number of patients to do it. And they could fail. One of the things that probably deterred them from doing the clinical trials was that the company had not had a lot of success doing this in the past.
The other way that you can get approval is to establish similarity to an already approved device, which is the approach they took. However, the approval that they got from the FDA said specifically that they could not mix Norian with other materials, which is what they needed to do for the spine treatment. The FDA later said this cannot be used to treat vertebral compression fractures.
Between 2002 and 2004, which was when the illegal trials were going on, there were three deaths. The first one was a 70‑year‑old woman whose X‑rays, in a disturbing twist, were later used in materials to promote the product. Then later on, an 83‑year‑old man and an 83‑year‑old woman died, both on the operating table. In all cases, the patients’ blood pressure dropped extremely quickly and they were unable to be resuscitated.
Experts later theorized that the cement was forming clots and causing blockages in the bloodstream. That's also what happened in a completely separate animal trial conducted at the University of Washington, where scientists injected the cement into a pig that also died for the same reason.
ProPublica: So they did not have FDA approval, but still promoted it for use in the spine. How did the marketing work?
Kimes: We’re talking here about off‑label marketing, an extremely common crime that’s led to huge settlements in recent years for drug companies and device makers. Doctors and surgeons are able to prescribe drugs and use devices in ways that they see fit. However, companies cannot promote them to doctors and surgeons for the unapproved, off‑label uses. As you can imagine this creates a bit of tension, especially when a company recognizes that doctors might be interested in using it in an unapproved fashion, or there's a potential revenue stream.
So what we encountered in this story was that the company expressed interest in this unapproved use, and it was documented that they promoted it for that use. I interviewed many surgeons who were involved in the unauthorized clinical trials. They told me that they talked to some of these sales representatives about this unauthorized use, and that in itself is off‑label marketing.
There are so many ways companies cross the line, whether it's giving information to doctors, bringing these devices into certain surgeries, or giving them instructions on how to use it. Synthes did all of these things and more. In one case, during a training session with surgeons, they explicitly showed them how to do this spinal procedure. They were giving out materials that talked about the procedure. Some of the promotional materials did not include the warning that the FDA had told them to include, saying not to use Norian to treat vertebral compression fractures. So there were many ways in which they committed the crime.
ProPublica: Did regulation fail, or did they flout the regulation?
Kimes: I think they definitely flouted the regulation. The question, I think, of whether or not the regulations were strong or clear enough is a matter of dispute. The FDA had issued a public warning about this procedure being off‑label. There was some confusion amongst surgeons and the company about the label, and I know from my interviews with employees that they knew what they were doing was not right. That said, there's still a lot of gray area.
ProPublica: How much influence do you think the marketing has over physicians?
Kimes: I think there's a great deal of influence. There has to be a confluence of factors. The appetite for the product was already out there. This is a procedure that was growing in popularity at the time. Plus, there was no clear treatment. Vertebroplasties were being conducted using a different kind of cement that had a lot of disadvantages. So there was certainly an audience for it. I imagine it was quite convincing when surgeons were presented with this miraculous‑seeming product and not told about some of the issues, such as the scientific trials. Also, many of the surgeons were flown out to training sessions where they had dinners and golf outings and whatnot. And at those training sessions, they were told all the good things about it and all the potential for it, and many walked away thinking it was a really wonderful opportunity.
One of the most surprising things I learned while reporting this story was that in all of these surgeries there was a sales representative from the company in the room. I didn't know that before. And I think that's emblematic of the relationship between doctors and companies, which is intermeshed and in some ways co-dependent.
ProPublica: What did this story tell you in general about patient safety?
Mina: Much of this has to do with knowledge. I mean, when you make a health care decision, you should be equipped with the best knowledge possible. This story was about the withholding of that knowledge at many crucial points, but especially to these patients who died not knowing that this product had been used in animal trials where there were very alarming results, and not knowing that it wasn't actually approved for the procedure that they were about to go into. The risks weren't properly communicated.
All the patients’ families maintain that they were not told about the unapproved nature of the product, about the animal trials and the risks associated with them. There were three deaths that took place during the clinical trials, but there was another death that occurred in July of 2009 after the company had been indicted. So if that particular family had simply known the name of the product — and they say they weren't told the name — they could've Googled it and seen a criminal indictment filed two weeks earlier.
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Documents posted
online Monday by hackers associated with the online group Anonymous appear
to give new details on a Syrian passenger flight from Moscow to Damascus that
Turkish fighter jets forced to land last month. The incident sparked a
diplomatic row between the two neighbors that have grown increasingly at odds
as the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad attempts to crush a
popular uprising.
The documents, which include letters from the chief
executive of Syrian Arab Airlines, as well as a cargo manifest,
could not be immediately authenticated. But they dovetail with what has been
reported about the flight by Reuters
and other news organizations.
ProPublica
reported this week that a Syrian government plane ferried what flight
records describe as more than 200 tons of “bank notes” from Moscow.
The letters from the CEO of Syrian Arab Airlines, if
authentic, give the airline’s account of how the Turkish military forced down
the civilian passenger plane, an Airbus A320. The letters are addressed to
officials with the International Air Transport Association and the Arab Air
Carriers Organization and appear to be official complaints about Turkey’s
actions, which the Syrian CEO labels “air piracy.”
The letters, which are almost identical and are written in
both English and Arabic, detail what happened to Flight 442 from Moscow to
Damascus on October 10. They contend that without warning, two F-16 warplanes
of the Turkish air force approached the Syrian passenger jet three times,
zooming in as close as 50 meters. The fighter jets forced the passenger plane
to land in a side area at Ankara airport. After two hours, Turkish commandos“stormed into the plane, sparking panic and dread among the passengers.”
The letters go on to allege that Turkish armed forces
searched the plane for more than seven hours, eventually confiscating ten parcels
weighing a total of 340 kilograms. In the letters and the cargo manifest, the
contents are described as electronic equipment.
Update (Nov. 28): The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said today it was temporarily debarring BP, suspending the company from receiving new contracts with the federal government based on its "lack of business integrity" concerning the 2010 explosion on the Deepwater Horizon rig, which killed 11 workers, and related oil spill.
* * *
This story was originally published on May 21, 2010.
Officials at the Environmental Protection Agency are considering whether to bar BP from receiving government contracts, a move that would ultimately cost the company billions in revenue and could end its drilling in federally controlled oil fields.
Over the past 10 years, BP has paid tens of millions of dollars in fines and been implicated in four separate instances of criminal misconduct that could have prompted this far more serious action. Until now, the company's executives and their lawyers have fended off such a penalty by promising that BP would change its ways.
That strategy may no longer work.
Days ago, in an unannounced move, the EPA suspended negotiations with the petroleum giant over whether it would be barred from federal contracts because of the environmental crimes it committed before the spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Officials said they are putting the talks on hold until they learn more about the British company's responsibility for the plume of oil that is spreading across the Gulf.
The EPA said in a statement that, according to its regulations, it can consider banning BP from future contracts after weighing "the frequency and pattern of the incidents, corporate attitude both before and after the incidents, changes in policies, procedures, and practices."
Several former senior EPA debarment attorneys and people close to the BP investigation told ProPublica that means the agency will re-evaluate BP and examine whether the latest incident in the Gulf is evidence of an institutional problem inside BP, a precursor to the action called debarment.
Federal law allows agencies to suspend or bar from government contracts companies that engage in fraudulent, reckless or criminal conduct. The sanctions can be applied to a single facility or an entire corporation. Government agencies have the power to forbid a company to collect any benefit from the federal government in the forms of contracts, land leases, drilling rights, or loans.
The most serious, sweeping kind of suspension is called "discretionary debarment" and it is applied to an entire company. If this were imposed on BP, it would cancel not only the company's contracts to sell fuel to the military but prohibit BP from leasing or renewing drilling leases on federal land. In the worst cast, it could also lead to the cancellation of BP's existing federal leases, worth billions of dollars.
Present and former officials said the crucial question in deciding whether to impose such a sanction is assessing the offending company's culture and approach: Do its executives display an attitude of non-compliance? The law is not intended to punish actions by rogue employees and is focused on making contractor relationships work to the benefit of the government. In its negotiations with EPA officials before the Gulf spill, BP had been insisting that it had made far-reaching changes in its approach to safety and maintenance, and that environmental officials could trust its promises that it would commit no further violations of the law.
EPA officials declined to speculate on the likelihood that BP will ultimately be suspended or barred from government contracts. Such a step will be weighed against the effect on BP's thousands of employees and on the government's costs of replacing it as a contractor.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.Even a temporary expulsion from the U.S. could be devastating for BP's business. BP is the largest oil and gas producer in the Gulf of Mexico and operates some 22,000 oil and gas wells across United States, many of them on federal lands or waters. According to the company, those wells produce 39 percent of the company's global revenue from oil and gas production each year -- $16 billion.
Discretionary debarment is a step that government investigators have long sought to avoid, and which many experts had considered highly unlikely because BP is a major supplier of fuel to the U.S. military. The company could petition U.S. courts for an exception, arguing that ending that contract is a national security risk. That segment of BP's business alone was worth roughly $4.6 billion over the last decade, according to the government contracts website USAspending.
Because debarment is supposed to protect American interests, the government also must weigh such an action's effect on the economy against punishing BP for its transgressions. The government would, for instance, be wary of interrupting oil and gas production that could affect energy prices, or taking action that could threaten the jobs of thousands of BP employees.
A BP spokesman said the company would not comment on pending legal matters.
The EPA did not make its debarment officials available for comment or explain its intentions, but in an e-mailed response to questions submitted by ProPublica the agency confirmed that its Suspension and Debarment Office has "temporarily suspended" any further discussion with BP regarding its unresolved debarment cases in Alaska and Texas until an investigation into the unfolding Gulf disaster can be included.
The fact that the government is looking at BP's pattern of incidents gets at one of the key factors in deciding a discretionary debarment, said Robert Meunier, the EPA's debarment official under President Bush and an author of the EPA's debarment regulations. It means officials will try to determine whether BP has had a string of isolated or perhaps unlucky mistakes, or whether it has consistently displayed contempt for the regulatory process and carelessness in its operations.
In the past decade environmental accidents at BP facilities have killed at least 26 workers, led to the largest oil spill on Alaska's North Slope and now sullied some of the country's best coastal habitat, along with fishing and tourism economies along the Gulf.
Meunier said that when a business with a record of problems like BP's has to justify its actions and corporate management decisions to the EPA "it's going to get very dicey for the company."
"How many times can a debarring official grant a resolution to an agreement if it looks like no matter how many times they agree to fix something it keeps manifesting itself as a problem?" he said.
Documents obtained by ProPublica show that the EPA's debarment negotiations with BP were strained even before the April 20 explosion on the Deepwater Horizon rig. The fact that Doug Suttles, the BP executive responsible for offshore drilling in the Gulf, used to head BP Alaska and was the point person for negotiations with debarment officials there, only complicates matters. Now, the ongoing accident in the Gulf may push those relations to a break.
Discretionary debarment for BP has been considered at several points over the years, said Jeanne Pascal, a former EPA debarment attorney who headed the agency's BP negotiations for six years until she retired last year.
"In 10 years we've got four convictions," Pascal said, referring to BP's three environmental crimes and a 2009 deferred prosecution for manipulating the gas market, which counts as a conviction under debarment law. "At some point if a contractor's behavior is so egregious and so bad, debarment would have to be an option."
In the three instances where BP has had a felony or misdemeanor conviction under the Clean Air or Clean Water Acts, the facilities where the accidents happened automatically faced a statutory debarment, a lesser form of debarment that affects only the specific facility where the accident happened.
One of those cases has been settled. In October 2000, after a felony conviction for illegally dumping hazardous waste down a well hole to cut costs, BP's Alaska subsidiary, BP Exploration Alaska, agreed to a five-year probation period and settlement. That agreement expired at the end of 2005.
The other two debarment actions are still open, and those are the cases that EPA officials and the company have been negotiating for several years.
