The U.S. Attorney Massacre of late 2006 was something that broke largely in the blogosphere--and was the subject of hundreds of diaries here at Daily Kos--before the MSM caught on to one of the bigger scandals of the Bush administration.

I know, I know.  I should not be surprised. The Justice Department's decision yesterday that no criminal charges will be filed in the Bush administration's dismissal of 9 U.S. Attorneys is part of the whole looking forwards, not backwards mantra.

But if we are going to look past the most horrific crimes of the Bush administration--torture, warrantless wiretapping, political firings--then it makes it particularly grotesque and obscene that the Obama administration is willing to continue--and ratchet up--Bush-era investigations into people who tried to do the right thing, like NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake and reporter James Risen.

The Government Accountability Project has a long, storied history of working with whistleblowers within the nuclear industry to bring public awareness to the most serious of safety threats.

With that in mind, GAP is partnering with other public interest organizations to raise awareness about an important new film. Countdown to Zero is a documentary about the escalating global nuclear arms crisis, making clear that the nuclear threat is very real – and not a bygone issue that died with the Cold War.

Close to 30% of the intelligence workforce is comprised of private contractors, who are accountable to shareholders and not the public, often make twice as much money (as well as perks like BMWs and signing bonuses) as civil servants for the same job, and--contrary to federal rules--are performing "inherently government functions."

In the second part of its explosive series stemming from a two-year investigation, the Washington Post today focuses on the government's dependency on private contractors who, like the secrecy industry that has ballooned since 9/11, have astronomically increased in number.

The Senate Judiciary Committee is scheduled to vote on James Cole’s nomination for Deputy Attorney General tomorrow – Tuesday, July 20th. Serious doubts remain, however, about Cole’s role at AIG before, during and after the company’s financial collapse in September 2008. I posed him some questions prior to Cole’s hearing last month on GAP’s YouTube channel.

Over the past two weeks, a number of Senators have posed written questions to Cole about his role at AIG. His answers are troubling – particularly those he provided to Senator Charles Grassley.

 

The Washington Post has an amazing article on the top-secret hidden world born of the terrorist attacks on 9/11. The sprawling security apparatus (I would add, coupled with the unitary executive mentality), has ultimately made our country less safe, secure and free.

If the problem pre-9/11 was a failure to connect the dots, the problem nine years later is that we've created by an order of magnitude so many more dots that it's impossible to connect them. Instead of honing the tools we have to find the needle in the haystack, we have made the haystack so big that we can't find even an elephant.

Today's Washington Post has a 2000-word profile on former senior NSA official Thomas Drake, who blew the whistle on (in the article's antiseptic description) NSA's "willingness to compromise Americans' privacy without enhancing security"--something that we here at Kos used to call "secret domestic surveillance."

The article states that Drake is "awaiting trial in a criminal media leak case." He is actually indicted under the Espionage Act--a law under which the Russian spies were not even charged--and is only the fourth American in history to be charged under this law for allegedly (mis)handling classified information (the first was Penatgon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg).

While this article is one of the fuller portraits on Drake to date, I will add critical information below that for space limitations, editing, or whatever reason, didn't make it into the piece.

On July 2nd, Senator Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) posed written questions to James Cole, the Obama administration’s nominee for the post of Deputy Attorney General. Many of these questions focused on Cole’s role as the Independent Consultant placed at AIG from 2005 through 2009 as part of two deferred prosecution agreements (DPAs). The first of these DPAs resulted from charges of aiding and abetting securities fraud in the AIG Financial Products subsidiary based in London, the AIG appendage that crashed the world economy in 2008 and required a $182 billion bailout courtesy of the US taxpayer. Some of Cole’s responses to Grassley’s questions were both puzzling and contradictory, and others we know to be misleading.

Under the terms of the 2006 DPA, Cole was asked to examine “the adequacy of whistleblower procedures designed to allow employees or others to report confidentially matters that may have a bearing on AIG’s financial reporting obligations.” In written questions Grassley asked Cole to provide a “discussion of the scope of your work under the 2006 DPA.” In response, Cole simply quotes from the DPA, which is, of course, available to Senator Grassley and the rest of the world on the DOJ website. A meaningful written discussion of whistleblower procedures at AIG would have to include an account of the layoff of ten compliance attorneys and officials in the aftermath of the corporation’s financial collapse in September 2008. Several of the ten were whistleblowers who had written to senior management at AIG about deficient compliance procedures. None of them was interviewed confidentially by Cole, who acceded to the demand of Suzanne Folsom, then Chief Compliance Officer, that Cole interview her staff only when she or her designee were present. As a result, the whistleblowers were summarily terminated under guise of a staff reduction.