The Center for Public Integrity

The U.S. government declared victory after prosecuting Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols for the horrific explosion seventeen years ago this week that tore the face off the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. But nagging controversy over the completeness of its investigation into the disaster provoked two journalists to write a new book about the bombing that details the bureaucratic dysfunction during the probe.

The book, “Oklahoma City: What the Investigation Missed and Why It Still Matters,” by Andrew Gumbel and Roger Charles, is due out at the end of the month. It describes missed signals, ignored investigative threads, blown leads, and bureaucratic infighting so counter-productive that it almost defies imagination. Throughout the probe, the FBI and the Treasury Department’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms failed to share crucial information and fought bitterly for credit while disparaging the other.

The two groups embraced evidence that pointed to McVeigh and Nichols, but ignored or bad-mouthed evidence that linked those men to others, including at least seven members of the radical right. Many had ties to Elohim City, a 240-acre religious compound in northeast Oklahoma that was home to a community of white supremacists. The ATF and FBI never coordinated their investigations of the group, according to the book, and prosecutors chose to keep things simple for a jury.

The April 19 explosion, which killed 168 people — including 19 infants and toddlers at a day care center in the building, has been eclipsed in notoriety by the World Trade Center’s destruction on 9/11. But some of the connect-the-dots issues and petty rivalries that bedeviled law enforcement both before and after the bombing foreshadowed vulnerabilities that would re-emerge in the wake of 9/11.

The group tasked with preserving the rich history of the U.S. Navy could be putting artifacts, paintings, and documents “at risk” — possibly due to massive spending on the service’s 200th anniversary.

That’s the conclusion of a report by the Navy Inspector General’s office, conducted last August but only released to the public in recent days. The report, an inspection of the Naval History and Heritage Command, is pessimistic about that office’s work.

The report criticizes the Navy for a lack of environmental controls for archived records, including microfilm and CD-ROMs; the “disenfranchisement” of the professional archivist and librarian workforce — which it depicts as having been marginalized; and a tardiness in collecting current information for future archives.

These shortcomings are striking, given the military's tradition of obsessive attention to the history of battles and lesser engagements so that commanders can learn what went right or wrong and how to avoid making similar mistakes. “More than most professions, the military is forced to depend upon intelligent interpretation of the past for signposts charting the future,” Gen. Douglas MacArthur once noted. The French general Antoine-Henri Jomini, added that "Military History, accompanied by sound criticism, is indeed the true school of war.”

Whether the Navy’s agency can change its path on its paltry budget — $38 million to manage the archives, museums and the most notable artifact of all, the U.S.S. Constitution floating in Boston harbor — is uncertain. But a number of historians interviewed for the report said they worried the leadership at the Command is too focused on big ceremonies, such as a series of bicentennial events celebrating the War of 1812.

In the central March 2008 negotiations over the delivery of weapons by Russian arms merchant Viktor Bout to a Columbian terrorist group, the key players were two men identified as Carlos and Ricardo. They cunningly presented themselves as representatives of FARC, or Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, a group known for kidnappings, drug smuggling, and access to lots of cash.

They did not hide their intentions. “We want to start … start killing American pilots,” Carlos bluntly told Bout, while asking for assault weapons, sniper rifles, and surface-to-air missiles.

As Bout abruptly learned when the deal-making sessions at the Bangkok Sofitel Hotel ended with his arrest, neither of the two men were actually with FARC. They were instead paid agents of the Drug Enforcement Administration, who once again had successfully posed as members of a group that has waged a brutal war against the Colombian government.

Lost in the attention surrounding Bout’s sentencing last week to a 25-year prison term is the fact that the DEA has conducted not just one major FARC-related sting, but at least four in the past six years alone. That they have successfully used the same strategy over and over again suggests one of two possibilities: Those in the drug trafficking and arms smuggling world are less well-informed and more careless than their pop-culture images suggest, or the DEA is particularly good at fooling its victims with the convincing patter of anti-imperialist revolutionaries bent on hobbling a U.S. ally.

A judge in New York sentenced arms dealer Victor Bout Thursday to 25 years in prison, permanently ending his run as perhaps the world’s most notorious weapons-dealing kingpin.
 
Bout was convicted on charges of conspiracy to kill U.S. citizens, conspiracy to kill U.S. employees, conspiracy to acquire and use anti-aircraft missiles, and conspiracy to provide material support to a terrorist group.
 
U.S. agents posing as members of the FARC terrorist group captured him in Thailand during a 2008 sting operation. It took over two years for Bout, a Russian, to be extradited to stand trial in New York.
 
In 2002, the Center for Public Integrity and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists published “The merchant of death,” a massive exposé on Bout’s activities throughout the world. For more, read the full series, Making a Killing, here.

Terrible medical care, long delays in service, and soldiers who felt like they were in a “petting zoo”: Those are just some of the issues identified in a Department of Defense Inspector General report issued March 30th on the Wounded Warrior Regiment.

Founded in 2007 as a way to help guide wounded Marines and sailors towards accepting and living with their injuries, the WWR has supported nearly 27,377 wounded, ill, and injured Marines. With camps throughout the country, WWR is among the leading groups in rehabbing both injured service members and their families.

