Whistleblower Support Blog

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    Plame Seeks to Resurrect Lawsuit Against Bush Administration in CIA Leak Case
    By Matt Apuzzo
    The Associated Press

    Friday 09 May 2008

    Washington - Former CIA operative Valerie Plame is trying to resurrect a lawsuit against those in the Bush administration she says illegally disclosed her identity.

    A federal judge dismissed Plame’s lawsuit last year, saying there was no basis to bring a case. Plame’s lawyers asked a federal appeals court Friday to send the case back before the judge and force him to consider its merits.

    Plame and her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, sued Vice President Dick Cheney; his former chief of staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby; former White House political adviser Karl Rove and former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage.

    Plame’s CIA position was revealed in a syndicated newspaper column in 2003, during a time when her husband was criticizing the march to war in Iraq. Armitage and Rove were the original sources for that story, which Plame believes was retribution for Wilson’s criticism.

    The article touched off a lengthy criminal investigation. Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald never charged anyone with the leak but convicted Libby of obstruction and lying to investigators.

    During the trial, it was revealed that Libby and former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer also discussed Plame with reporters.

    Plame says those leaks violated her constitutional rights. But U.S. District Judge John D. Bates dismissed the case, saying the law requires Plame’s complaints be raised under the Privacy Act. Plame’s attorneys say that law is insufficient. They asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to send the case back to Bates for reconsideration.

    With the exception of Cheney, those named in Plame’s lawsuit have left the administration.

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    Iraq Contractor in Shooting Case Makes Comeback
    By James Risen
    The New York Times

    Saturday 10 May 2008

    Washington - Last fall, Blackwater Worldwide was in deep peril.

    Guards for the security company were involved in a shooting in September that left at least 17 Iraqis dead at a Baghdad intersection. Outrage over the killings prompted the Iraqi government to demand Blackwater’s ouster from the country, and led to a criminal investigation by the F.B.I., a series of internal investigations by the State Department and the Pentagon, and high-profile Congressional hearings.

    But after an intense public and private lobbying campaign, Blackwater appears to be back to business as usual.

    The State Department has just renewed its contract to provide security for American diplomats in Iraq for at least another year. Threats by the Iraqi government to strip Western contractors of their immunity from Iraqi law have gone nowhere. No charges have been brought in the United States against any Blackwater guard in the September shooting, either, and the F.B.I. agents in Baghdad charged with investigating whether Blackwater guards have committed any crimes under United States law are sometimes protected as they travel through Baghdad by Blackwater guards.

    The chief reason for the company’s survival? State Department officials said Friday that they did not believe they had any alternative to Blackwater, which supplies about 800 guards to the department to provide security for diplomats in Baghdad. Officials say only three companies in the world meet their requirements for protective services in Iraq, and the other two do not have the capability to take on Blackwater’s role in Baghdad. After the shooting in September, the State Department did not even open talks with the other two companies, DynCorp International and Triple Canopy, to see if they could take over from Blackwater, which is based in North Carolina.

    ”We cannot operate without private security firms in Iraq,” said Patrick F. Kennedy, the under secretary of state for management. “If the contractors were removed, we would have to leave Iraq.”

    Still, serious risks remain for Blackwater and at least some of its current and former personnel. A federal grand jury continues to consider evidence in the Baghdad shooting. Although the company is not likely to face any criminal charges, people involved in the case say that some Blackwater guards involved in the shooting are cooperating with the F.B.I. as it pursues evidence against other guards.

    Separately, a former Blackwater guard is under criminal investigation for the December 2006 shooting death of an Iraqi guard for an Iraqi vice president, and may soon face federal charges. In a third case, two former Blackwater workers pleaded guilty to weapons-related charges, but both received sentences that included no jail time in return for their cooperation with federal prosecutors in a broader investigation.

    A House committee has also asked the Internal Revenue Service to begin an inquiry into whether Blackwater has designated its guards as independent contractors rather than employees to in order to avoid paying and withholding federal taxes. The State Department renewed the security contract for only one year - just long enough to take the company into the start of the next administration. And Blackwater’s political connections to the Bush administration may not serve it well if the Democrats win the White House in November.

    Given the furor that surrounded Blackwater after the September shooting in Baghdad, critics say the decision to renew the company’s contract in Iraq is a sign of the Bush administration’s inability to curb its reliance on outside contractors in the war.

    ”The shooting incident was like a hammer blow, but where are the consequences?” said Peter W. Singer, a scholar at the Brookings Institute and author of “Corporate Warriors,” a book about contractors in Iraq. “I think it points to the fact that the dependence on contractors is like a drug addiction. They just can’t help themselves.”

    Representative Henry Waxman, California Democrat who is chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, which has been investigating Blackwater on several fronts, said, “I can’t understand why Blackwater’s contract was renewed. It seems to me the administration should have looked for others who could do the job, including the U.S. military.”

    In the past administration officials have dismissed the notion of using military personnel to guard diplomats.

    Founded in 1997 by Erik Prince, a former member of the Navy Seals and heir to a family fortune made in the auto parts industry, Blackwater began to generate controversy in Iraq long before last September’s shooting. Blackwater had developed a reputation among both Iraqis and American military personnel as a company that flaunted a quick-draw image that led its security personnel to take overly aggressive actions to protect the people they were paid to guard.

    Last year the State Department acknowledged that Blackwater had been involved in significantly more shootings per convoy mission than DynCorp and Triple Canopy, which provide security for the State Department outside Baghdad.

