Interviews Reveal Serious Systemic Problems

Photo courtesy of Wikimedia CommonsToday, the Government Accountability Project (GAP) is releasing a report that analyzes the impact of the United Nations internal justice system on accountability practices in the UN peacekeeping missions. The GAP report, “Tipping the Scales: Is the United Nations Justice System Promoting Accountability in the Peacekeeping Missions or Undermining It?” is based on a review of two years of UN Dispute Tribunal (UNDT) and UN Appeals Tribunal (UNAT) judgments, and 36 interviews with key UN personnel, external attorneys and whistleblowers from eight different peacekeeping missions.

"Virtually every person in a UN peacekeeping mission whom we spoke with raised disturbing concerns about fundamental shortcomings in the UN’s accountability mechanisms," said GAP International Officer Shelley Walden, one of the report's authors. "Most stated that they were afraid to speak-up about misconduct, and whistleblowers who did told us that they were subjected to intense retaliation as a result.”

A copy of the report's Executive summary can be downloaded here.

A copy of the full report and annexes can be downloaded here.

The report details both positive and negative findings related to the judgments of the two-tiered Tribunal system, which is a UN staff member’s only legal recourse in an employment dispute. Encouraging data and evidence illustrated that the new system appears to better protect the due process rights of staff members. Negative findings, however, included numerous shortcomings in the new justice system, the UN’s procedures for protecting whistleblowers in peacekeeping missions, and prevailing practices for addressing disciplinary issues.

Today, GAP released a report on one of the most effective ways to undermine the disclosures of a whistleblower: retaliatory investigations. Whistleblower Witch Hunts follows 12 federal employees into Kafka’s The Trial, as they undergo underhanded tactics that run the gamut of indecency, including:

• Denying the existence of active but secret investigations;
• Classifying or restricting information years after the fact, and then imposing ex post facto liability for blowing the whistle with it;
• Making unsupported accusations of whistleblowers being suicidal, violent or otherwise mentally disturbed, without providing any medical basis;
• Raiding whistleblowers’ homes and scaring their families, confiscating personal property
• Enacting blacklisting campaigns for several years

It’s no wonder that retaliatory investigations are used to silence whistleblowers: Framing the messenger kills the message. Unfortunately, this approach ultimately harms the public, the messenger and the agency while whistleblowers’ warnings remain unheeded.

The whistleblowers profiled in this new report exposed national security risks including: the attempted cancellation of all Air Marshal coverage during a confirmed terrorist plan for a more ambitious rerun of 9/11, fraudulent certifications for mechanics who vouch for commercial aircraft safety, and the failure by the Air Force to conduct required inspections and maintenance for over a decade on intelligence and cargo aircraft, which could lead to mechanical failures that endanger servicemen’s lives, delay critical missions, and cause national security breaches.

But it doesn’t stop there. Public safety disclosures detailed in the report include the stonewalling of lifesaving military equipment for U.S. troops and civilians abroad, corrupt diversion of all funds reserved to treat dramatic brain injury for over 400,000 Iraq and Afghanistan veterans, and losing track of a significant amount worth of plutonium. Plus, civil liberties abuses spanned the NSA's warrantless domestic surveillance, and the Justice Department’s lying to court about a dress rehearsal for Abu Ghraib tactics on American citizen John Walker Lindh.

Legislation currently pending in Congress, the Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act, empowers whistleblowers to stop retaliation in its initial stage, rather than have to live indefinitely with investigations or dossiers that are used as smoke screens to cloud genuine threats. Click here to sign a petition to demand the Act be passed!

Shanna Devine is Legislative Coordinator for the Government Accountability Project, the nation's leading whistleblower advocacy organization.

If folks feel conflicted about WikiLeaks, the answer is to pass meaningful whistleblower reform. Otherwise, whistleblowers have no alternative, as detailed in this Whistleblower Witch Hunt report released today.

I've been saying that quite often here at Kos. Now, following the latest WikiLeaks spill, Congress is poised to pass legislation giving employees in the most sensitive government jobs--national security and intelligence employees--a way to report corruption, waste, mismanagement and illegality without resorting to WikiLeaks, which for better or for worse, has been the only viable avenue available to whistleblowers.

President Barack Obama is expected to sign the Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act, and it is viewed by supporters as a way to discourage leaks of classified information. It would give intelligence agency whistleblowers a way to raise concerns internally instead of giving classified materials to WikiLeaks or other outlets.