But it has been seriously shortchanged by the Marines, according to the IG’s report. Both staff and service members undergoing treatment had a litany of complaints. Some beefed that they were forced to endure visits from VIPs, nonprofit groups and reporters looking for “visibly wounded” Marines with whom they could talk. One said he felt like he was in a “petting zoo.” Prescriptions were poorly monitored and frequently given in excessive quantities, creating a potential for drug misuse. The health care privacy act known as HIPPA was not respected at one location, causing medical information to be passed around loosely.

But the overarching problem highlighted in the report is the length of time it takes service members to be cleared to leave WWR facilities. At one location, Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, Warriors spent an average of 730 days — two full years — before being discharged. More than a fifth of the wounded service members at that location spent three years there, sometimes just waiting for paperwork to be processed. Some Marines had to wait three months for neurological exams, and then wait again to get a pain management appointment.

In 1995, U.S. spy satellites photographed telling moments in the massacre over four days of an estimated 7,800 Bosnians by Bosnian Serb forces near the town of Srebrenica. But these photographs were not publicized by U.S. officials until nearly four weeks after the massacre had ended.

Intelligence analysts did not circulate the evidence to senior officials for 22 days, even though two U.S. diplomats had picked up and circulated warnings about the killings on the first day and again 12 days later (“New Proof Offered of Serb Atrocities,” The Washington Post, Oct. 29. 1995, read an article excerpt on Highbeam).

It was an embarrassing disconnect between top policymakers and officials in the U.S. intelligence community, which jointly missed the chance to sound an alarm about a horrific, genocidal crime — the largest mass killing in Europe since World War II — while it was still under way.

In 2012, the public picture of what’s happening in Syria — where 9,000 people have been killed so far, according to the UN — literally looks different, due to an unusual agreement brokered by White House aides between the intelligence community and the State Department. For more than a month, U.S. intelligence analysts have been declassifying satellite photos depicting the movement of Syrian armor and the destruction of Syrian villages so the department’s Human Rights Bureau can plaster them on its website.

Want to know how much of your tax money is going to the military? Thanks to a new website from the federal government, now you can!

The White House “Federal Taxpayer Receipt” calculator, released Wednesday, asks you to put in how much you paid in taxes this year before spitting out a calculation of how much went to fund what programs. The largest chunk of your taxes goes to the military — 24.9% of tax income, in fact.

The calculator goes farther and breaks down how much of the tax money goes to specific programs within DOD. The (somewhat general) categories:

• Military personnel salaries and benefits — 5.8%
• Ongoing operations, equipment, and supplies — 10.3%
• Research, development, weapons, and construction — 7.9%
• Atomic energy defense activities — 0.7%
• Defense-related FBI activities and additional national defense — 0.2%

After defense, the largest cost is healthcare at 23.7%, followed by “Job and Family Security” (unemployment, housing insurance, etc) at 19.1%. The other categories are all in the low single digits, which only serves as a reminder just how much money the average taxpayer puts in to the defense apparatus of the country each year.

Let’s do some math. The average taxpayer brings in $49,000 a year, according to tax firm HRBlock. A reasonable income tax for that amount is $5,000. Here’s how your money would be spent:

Some stories are so grim that they depress the spirit, make one angry, and stick in the mind for days afterward. Such is the powerful and important tale of Shin In Geun, one of the few successful escapees from a North Korean gulag. He was unfortunate enough to be born inside one of that country’s prisons, called Camp 14, as the child of an arranged liason between two inmates. His father was imprisoned solely because the father’s brothers had fled to South Korea.

Life in the camp, according to my former Washington Post colleague Blaine Harden’s detailed and harrowing account, featured persistent hunger, regular torture, and forced attendance at brutal executions — some involving children. After his mother and brother spoke of escape, he followed camp rules and turned them in, then was taken to watch them be killed. His partner in the successful escape was electrocuted on the prison fence.

Somehow, Shin made his way to the United States and now works for an American human rights group based in California. Harden wrote a book about Shin’s astonishingly hard life that has just been released, called “Escape from Camp 14: One Man’s Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West.” An excerpt from the book appeared recently in the Guardian. 

In Seoul last week President Obama announced a major new deal with Belgium, France and the Netherlands to reduce the amount of highly-enriched uranium used to create medical isotopes. Under the new deal, the three countries will soon start making isotopes only from low-enriched uranium — the much safer nuclear material that isn’t useful for terrorists or rogue nations looking for a quick way to damage a city by exploding a dangerous bomb.

In theory, the agreement will make the world a safer place. This assumes, of course, that the gains made in Seoul aren’t undercut by cheaper HEU-produced isotopes due to a joint Russian-Canadian agreement. Neither of those countries has agreed to the shift embraced by the Europeans.

Some isotopes are used in are scans for life-threatening conditions. About 50 percent of the scans are related to cardiac disease and 20 percent relate to cancer. When there have been isotope shortages, often caused by interference in the supply chain that travels the globe, doctors have shown a reluctance to perform tests or surgeries that might otherwise be routine.

Right now, America provides isotope producers with much of the HEU — a key component of a nuclear weapon — that they need to make the diagnostic tools used in numerous medical procedures around the globe. Nonproliferation experts have long pushed the major isotope generating facilities (located in South Africa, Australia, Canada, France, Belgium and the Netherlands) to use LEU — which is not suitable for nuclear bombs — instead. They argue that the technology is there for LEU-developed isotopes, and say that by limiting the movement of HEU around the globe they are minimizing the security risk it represents.