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According to press accounts, President Trump’s nominee to lead the CIA, Gina Haspel, was deeply involved in the Agency’s torture program, though there are more questions than answers about exactly what her role was.
News reports last year stated that Haspel was the chief of base at the CIA’s first overseas prison (or “black site”) for terrorism suspects, in Thailand. She was involved in the destruction of the videotapes that documented the torture.
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See coverage of our analysis:
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The federal government plans to pay private companies hundreds of millions of dollars to help two of its largest law enforcement agencies—ICE and CBP—hire employees.
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An oversight request from the Senate Judiciary Committee last month went all but unnoticed, lost in the tempest of scandals, resignations, and blistering partisanship that has swamped Washington. It deserves greater attention, and even praise.
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Finally, the revolving door between the Department of Defense and the private sector might be slowing down, and the taxpayers have the Senate to thank. Section 1045 of the FY 2018 National Defense Authorization Act strengthens lobbying prohibitions for certain Defense Department officials.
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Whistleblowers are critical to journalists, but they usually aren’t held in high esteem by their colleagues or their bosses. Whistleblowers have come a long way both in broader American culture and in terms of the actual laws protecting them.
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Over 200 years ago, our Founding Fathers faced a question: How could they build a democracy to withstand the trials of time and survive the pressures that destroyed those that came before?
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Cutting-edge technologies shouldn’t be used to turn the U.S. military’s highly-trained pilots (it costs $11 million to train a fighter-jet jockey) into guinea pigs. Military pilots do breathtaking things, but suffocating shouldn’t be one of them.
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POGO in the News
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“The confirmation hearings are going to be a bad joke if stuff isn’t declassified,” said Katherine Hawkins of the Project on Government Oversight, one of the most tenacious outside investigators of CIA torture. Hawkins, also part of the coalition to defeat Haspel, plans on drafting questions to ask Haspel for Senate staff.
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POGO's Liz Hempowicz: If you have cabinet secretaries in place who are showing kind of a disregard for being responsible stewards of taxpayer dollars, I think that trickles down.
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Government watchdog groups and at least two congressional Democrats say Zinke’s trip smells of politics and seemed designed to benefit the GOP candidate in a special congressional election that Republicans are in danger of losing on Tuesday. “It definitely looks fishy,” said Nick Schwellenbach, an investigator with the Project on Government Oversight.
[...] Even if the Pennsylvania trip didn’t violate the law, “it would be hard not to see political overtones in all of this,” Schwellenbach said. “Some of the stuff Zinke is doing, it certainly doesn’t look good,” he said. “Even if it’s not technically a violation of the law, he should be concerned about appearances. He’s not a member of Congress anymore. He’s the secretary of a major cabinet. Perceptions do matter.”
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WATCHDOG: ICE, CBP RUN RISKS WITH HIRING: A pair of federal immigration agencies intend to use private companies to ramp up hiring in the coming years — a move that risks onboarding subpar workers, according to Mia Steinle, an investigator for the Project On Government Oversight. Steinle laid out the scenario in an online post this week: U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement aims to hire 16,000 new employees and is seeking contractors to assist with the process. U.S. Customs and Border Protection plans to hire 5,000 additional Border Patrol agents and already paid a division of Accenture to help reach that goal.
“ICE and Border Patrol … will pay the private companies a flat rate for every new employee hired,” writes Steinle, “potentially incentivizing the companies to cut corners and not fully vet every candidate before they’re hired. As history has shown, this can have dangerous — even deadly — consequences.” Border Patrol used private companies to aid hiring in the 2000s, as Steinle notes. “As a result, the number of Border Patrol employees charged with civil and criminal misconduct increased by 44 percent in the years following the hiring surge, the Associated Press reported last year.”
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“The confirmation hearings are going to be a bad joke if stuff isn’t declassified,” said Katherine Hawkins of the Project on Government Oversight, one of the most tenacious outside investigators of CIA torture. Hawkins, also part of the coalition to defeat Haspel, plans on drafting questions to ask Haspel for Senate staff.
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It’s “really troubling because we know the Air Force is confronting a number of problems and the best way, usually, to get those problems fixed is to be transparent about them both to the public and to Congress,” Mandy Smithberger, director of the CDI Straus Military Reform Project at the Project on Government Oversight, told Federal News Radio.
The Air Force is cutting base visits and media interviews for fear of “giving insights to our adversaries, which could erode our military advantage” in what it calls a public relations reset, according to a new memo, which was first obtained by Defense News.
[...] “We’ve seen the secretary of defense crack down on communications with the press by not having announced press conferences, being stupidly cagey about troop numbers when that information is publicly reported elsewhere and you have a lot senior leaders that fail to understand how important it is for our public to understand how our military its defending the country,” Smithberger said.
