Little Brother Forum

October 12, 2007
From the Desk of Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton:

“Personnel is policy,” or so the old political adage goes. This week, the media has gotten around to exposing a criminal as part of the personnel of Hillary Clinton’s kitchen cabinet. As I’ve been noting for some time now, disgraced former Clinton National Security Advisor Sandy Berger, is already in the Clinton campaign’s inner circle. This according to The Washington Examiner:

“Sandy Berger, who stole highly classified terrorism documents from the National Archives, destroyed them and lied to investigators, is now an adviser to presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton. Berger, who was fired from John Kerry’s presidential campaign when the scandal broke in 2004, has assumed a similar role in Clinton’s campaign, even though his security clearance has been suspended until September 2008.” (more…)

October 11, 2007 / Today, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) filed a temporary restraining order with the court in CREW v. Executive Office of the President, the lawsuit in which CREW is challenging the White House’s failure to preserve and restore millions of emails deleted from White House servers from March 2003 forward. CREW filed this motion in the face of the White House’s refusal to give CREW assurances that all back-up copies of the deleted emails are being preserved. The White House has refused to identify what back-up copies of the deleted emails currently exist and has refused to commit to preserving all existing back-up copies.

Source: Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (http://www.citizensforethics.org)

Jonathan Saltzman/Boston Globe/September 28, 2007,

Bristol-Myers Squibb Company and its subsidiary, Apothecon, have agreed to pay more than $515 million to settle a broad array of federal and state civil allegations involving their drug marketing and pricing practices, US Attorney Michael J. Sullivan said today.

The government alleged that from 2000 to mid-2003, BMS paid illegal remuneration to physicians and other healthcare providers to get them to promote BMS drugs. The payments were in the form of consulting fees and other programs, some of which involved travel to luxurious resorts.

The prosecutors also said that from 2002 through 2005 BMC promoted the sale and use of Abilify, an atypical antipsychotic drug, for pediatric use and to treat dementia-related psychosis, both of which were “off-label” uses. The US Food and Drug Administration has approved the drug to treat adult psychiatric disorders but not for use in children, teenagers, or for dementia-related illnesses.

Doctors are allowed to prescribe drugs “off-label,” but companies are not allowed to promote drugs for those uses. (more…)

By Mimi Hall/USA TODAY/October 3, 2007

Government employees spent at least $146 million in a year on business- or first-class airline tickets that violated government policies requiring workers to fly coach, a new report says.

The abuses could be more widespread because most agencies don’t monitor employees’ use of costly business-class tickets, according to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the watchdog arm of Congress.

“The serious fiscal challenges facing the federal government dictate that agencies do everything they can to operate as efficiently as possible,” said the report, which was released today. “Individuals that abusively use premium-class travel at taxpayers’ expense should be held accountable for the taxpayer dollars they waste.”

The GAO found that employees, many at the top levels of government, violated government travel policies. It said they often broke rules requiring that they book premium-class seats only if they were taking flights that exceeded 14 hours or if they had a physical disability. Premium class consists of business and first class.

The report said some employees paid five to 10 times more than they should have for tickets. (more…)

By Nancy Scola/AlterNet/September 19, 2007

Anyone hearing about central India’s ongoing epidemic of farmer suicides, where growers are killing themselves at a terrifying clip, has to be horrified. But among the more disturbed must be the once-grand poobah of post-invasion Iraq, U.S. diplomat L. Paul Bremer.

Why Bremer? Because Indian farmers are choosing death after finding themselves caught in a loop of crop failure and debt rooted in genetically modified and patented agriculture - the same farming model that Bremer introduced to Iraq during his tenure as administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority, the American body that ruled the “new Iraq” in its chaotic early days.

In his 400 days of service as CPA administrator, Bremer issued a series of directives known collectively as the “100 Orders.” Bremer’s orders set up the building blocks of the new Iraq, and among them is Order 81*, officially titled Amendments to Patent, Industrial Design, Undisclosed Information, Integrated Circuits and Plant Variety Law, enacted by Bremer on April 26, 2004. (more…)

According to the facts admitted in her plea, Quintana was employed by a contractor at the Los Alamos research facility to archive classified information. On July 27, 2006, while she was working on this project in a secure area at the LANL, Quintana printed off pages of classified documents and downloaded other classified information to a computer thumb drive, before putting them in a backpack and taking them home. Quintana stored the pages and thumb drive at her residence, which was not an authorized location for the storage of classified information.