As highlighted by the Associated Press and NPR this morning, in order to draw attention to the risks whistleblowers now face, my organization, the Government Accountability Project, prepared a report detailing the ordeals of 12 government officials whose employers sought "to enforce secrecy though repression."

Among them is Thomas Drake, a former National Security Agency official who reported "massive fraud, waste and abuse" in agency surveillance programs to the Department of Defense Inspector General's office. Drake's reward was an indictment in April under the Espionage Act for allegedly making unauthorized contact with a newspaper reporter after he had exhausted all other means for disclosing the problems he witnessed. (He is actually only charged with "willful retention for purposes of disclosure," which is not a real crime, but rather the bizarre parsing of the Espionage Act and other federal statutes in order to manufacture a crime that fits the facts of Drake's case.

Without protections spelled out in law, whistleblowers risk being demoted, fired, or in Drake's case, put in jail.

Until the law is passed, WikiLeaks will continue to be the safest option for whistleblowers unwilling to engage in professional suicide. Blowing the whistle leaves people broken, bankrupted and blacklisted.

More than 60 public interest and advocacy groups support this bill. The Senate is expected to approve the bill this week and send it to the House, where Democrats are planning to pass it quickly. White House spokesman Josh Earnest called the bill

landmark legislation

that the Obama administration

hopes will be passed promptly.

The Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act bars workplace reprisals against employees at the CIA and other intelligence organizations for telling their superiors about illegal activities, abuses of authority and dangers to public health or safety.

It also requires the director of national intelligence to set up a special review board to resolve cases involving whistleblowers who believe their security clearances were suspended or revoked as punishment for speaking out, and gives expanded whistle-blower protections to civil service employees outside the intelligence agencies.

Whistleblowers outside the intelligence agencies would also be able to seek a jury trial in federal court to appeal dismissals or demotions.

Whistleblower should not have to choose their conscience over their career, or in Tom Drake's case, over their very liberty.

Jesselyn Radack is Homeland Security & Human Rights Director for the Government Accountability Project, the nation's leading whistleblower advocacy organization. This post originally appeared in her Daily Kos column.

Details Questionable Roles of Liz Cheney, Shaha Riza, and Others in Multi-Million Dollar Program

(Washington, D.C.) – A report released by the Government Accountability Project (GAP), based on documents obtained through nearly three years’ of U.S. Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, exposes the highly irregular manner in which the Foundation for the Future (FFF) – an obscure project funded by the U.S. Department of State – was established and operated by Bush administration officials and appointees.

Specifically, the report details how high-level State Department officials misled Congress as they sought millions in public money for the Foundation, which was a haven for people with political connections. The report also shows that FFF was a pet project of Elizabeth Cheney, former Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs. Cheney worked to set up the Foundation with Shaha Riza, Paul Wolfowitz’s companion whose seconding to the State Department (and then to the FFF) was directly responsible for the 2007 World Bank scandal that resulted in Wolfowitz’s departure from the Bank.

“Liz Cheney had the preposterous idea that the Foundation for the Future would bring peace and democracy to the Middle East,” said GAP International Program Officer Shelley Walden, author of the report. “This overlong project wasted millions of taxpayer dollars.”

The report, which is based on 267 documents released by the Department of State over a period of 33 months, can be found here: (Full Report) (Executive Summary) (Key FOIA documents) (Appendix I)

Background

The Foundation for the Future first became an issue of public interest inquiry in 2007, when GAP published the payroll records of Riza, girlfriend of then-World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz. The records showed that Riza, a British national who worked as a World Bank communications officer, was seconded to the U.S. State Department after Wolfowitz was appointed, where she was responsible for establishing the Foundation for the Future (FFF). The FFF was a nonprofit organization tasked with promoting democracy and reform in the Broader Middle East and North Africa (BMENA) region.

While seconded from the Bank to the State Department in 2005 and 2006, Riza received salary raises in excess of what Bank rules allowed, earning far more than Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. In October 2006, Riza’s secondment was transferred to the FFF itself, where she remained until returning to the Bank in early 2008, after Wolfowitz was forced to resign.

Liz Cheney’s Failed Pet Project

The documents released by the Department of State (DOS) show that Liz Cheney, as Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs, envisioned Riza’s highly irregular secondment to the FFF in May 2005, well before it was established, and before Paul Wolfowitz became President of the Bank. In this unsupervised position, Riza promoted an overtly political U.S. agenda in the Middle East. Riza’s activities in this role were in apparent violation of conflict of interest regulations at the World Bank, as well as the national security, tax and visa regulations of the U.S. government. The report also shows that Cheney was instrumental in the Foundation’s launch and failure to obtain broad international support.

