Common Cause Blog

Don't Cross KBR

From this morning's Times ...

The Army official who managed the Pentagon's largest contract in Iraq says he was ousted from his job when he refused to approve paying more than $1 billion in questionable charges to KBR, the Houston-based company that has provided food, housing and other services to American troops.

The official, Charles M. Smith, was the senior civilian overseeing the multibillion-dollar contract with KBR during the first two years of the war. Speaking out for the first time, Mr. Smith said that he was forced from his job in 2004 after informing KBR officials that the Army would impose escalating financial penalties if they failed to improve their chaotic Iraqi operations.

Army auditors had determined that KBR lacked credible data or records for more than $1 billion in spending, so Mr. Smith refused to sign off on the payments to the company. "They had a gigantic amount of costs they couldn't justify," he said in an interview. "Ultimately, the money that was going to KBR was money being taken away from the troops, and I wasn't going to do that."

Politicization at NASA and NOAA

Since taking office the Bush administration has made clear its distaste for regulating air and water pollution, even in the face of global warming. What is now coming out is how they took their political beliefs and forced them upon important government agencies charged with developing scientific analyses of these dangerous problems.

Today, the Inspector General reports that political appointees in the NASA press office altered the agency's findings on global warming. Yes, at the press office.

The world's most powerful country -- and its biggest polluter -- has some of the most talented and respected scientists anywhere, and yet

from the fall of 2004 through 2006, the report said, NASA's public affairs office "managed the topic of climate change in a manner that reduced, marginalized, or mischaracterized climate change science made available to the general public." It noted elsewhere that "news releases in the areas of climate change suffered from inaccuracy, factual insufficiency, and scientific dilution."

Officials of the Office of Public Affairs told investigators that they regulated communication by NASA scientists for technical rather than political reasons, but the report found "by a preponderance of the evidence, that the claims of inappropriate political interference made by the climate change scientists and career public affairs officers were more persuasive than the arguments of the senior public affairs officials that their actions were due to the volume and poor quality of the draft news releases."

The arm of the White House under this overreaching executive can apparently extend into any agency, on any subject, and bend it to their political will. The reason we have career staff at government agencies is to handle such issues without political interference -- the exact opposite of what's happening now, as this story shows.

(h/t TPM)

Karl Rove subpoenaed

House Judiciary Committee subpoenas Rove over the still-unresolved issue of the U.S. attorneys scandal.

We know that the White House believes that this falls under "executive privilege" and will compel Rove not to comply -- the same way they kept Josh Bolten and Harriet Miers from testifying before Congress.

Here's hoping this time turns out differently, and we get some accountability for once.

FISA bill passes House; no retroactive legal immunity for telecoms

While the Senate was willing to grant retroactive legal immunity to telecommunications companies that submitted to the White House's request for them to spy on Americans without a warrant, the House today voted to renew the surveillance bill without granting such legal immunity.

The House on Friday narrowly approved a Democratic bill that would set rules for the government's eavesdropping on phone calls and e-mails inside the United States.

The bill, approved as lawmakers departed for a two-week break, faces a veto threat from President Bush. The margin of House approval was 213 to 197, largely along party lines.

Because of the promised veto, "this vote has no impact at all," said Republican Whip Rep. Roy Blunt of Missouri.

The president's main objection is that the bill does not protect from lawsuits the telecommunications companies that allowed the government to eavesdrop on their customers without a court's permission after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Dems Stand Up to Bush: Let Spy Bill Expire

You have to give Pelosi some credit. One of my colleagues commented that she must have been eating spinach.

The House is NOT going to take up the Senate passed version of the new domestic surveillence bill which grants telecom companies immunity. The House Dems tried to extend the current law to make time to go into conference and resolve the differences between the House- and Senate-passed versions of the bill before time ran out, but that got shot down. The main difference between the bills is the question of legal immunity for telecommunications companies that handed over personal information to the feds without a warrant, which violates civil and criminal law.

President Bush, of course, has said that if the House doesn't shut up and pass the Senate version of the bill (and grant the telecos immunity from all the lawsuits that have sprung up as a result) it will imperil every red-blooded American. Sweeping immunity for some telecom companies that knowingly broke the law IS THAT IMPORTANT. Both the House and Senate bills give the government expanded authority to snoop - but this isn't about that, is it?

But it looks like Pelosi is going to call the bluff and let the bill expire while they fight it out over immunity. Kudos.

Senate Debating Domestic Spying

UPDATE: In a sad and unsurprising vote, the Senate passed the FISA renewal with retroactive legal immunity for the telecom companies. The battle moves to the House, where hopefully our elected officials will remember that they are there to uphold the rule of law and protect the process of justice, especially when it comes to determining whether telecommunications firms unlawfully allowed the government to spy on American citizens. - Josh Zaharoff

...

Senate is now debating the FISA bill. On January 22, Common Cause did a letter with other groups to Senator Reid opposing immunity for telecommunications companies. Excerpt:

We now know that communication service providers turned over our private calls, emails and records to the government in the absence of a court order or other lawful requirement to do so. This violates both criminal and civil laws. Currently, citizens and consumers are trying to advance their rights in court, some seeking damages, and some seeking a simple declaration that the activity was illegal and a court order stopping it from happening in the future.

Killing all the pending cases will have two effects. First, it deprives consumers the opportunity to assert their own privacy rights before a neutral arbiter, which had been statutorily guaranteed since 1978. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act provides a civil cause of actions so that Americans can enforce their rights when the communications companies and the government infringe on them. Robbing them of this opportunity through legislation not only frustrates the pending cases, but undercuts the accountability structure in the statute, which will only encourage law breaking in the future.

Second, it serves to bury government misconduct. Granting retroactive immunity shields not only the telecommunications industry, but the government actors that induced them to break the law in the first place. Despite numerous subpoenas, Congress has been completely frustrated in its attempts to discover what the Administration has done with our private information. These cases may be the last chance for citizens to actually determine who ordered the interception of their phone calls and how those intercepted communications have been used against them.

Senator Ensign -- Show Us the Money!

I was in Reno, Nevada yesterday with former Nevada Common Cause Board Chair Jim Hulse and a group of activists who were calling on Senator Jim Ensign to explain his obstruction of a bill to require U.S. Senators to tell us who they are taking money from -- now.

Watch a video of our event:

Currently, Senators file campaign finance disclosure reports on paper. The paper reports are scanned into a computer, printed out, and then retyped to be placed on the Federal Election Commission website. This process takes about four months and costs about $250,000 in taxpayer dollars.