In the first incident, on March 23, 2005, an explosion at BP's Texas City refinery killed 15 workers. An investigation found the company had restarted a fuel tower without warning systems in place, and BP was eventually fined more than $62 million and convicted of a felony violation of the Clean Air Act. BP Products North America, the responsible subsidiary, was listed as debarred and the Texas City refinery was deemed ineligible for any federally funded contracts. But the company as a whole proceeded unhindered.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.A year later, in March 2006, a hole in a pipeline in Prudhoe Bay led to the largest ever oil spill on Alaska's North Slope – 200,000 gallons -- and the temporary disruption of oil supplies to the continental U.S. An investigation found that BP had ignored warnings about corrosion in its pipelines and had cut back on precautionary measures to save money. The company's Alaska subsidiary was convicted of a misdemeanor violation of the Clean Water Act and, again, debarred and listed as ineligible for government income at its Prudhoe Bay pipeline facilities. That debarment is still in effect.
That accident alone -- which led to congressional investigations and revelations that BP executives harassed employees who warned of safety problems and ignored corrosion problems for years -- was thought by some inside the EPA to be grounds for the more serious discretionary debarment.
"EPA routinely discretionarily debars companies that have Clean Air Act or Clean Water Act convictions," said Pascal, the former EPA debarment attorney who ran the BP case. "The reason this case is different is because of the Defense Department's extreme need for BP."
Instead of a discretionary debarment, the EPA worked to negotiate a compromise that would bring BP into compliance but keep its services available. The goal was to reach an agreement that would guarantee that BP improve its safety operations, inspections, and treatment of employees not only at the Prudhoe Bay pipeline facility, but at its other facilities across the country.
According to e-mails obtained by ProPublica and several people close to the government's investigation, the company rejected some of the basic settlement conditions proposed by the EPA -- including who would police the progress -- and took a confrontational approach with debarment officials.
One person close to the negotiations said he was confounded by what he characterized as the company's stubborn approach to the debarment discussions. Given the history of BP's problems, he said, any settlement would have been a second chance, a gift. Still, the e-mails show, BP resisted.
As more evidence is gathered about what went wrong in the Gulf, BP may soon wish it hadn't.
It's doubtful that the EPA will make any decisions about BP's future in the United States until the Gulf investigation is completed, a process that could last a year. But as more information emerges about the causes of the accident there -- about faulty blowout preventers and hasty orders to skip key steps and tests that could have prevented a blowout -- the more the emerging story begins to echo the narrative of BP's other disasters. That, Meunier said, could leave the EPA with little choice as it considers how "a corporate attitude of non-compliance" should affect the prospect of the company's debarment going forward.
ProPublica reporters Mosi Secret and Ryan Knutson and director of research Lisa Schwartz contributed to this report.
The Environmental Protection Agency temporarily banned oil giant BP from receiving new government contracts Wednesday, citing a “lack of business integrity” over the 2010 Deepwater Horizon explosion.
ProPublica reporter Abrahm Lustgarten has been covering BP since 2005, reporting on the company’s subsequent $7.8 billion settlement and outlining the potential impact of sanctions early on. In May 2010, Abrahm noted:
“The most serious, sweeping kind of suspension is called ‘discretionary debarment’ and it is applied to an entire company. If this were imposed on BP, it would cancel not only the company’s contracts to sell fuel to the military but prohibit BP from leasing or renewing drilling leases on federal land. In the worst case, it could also lead to the cancellation of BP’s existing federal leases, worth billions of dollars…even a temporary expulsion from the U.S. could be devastating for BP’s business.”
What do these new restrictions mean for BP, its U.S. operations and drilling in the Gulf?
Join Abrahm for a live discussion of BP’s debarment tomorrow, Nov. 29, from 1 p.m. – 2 p.m. ET. Leave your questions for Abrahm below, or tweet @ProPublica with #InvestigateThis. Come back here at 1 p.m. tomorrow for the live Q&A.
When the Obama administration temporarily banned BP from federal contracts Wednesday, it pointed to BP's "lack of business integrity" and conduct relating to the 2010 Deepwater Horizon explosion and spill.
The sanction, however, has been years in the making.
BP has been criminally convicted in four previous cases— including a 2005 explosion in Texas that killed 15 workers — and the EPA has been considering broader debarment proceedings against the company since at least 2005. The agency had actually been nearing a decision on a contract ban in January 2010, just a few months before the Deepwater Horizon tragedy unfolded, killing 11 workers and sending more than 200 million gallons of oil into the sea.
"This is not just about the Deepwater Horizon, but about a whole lot of things and a whole lot of parts of BP," said a former government official familiar with the debarment process. "It wasn't just narrowly scoped... they are looking at it as a systemic corporate-wide issue."
A limited suspension of government contracts for a specific facility or subsidiary operations, called suspension and debarment, is standard practice after a criminal conviction.
BP pleaded guilty on Nov. 15 to federal criminal charges of manslaughter and lying to Congress and agreed to pay more than $4 billion in fines relating to the Deepwater Horizon accident, which killed 11 workers and sent more than 200 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. Three of the company's managers have also been criminally charged.
But the broad sanctions announced Wednesday target the BP corporation writ large— the British-based parent company and 21 international subsidiaries are included — and reflect a mistrust for BP's operations that has been growing over more than a decade.
In this case, experts close to the case say, the timing of the government's announcement was significant.
It came just hours before the government sold new rights to drill in the Gulf of the Mexico and seems intended to prevent BP, the largest leaseholder in the Gulf, from expanding its operations there until all of its problems are resolved.
"Suspensions are always timed to prevent something from happening," said Jeanne Pascal, a former EPA debarment attorney who led the government's investigation into BP from 1997 until she retired in 2010.
"A debarment says you have chronic bad behavior, and we think you present chronic risk for the government and that you will continue this behavior," said Pascal. "The immediate need was the issuance of new leases (Wednesday) in the Gulf of Mexico."
Wednesday's actions represent the government's effort to protect its fiscal resources and protect the public economic interest by not using taxpayer money to support actions that could cost the government more money later on.
After several past BP accidents, including two oil spills in Alaska and close calls at several U.S. refineries, private consultants and government investigators have pointed to wide-ranging problems within the company's culture. The critics have warned that BP has consistently prioritized speed and profit-making over safety and regulatory compliance.
The type of suspension ordered Wednesday is a part of what the government calls a "discretionary" debarment, which means it is considering this broader "corporate culture of noncompliance" and longer history.
While the EPA is the lead agency, its debarment decision affects the Department of Interior and Department of Defense, among other agencies. BP is among the U.S.'s largest corporate contractors and supplies more than $1 billion a year worth of fuel to the military.
The temporary suspension order issued Wednesday is the first step in a still-to-be-made decision about whether BP should be formally debarred, or banned entirely from contracts for a specified length of time.
For now, EPA officials tell ProPublica that the suspension could last anywhere from two to 18 months, depending on the final terms of the Department of Justice's plea agreement with BP. If the civil suits against BP remain unresolved, the suspension could stay in place longer.
As part of its criminal plea announced earlier this month, BP agreed to hire ethics and safety monitors for its Gulf operations and regularly evaluate its facilities for safety and environmental compliance. If the court approves the plea agreement, those terms would become a part of BP's probation, and thus a term of the suspension and debarment proceedings, an EPA spokesperson told ProPublica.
A spokesperson assigned to speak on behalf of BP told ProPublica that the company had not intended to bid on new Gulf leases in Wednesday's sale, and was not aware of the EPA's suspension decision until after their bids were due. But a Nov. 15 press release and filings with the SEC both suggest the company knew a ban could be coming.
BP was not explicitly banned from participating in the sale of new rights to drill in western Gulf of Mexico waters Wednesday, but would not have been allowed to win any leases if it had competed for them, a Department of Interior official said.
Since the 2010 spill in the Gulf, the government has granted BP more than 50 new leases in the Gulf of Mexico. BP is the single largest investor and leaseholder in the Gulf, where it currently operates seven drilling rigs.
"BP has invested more than $52 billion in the United States," the company said in a statement, "more than any other oil and gas company and more than it invests in any other country." It emphasized that it employs 23,000 people in the U.S. and said it supports nearly a quarter of a million American jobs.
So far, BP has spent more than $14 billion on cleanup and settlement costs related to the Gulf spill, and expects to pay more than $37 billion — including in criminal and civil settlements — by the time it is finished. In addition, the company has stated a renewed focus on safety and reorganized its corporate operations to increase safety and environmental accountability.
"I believe BP is genuine and sincere" in its efforts, said Tommy Beaudreau, director of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, in a press conference held Wednesday after the government's lease sale.
BP also emphasized that it is working speedily towards a resolution with the government.
"BP has been in regular dialogue with the EPA and has already provided both a present responsibility statement of more than 100 pages and supplemental answers to the EPA's questions," it said in a statement. "The EPA has informed BP that it is preparing a proposed administrative agreement that, if agreed upon, would effectively resolve and lift this temporary suspension."
Suevon Lee contributed reporting to this story.
Questions on the latest BP news? Join our live chat November 29 at 1 p.m. ET, with reporter Abrahm Lustgarten.
This post is being kept up-to-date. It was first published on Nov. 13.
For the past nine months, we’ve been following how political campaigns use data
about voters to target them in different ways. During the election, the Obama
campaign, which had assembled a cutting-edge team of data scientists, developers, and digital
advertising experts, refused to say anything about how it was targeting voters.
Now, members of the campaign are starting
to open up about what their team actually did with all that data. Based on our
own interviews with campaign officials, as well as reporting elsewhere, here’s
an overview of some of the campaign’s key strategies, from connecting Facebook
data to the national list of registered voters, to measuring how “persuadable”
individual swing state voters might be.
Chief Innovation and Integration Officer
Michael Slaby and other campaign officials said again that they relied less on
consumer data, and more on public voting records and the responses that voters
provided directly to campaign canvassers. They would not comment on exactly
what data the campaign collected about individual people.
Officials within the campaign said media
reports had overemphasized the importance of online web
cookie data to track voters across the web.
Slaby said the campaign primarily used web
cookies to serve ads to people who had visited the campaign site — a
tactic called “retargeting,” which Mitt Romney’s campaign also used.
The campaign also told us web cookies were
useful for helping them analyze whether volunteers were actually reading the
online training materials the campaign had prepared for them. (They didn’t
track this on a volunteer-by-volunteer basis.)
The backbone of the campaign’s effort was a
database on registered voters compiled by the Democratic National Committee. It
was updated weekly with new public records from state level election officials,
one official said.
The campaign then added its own voter data
to the mix. Officials wouldn’t say exactly what information they added.
What will happen to the data about millions of voters collected during the campaign?
It's still not clear.
As the Washington Post reported earlier this month, other Democratic candidates are eager to use Obama's voter data for their own campaigns.
Some of the president's data will certainly go to the Democratic National Committee, where it can be used to help other Democrats.
But both the Post and the Wall Street Journal reported that it's unclear if the DNC has the resources— technological and financial — to manage all of the voter data and analysis the campaign produced.
The Wall Street Journal cited an anonymous Democratic Party official, who said that a new organization might be created to manage and update Obama's campaign data. This kind of organization "would have the potential to give the president leverage in the selection of the next Democratic presidential nominee," the Journal reported.
After his 2008 win, Obama created "Organizing for America," a group that worked within the DNC to advance the president's agenda.
How did the Obama campaign know which TV shows voters were watching?
Did the Obama campaign really "get a big list of the names of people who watched certain things on TV," as Gawker asked earlier this month?
No. But they were able to get very detailed information about the television habits of certain groups of voters.
In order to decide where to buy their TV ads, the Obama campaign matched lists of voters to the names and addresses of cable subscribers, as the Washington Post, The Atlantic, and others have reported.
This allowed them to analyze which channels the voters they wanted to reach were watching.
The campaign focused on swing state voters the campaign had scored as "persuadable," and voters who were supporters but needed to be encouraged to turn out at the polls, Carol Davidsen, who ran the campaign's television ad "Optimizer" project, told ProPublica. They also looked at voters who are Latino and African-American.
Working with Rentrak, a data company, the campaign tracked the television viewership of these groups across 60 channels, looking at how viewership changed for every quarter hour of the day, Davidsen said.
The campaign was able to identify the audience size of each group for a particular channel at a particular time — and then analyze where and when the campaign could advertise to key voters at the lowest cost.