“The project was doomed from the start – State Department officials in the region warned that restrictive laws in the Persian Gulf states would make the Foundation ineffective; BMENA governments did not support a Foundation that would give their opposition a platform from which to oppose them; and potential donors had misgivings about the project’s lack of indigenous imprint,” stated Walden. “Despite these warning signs, Cheney and the Bush administration moved full steam ahead and established the Foundation anyway.”

In 2005, Cheney, Shaha Riza and Condoleezza Rice embarked on an international crusade to obtain financial and diplomatic support for FFF. But their efforts at diplomacy were a failure; they raised less than 25% of the goal (set by Cheney) of $25 million (USD) in contributions from other nations. The great majority of funding came from the United States, although the legislation creating the institution included a requirement for matching funding.

“The Foundation for the Future was to promote democracy, transparency and popular political participation on a multilateral basis in the Middle East,” said GAP International Program Director Bea Edwards. “So when Liz Cheney – who, in the view of many Middle Eastern leaders, occupied her position largely because she was the Vice President’s daughter – asked other nations for contributions, they balked. Add to this the fact that the Foundation’s board member selection process was directed by the former Deputy Secretary of Defense’s girlfriend and that the Foundation was managed by a personal friend of Wolfowitz’s with little expertise in the region, and it’s no wonder that many potential donors refused to fund it.”

Astroturfing

GAP’s report shows that the FFF was almost entirely financed and monitored by the U.S. government, even though the Bush administration repeatedly portrayed it to Congress as a multilateral, non-governmental organization created in response to democratic demands from grassroots organizations. Documents also show that the Bush administration intended to use the Foundation as a vehicle through which to demonstrate its purported commitment to democratic processes and human rights abroad, at a time when President Bush was subjected to increasing criticism for human rights violations in Iraq, Afghanistan, “black sites” around the world and Guantánamo Bay.

Dubious Lobbying and Funding Efforts

From 2005-2007, officials at the State Department executed a number of questionable legislative maneuvers in the US Congress that were favorable to the FFF. In the end, the Bush-Cheney administration successfully obtained the passage of three laws related to the Foundation and a disbursement of $21.3 million in public funds. They also secured $921,064 for the Eurasia Foundation – a non-profit organization set up by the State Department in the 1990s to promote democracy in the former Soviet Union – to help establish the FFF.

It appears that in order to obtain the disbursement to the FFF, State Department officials deliberately misled the US Congress about the funding pledged to the Foundation by other governments. Evidence strongly suggests that section 534(k) of US Public Law 109-102, which at that time stipulated that funds could only be made available to the Foundation to the extent that they had been matched by contributions from other governments, was violated; the Foundation’s own reports show that less than $6.4 million of the $22.26 million in “matching funds” listed by the State Department in its communications with Congress as pledged ever materialized.

Especially suspicious was the State Department’s representation of a murky $10 million pledge from Qatar, the largest “pledge” of any country other than the United States. Documents indicate that the State Department knew that this pledge would never materialize when it asked Congress to disburse matching funds.

GAP’s report also suggests that FFF management – including former FFF Chairman (and close friend of Paul Wolfowitz) Anwar Ibrahim, who is currently a Malaysian parliamentarian – misled the US Internal Revenue Service. The FFF’s financial statements for 2006 and 2007 state that the Foundation did not attempt to influence national legislation, an assertion contradicted by the cables and reports released by the Department of State. These documents suggest that several Foundation representatives actively lobbied the US Congress in 2006-07 for legislative changes favorable to the FFF.

Shaha Riza

State Department documents show generous travel allowances and salaries for the office of Shaha Riza, whose nebulous duties did not seem to require such lavish financial support. Riza was paid a net salary of $180,000 to perform such tasks as reviewing a translated draft of the FFF bylaws, a PowerPoint presentation of a business plan and a translated policies and procedures manual.

The Foundation for the Future continues to operate, although the departure of both Cheneys from public office appears to have weakened its financial support from Congress. Because the vast majority of its funding comes from the U.S. government, budgetary figures indicate that the FFF will be unsustainable after 2014.

Dylan Blaylock is Communications Director for the Government Accountability Project, the nation's leading whistleblower advocacy organization.

