All Things Whistleblower: A GAP Blog

Running Out the Clock

A report released yesterday by the White House summarizes evidence of global climate disruption, the harmful impacts it is already having on society and the environment, and future projections of potential damages. The report, years overdue under a requirement of law, was produced only in response to an August 2007 federal court order that an assessment be produced by May 31, 2008.

The report is an about-face by the Bush administration on their official statements on climate change, for pretty much the entire time he’s been in office. And they didn’t want this getting out now - they were legally forced to release the information.

Said Rick Piltz, Director of the Government Accountability Project’s Climate Science Watch program: “After seven years of denial, disinformation, cover-up, and delay, in its waning months, the Bush administration is finally beginning to allow the publication of reports that acknowledge this scientific reality.” From the Associated Press:

Environmental groups got a court order last summer to force the Bush administration to produce the document by the end of this month. Hays said the White House has preferred issuing studies on individual global warming issues, such as an agricultural effects report that was released on Tuesday.

"It's totally begrudging," said Rick Piltz, director of Climate Science Watch at the nonprofit Government Accountability Project, a whistleblowers' organization. "It's important the government go on record honestly acknowledging this stuff."

ABCNews.com also has a good piece on the story, and an even better video segment. To view that, click on the link and search for “Climate,” and it should be in the first few videos today.

-- Dylan Blaylock

Bad News, Good News

According to a new federal report on climate change, global warming has already had serious negative environmental ramifications for the United States, including an increase in forest fires and drought.

The report comes from the U.S. Climate Change Science Program, the lead agency on such matters.

Obviously, the report is disheartening, but there is a silver lining. The CCSP is the same group that GAP client Rick Piltz previously worked for before leaving it to blow the whistle on the White House’s censoring and editing of climate data. This was a political decision taken by the White House in order to lower the perception of the human impact on climate change. Rick Piltz now is the director of the GAP program Climate Science Watch. The White House official who edited the documents, Phil Cooney, left the White House two days after Piltz’s story broke to work for ExxonMobil, where he remains today.

The bright side is that, three years later, a hard-hitting report by the CCSP such as this is able to be presented to the American public, without any political censoring (that we know of).

-- Dylan Blaylock

An “Important Middle Ground"?

In what is really a shocking abuse of government power, it is now known that at least 30 former government prosecutors in the Bush administration have secured controversial lucrative positions as “corporate monitors,” which are programs that allow companies that have committed wrongdoing to escape criminal prosecution.

This practice came to light in January when it was discovered that former Attorney General John Ashcroft secured a $52 million dollar contract for his firm to perform “corporate monitoring” work – a contract that was granted noncompetitively. 

The Justice Department, naturally, is defending the practice. This latest development was released as part of a Congressional report on the project. From the New York Times:

In a letter to members of Congress that accompanied the new data, the Justice Department acknowledged that it had been using deferred prosecutions and similar arrangements known as nonprosecution agreements more frequently, but it defended the practice. It said the agreements represented “an important middle ground” between not bringing a criminal prosecution at all and charging a company and hurting all its employees and shareholders, who might have had nothing to do with the misconduct.

So, the official rationale here is that it is best not to hold corporate criminals accountable because it would hurt shareholders? Alrighty. But there’s more –

And last week, the department informed Congress that it was putting in place a restriction to prevent deferred prosecution or other types of plea agreements from requiring the defendant to pay restitution to a charity, school or other institution that was not harmed by the company’s misconduct. Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee quickly dubbed the new guidance “the Christie amendment” because it was seen as a response to the disclosure that Bristol-Myers Squibb, as part of an agreement with Mr. Christie’s office in 2006 to avoid prosecution, was required to endow a chair in business ethics at the law school at Seton Hall University, his alma mater.

Christie is the Attorney General for New Jersey who selected Ashcroft for his contract back in the day. So, prior to last week, corporate officials who committed wrongdoing could, under this program, avoid prosecution of their companies by giving money to the school of the monitor?

-- Dylan Blaylock

Successful Game-plan for Suing Energy Companies Over Global Warming?

An interesting piece that just came out in the Atlantic details how two prominent attorneys believe they have a proper game-plan for bringing lawsuits against large energy corporations for global warming damage. The lawyers argue, besides showing evidence of damage caused by climate change (from greenhouse gas emissions), that large energy companies have been actively conspiring to cover-up the threat of global warming.

The game-plan is the same methodology used against big tobacco companies in the 1980’s and 90’s. Basically, each industry engaged in the use of shill groups to raise and foster public doubt about the effects of their respective products (or emissions) on public health. From the article:

The energy industry’s ties to government, like the tobacco industry’s, have been unusually tight, and its lobbying efforts demonstrably effective. Philip Cooney, a liaison between the Bush administration and federal environmental agencies, edited uncertainty into reports on global warming by top government scientists from 2001 until 2005, when he resigned after examples of his changes were published by The New York Times. Before joining the White House, Cooney had worked for the American Petroleum Institute; a week after his departure, Exxon­Mobil announced he was joining the company. “In a sense, ExxonMobil walked right into the room of the science program,” says Rick Piltz, the federal official who blew the whistle on Cooney. A government memo obtained by Greenpeace outlines a State Department official’s talking points for a meeting with energy-company lobbyists: the president, the memo says, “rejected Kyoto, in part, based on input from you.”

The piece also centers around the sad story of the town of Kivalina, Alaska, whose residents will have to be relocated within 10 years due to massive beach erosion.