For instance, the campaign was able to identify a subset of persuadable voters who lived in households that watched less than two hours of television a day. This allowed the campaign to schedule ads during the times these voters would actually be watching TV.
"Even if it's more expensive, it's worth it, because we can't catch them later," Davidsen told ProPublica.
So, how was the campaign able to get all this viewership data?
In Ohio, the campaign worked with FourthWall Media, a data and targeting company, to get television viewership data for individual homes, which had "anonymous but consistent" household ID numbers, Davidsen said. This allowed the campaign to track household viewing behavior over time, without knowing which exact voters they were analyzing. (FourthWall Media has yet to respond to a request for comment on how their process works.)
Working with Rentrak, the campaign could follow the viewing habits of larger groups of voters in different TV markets across the country.
Rentrak used a third-party data company to match lists of voters to TV operator data about subscribers — and then match that information to the anonymous ID numbers that Rentrak uses to track the usage patterns of television set-top boxes.
To protect users' privacy, none of the companies involved have all the information they would need to know what shows a specific voter watched on TV, Rentrak's Chris Wilson told ProPublica. For instance, Rentrak knows viewers' ID numbers and viewing habits, but doesn't know which ID numbers correspond with which name or address. In fact, Rentrak never knows the name or address of the household, Wilson said.
While commercial advertisers are beginning to do this kind of data matching and analysis, "What [the Obama campaign] did was probably on the more sophisticated side compared to a lot of folks," Wilson told ProPublica. He said the campaign had done "pioneering work" in television targeting.
Rentrak also works with large consumer data companies, including Experian and Epsilon, to match television viewer data with consumer data. According to the Federal Communications Commission privacy rules, cable operators are not allowed to disclose subscribers' "personally identifiable information" without their consent, but they can collect and share "aggregate" data.
How important was the data the campaign could access through its Facebook app about volunteers
and their friends?
Observers noted that in the last days of
the campaign, Obama supporters who used the campaign’s Facebook app received
emails with the names and profile photos of friends in swing states.
The e-mails urged supporters to contact their friends and encourage them to
vote.
It wasn’t clear how well the effort went or
what the response was. Some people had been encouraged to ask their Republican
friends to vote. A Romney official who had signed up for the campaign’s e-mail
list was told to contact his Facebook friend Eric Cantor,
the Republican House Majority Leader.
What we now know is that the campaign did
in fact try to match Facebook profile to people’s voting records. So if you got
a message encouraging you to contact a friend in Ohio, the campaign may have
targeted that friend based on their public voting record and other information
the campaign had.
But the matching process was far from
perfect, in part because the information the campaign could access about
volunteers’ friends was limited.
Were privacy concerns about the campaign’s data collection justified?
We’ve reported on some of the concerns about the
amount of data the campaign has amassed on individual voters.
Were those concerns at all justified? It’s
hard to say right now, since we still don’t know where the campaign drew the
line about what data they would and would not use.
Obama officials did dismiss the idea that the
campaign cared about voters’ porn habits.
The Obama campaign had a list of every
registered voter in the battleground states. The job of the campaign’s
much-heralded data scientists was to use the information they had amassed to
determine which voters the campaign should target— and what each voter
needed to hear.
They needed to go a little deeper than
targeting “waitress moms.”
“White suburban women? They’re not all the
same. The Latino community is very diverse with very different interests,” Dan
Wagner, the campaign’s chief analytics officer, told The Los Angeles Times. “What the data
permits you to do is figure out that diversity.”
What Obama’s data scientists produced was a
set of four individual estimates for each swing state voter’s behavior. These
four numbers were included in the campaign’s voter database, and each score,
typically on a scale of 1 to 100, predicted a different element of how that
voter was likely to behave.
Two of the numbers calculated voters’
likelihood of supporting Obama, and of actually showing up to the polls. These
estimates had been used in 2008. But the
analysts also used data about individual voters to make new, more complicated
predictions.
If a voter supported Obama, but didn’t vote
regularly, how likely was he or she to respond to the campaign’s reminders to
get to the polls?
The final estimate was the one that had
proved most elusive to earlier campaigns—and that may be most influential
in the future. If voters were not strong Obama supporters, how likely was it
that a conversation about a particular issue — like Obamacare or the
Buffett rule—could persuade them to change their minds?
Slaby said that there was early evidence
that the campaign’s estimate of how “persuadable” voters would be on certain
issues had actually worked.
“This is very much a competitive advantage
for us,” he said.
Wagner began working on persuasion
targeting during the 2010 campaign, Slaby said — giving the campaign a
long time to perfect their estimates.
Did everyone on the campaign have access to these scores?
No.
Campaign volunteers were not given access
to these individual scores, one official said. “Oh, my neighbor Lucy is a 67
and her husband is a 72—we would probably consider that a distraction.”
Do other political campaigns also assign
me a set of numerical scores?
Yes.
The use of microtargeting scores — a
tactic from the commercial world — is a standard part of campaign data
efforts, and one that has been well documented before.
In his book exploring the rise of experimentally
focused campaigns, Sasha Issenberg compares microtargeting scores to
credit scores for the political world.
In 2008, the Obama campaign ranked voters’
likely support of the senator from Illinois using a 1 to 100 scale.
This year, The Guardian reported, Americans for Prosperity, a conservative
group backed by the Koch brothers, ranked some swing state voters on a scale from 0 to 1,
with 0 being “so leftwing and pro-government” that they are “not worth
bothering with,” and 1 being “already so in favour of tax and spending cuts
that to talk to them would be preaching to the converted.”
What’s different about what Obama’s data scientists did?
Obama campaign’s persuadability score tried
to capture not just a voter’s current opinion, but how that individual opinion
was likely to change after interactions with the campaign. Most importantly, Obama’s
analysts did not assume that voters who said they were “undecided” were
necessarily persuadable—a mistake campaigns have made in the past,
according to targeting experts.
“Undecided is just a big lump,” said Daniel Kreiss, who wrote a book on the
evolution of Democratic “networked” politics from Howard
Dean through the 2008 Obama campaign.
Voters who call themselves “undecided”
might actually be strong partisans who are unwilling to share their
views—or simply people who are disengaged.
“Someone who is
undecided and potentially not very persuadable, you might spend all the time in
the world talking to that person, and their mind doesn’t change. They stay
undecided,” Slaby said.
To pinpoint voters who might actually
change their minds, the Obama campaign conducted randomized experiments, Slaby
said. Voters received phone calls in which they were asked to rate their
support for the president, and then engaged in a conversation about different
policy issues. At the end of the conversation, they were asked to rate their
support for the president again. Using the results of these experiments,
combined with detailed demographic information about individual voters, the
campaign was able to pinpoint both what kinds of voters had been persuaded to
support the president, and which issues had persuaded them.
Avi Feller, a graduate student in statistics at Harvard who has worked on this kind of modeling, compared it to medical research.
“The statistics of drug trials are very similar to the statistics of experiments in campaigns,” he said. “I have some cancer drug, and I know it works well on some people—for whom is the cancer drug more or less effective?”
“Campaigns have always been
about trying to persuade people. What’s new here is we’ve spent the time and
energy to go through this randomization process,” Slaby said.
Issenberg
reported that Democratic strategists have been experimenting with persuasion
targeting since 2010, and that the Analyst
Institute, an organization devoted to improving Democratic campaign
tactics through experimentation, had played a key role in its development.
Slaby said the Obama campaign’s persuasion
strategy built on these efforts, but at greater scale.
Aaron Strauss, the targeting director at
the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said in a statement that the
DCCC was also running a persuasion targeting program this year using randomized
experiments as part of its work on congressional races.
What were the persuasion scores good
for—and how well did they work?
The persuasion scores allowed the campaign
to focus its outreach efforts—and their volunteer phone calls—on
voters who might actually change their minds as the result. It also guided them
in what policy messages individual voters should hear.
Slaby said the campaign had some initial
data suggesting that the persuasion score had been effective—but that the
campaign was still working on an in-depth analysis of which of its individual
tactics actually worked.
But a successful“persuasion” phone call may not change a voter’s mind forever—just like a
single drug dose will not be effective forever.
One official
with knowledge of the campaign’s data operation said that the campaign’s
experiments also tested how long the “persuasion” effect lasted after the
initial phone conversation—and found that it was only about three weeks.
“There is no
generic conclusion to draw from this experimentation that persuasion via phone
only lasts a certain amount of time,” Slaby said. “Any durability effects we
saw were specific to this electorate and this race.”
In late October, Syria asked Iraqi
authorities to grant air access for a cargo plane transporting refurbished
attack helicopters from Russia, according to flight records obtained by
ProPublica. With
Turkish and European airspace off limits to Syrian arms shipments, the regime
of Bashar al-Assad needs Iraq’s air corridor to get the helicopters home, where
the government is struggling to suppress an uprising.
Iraq regained control of its airspace
from the U.S. military just a year ago and has been under intense diplomatic
pressure from the United States to isolate the Syrian regime. Turkey says it
has closed its airspace to Syrian flights, and if Iraq did so, Syria would be
virtually cut off from transporting military equipment by plane. European Union
sanctions have already constricted arms transport by sea and air.
But it is unclear whether Iraq permitted
the fly-overs described in the documents. The Syrian cargo plane scheduled to
pick up the helicopters did not land or take off from Moscow at the appointed
times this month, suggesting that those flights did not happen.
Some of the flight request documents have been posted by
hackers associated with the online collective Anonymous and formed the basis of
a Time
story Thursday. Other documents were obtained separately by ProPublica,
which reported Monday that Syria appears to have flown 240
tons of bank notes from Moscow this summer. The authenticity of the
documents in either cache could not be independently verified.
But
taken together, the documents appear to contain new information. They show that
Baghdad has requested several times to inspect other Syrian flights that were
going to pass over Iraq from Iran and Russia, something that U.S. officials
confirmed to ProPublica.
According
to an overflight request form dated Oct. 30, the helicopter the Syrians were going to
pick up is an Mi-25, a Russian-made gunship that experts liken to a cross
between an Apache and a Black Hawk helicopter because it can fire from the air and
transport troops.
“Mi-25s
are very important to the Syrian Air Force effort against the rebels,” said
Jeffrey White, former chief of the Middle East intelligence division for the
Defense Intelligence Agency and now at the Washington Institute for Near East
Policy. “It’s a heavily armored military helicopter, which makes it very
difficult for the rebels to shoot down.”
Still,
the documents leave many questions unanswered. Crucially, it is not known
whether the overflights actually happened.
A
U.S. diplomatic official told ProPublica
that the United States has been working with the Iraqi government to stop such
flights. “We have urged them directly to insist that the inspection of
those flights occur or deny overflight rights,” the official said. “We have
raised this concern and they have taken a couple steps in the right direction— either denying overflight rights if they believe arms are being shipped
to Syria or insisting on an inspection.”
But,
State Department and Pentagon officials have not provided information on the
particular request made in the documents. Iraqi and Russian officials did not respond
to questions.
The
first two flights were scheduled for Nov. 21 and Nov. 28, but a photographer
hired by ProPublica did not observe the cargo plane at the Moscow airport where
it was supposed to land and then take off just three hours later. Nor could the
flights be confirmed with international tracking services that have recorded
the plane’s movements in the past.
Two
more flights are scheduled for Dec. 3 and Dec. 6 , according to the records.
The
Assad regime has been trying to suppress a popular uprising for almost two
years. Tens of thousands of people have reportedly died in the fighting. On Thursday, dispatches described intense clashes
on the main road to the Damascus International Airport, and at least one
airline was reported to have canceled flights. Most of the Internet in the country was shut down as
well.
Russia’s
prime minister, Dmitri Medvedev, said this week in an interview with the French
newspaper Le Figaro that arms shipments are part of a longstanding contract
with the Syrian military to repair equipment for “defense against an external
aggression.”
“We
must fulfill the obligations connected to our contracts,” Medvedev said, noting
that Russia has faced a legal conflict after suspending some arms deliveries to
Iran.
Syria
has found it increasingly difficult to transport helicopters. In June, a ship
carrying three Mi-25 helicopters from Russia to Syria was forced to turn back after the ship’s insurer withdrew coverage in response to sanctions. A
month later, a second attempt to deliver the helicopters by sea was aborted.