Today GAP released a report about the lack of security for World Bank staff and consultants, based on the experience of an International Finance Corporation (IFC) employee who was diagnosed with posttraumatic stress disorder after a mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. For cost reasons, the Bank has neglected measures that would provide a reasonable assurance of staff safety and security, even as management transfers more staff into the field and expands operations into conflict and post-conflict countries. Moreover, when a staff member is injured in the line of duty, the processes in place are inadequate and irregular, using unlicensed workers’ compensation providers in order to reduce costs. Because the World Bank enjoys immunity from civil and criminal judicial proceedings, staff members have little recourse when they are denied care or reimbursement. In brief, the Bank is increasingly placing its employees in the line of fire without providing adequate safety protection and then, when accidents happen, evading responsibility for caring for injured personnel.

President Obama announced an $8.33 billion federal loan for construction of a nuclear reactor in Georgia yesterday. Energy Secretary Steven Chu later elaborated that the Georgia project is the first of "at least a half-dozen, probably more, loans." While the backing of nuclear plant construction is an attempt to create bipartisan support for clean energy, the announcement has drawn criticism from both fiscal conservatives and environmental activists. Both cite the nuclear industry's history of hundreds of billions in budget overruns, and the cost of maintaining abandoned plants. Even the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) warned that the risk of default on new nuclear plants could be as high as 50 percent. Chu responded to the CBO concerns that he expects the risk of default to be "far less than that," without providing a figure.

The Union of Concerned Scientists, a non-profit science advocacy group, said that the new construction would "shift unacceptable risks from the nuclear industry to U.S. taxpayers" and called the federal loan program "a prime example of pork-barrel politics on behalf of special interests."

In public health news today, ABC News reports that despite talk of a push for greater drug safety, the number of drugs approved in 2009 was similar to the number approved in years before.

An article from Frank Chiropractic reported that drug research is full of conflicts of interest that threaten drug safety, using GAP’s 2009 report, The ABC’s of Drug Safety, as its main evidence. One conflict, for example, is that while drug companies continue to grow, the FDA continues to experience cutbacks, thus threatening regulation and oversight.

A physician and a community hospital in Minnesota agreed to pay almost $850,000 after another doctor blew the whistle on fraudulently billing of Medicare for "unreasonable and unnecessary" hospitalizations. Under a federal law, the whistleblower received $203,150.

In other news, the New York Times featured an editorial by two members of the 9/11 Commission arguing that the government should examine the entire intelligence and airline safety system to determine if the failures that lead to 9/11 and the failed Christmas Day terror attempt are endemic or fixable. Obviously, despite the commission’s recommendations, major lapses are still apparent.

by the Sunday Times (Sri Lanka)

PricewaterhouseCoopers has sent a letter with reference to last week’s article with the above title in the Sunday Times FT.

It said the report, mostly a reproduction of a report by the US-based Government Accountability Project (GAP) provides incomplete and misleading information. The letter says the Supreme Court states that on 4th June 2009, it gave its findings with regard to only executive or administrative action that led to the sale of SLIC.

by the Sunday Times (Sri Lanka)

The Government Accountability Project (GAP), a 30-year-old nonprofit public interest group in the US that promotes government and corporate accountability based in Washington D.C, and has published reports on unlawful privatizations in Sri Lanka, this week wrote on the 'shocking decision' handed down on September 24 by the Supreme Court of Sri Lanka, allowing former Treasury Secretary P.B. Jayasundera to return to public office. The GAP report states that the Supreme Court overturned its own previous ruling allowing Jayasundera to return to public office despite his orchestration of the unlawful privatization of the former public enterprise Lanka Marine Services (LMS) in August 2002.

by the Sunday Times (Sri Lanka)

Second Installment

The first part of the US-based Government Accountability Project (GAP) report, published last week in the Sunday Times FT, examined the Lanka Marine Services (LMS) privatization. GAP is a 30 year old non-profit public interest group that promoted government and corporate accountability and is the top whistle blower protection organization in the US.

This section looks into the privatization of Sri Lanka Insurance Corporation (SLIC) following the June 2009 judgment by the Supreme Court which named several high ranking past and present public officials as having been involved in the corrupt transaction. The GAP report gratefully acknowledged the research and contributions to this paper of Consultants 21 Limited, Colombo, Sri Lanka, www.consultants21.com.

Vasudeva Nanayakkara, petitioner in the SLIC case rejoices after the SC verdict

SLIC

The GAP report states that on June 4th, 2009, the Supreme Court of Sri Lanka reversed the privatization of SLIC after determining that the company’s sale had been improperly concluded six years ago. The Court expressed its opinion strongly, writing that the improper way in which the sale of SLIC took place “shocked the conscience.”