September 14, 2007

A computer which may have contained highly classified nuclear weapons information from the Los Alamos National Laboratory was traded in exchange for drugs, according to unconfirmed sources. The computer was owned by Jessica Quintana, the former contractor employee at the Lab who pled guilty in May to removing classified information after hundreds of pages of documents were discovered in a methamphetamine drug raid at her trailer.

Among the list of items collected by the Los Alamos Police Department during the execution of the search of the trailer were three memory sticks containing classified LANL documents, as well as hard copies. No computer was listed. A senior POGO source claims that the LAPD did search the computer looking for drug information and found none. They did not search for classified LANL information. POGO has also been told that the FBI never obtained a search warrant to seize the computer for a review of evidence of classified information.

Ms. Quintana allegedly broke down during an FBI polygraph session and indicated the computer she was using to work with the information on the memory sticks was now missing.

The computer remains missing. Stay tuned.

Additional Resources:

Department of Justice press release, May 15, 2007.
http://albuquerque.fbi.gov/dojpressrel/pressrel07/nationalsecurity051507.htm

Document - Los Alamos County Police Department Press Release
http://pogoblog.typepad.com/policedocs.pdf

POGO Alert - Los Alamos Classified Info Found in Drug Raid
http://www.pogo.org/p/homeland/ha-061003-lanl.html

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

By Tony Capaccio/Bloomberg/August 16, 2007

A small South Carolina parts supplier collected about $20.5 million over six years from the Pentagon for fraudulent shipping costs, including $998,798 for sending two 19-cent washers to an Army base in Texas, U.S. officials said.

The company also billed and was paid $455,009 to ship three machine screws costing $1.31 each to Marines in Habbaniyah, Iraq, and $293,451 to ship an 89-cent split washer to Patrick Air Force Base in Cape Canaveral, Florida, Pentagon records show.

The owners of C&D Distributors in Lexington, South Carolina — twin sisters — exploited a flaw in an automated Defense Department purchasing system: bills for shipping to combat areas or U.S. bases that were labeled “priority” were usually paid automatically, said Cynthia Stroot, a Pentagon investigator.

C&D and two of its officials were barred in December from receiving federal contracts. Today, a federal judge in Columbia, South Carolina, accepted the guilty plea of the company and one sister, Charlene Corley, to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and one count of conspiracy to launder money, Assistant U.S. Attorney Kevin McDonald said. (more…)

Originally published on Tuesday, February 4, 2003 by the Prince George’s Journal (Maryland)

by Margie Burns

George W. Bush’s brother was on the board of directors of a company providing electronic security for the World Trade Center, Dulles International Airport and United Airlines, according to public records. The company was backed by an investment firm, the Kuwait-American Corp., also linked for years to the Bush family.

The security company, formerly named Securacom and now named Stratesec, is in Sterling, Va.. Its CEO, Barry McDaniel, said the company had a “completion contract” to handle some of the security at the World Trade Center “up to the day the buildings fell down.” (more…)

by Alex Berenson/New York Times/July 24, 2007

Two years ago, when companies received a big tax break to bring home their offshore profits, the president and Congress justified it as a one-time tax amnesty that would create American jobs.

Drug makers were the biggest beneficiaries of the amnesty program, repatriating about $100 billion in foreign profits and paying only minimal taxes. But the companies did not create many jobs in return. Instead, since 2005 the American drug industry has laid off tens of thousands of workers in this country.

And now drug companies are once again using complex strategies, many of them demonstrably legal, to shelter billions of dollars in profits in international tax havens, according to their financial statements and independent tax experts.

In one popular accounting move, companies declare their foreign markets as far more profitable than their American businesses — even though drug prices are typically higher in the United States than anywhere else in the world. (more…)

Reuters/Aug 1, 2007

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Citing executive privilege, President George W. Bush on Wednesday rejected a subpoena for his close adviser Karl Rove to testify to the Senate Judiciary Committee in a probe over fired federal prosecutors.

The committee had subpoenaed Rove to testify at a hearing on Thursday morning in its investigation of the firing last year of nine federal prosecutors, which critics said was prompted by partisan politics.

“Mr. Rove, as an immediate presidential advisor, is immune from compelled congressional testimony about matters that arose during his tenure and that relate to his official duties in that capacity,” White House Counsel Fred Fielding wrote in a letter to Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat. Leahy made the letter available to Reuters. (more…)