The
newly obtained flight documents show that Syria planned to use its Ilyushin IL-76
cargo plan to pick up helicopters at Ramenskoye Airport, also known as
Zhukovsky Airport, near Moscow. The manifest describes the cargo as an “old helicopter after
overhaulling [sic].” A second document, sent to the Syrian embassy in Baghdad, identifies
the helicopters as Mi-25s.
Officials
at Russian Helicopters, which makes the Mi-25, and Ilyushin, which makes the IL-76,
said one Mi-25 with its blades removed would fit into an IL-76. Such
helicopters have been shipped this way all over the world, they said.
Rick
Francona, who was the U.S. air attaché in Damascus in the 1990s, said that
using a cargo plane instead of a ship suggested the Assad regime was getting
desperate.
“If
they’re willing to use an IL-76 to bring one or two helicopters back, that
tells me they need these right now,” he said. “Rather than getting it there in
10 days, it gets there in five hours. You can pull it out, reattach the blades
and have in the air the next day.”
U.S. officials have expressed particular
frustration with Russia over the Syrian conflict, which began in March 2011.
“I think we’ve been very clear, both
publicly and privately, how we feel about any country, Russia included,
supporting the Assad regime in any way,” State Department spokeswoman Victoria
Nuland said Wednesday. “And it doesn’t simply go to the question of military
support; it also goes for any kind of economic or political support.”
In June, Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton said Russian aid with Syria’s attack helicopters would escalate the
civil war “quite dramatically.” But a week later, a Pentagon spokesman declined
to answer whether the Defense Department would try to stop future helicopter shipments.
The records obtained by ProPublica
list the Russian 150 Aircraft
Repair Plant as the charterer of the flights to pick up
the helicopters. The documents show the firm was operating under a contract
dated Nov. 27, 2005. The address listed for the charterer is in Kaliningrad, a
Russian territory between Poland and Lithuania that contains large Russian
military installations.
As with the currency shipments, the
flight records show the Syrian cargo plane would take a circuitous route back
from Moscow, flying over Azerbaijan and Iran before crossing Iraq.
Iraqi
airspace has largely been controlled by the U.S. Air Force since the
American-led invasion in 2003. Indeed, the overflight request form used by
Syria for the helicopters was created by the U.S. Air Force and still bears the
old contact information for the regional air command, which is no longer in
charge.
Last
year, the United States began transferring air traffic control responsibilities
to the Iraq Civil Aviation Authority. The Iraqis assumed control of the last
sector, over Baghdad, in October 2011.
Amid the media frenzy over former CIA director David Petraeus’ extramarital affair, we were struck by a quick reference in a Washington Post story about Petraeus’ time running the war in Afghanistan:
Prominent members of conservative, Washington-based defense think tanks were given permanent office space at his headquarters and access to military aircraft to tour the battlefield. They provided advice to field commanders that sometimes conflicted with orders the commanders were getting from their immediate bosses.
So who were these think-tankers and what exactly were they doing?
We spoke to some of them.
The most prominent and frequent traveler appears to have been the American Enterprise Institute’s Fred Kagan. Best known as the intellectual author of the Iraq surge strategy, Kagan said he and his wife, Kimberley Kagan of the Institute for the Study of War, spent a total of about 270 days in Afghanistan while Petraeus was in command from summer 2010 to summer 2011, and about 128 days under Gen. John Allen, who took command after Petraeus and remains in the position.
Like others we spoke with, Kagan said Petraeus and other generals have routinely brought think tankers to both Iraq and Afghanistan, both to solicit outside advice and to shape the debate back home.
“General Petraeus liked to talk about ‘directed telescopes’ to describe people who go down to lower echelons and see what’s going on and go back and help the commander get a better sense of that,” says Kagan, who added that he has been going on such trips since 2007. The other aim of the trips was for the military to “help inform people who were going to be writing in the national debate to understand what was going on on the ground.”
Responding to the Post’s characterization about the military resources made available to think tank members during Petraeus’ time in charge in Afghanistan, Kagan said: “Everybody who travels to Afghanistan or any combat zone at the invitation of the military is given access to military aircraft.”
On the issue of providing advice to field commanders that conflicted with advice of their bosses, Kagan said: “We were always very careful to say we are not giving you orders, we’re not passing on orders. We’re not doing anything except giving you our opinion.”
Defense Department spokesman Bill Speaks told ProPublica that the Pentagon often reaches out to such outside experts to advise war commanders.
“We do periodically invite those experts involved in relevant research to receive briefings on the status of the campaign,” Speaks said in an email. He said the military does not have a comprehensive list of think tank members who have visited the U.S. headquarters in Kabul.
Indeed, the trips do not appear to have been part of any formal program, and they often differed in length and purpose.
Other think tankers we spoke with say they spent much less time in Afghanistan than Kagan, usually a few weeks or less. Those who have participated are from both Republican- and Democratic-leaning think tanks and they said they were not compensated.
“We did battlefield circulation, visited units in the field, and met with local political and security leaders,” says John Nagl, a retired Army officer and current fellow at the Center for a New American Security who took one military trip to Iraq and two to Afghanistan.
Nagl — who said attendees were responsible for getting to Kabul on their own and the military then covered transportation, lodging, and food — believed the trips allowed him “to be better informed in my analysis and advocacy.”
Michael O’Hanlon of the Brookings Institution, who has taken the trips several times to both Iraq and Afghanistan, says the practice first became common under Petraeus during the surge in Iraq in 2007.
Kenneth Pollack, also of Brookings, credits a 2007 military trip to Iraq with prompting he and O’Hanlon to write an influential New York Times op-ed supporting Petraeus’ surge strategy in the country.
“I hesitate to say these trips are uniformly good or bad. They can be both, they can be neither,” Pollack told us. “It so depends on the people you meet and the people you’re taking” on the trip. At times “there’s no question they’re trying to have you see things the way that they see them. But if you’re smart about it, you can get past that.”
Max Boot, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, has also gone on the trips. He declined to comment.
In a natural disaster or other emergency, one of the first things you're likely to reach for is your cellphone. Landlines are disappearing. More than 30 percent of American households now rely exclusively on cellphones.
Despite that, cell carriers have successfully pushed back against rules on what they have to do in a disaster. The carriers instead insist that emergency standards should be voluntary, an approach the Federal Communications Commission has gone along with.
After Hurricane Katrina, for instance, carriers successfully opposed a federal rule that would have required them to have 24-hours of backup power on cell towers. In another instance, an FCC program to track crucial information during an emergency — such as which areas are down and the status of efforts to bring the network back — remains entirely voluntary. Nor is the information collected made public.
After Sandy, when thousands roamed the streets looking for service, many had no idea where they could get a signal. AT&T and Sprint, among the major carriers, didn't initially release details on what portion of their network was down.
The emergency issue has been part of a trend in deregulation of the telecommunications industry. Since 2010, more than 20 states have passed laws limiting their regulation of telecoms.
"The FCC is very concerned about the nature of their overall authority and whether rules would survive a court challenge," says Harold Feld, senior vice president of Public Knowledge, a technology advocacy nonprofit. "So their approach is to push and nudge and come up with things that would be more acceptable to the industry."
"Traditional carriers had reliability requirements, and reporting requirements," says Susan Crawford, a visiting professor at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and a former technology adviser to President Obama. "We treat wireless and broadband much differently."
An FCC spokesperson declined to comment on emergency planning issues beyond pointing to field hearings announced last week, to study the response by networks to Hurricane Sandy and other recent disasters.
Katrina also generated concern over emergency communications plans, but did not lead to binding rules. Instead, the FCC advised that the industry work with them to create emergency preparations checklists — voluntary best practices, rather than requirements.
The FCC's voluntary Disaster Information Reporting System was also created in the wake of Katrina. The agency does not say which carriers are participating in the system, and says it can't release the data that is reported because it is considered "sensitive, for national security and/or commercial reasons." The FCC also hasn't determined to what extent it can share information with state and local governments.
Carriers "actively report" to the database, and also work with the Department of Homeland Security during emergencies, according to Chris Guttman-McCabe, vice-president of regulatory affairs at CTIA-The Wireless Association, an industry group. "It's clearly a balance," he says, between "working with the government on getting information to them" and "trying to stand up the networks."
Others argue that a voluntary system isn't enough to inform the public or hold companies accountable. "When it's voluntary, what are the expectations about the accuracy of information?" Feld says. "It's a whole other thing to have to give a serious, mandatory assessment to a federal agency."
Another instance where a voluntary initiative met pushback from carriers is a new system of Wireless Emergency Alerts, beamed out from cell towers in a disaster area to anyone with a capable phone within reach. Most carriers are participating, gradually phasing in new phones with the ability to receive WEAs.
But the carriers resisted recommendations that they should be able to target the alerts more precisely, and not just to county-level.
First responders in Western states in particular, where counties can be enormous, would like the ability to issue more local warnings, according to Art Botterell and Lorin Bristow, both emergency planning experts. Botterell also noted that cities could benefit from the ability to blast messages to a radius of just a few blocks, citing New York City's 2007 steam pipe explosion. "Worrying about lighting up the whole county creates a disincentive to use it at all," says Botterell.
The industry had argued that not all carriers had the technological capability to offer that kind of precise targeting. The Telecommunications Industry Association wrote that "geotargeting rules that are more stringent" than county-level could "stifle innovation, delay the roll-out [of the program] and reduce voluntary participation." (Some carriers are now working with local officials to offer more flexible targeting, according to Bristow.)
Carriers have long argued along these lines — that disasters each present unique scenarios and that companies need to stay flexible as technologies change. The carriers say it is in their best interest to keep networks running, and point to the quick deployment of portable towers after Sandy and examples like AT&T and T-Mobile allowing customers to roam between networks.
Feld, of Public Knowledge, says that the "technological flexibility argument is true, but it's not a show-stopper. We have to balance flexibility against the need to have real emergency planning."
A
congressional subcommittee today plans to take up the topic of missing war
records from Iraq and Afghanistan, the subject of a ProPublica-Seattle Times
investigation last
month.
Witnesses include representatives from major veterans’
groups, the Department of Veterans’ Affairs , the
National Archives and Records Administration and the Defense Department.
The ProPublica and the Times reported over Veterans Day
weekend that, despite orders, dozens of U.S. Army units in both theaters had
lost or failed to keep field records during the wars. The records — such
as after-action reports, casualty reports and duty logs — provide vital
information for historians and can be critical evidence for veterans seeking
disability benefits.
“The
impact that accurate recordkeeping and access to records has on the backlog of
VA disability claims and the negative impact to our veterans cannot be stressed
enough,” subcommittee Chairman Jon Runyan, R-N.J.,
said in a statement to ProPublica.
“It is
important that this issue receive the attention and oversight it merits, as it
has a very real effect on the lives of those who have served our nation, and
the barriers they run into to access the benefits they have earned through that
service,” Runyon said.
The
panel is taking up the issue as part of a larger discussion about the VA’s plans
for transitioning to paperless records. Scheduled witnesses include:
• Richard Dumancas,
deputy director for claims, The American Legion
• Michael Viterna,
president, National Association of Veterans Advocates
• Jeffrey Hall, assistant national legislative
director, Disabled American Veterans
• Jim Neighbors, director of DoD/VA Collaboration Office, U.S. Department of Defense
• Scott Levins,
director of National Personnel Records Center, U.S. National Archives and
Records Administration
• Alan Bozeman, director, Veterans Benefits
Management System Program Office, Veterans Benefits Administration, U.S.
Department of Veterans Affairs.
I found myself in the hospital recently, watching my 11-year-old son get an X-ray for an arm he broke after a fall from his skateboard. As the technician positioned his arm on a table beneath the X-ray machine, she directed me to stand in the corner of the room, behind a protective window, so I wouldn't be exposed to the radiation.
The computer that ran the machine happened to be in the same corner, and, being curious, I read what was on the screen. The monitor showed my son's name, date of birth and other basic info – that all looked good. But it also said it was set to do an X-ray on a moderately sized adult. That didn't sound right. My boy only weighs about 80 pounds!