[...] Smithberger said some of the Navy’s issues with ship accidents this summer may have been avoided through better transparency.
“The worst case scenario is that we have preventable accidents happen that result in loss of life … we’ve seen in hypoxia issues that in a lot of cases pilots and lower level people don’t think they can trust their commanders and are unsure what recourse they have to raise concerns about safety and other operational issues. If that information isn’t public it’s not going to get fixed,” Smithberger said.
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Lydia Dennett—an investigator for the Project on Government Oversight, a Washington, D.C., watchdog group—said BSI’s failure to register may be illegal.
“It seems very clear that this would be captured by the law,” she said. “But there’s just enough of a gray area or squishiness in the language that it’s not 100 percent certain.”
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Sixteen years after the U.S. started torturing terrorism suspects, details remain shrouded in secrecy. But there is enough information to warrant serious questions, Katherine Hawkins of the watchdog group Project On Government Oversight tells Raw Story. Hawkins says the Senate Intelligence Committee has to dig in to determine how deeply she was involved in activities like waterboarding.
“She may not have personally poured the water, but as Chief of Base she was the only person on site with the authority to stop it,” Hawkins said.
Hawkins points out that Haspel has been investigated by the International Criminal Court for her involvement in black sites in Afghanistan and that a German watchdog group pushed prosecutors to indict her for her role in torture.
[...] Hawkins worries that senators will not be able to bring these issues up when discussing whether to confirm her. “Senators can’t even ask about information on her Wikipedia page without being accused of disclosing classified information and jeopardizing their security clearances,” she said. “There has to be disclosure of what she did—and if that’s too damaging, she shouldn’t be the head of the CIA.”
In 2013, Haspel was due to lead the agency’s clandestine service. That was blocked by Senator Dianne Feinstein. There was enough information to stop Haspel’s rise then, Hawkins says, but it remains to be seen how this round will go.
“The question is whether the Senate Intelligence Committee is going to go into it,” Hawkins says.
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The Project on Government Oversight’s general counsel, Scott Amey, on Thursday welcomed Sanders’ voice as defense spending rises, making a comparison to the oversight Congress exerted on the 2009 economic stimulus package.
“With more spending, you also need more oversight,” Amey said. “They added some protections to the stimulus to make sure it’s not ripe for waste, fraud and abuse. I don’t know if they’re adding the same protections, now that they’re increasing the defense budget.”
When the Defense Department awarded contracts worth $324 billion in fiscal 2017, it makes sense to guard for fraud, said Amey.
“He wants a specific breakdown on contractors who are defrauding the Department of Defense,” Amey said of Sanders. “That request isn’t new and can be helpful in exposing those defrauding the government and making sure more money gets to DoD programs and the war fighter.”
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Katherine Hawkins, an expert on CIA torture at the Program on Government Oversight, told ThinkProgress that while Haspel’s personal history is concerning, the problems with transparency over CIA torture are bigger than one person.
“I am concerned with the entire agency’s track record on preserving documents that portray them in a negative light,” Hawkins said in an email.
“As far as I know, the CIA has still never acknowledged that destroying the [torture videos] was unlawful,” Hawkins, the CIA torture expert, told ThinkProgress. “Pompeo promised during his confirmation hearings that he would preserve and review the CIA’s copy of the torture report; then he broke that promise.”
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But this week, an investigation by the Project on Government Oversight and Mother Jones revealed just how deeply involved Sessions and his Senate office were in fighting the EPA's cleanup efforts in north Birmingham.
According to records obtained by POGO, Sessions and his staff coordinated with other lawmakers and put intense pressure on the EPA in 2016 to prevent the site from being added to the National Priorities List.
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Liz Hempowicz, director of public policy for the nonprofit Project on Government Oversight, which focuses on enforcement of whistleblower protections, told Government Executive that the GSA’s policies as the report describes are “yet another example of agencies either being unclear about what requirements are in place to ensure employees know about their rights to make protected disclosures about wrongdoing or just not caring about those requirements. Agency actions that can chill speech and deter whistleblowers from coming forward should make all taxpayers uneasy.”
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That case has been appealed to the Supreme Court, and on March 8, the National Whistleblower Center joined with the Project on Government Oversight in a friend-of-the-court brief seeking a high court hearing for John Parkinson and others after Parkinson reported employees who used FBI surveillance planes for joy rides and to pick up prostitutes.
The brief argues that the Justice Department’s “procedures for FBI whistleblowers are not an adequate substitute for a veterans’ preference-eligible FBI employee raising a whistleblower claim in an MSPB case,” according to the center.
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