    The shooting death of the bodyguard for the Iraqi vice president in 2006 rankled the Iraqi government well before last September’s shooting. An off-duty Blackwater guard who American and Iraqi officials said had been drinking heavily was the sole suspect. The off-duty Blackwater guard, Andrew J. Moonen, who no longer works for the company and who is a former Army paratrooper, is now under criminal investigation by federal prosecutors in Seattle. Although Mr. Moonen has not been charged, his lawyer, Stewart Riley of Seattle, said that he had recently been in contact about the case with prosecutors from the United States Attorney’s Office in Seattle.

    People familiar with the case said they believed that the Justice Department had recently concluded that it had found a way to skirt some of the jurisdictional problems that in the past made it difficult to bring charges in American courts for crimes committed by contractors in Iraq.

    ”I think they may come to a decision on what to do with this case in the next three or four months,” said one person familiar with the matter. Mr. Riley says that Mr. Moonen maintains his innocence in the shooting.

    In addition, a wrongful death lawsuit against Blackwater filed by the families of four Blackwater guards killed in Falluja, Iraq, in 2004 - an event that prompted the first major battle in Falluja between the American military and insurgents that year - is also still pending.

    A federal appeals court is expected to rule this year on whether the families can proceed with their lawsuit or be forced into arbitration with Blackwater, an outcome the company prefers, according to the families’ lawyer, Daniel Callahan of California.

    Donna Zovko of Cleveland, the mother of Jerko Gerald Zovko, one of the Blackwater guards, says Blackwater has stonewalled the families.

    ”It is 1,501 days since he was killed, and I don’t know one-tenth of what happened to him, and no one seems to care,” Mrs. Zovko said in an interview.

    Given so many headlines about his company, Mr. Prince until recently seemed eager to tell his side of the story, and there were reports that he planned to write a book. But on Friday, Anne Tyrrell, a Blackwater spokeswoman, said Mr. Prince’s book project had been put on hold.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact:  Danielle Brian or Beverley Lumpkin, 202-347-1122

POGO REVEALS INTERNAL OSC DOCUMENT

SHOWS BLOCH MISUSED OWN TASK FORCE

Washington, D.C. - An extraordinary document obtained by the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) from inside the Office of Special Counsel (OSC) reveals that Special  Counsel Scott Bloch created a special task force to investigate sensitive and high-profile matters and then ignored virtually every recommendation made by it.  The document lends support to POGO’s theory that Bloch used the task force to launch an investigation of the White House, issuing demands for documents termed by his own task force as “overly broad,” to create the appearance of a conflict of interest with an ongoing investigation into allegations that Bloch himself had engaged in misconduct.

“With this deeply troubling new evidence of Bloch’s misuse of his office POGO now believes the President has more than ample cause to fire Bloch immediately, said Danielle Brian ,” Executive Director, POGO.

The 13-page memo from the task force, dated January 18, 2008, is entitled “Summary of Task Force Activities and Recommendations.” (http://pogoarchives.org/m/wi/osc-tf-summary-20080118.pdf)  It reveals that Bloch countermanded virtually every recommendation made by his own team; if they recommended pursuing a matter, he ordered them to stop, and if they advised that they lacked either jurisdiction or evidence to proceed, he ordered them to go forward.

Here are some examples gleaned from the memo:

·        Regarding the White House Office of Political Affairs (OPA), the task force examined allegations that 25 federal agencies had received political briefings that might have violated the Hatch Act, which bans the use of government resources to promote or oppose a political party or candidate.  But as the investigators proceeded, sending requests for documents to the agencies and the White House, they received a stream of new directions from Bloch that kept expanding the focus of the inquiry.  In the memo, the task force finally exclaimed:  “{TF expressed concerns that this request is too broad and may exceed OSC’s jurisdiction} (Emphasis in original.)  When the task force recommended ways to narrow the scope of the investigation, they were denied.  When they drafted a subpoena to the Republican National Committee, Bloch ordered it be expanded to include ten new topics.

·        At the time of the firings of U.S. Attorneys by the Justice Department, former U.S. Attorney David Iglesias filed a complaint with OSC charging a Hatch Act violation.  Bloch ordered the task force to broaden their probe to include all nine of the fired U.S. Attorneys.  Amid Justice Department requests that OSC suspend its inquiry, and task force protestations that there was no evidence to support the theory of a Hatch Act violation – which only applies to Executive branch influence, and Iglesias had complained of interference from Members of Congress – Bloch refused to suspend his inquiry.

·        After Justice Department officials testified before Congress about having considered job applicants’ political affiliations in hiring and promotion decisions, the task force recommended that “this case be opened immediately and that the [task force] investigate whether individuals at DOJ committeed any PPPs [prohibited personnel practices] when they took political affiliation into consideration when hiring and making other personnel decisions.”  Prohibited personnel practices are within the clear jurisdiction of the OSC; nevertheless, Bloch nine days later directed the task force “not to open or investigate allegations concerning DOJ political hiring practices.”  Four months later, the task force was permitted to open a file, but “no other activity or devotion of resources authorized at this time.”

In additional cases involving the possibility of politically-tainted prosecutions, a voter fraud case, and the concoction of a new case against former GSA Administrator Lurita Doan, and others, Bloch mostly contradicts the advice of his hand-picked task force.

POGO, along with the Government Accountability Project and Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, has been calling for Bloch’s removal from office for more than three years. (http://www.pogo.org/p/government/OSCcompendium.html)  In fact, the current federal investigation of Bloch’s alleged misconduct, which reached a significant new phase yesterday with the execution of search warrants at both his home and office, was launched in response to POGO’s and the other groups’ complaint. 

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Founded in 1981, the Project On Government Oversight is an independent nonprofit which investigates and exposes corruption and other misconduct in order to achieve a more accountable federal government.