That’s where I faced a dilemma that I’m sure is quite familiar to anyone who has been a patient or watched a loved one undergoing medical treatment: Should I question the X-ray technician, or should I keep my mouth shut?
You can probably guess what I did. I didn’t want my son exposed to too much radiation, and I also wanted to be sure the X-ray was done correctly, so I pointed out the apparent discrepancy to the X-ray technician.
You can probably guess how she responded. It chapped her hide. “The machine’s setting is fine!” she said, clearly irritated. “I do this all day long. I know what I’m doing.”
I don’t doubt that she was correct. I’m sure she knows her machine, and that the setting was just fine for my son. But at the same time, I wondered what she had expected me to do when I saw the setting. Was I supposed to turn my brain off and not ask a question about the apparent discrepancy?
Other than this minor flare-up, my son was extremely well taken care of during his visit. But the exchange with the X-ray tech definitely had a chilling effect on me – and I’m pretty comfortable with conflict. And it made me wonder about other patients or family members who question medical providers. If my small question during a routine procedure on a healthy child with a minor injury created irritation and tension, then how much worse is the chilling effect during more extreme circumstances?
Plus – if patients or their loved ones do not speak up, then how many possible medical errors can occur?
The incident made me wonder how many others have had a similar experience. Have you ever faced this dilemma? Did you speak up? Did you decide not to? What happened?
Iraq has shut its airspace to four Syrian flights scheduled to pick up attack helicopters that had been repaired in Russia, the spokesman to Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki said Tuesday. Syria has failed several times since June to retrieve the refurbished helicopters from Russia, and the regime of Bashar al-Assad appears to be growing more desperate as fighting intensifies.
Iraq's denial of the flights appears to be a diplomatic breakthrough for the U.S. Although Baghdad has said it won't allow arms shipments to Syria and has recently begun to inspect some planes flying from Iran, White House and State Department officials have been pressuring Iraq to act much more aggressively to choke off military aid.
Two U.S. diplomatic officials who are closely monitoring Iraq-Syria relations expressed relief when told that Baghdad said it had denied Syria's overflight request for the helicopters.
But one of the officials emphasized caution, noting that flights continue over Iraqi airspace from Iran to Syria. Iraq has maintained that the flights carry humanitarian goods but the United States suspects they contain matériel. "The abuse of Iraq's airspace continues to be a concern," the official said. "We urge Iraq either to require flights enroute to Syria over its territory to land for inspection or deny overflight requests for these aircraft."
ProPublica reported on the Syrian fly-over requests last week, noting that the cargo plane expected to pick up the helicopters did not land or take off at the scheduled times at a military airfield near Moscow. The reason was unknown at the time.
Ali al-Mousawi, the prime minister's media adviser, told ProPublica on Tuesday that Syria's requests had been denied by the Iraqi Civil Aviation Authority.
"We will not authorize any overflight until we make sure that it does not contain any military equipment in line with the Iraqi government's policy which firmly rejects allowing transporting any military shipments via our airspace from or to Syria," he wrote in an email.
Syria has tried various ways to retrieve its attack helicopters from Russia.
In June, a cargo ship carrying helicopters from the Russian port of Kaliningrad to Syria was turned back after the ship's insurer withdrew coverage in response to sanctions. A second attempt by sea a month later also failed.
The new plan, according to flight records obtained by ProPublica, was to fly an Ilyushin IL-76 cargo plane in late November and early December from Damascus to Ramenskoye Airport outside Moscow, also known as Zhukovsky Airport. The records described the cargo as an "old helicopter after overhaullling" (sic) and identified the model as an Mi-25 — a heavy combat helicopter that has been filmed in online videos appearing to fire at rebels.
Some of the flight records were posted by hackers associated with the online collective Anonymous. Many of those documents, as well as others, were obtained separately by ProPublica, which reported last week that Syria appears to have flown 240 tons of bank notes from Moscow this summer.
One of the U.S. diplomatic officials said Iraq's decision to block the flights — and to acknowledge doing so publicly — risks angering Moscow. Failure to deliver the helicopters, this official said, could mean a delay in payment for the Russians. Russia has long been Syria's main supplier of arms.
Officials at the Russian Foreign Ministry and its lead arms exporter Rosoboronexport did not return phone calls from ProPublica. The 150 Aircraft Repair Plant, which is listed as the charterer of the flights, declined to answer questions.
Russia's Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev told reporters last week that Russia was obliged to fulfill its existing contracts even in the teeth of international pressure.
Until last year, Iraqi airspace had been largely controlled by the U.S. Air Force. But American officials have gradually turned over control to the Iraqis and now have little involvement in day-to-day operations, according to U.S. aviation advisers working with the Iraqis.
The New York Times reported Sunday on the struggle of American officials to stop arms shipments from Iran. According to the Times, Iraq's foreign minister promised Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in September that Iraq would inspect the flights from Iran. But since then, the newspaper said, it has only inspected two planes, including one that was returning from Syria.
President Obama, speaking yesterday at the National War College, said, "We will continue to support the legitimate aspirations of the Syrian people — engaging with the opposition, providing them with humanitarian aid and working for a transition to a Syria that's free of the Assad regime."
The leader of a national veterans' advocacy group urged a congressional subcommittee to force the Department of Defense to immediately reconstruct — if possible — missing military field records from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
"We were deeply troubled from recent news reports that records from Iraq and Afghanistan were lost, destroyed or never created in the first place," Viterna said.
Viterna also called for legislation to lower the standard of proof for approving benefit claims if a soldier's case is hampered by "lost, missing or nonexistent military service records." ProPublica and the Times found cases in which soldiers faced years of delay in getting benefit in part because of missing records.
New Jersey Republican Jon Runyan, the subcommittee chairman, said after the hearing that he intends to hold more sessions on the matter of missing field records next year. Runyan said he plans to call officials from the Department of the Army, which documents show had widespread record losses.
"Issues pertaining to the thoroughness of DoD's record keeping have recently received media attention in light of evidence that some units were not properly documenting in-service events, such as combat-related incidents," Runyan in a statement opening the hearing.
"This has been a source of significant frustration for many veterans who file claims with VA (Department of Veterans Affairs) and are dependent on such documentation to substantiate their claims," he said.
Documents obtained by ProPublica and the Times showed that entire Army brigades could not produce field records for certain deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan. A 2010 assessment of U.S. Central Command in Iraq found that recordkeeping was in disarray, with "large gaps in records collections ... the failure to capture significant operational and historical" materials.
The Army said that recordkeeping is a concern but that it is working to improve procedures. U.S. Centcom's former records manager confirmed that some operational records were lost in Iraq but that others are being recovered.
Field records are a distinct class of military records, unlike medical or personnel records. Among other things they include after-action reviews describing combat operations; situation and incident reports; daily and staff journals; and command reports and orders.
The records have multiple uses after they leave the battlefield. Military and civilian historians regard them as vital for their work. They can provide critical evidence in criminal investigations arising from military operations and are used to train upcoming commanders in lessons learned.
Recreating missing operational records, as Vitera suggested, can be an expensive and time-consuming process. The Army spent millions of dollars on a similar process following the 1990-91 war in Iraq, when missing field records hampered efforts to help veterans with symptoms of Gulf War Syndrome.
Runyan's subcommittee has jurisdiction over the Department of Veterans' Affairs rather than operational issues, such as Army recordkeeping practices. The two bureaucracies intermingle, however, because the VA often needs field records, personnel records and medical records to process claims. The VA is under pressure to reduce a claims backlog with an average wait time of nearly nine months.
"Often a single record or notation can be the difference between when a veteran's claim is accepted or denied," Runyan said during the hearing.
Separately, Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., who chairs the Senate Committee on Veterans' Affairs, and Rep. Michael Michaud, D-Maine, have written to Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta asking him to explain the status of efforts to locate and collect field records for units in Iraq and Afghanistan. Michaud, a member of Runyan's subcommittee, formally put his letter into the hearing record Tuesday.
"While DoD (Department of Defense) has assured Sen. Murray that they will respond to her inquiry on missing field records, we are still awaiting that answer," a spokesman for the senator said. "If no response is forthcoming, Sen. Murray will certainly seek out answers in public hearings with Pentagon officials."
TUXTLA GUTIÉRREZ, Mexico — Oscar and Jennifer Cruz knew that crossing the border would be the easy part.
The Salvadoran brother and sister made their way over the international line between Guatemala and Mexico with the help of a smuggler who guided them through the jungle. But soon afterward, Mexican immigration officers arrested the clean-cut teenagers on a bus in Tuxtla Gutiérrez, the capital of the southernmost Mexican state, Chiapas.
Like many other Central American youths who migrate on their own, Oscar, 16, and Jennifer, 13, were pushed by the danger of street gangs and pulled by hopes of joining their parents, who left El Salvador when their children were very young and settled in Las Vegas. The brother and sister embarked on the trek to the United States despite the horror stories about migrants getting robbed, raped, kidnapped or killed in transit across Mexico.
"We wanted to be with my parents," Oscar, a devout Christian, said in an interview at a detention center. "And there was also the threat from the gangs. Once I started high school, they tried to recruit me. What worried me most were the threats. The gangs fight for turf, do extortion, threaten families and deal drugs. The police are scared of them — kids my age."
Oscar and Jennifer crossed a lawless, long-neglected border between Guatemala and Mexico, a 540-mile boundary snaking through mountains, jungles and rivers. It is a hotbed of threats: smuggling of people, drugs, arms and cash; abuse of migrants by criminals and security forces; violence and corruption that menace institutions and create fertile turf for mafias.
The border is also a window into the future. Profound shifts in economics, demographics and crime are transforming immigration patterns and causing upheaval in Central and North America. After decades in which Mexicans dominated illegal immigration to the United States, the overall number of immigrants has dropped and the profile has changed.
Although Mexicans remain the largest group, U.S.-bound migrants today are increasingly likely to be young Central Americans fleeing violence as well as poverty, or migrants from remote locales such as India and Africa who pay top smuggling fees. They journey through a gantlet of predators.
Mexico's southern frontier has become a national security concern for U.S., Mexican and Central American leaders. Interviews with U.S. and Mexican government officials, human rights advocates and migrants by a ProPublica reporter visiting the border showed how these converging trends are raising alarms.
"It is becoming imperative and urgent to immediately initiate and develop in the next few years a serious and coordinated regional strategic plan in the areas of security, control and development to prevent this border from sliding out of control and generating an experience with enormous gravity for the region," said Gustavo Mohar, a veteran immigration and intelligence official who ended his tenure last week as Mexico's interior sub-secretary for migration issues.
"The same way that it took the United States 30 years to reach a point of physical control on its border, Mexico needs a medium-range strategy," Mohar said. "But we will control it better with a strategic vision that part of the problem is Central American poverty and the drug trade."
The new Mexican administration of President Enrique Peña Nieto inherits repercussions of the transformation at the better-known, aggressively policed U.S.-Mexico border. Although the U.S. political debate often gives a contrary impression, illegal crossing at Mexico's northern border has plummeted.
Until 2007, the U.S. Border Patrol made an average of about 1 million arrests a year at the line, the overwhelming majority of them Mexicans. But there has been a marked decline since. Patrol statistics through July indicate U.S. agents made about 355,000 apprehensions at the border in the fiscal year that ended in September. An expected figure of about 260,000 arrests of Mexicans would be the lowest in more than a decade.
Caught at the Border
Nationality of immigrants crossing from Mexico to the U.S.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Note: Federal fiscal years; 2012 projected. Source: Department of Homeland Security
Smuggling of people and drugs, especially marijuana, persists across the U.S.-Mexican border. But the changes seem dramatic. In April, a landmark study by the Pew Hispanic Center in Washington, D.C., determined that, after accounting for Mexican immigrants who return to their homeland, the net in-flow of Mexicans to the United States has dropped to zero. The reasons include tougher defenses, stepped-up deportations, a long-term decline in Mexican birth rates and the simultaneous slump in the U.S. economy and growth of the Mexican economy.
Even if the U.S. economy improves, the demographic and economic evolution of Mexico appears to have ended the era of massive Mexican migration to the United States, according to experts and officials.