-- Dylan Blaylock

How Greece is Different from America

An Associated Press article details how, following an “outcry over tainted sunflower oil,” the head of Greece’s food safety division has resigned.

A quick thought - Considering just some of the scandals that have occurred in America just this year with regard to consumer safety (massive meat recall from tainted beef, heparin scandal, ongoing toy recalls), wouldn’t our country look a lot different if the heads of agencies that made these major blunders resigned, similar to what’s happened in Greece?

-- Dylan Blaylock

Food Safety Spotlight

There was a ton of food safety-related newspaper articles appearing today and over the weekend. While this has been a hot button topic for some time now, the increasing coverage means that more consumers are rightfully questioning the history, naturalness, and integrity of the food they consume. This isn’t just specific kinds of food, either – the breadth of food type where concerns are looming is wide. Consider these stories from just the last couple of days:

• American shrimp producers are pressuring the FDA to increase inspections of foreign shrimp, thought of as being inferior and possibly unsafe
• Some doctors are asserting that the natural sugar found in organic baby formula may have detrimental health effects
• Safety concerns about produce have led to a spike in demand for locally grown food
• Numerous factors, including diet and food quality, have led to an explosion of childhood obesity levels

-- Dylan Blaylock

Clarifications regarding media reports about Ismail Ahmed

Various media outlets have recently reported that GAP whistleblower Ismail Ahmed suffered retaliation after alerting authorities to the United Nations Development Program’s (UNDP) support of a company with links to Islamic militants in Somalia. This is misleading.

Dr. Ahmed was subject to retaliation after providing evidence of corruption involving KPMG and the Somalia country office of UNDP. He tried to alert UNDP to this apparent wrongdoing three times:

• On March 2006, through UNDP’s Fraud Hotline
• In October 2006, to UNDP country office management
• In November 2007, to the UNDP Administrator, with copy to UNDP’s Office of Audit and Investigations (OAI)

The retaliation against Dr. Ahmed began after his October 2006 disclosure and is ongoing.

In April 2008, Dr. Ahmed gave a much more extensive dossier – which contained information about UNDP’s alleged support of a company with suspected links to militant Islamic organizations – to a unit within the United Nations Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS). Dr. Ahmed has not provided UNDP with a complete version of this dossier, which documents the extent of the retaliation he faced and corruption he witnessed, because he made his disclosure externally to OIOS in order to prevent possible destruction of evidence inside UNDP. Dr. Ahmed had reason to believe that an attempt to destroy evidence would be made by specific individuals inside UNDP because this had in fact occurred after his October 2006 disclosure. Although Dr. Ahmed notified OIOS and the UNDP Somalia country office management of his concerns regarding UNDP’s support of a company with suspected links to terrorist organizations, he did not submit his evidence of these links to OAI.

-- Shelley Walden

Whistleblower Week Events Kick Off Today

This week marks the second year of annual events and conferences aimed at raising awareness of whistleblower issues in Washington, D.C. GAP is sponsoring six forums and/or panels during this time period. These include the topics of:

-- Secret Domestic Surveillance
-- Are We Safe When We Fly?: Addressing Issues of Aviation Safety & Security
-- Scientific Freedom & the Public Good
-- Joint Congressional Forum: Congress at the Crossroads for Your Rights
-- Forum on the Office of Special Counsel
-- From Immunity to Impunity: Whistleblowers at International Organizations

For a complete agenda of panelists, time and location, check out this GAP press release.

-- Dylan Blaylock
 

The Morning After

Yesterday, federal agents raided the Office of the Special Counsel (OSC) and the home of Special Counsel Scott Bloch, confiscating numerous computers and file data. OSC is the agency in charge of protecting federal whistleblowers from improper retaliation. GAP and other whistleblower organizations have long been critical of Bloch, accusing him of abusing his powers and not truly advocating for whistleblower rights.

While FBI spokesman would not publicly state what the nature of the raid was, Bloch has been under severe scrutiny since last November when he hired an outside service, Geeks On Call, to erase an unknown amount of information from OSC computers. Bloch has been investigated by the Office of Personnel Management’s IG over allegations that Bloch “retaliated against career employees and obstructed an investigation.”

Employees at OSC have been asked to appear next week before a grand jury about “possible obstruction of justice and destruction of federal records during an investigation.” From the LA Times:

“The Bush administration has been unable to make up its mind whether to ignore him or to act against him,” said Tom Devine, legal director for the Government Accountability Project, a whistle-blower advocacy group. “Mr. Bloch is finally being held accountable for the same cover-ups that he is supposed to be policing. It is a very positive step.”

-- Dylan Blaylock

FBI Agents Raid Office of Special Counsel

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that “more than a dozen” FBI agents served grand jury subpoenas this morning while searching the U.S. Office of Special Counsel and the home of Special Counsel Scott Bloch. According to the Journal, OSC employees say the raid is in connection with allegations of obstruction of justice by Bloch, who in 2006 used a computer service, Geeks on Call, to completely erase his work computer's hard drive. Bloch asked the company to eradicate his computer’s files as he was being investigated by the Office of Personnel Management Inspector General in connection with a complaint submitted by a group of anonymous OSC employees, GAP, the Project On Government Oversight, and Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility.

Last week, attorney Debra Katz, who represents the groups and the anonymous OSC employees, sent a comprehensive summary of Bloch’s abuses during his tenure to President Bush, and called on the President to use his authority to remove the Special Counsel “for cause.”

-- Adam Miles