"Everybody agrees there's going to be some vacillation in the numbers, but I don't know of any serious observer or analyst who thinks we are going to revert to pre-2008 levels of Mexican immigration," said Doris Meissner, a former U.S. immigration commissioner and now a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute in Washington, D.C. "I don't see any evidence of that happening, not in the structural changes in Mexico such as birth rates, not in the enforcement at the border, and not in the forecasts of what kind of economy is to come in the United States."
For years, non-Mexicans have accounted for only a small fraction of U.S. border arrests. The proportion has changed, however, and Central American migration has surged during the past year. Statistics indicate that U.S. agents caught at least 90,000 non-Mexicans at the U.S-Mexico border in the fiscal year, the great majority of them Central American. The number almost doubles the previous year's tally and equals more than a third of the arrests of Mexicans.
The non-Mexicans include a subset of migrants from Asia, Africa, South America and the Caribbean. The relative numbers are small, but the smugglers are especially powerful because they charge up to $65,000 per client. Drug mafias have muscled in on the human smuggling trade. And U.S. counterterrorism officials worry that corruption and disorder could enable terrorists or foreign agents to use the region as a gateway to the United States or a base for plots.
Apprehensions of Central American Immigrants in the U.S.
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Note: Federal fiscal years. Data for 2012 is through August. Source: Department of Homeland Security
Still, most non-Mexican migrants today come from three small and poor nations: Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala. U.S. Border Patrol apprehensions of Hondurans rose from 12,197 in fiscal 2011 to 27,734 through August; Salvadorans from 10,471 to 20,041; and Guatemalans from 19,061 to 32,486.
Mexican authorities this year have detained 40,971 illegal immigrants, most of them Central Americans, a rise of about 15,000 during the past two years, according to the Mexican National Institute of Migration, that country's immigration service. Detentions of unaccompanied Central American minors also increased, Mexican officials said.
The motivations are not just economic. El Salvador and Honduras have the highest homicide rates in the world; Guatemala is extremely violent. Ingrained inequality, migration and strife devastate family structures and state institutions. Crime generates a conflict-driven migration that recalls the refugee exodus from the region's civil wars in the 1980s.
"They are expelled from their countries by fear," said Father Flor Maria Rigoni, a cerebral, bearded Italian priest who directs the Casa del Migrante shelter in Tapachula on the southwest corner of the Mexico-Guatemala border. "They are seeking the possibility to survive. The violence there drives them. The migrants don't talk about the economic situation of the U.S. — they just bet on the future."
Central American street gangs have become formidable transnational mafias active in the United States and allied with Mexico's powerful drug cartels, which are expanding in Central America. Half the cocaine headed for the United States is off-loaded at the coast of Honduras, according to intelligence reports cited by U.S. officials.
For all those reasons, the southern border of Mexico is becoming a priority for security officials in Washington as well as Mexico City.
"We must continue to work together to prevent illegal flows of drugs, migrants, contraband, weapons and stolen goods across shared land borders," Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano told Central American leaders at a conference in Panama in February. Her visit was part of a push by the Obama administration to beef up security, train border forces and improve regional cooperation.
The current immigration debate in Washington should be based on a realization that both the United States and Mexico are dealing with a new reality at their borders, officials and experts said.
"Changing demographics in Mexico make this situation a 'new normal' with profound implications for our southwest border," said a senior U.S. official who monitors Mexico and Central America and requested anonymity because he is not authorized to speak publicly. "This means that any demand for labor in the United States in the mid to long term would be met by other than Mexicans, at the outset principally by Central Americans. Proposals to reform our immigration laws should take that into account."
Peña Nieto met with Napolitano and President Obama in Washington last week. The Mexican president's advisers have announced plans to beef up defenses at Mexico's southern boundary and create an entity whose existence would reflect how much times have changed: a Mexican border patrol.
Zip-Line Across the River
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The Suchiate River divides El Carmen, Guatemala and Talismán, Mexico. Above it smugglers string a zip line for illegal migrants to whiz across the water. (Keith Dannemiller/Corbis)
The westernmost Mexican port of entry at the town of Suchiate accounts for 95 percent of Mexico's commercial traffic with Central America, most of it southbound exports. Soldiers, police officers and security guards watch the parade of northbound legal crossers on foot, bikes, motorcycles and vehicles on the bridge over the Suchiate River, which demarcates the international line.
Illicit activity is not hard to spot. Riverbank commerce thrives beneath the hot sun. Authorities do not interfere with rafts gliding back and forth between Suchiate and the Guatemalan town of Tecun Uman, where a swan perches on a rooftop and garbage is piled high beneath the border bridge. Gasoline and food products are smuggled south because they are cheaper in Mexico; people and drugs go north.
About 50 miles northeast, colorful ceramic tiles dot the walkways of the modern port of entry between Talismán, Mexico, and El Carmen, Guatemala. A youthful canine officer screening trucks for Mexican customs is sharp, trim and presentable; he was trained by U.S. border inspectors in El Paso.
But here too, smuggling takes place at high noon in plain sight. Beneath the border bridge on the Guatemalan side, smugglers charge illegal immigrants $1.50 to cross the narrow, fast-moving river on a raft made of giant black inner tubes with a plank lashed on top. The shirtless smugglers can be seen swimming behind the rafts, pushing migrants and luggage to the Mexican riverbank, where the crossers hurry into the underbrush.
Another option: the aerial route. Smugglers string tightrope-like cables between trees or buildings on the riverbanks within yards of the port of entry. Illegal crossers whiz north above the water on these makeshift international zip lines, unmolested.
Mexican authorities do little enforcement on the riverbank. Officials say it would disrupt a deep-rooted transborder economy and culture. Moreover, a front-line crackdown would require a large contingent of specialized law enforcement personnel and other defenses. That has not been feasible given budget constraints, political sensitivities about immigration, and the demands of the fight against drug mafias elsewhere, officials say.
Instead, Mexico's immigration service deploys patrols in strategic spots a few miles from the border. A major chokepoint: the rail yards of Arriaga, where illegal immigrants race their pursuers in hopes of hopping a freight train and making the clandestine trek across Mexico to the U.S. border.
Known as La Bestia (The Beast), the freight train is a magnet for predators. The dangers have been documented in accounts such as the book "Enrique's Journey" and the documentary "María en Tierra de Nadie" ("María in No-Man's-Land"). Smugglers, bandits and corrupt security forces swarm the rail line. Accidents kill or maim scores of riders who fall off trains or are run over.
The paramilitary-style Zetas drug mafia of northeast Mexico, and lower-level criminals seeking its favor, terrorize the smuggling corridors.
"The chiefs give the green light to new recruits to do their business on the train," said Father Rigoni of the Casa del Migrante shelter. "They monitor the recruits in their ability in their turf to handle logistics, strategy, organization. They are applying market policy. The Zetas choose a little gang in Tapachula: If you can prove you control the turf, and pay us $500,000, you can rely on us for military support."
Gangsters shake down smugglers and subject migrants to robbery, rape and extortion. They kidnap them and demand money from relatives back home or in the United States. Women and children are forced into sexual slavery. Detention centers and migrant refuges brim over with horror stories.
An increase in young migrants traveling alone comes after years in which Central American migration fluctuated: It peaked in 2005 and declined for a few years before the new increase, which analysts see as a result of lawlessness as well as deprivation. This year, the Casa del Migrante has housed more than 5,000 migrants in transit; the number of Hondurans seeking refuge this year increased 57 percent, and the number of minors jumped 82 percent.
Father Rigoni called them "lambs to the slaughter." That phrase comes to the mind listening to the account of Oscar and Jennifer Cruz, the teenage Salvadoran brother and sister who told their story at the detention center in Tuxtla Gutiérrez.
Oscar, who has a stylish haircut and new red gym shoes, aspires to work in a bank someday. Jennifer — quiet, polite, wide-eyed — wants to be a secretary. Their parents left the town of Usulutan when the children were small. The parents found jobs in Las Vegas, sending back enough money for grandparents to raise Oscar and Jennifer. Divided families like this are typical in El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala. Jennifer said she knows her parents through "Skype, Facebook and the telephone."
Oscar and Jennifer decided to leave when the pressure from street gangs got too intense for Oscar at school. The family pooled resources to pay smugglers $10,000 for the trip; the parents insisted the youths travel in Mexico by bus, not The Beast. The dangers of home and the lure of the north overcame their fears. They made it across Guatemala unscathed, but were caught on a bus soon after crossing the line into Mexico.
"Relying on our faith, we decided to do it," Oscar said. "It was exciting and scary. I have two friends from school who left for the United States. Their brothers were already there. My friends didn't make it. They disappeared."
Abuse of migrants, especially Central Americans, is widespread and often involves corrupt officials. Hard numbers documenting the crimes remain elusive, however. In a study in 2010, Amnesty International asserted that hundreds of migrants go missing or are killed in Mexico each year. A Salvadoran advocate group quoted in the study said that 293 Salvadorans had died or disappeared in Mexico between 2007 and 2009.
Last year, a report by Mexico's National Human Rights Commission found that 11,333 migrants had been victims of kidnapping during a six-month period in 2011. Some officials and human rights defenders think that figure is too high. They cite the difficulty of gathering accurate data and the ambiguity of kidnapping, which can result from a voluntary deal with a smuggler that degenerates. But human rights advocates and Mexican and Central American officials agree about the dire plight of the border-crossers.
The gang members and other criminals who prey on migrants are sometimes fellow Central Americans. The fast growth of the Zetas has created a demand for foot soldiers that is filled partly by young Central Americans in states such as Zacatecas, according to U.S. and Mexican law enforcement officials. A Honduran ex-convict was among a group of Zetas gunmen who killed a U.S. agent of Immigration and Customs Enforcement in a highway ambush in central Mexico last year. Massacres in northern Mexico have been triggered by incidents in which Mexican drug traffickers tried to recruit groups of migrants as mules or henchmen, U.S. and Mexican officials say.
There is another Beast. The rail hub at Palenque, 200 miles to the northeast of Arriaga, also attracts border-crossers. Authorities estimate that up to 500 clandestine passengers ride each freight train coming out of Palenque. The game is played differently, however.
On a sweaty afternoon, hundreds of migrants fill the tumbledown Palenque neighborhood of Colonia Pakal-Na. They wear caps, bandannas, shirts as headdresses. Unconcerned by police driving by, the men panhandle, rest in the shade and talk on cellphones near train tracks strewn with trash. Handwritten signs in the windows of low-slung, multicolored stores and houses announce the use of bathrooms for a fee. Clothes hang in the chain-link fence of a basketball court dotted with sleeping figures. El Sabor Hondureño, a Honduran-owned diner a few yards from graffiti-covered freight cars, does a brisk business.
"They drink and take drugs and bother people coming through the area; there have even been victims of assaults," says José López, an official in Palenque City Hall, sounding not unlike U.S. residents complaining about immigrant laborers in their neighborhoods. "There is the problem of gang fights among them. There are no bathrooms where they can do their necessities, so they go in the open areas. They are rejected by the residents of the neighborhood."
Mexican immigration officials say their hands are tied. They conduct occasional raids. Were they to arrest migrants on a daily basis, officials say, they would have to transport them to Tapachula to be repatriated by bus. Resources are lacking.
Detainees cannot simply be deported south from Palenque because Guatemalan authorities cannot ensure safe passage through the jungles of the Petén region, an outpost of drug traffickers. As at the U.S.-Mexico border, the asymmetry between Mexico and Central America is dramatic.
"We cannot ask the Guatemalan government to control its border to prevent people from crossing when it is battling to maintain national stability and programs of development, education, rebuilding police and intelligence to fight gangs and drug trafficking," Mohar said. "For Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, the departure of their citizens has historically brought remittances that are fundamental to their economies. This has been also true for Mexico, but fortunately less and less today. The Central American countries don't have an incentive to do something at the border. But I'm afraid if they don't, and if we don't work with them, the problem will overwhelm us."
A study released recently by the Migration Policy Institute in Washington found that borders are "porous and uncontrolled" throughout Central America. Only four of the eight official crossing points between Mexico and Guatemala operate regularly, and secret landing strips for drug smuggling planes proliferate, according to the study. Border security suffers from the ills afflicting overall security, according to the study: insufficient resources, weak institutions, corruption and lack of continuity between administrations.
"Guatemala has not had a coherent border security strategy or policy for the last four years," the study states. "The government has ordered increases in police and military personnel sent to the border without providing these forces any new resources. As a result, these border build-ups have been short-lived."
It is harder than ever to sneak across the U.S.-Mexico border. As a result, Mexican officials detect a new trend.
"What we have in the last six months is a very significant increase in the flow of Central Americans who are not going to the U.S. but rather to stay in Mexico," Mohar said. He cites a presence of immigrants in the states of San Luis Potosí, Jalisco and Querétaro and "an enormous challenge with Central American children traveling alone who stay in Mexico City and live on the streets and are very vulnerable to joining gangs or being trafficked."
Smugglers Adapt and Thrive
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Father Flor Maria Rigoni runs the Casa del Migrante shelter for Central American migrants in Tapachula on the southwest corner of the Mexico-Guatemala border. (Stanley Leary)
Market conditions — namely, the likelihood of getting caught — dictated the deal that the smugglers made with Marco, an Ecuadoran who wanted to go to United States with his wife.
"The fee I paid included three attempts," said Marco, who asked that his full name be withheld for his safety. "This was my first try. I paid for a package. And if I don't want to keep trying, they said they will reimburse me 50 percent."
Marco is a compact 26-year-old with buzz-cut hair and a bemused expression. He was interviewed at the detention center in Tuxtla Gutiérrez while he awaited deportation after his arrest for crossing from Guatemala. He had hoped to reach New York, where his brother had spent six years working in construction, returned to their hometown of Azogues and bought himself a house and a pickup truck.
The Ecuadoran smugglers dealt with Marco almost exclusively by phone, he said. They charged $11,000, collecting a $3,000 down payment. Marco and his wife packed coats and hats because they were told they would spend four days walking through the desert with a group to enter the United States. They prayed at a shrine and set off, armed with a phone number and a password, to a hotel in Guayaquil. A woman facilitator gave them a new number and password and plane tickets to San Pedro Sula, Honduras, via Panama.
The couple took a bus from Honduras to Guatemala City. Local smugglers took charge of them. Marco and his wife slept in a safe house where the clients came from as far away as China. After another bus ride, they spent two days by mototaxi and on foot entering Mexico through the mountains. The group of Ecuadorans and Guatemalans, using the code name "Eagles," met a Mexican smuggler known as Chiclet at a cheap hotel in picturesque San Cristóbal de las Casas, according to Marco's account.
In Ecuador, the smugglers had promised that Marco and his wife would travel by bus in Mexico to avoid the perils of the freight trains. But Chiclet announced a change in plans.
"He told me we were supposed to go to Arriaga to catch The Beast, and we would go to the border and Houston," Marco said. "I had heard all about the train. I didn't want to go."
The Mexican smuggler went out, got drunk and didn't return until 4 a.m., Marco said. Instead of escorting his clients, Chiclet sent them to Arriaga on their own. Marco and his wife were arrested on a bus when immigration officials checked papers.
"It was the fault of the smugglers," Marco said. "They aren't trustworthy."
Smuggling is a major industry. Last year, Mexican authorities in Chiapas discovered two tractor-trailers carrying a total of 500 Central Americans, Indians and Chinese who had just crossed the Guatemalan border. Smuggling fees for immigrants from Asia and Africa depend on factors such as the length and risk of the trip and use of fraudulent documents. Chinese migrants pay as much as $65,000 and Indians about $25,000, according to U.S. border enforcement officials. If they cannot afford to pay upfront, clients borrow from family and associates or work off debts through indentured labor upon arrival in the United States.
The revenue from such valuable human cargo buys allies in government.
Mexican immigration investigators broke up a corruption ring last year after arresting three frightened Indians at the Tapachula airport. The Indians carried seemingly legitimate visas for Mexico but admitted their intent to sneak into the United States, according to their statements to Mexican investigators obtained by ProPublica.
A husband and wife named Nareshkumar and Urbilaben Patel explained that everything was arranged before their departure. They left Delhi for Dubai, where they spent a month and then flew via Amman and Madrid to Guatemala City. After the Indians were smuggled across the Suchiate River by raft, a Mexican lawyer gave them documents and told them to pose as tourists, according to the statements.
Investigators arrested the lawyer, a former state prosecutor from Tabasco who obtained fraudulent visa papers from accomplices in the immigration bureaucracy in Mexico City. The ex-prosecutor was charged with smuggling and the officials were fired, authorities said.
The smuggling flow changes rapidly. Mexico detained 723 Eritreans in 2010, that year's largest group of illegals who were not from Latin America. This year has brought a fourfold increase in Cubans: 2,593 so far. Farther south, the numbers are similar. In Panama, a gateway for migrants arriving from South America, authorities arrested 2,117 Cubans in the first 10 months of the year, a fivefold rise. Many Cubans come through Ecuador, where visa policies are lax, according to U.S. and Mexican officials.
Cubans speaking melodious Caribbean Spanish congregate in the patio of the federal immigration detention center in Tapachula. A muscular, gray-eyed young man from the town of Bayamo explains that he voyaged on a makeshift vessel to Honduras. He waited and worked odd jobs for a year, when his absence from Cuba meant he had legally renounced citizenship. His goal is to join relatives in Hialeah, Fla. He chose the route because U.S. refugee law favors Cubans who arrive at a land border.
"If I arrive in a raft in Miami and the Coast Guard catches me at sea, they deport me right back, chico," said the young Cuban, who asked not to be identified because of his migratory situation. "Matamoros, Mexico, that's where I want to go."
The repercussions of the evolving smuggling patterns bubble up at the U.S.-Mexico border as well. During a hectic period in March of last year, one in four migrants arrested in the Border Patrol's Rio Grande Valley sector in south Texas were non-Mexicans.
Several recent cases have raised concerns about the potential for terrorists or foreign intelligence operatives to tap into the smuggling infrastructure. Last year, a Somali was sentenced to 10 years in prison in Texas on immigration charges. Ahmed Muhammed Dhakane led a ring that smuggled East Africans to the United States via Brazil, Guatemala and Mexico and admitted that he and some of his clients had links to Somali terrorist groups, according to U.S. court documents. Dhakane boasted that he made as much as $75,000 a day smuggling Somalis, documents say.
In a case that startled law enforcement and intelligence agencies, an Iranian-American pleaded guilty this year in federal court to a plot to hire hit men from a Mexican cartel to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to Washington. Intercepts and other evidence showed that the defendant was working for Iranian intelligence chiefs, who provided $100,000 for the plot. The Iranian agent lived in Corpus Christi, Texas, and traveled back and forth frequently to Mexico, where he developed contacts among drug traffickers, according to court documents.
Counterterrorism officials worry that extremist operatives could establish a presence in Central America by taking advantage of porous borders, the availability of fraudulent documents and mafias involved in arms, drugs and people smuggling. Mexican intelligence works closely with U.S. counterparts to aggressively target migrants from nations such as Iran or Somalia with hostile governments or active terror groups — Special Interest Aliens, in the parlance of U.S. border agencies.
Mexican officials tend to see the U.S. worries about terrorists as exaggerated, however. In September, police in the city of Merida acting at the request of U.S. officials arrested several suspects, including a former California imam wanted for a U.S. parole violation and found that he carried a fraudulent passport from Belize, which neighbors Guatemala and Mexico, according to Mexican and U.S. officials. There were initial suspicions that the imam and his Belizean associates had Hezbollah links, but Mexican and U.S. officials subsequently downplayed that aspect of the case.
U.S. officials say the larger intelligence picture justifies their concerns, especially about a presence of Iranian and Hezbollah operatives in Latin America.
A Mexican Border Patrol?
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Guatemalan workers steer Central American migrants heading for the U.S. across the Suchiate river on makeshift rafts at the Guatemala-Mexico border crossing in September 2012. (Moises Castillo/AP Photo)
The detention center in Tapachula, run by Mexico's National Institute of Migration, is the largest facility of its kind in Latin America. It embodies the contradictions and challenges of the border.
The clean, modern complex has a capacity for 950 men, women and children. The administrators look more like social workers than jailers. It has a game room and a library, where a small cheerful boy plays on a computer. The boy's mother is Eritrean; he is stateless, born in South Africa during a yearlong odyssey that led through Brazil and Guatemala before falling short of the destination: Chicago.
Mexican immigration officers are unarmed, enlisting federal and state officers for support on investigations and operations as needed. Although corruption and abuse are longtime problems in the immigration service, it is not a border patrol or even a traditional police force.
At least in theory, Mexican immigration policy is driven by human rights concerns. A new law passed last year spells out liberal policies toward illegal immigrants in Mexico and places limits on enforcement.
In the United States, the changes at Mexico's borders will have an impact on the immigration debate. After President Obama's re-election, Republicans looking to court Latino voters have expressed new interest in immigration reform. The Obama administration argues that the drop in illegal crossings and the security buildup at the U.S. border have established a framework for reform. But the changes at the Southwest border have not necessarily sunk in among politicians and the public.
"Whether the perception has caught up with the reality is not clear," said Douglas Rivlin, chief spokesman for Rep. Luis Gutiérrez, D-Ill., a leading proponent of immigration reform. "There's often a big gap between what Congress is talking about and what the reality is. People probably aren't aware the flow is so low."
One goal of immigration reform will be legal status for more Central Americans, reducing the number of migrants who transit through Mexico, Rivlin said.
"The goal is to have an immigration system in which people board a plane in San Salvador and are not taking the risk of riding on top of a train through Mexico," he said. "That's what gives the U.S. security; that's what means less deaths on the border; that's what gives us one labor market rather than several."
Just as the United States and Mexico work together more closely than ever against drugs, there is unprecedented cooperation on border issues. In the United States, representatives of Mexican consulates routinely visit U.S. Border Patrol stations and are provided with office space to attend to Mexican detainees. U.S. agents stationed in Mexico share information in real time with Mexican aviation security authorities to screen incoming passenger flights. Similar programs are expanding in Central America.
Nonetheless, Mexican human rights advocates and politicians object to measures such as Mexican police stopping Central Americans from riding the freight trains, saying they do not want Mexico doing the dirty work of the United States.
Mexico still suffers nagging inequality and crime. But last year's Pew study cited the growth of the middle class, the decline in Mexican immigration, lower birthrates and higher rates of literacy and education. If those trends continue, Mexico seems headed toward a transition that could spur social tension — and tougher border enforcement policies
"Mexico is increasingly finding itself in the most complex situation for a country in regards to migration: It is simultaneously a sending country, a transit country and a receiving country," said Meissner of the Migration Policy Institute. "Those are very different identities to reconcile. They really have to build an infrastructure on that border."
The rise of Central America as a base for drug mafias adds pressure. President Peña Nieto's aides have announced a plan for the southern Mexican border featuring 10 new ports of entry and legal status for Guatemalan laborers in Mexico's four southernmost states. The new administration intends to create a Mexican border police of 5,000 to 8,000 officers to patrol areas between official crossings at the Guatemalan border, officials said.
The mission of the new force will be to prevent the flow of "drugs, arms and to a certain extent so people don't cross," said Arnulfo Valdivia, immigration coordinator for the president's transition team, according to a report in El Universal newspaper.
The extent to which this border patrol will intercept illegal crossers remains to be seen. The plan is part of a larger security restructuring, discussed during Peña Nieto's visit to Washington last week, that will expand the role of Mexican federal law enforcement.
If the past is a guide, Washington is likely to contribute border-related training, resources and technology to help Mexico and Central American nations target organized crime, but will tread lightly to avoid the perception that it is intervening directly in other countries to block U.S.-bound migration. The U.S., European Union and United Nations contribute to a number of initiatives to strengthen security policy in Central America.
Politics aside, the obstacles to controlling Mexico's southern line are daunting. The geography is rugged. Mafias overwhelm opponents with firepower and corruption. There are other budget demands in Mexico, let alone in Guatemala and its neighbors.
Experts say the strategy must be smart and targeted. An example: In response to the surge of illegal migrants from India, most Central American countries have stemmed the influx by imposing a visa requirement on Indians.
The study by the Migration Policy Institute cautioned against a narrow focus. Because mafias are often stronger than the state in the remote border regions, reforms should focus on establishing the rule of law and improving safety in those areas and not just at the international line, the study said.
Mohar, the veteran Mexican official, calls for a regional approach that addresses violence and poverty in Central America as well.
"Law enforcement and security are not enough," he said. "The truth is that Central America is a small region where investment by the international community, the United States and international entities could be relatively low compared to the risk of not doing anything. The border is an expression of problems that exist far from the border."
When the Federal Communications Commission passed a rule earlier this year to require TV stations to post political ad buying information online, public interest groups (and ProPublica) welcomed the policy as a means to get an unprecedented look at how billions of campaign dollars flow around the country.
FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski called the rule a victory for transparency, saying the disclosure requirements are “part of the public’s basic contract with broadcasters in exchange for use of the spectrum and other benefits.”
But, in practice, attempts to create a full picture of political ad spending from the TV station files exposed deep flaws in the FCC’s effort as well as spotty compliance by the stations themselves.
“The reviews are abysmal,” says Campaign Legal Center Policy Director Meredith McGehee, who has been tracking the issue closely as a member of the Public Interest Public Airwaves Coalition. “The information posted has not been as helpful as expected.”
Now, the commission is refusing to even talk about the future of its own transparency initiative.
The key to fulfilling the system’s potential is to require stations to submit political ad data in a consistent format making it actually sortable. Such a requirement would allow for a truly useful database that would show in unprecedented detail how ad money is spent in local, state, and federal campaigns. That was the recommendation of an FCC working group last year.
Speaking at a public forum in July, the head of the FCC office overseeing the rule, Bill Lake, called making such improvements the “long-term goal.”
But it’s not at all clear when, or if, that will happen.
We repeatedly asked commission officials about their plans for the site, but our interview requests were denied and FCC spokeswoman Janice Wise declined to comment.
When the Campaign Legal Center’s McGehee proposed to FCC staff during the campaign that the system should move in the direction of “a searchable, sortable, downloadable database … they looked at me like I was a wild-eyed Stalinist,” said McGehee, who still praised the FCC for getting its system up just a few months after finalizing the new regulation.
The new FCC website is indeed a big improvement over the old system of keeping political ad information in difficult-to-access paper files at stations around the country. ProPublica along with other organizations and media outlets produceddozensofstories based on the new information, which shows where campaigns and outside groups bought ads and how much they paid. We had the help of nearly 1,000 volunteers who helped sift through pdf documents in our Free the Files project.
Many stations fell short of the legal requirement to maintain an “orderly” public file. Some stations’ files were plagued by illegible writing, duplicate contracts, opaque revisions, and obscure internal filing practices.
At times stations filed five, ten, even twenty versions of a single contract between a campaign and a TV station to buy a week of ads. That made it nearly impossible to get an accurate picture of overall spending.
McGehee now believes that any improvements may be on hold pending the appointment of a replacement for Chairman Julius Genachowksi, a longtime friend of President Obama who is reportedly expected to leave his post once a successor is found.
The other wild card? The position of the broadcast industry and its outstanding lawsuit against the FCC.
Media companies earlier this year mounted an aggressive but unsuccessful lobbying push against the plan to put political ad data online. After the FCC voted to institute the system, industry trade group the National Association of Broadcasters sued. That lawsuit, in the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, was put on hold until early next year while TV stations tried out the new system in the election.
Industry spokesman Dennis Wharton told ProPublica that no final decisions have been made about whether to pursue the suit.
There are some scheduled changes ahead.
The system, which currently covers only the four affiliates of the major networks in the top 50 broadcast markets, will expand to cover all TV stations beginning in July 2014. That will increase the political ad spending reported on the FCC website in the midterm elections. The FCC has promised to seek comment in July 2013 on the impact of the expansion of the system before it goes into effect.
***
Here’s just one example of the kind of impossible-to-understand documents filed by some TV stations. This one involves a transaction — exactly what kind is not clear — between conservative dark money group Crossroads GPS and Albuquerque CBS affiliate KQRE:
On Tuesday, the Senate passed the National Defense Authorization Act, or NDAA, a yearly military spending bill.
Last year, the bill affirmed the U.S.’s authority to hold suspected terrorists indefinitely and without charges. The provision had generated plenty of controversy, particularly about whether U.S. citizens could be detained indefinitely. This year, the Senate bill says that citizens can’t be detained in the U.S. – but concerns remain about the scope of detention powers.
We’ve taken a step back, run through the controversy, and laid out what’s new.
What does the law currently say about military detention?
Section 1021 of last year’s National Defense Authorization Act affirms the military’s ability under the law of war to detain people “without trial until the end of hostilities.”
It also says they can be tried at a military commission, transferred to another country or to “an alternative court” – leaving open the possibility of civilian trials.
Who can be detained?
Anyone who “planned, authorized, committed, or aided” the 9/11 attacks, or “harbored those responsible.” Also, anyone who been “part of or substantially supported” Al Qaeda, the Taliban, “or associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the U.S. and its coalition partners.”
Does that include U.S. citizens?
Congress left that deliberately unspecified last year, essentially punting the issue to the courts.
The language in the bill didn’t outright permit or prohibit indefinite detention of U.S. citizens. The act stated that it wouldn’t affect “existing law or authorities relating to the detention of United States citizens, lawful resident aliens of the United States, or any other persons who are captured or arrested in the United States.”
But existing laws and authorities don’t actually give a definitive answer. There were cases involving U.S. citizens held by the military under President George W. Bush, but no precedents were established. The Supreme Court ruled only narrowly on the case of Yaser Hamdi, on the basis that he was captured on the battlefield in Afghanistan. (Hamdi was releasedand went to Saudi Arabia in 2004.)In a second case, Jose Padilla was transferred to a civilian court. (For more legal details, see these backgrounders from the blog Lawfare and the Congressional Research Service.)
In signing the bill last year, Obama said that his administration “will not authorize the indefinite military detention without trial of American citizens.” Critics were quick to point out that this was a non-binding policy, and that the law left the door open for future administrations to interpret it differently.
But this year’s bill fixed all this confusion, right?
Kind of.
In a replay of last year’s debate, a flurry of proposedamendments went around the Senate in an attempt to clarify the language about indefinite detention. Ultimately, the Senate passed an amendment from Senator Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., that seems to protect U.S. citizens:
“An authorization to use military force, a declaration of war, or any similar authority shall not authorize the detention without charge or trial of a citizen or lawful permanent resident of the United States apprehended in the United States, unless an Act of Congress expressly authorizes such detention.”
What about people detained in the U.S. who aren’t citizens or permanent residents?
They could still be indefinitely detained.
Human rights and civil libertarian groups criticized the amendment for falling short of the protections in the constitution under the Fifth Amendment, which says that any “person” in the U.S. be afforded due process.
In the floor debate, Feinstein said she agreed with critics that allowing anybody in the U.S. to be detained indefinitely without charges “violates fundamental American rights.” Feinstein said she didn’t think she had the necessary votes to pass a due-process guarantee for all.
So does that settle it? Citizens can’t be detained?
Depends which senator you ask.
Some voted for Feinstein’s amendment even though they think the military should be able to indefinitely detain people within the U.S. They think her amendment still allows it, because of the last clause – “unless an Act of Congress expressly authorizes such a detention.”
As the Hill reported, Senators Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., John McCain, R-Ariz., and Carl Levin, D-Mich., all claim that Congress’ 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Forcedoes authorize the detention of citizens, even in the U.S. They cited the Hamdi case, despite the fact that he was captured abroad.
What about last year’s NDAA? Isn’t that an Act of Congress authorizing detention?
Not expressly. It gets back to that non-position that last year’s bill settled on-- “Nothing in this section shall be construed to affect existing law or authorities” about the detention of U.S. citizens.
Does the NDAA go farther than the post-9/11 AUMF?
On the surface, yes, but many courts have already used AUMF to affirm broad presidential powers.
The AUMF doesn’t mention detention, or Al Qaeda, the Taliban and associated forces, which the NDAA claims the U.S. has the authority to detain. It authorizes “necessary and appropriate force” against anyone involved with or harboring anyone involved with the 9/11 attacks.
But both Bush and Obama have maintained in court that the AUMF does authorize detention, and that its authorization applies to Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and “associated forces.”
So the detention section of the NDAA largely echoes the authorities that Bush and Obama have previously asserted and gotten through the courts.
What the NDAA does do, as Lawfare phrased it, is “put Congress’s stamp of approval” on these claims, which could have implications for future litigation. The Congressional Research Service report goes into more detail on the way that courts have interpreted “associated forces” and “substantial support”—phrases the NDAA doesn’t attempt to define.
Isn’t there a lawsuit going on over the NDAA?
Yes. Last year, a coalition of journalists and activists sued to block the indefinite detention provision on constitutional grounds. A U.S. District Court judge ruled in their favor in September, claiming that the government had overstepped in its interpretation of the AUMF. Her decision was stayed by an appeals court, who found it overly broad. The case is ongoing.
So what happens next?
The bill still has to be reconciled with the House version, which did not include an amendment to the detention provision like Feinstein’s.
Obama has threatened to veto the NDAA over other measures, including restrictions on transfers from Guantanamo prison. But he said the same thing last year, and ended up signing the bill into law.
In July 2007, a Minnesota landlord arranged to show a duplex to a potential renter. But when she arrived at the rental and saw the prospective tenant was black she refused to get out of her car. “No way, it’s not for rent. I can’t do this … I’m not renting to these kinds of people,” the landlord said, according to an investigation of the incident by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. The landlord drove away.
In March 2008, Angela and Brian Scherer, who are white, advertised an apartment for rent in Wayne County, Ill. They found a tenant who planned to pay part of her rent with a federal voucher issued by the Wayne County Housing Authority. When Brian Scherer called the housing authority to check on the tenant’s voucher, according to a HUD complaint filed by the Scherers, he was told, “I don’t know if you know this, but they’re black and from St. Louis …You may not want them in your home.” Scherer said he didn’t care as long as they paid rent.
Days later, when another housing authority employee met Angela Scherer to inspect the property, she repeated the warning about the tenant. She said she couldn’t tell Scherer who to rent to, but that she had “friends in the neighborhood and I wouldn’t want a black family living next to me.” After Scherer accused the woman of racism, the housing official said Scherer’s property had failed the inspection.
In August 2008, Celeste Barker found a townhouse advertised in a local Ohio newspaper. When she stopped by the rental office, the property manager told her the office was closed and the townhouse was no longer available, according to HUD. Barker, who is black, suspected discrimination and filed a complaint with a fair housing group. The group had a white tester call to inquire about the rental. The property manager made an appointment to show the tester the apartment the next day. When a black tester called, he once again claimed he had nothing to rent.
Millions Affected, But Few File Complaints
Four decades after Congress made it illegal to deny someone housing based on race, color, religion, national origin, sex -- later adding disability and familial status in separate legislation -- these stories remain all-too common. According to the National Fair Housing Alliance, African Americans and Latinos experience housing discrimination an estimated 4 million times each year.
Most people never know they’ve faced discrimination when landlords don’t call them back, deny apartments are available, or demand higher rents and deposits than are required from whites tenants. Similarly, it’s rare to discover that a bank funneled you into a higher-priced loan simply because of your race, ethnicity or gender, or that a real estate agent failed to show you homes in white neighborhoods.
Even when people suspect they’ve faced discrimination, proving it can be daunting.
Though millions of instances of discrimination occur each year, only about 10,000 complaints are filed annually with HUD or state or local fair housing enforcement agencies. HUD typically issues charges of discrimination in about 2 percent of the cases it receives.
Share Your Story
Are you one the millions who’ve faced housing discrimination?
Did you suspect you were discriminated against, but thought you couldn’t prove it or that authorities would not do anything about it? Did you know where to file a complaint? If you filed a complaint, did you feel your case was handled well or were you disappointed with the outcome?
Are you a leasing agent, lender or real estate agent who was encouraged or instructed to discriminate against home seekers based on their race or ethnicity?
