By Tom Leonard in New York Last Updated: 2:18am GMT 12/01/2008
Eavesdropping operations on criminal and terrorist suspects by the Federal Bureau of Investigation have collapsed because the bureau has failed to pay its telephone bills.
A report by the US Department of Justice revealed that the unpaid costs of wiretaps came to $66,000 (£33,000) in one FBI field office alone.
An audit by Glenn Fine, the inspector general, discovered that a wiretap used in an operation conducted under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act - the government's most sensitive covert investigations - "was halted due to untimely payment" in at least one case. The report added: "We also found that late payments have resulted in telecommunications carriers actually disconnecting phone lines established to deliver surveillance results to the FBI, resulting in lost evidence."
Nearly 500 bills for telecommunication surveillance in five field offices were not paid on time, the audit found.
sheesh.... this is top down incompetence...
holy batturds batman:
Revealing a picture of financial chaos within the 56 field offices of America's chief law enforcement agency, the audit blamed the lost connections on the FBI's lax oversight of money used in undercover investigations.
The report - of which only an edited version was released publicly - followed a case in 2006 in which an FBI employee admitted stealing more than $25,000 (£12,500) that was intended to be spent on wiretaps.
stealing from the FBI?
-------------------- Don't envy the happiness of those who live in a fool's paradise. Posts: 36378 | From: USA | Registered: Sep 2003
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By LARA JAKES JORDAN and MATT APUZZO – 8 hours ago
WASHINGTON (AP) — Blackwater Worldwide repaired and repainted its trucks immediately after a deadly September shooting in Baghdad, making it difficult to determine whether enemy gunfire provoked the attack, according to people familiar with the government's investigation of the incident.
Damage to the vehicles in the convoy has been held up by Blackwater as proof that its security guards were defending themselves against an insurgent ambush when they fired into a busy intersection, leaving 17 Iraqi civilians dead.
U.S. military investigators initially found "no enemy activity involved" and the Iraqi government concluded the shootings were unprovoked.
The repairs essentially destroyed evidence that Justice Department investigators hoped to examine in a criminal case that has drawn worldwide attention. The Sept. 16 shooting has strained U.S. relations with the Iraqi government, which wants Blackwater expelled from the country. It also has become a flash point in the debate over whether contractors are immune from legal consequences for their actions in a war zone.
Blackwater's four armored vehicles were repaired or repainted within days of the shooting, and before FBI teams went to Baghdad to collect evidence, people close to the case said. The work included repairs to a damaged radiator that Blackwater says is central to its defense.
The damage and subsequent repairs were described to The Associated Press by five people familiar with the case who discussed it in separate interviews over the past month. All spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the case.
The repair work creates a hurdle for prosecutors as they consider building a case against any of the 19 guards in the Sept. 16 convoy. It also makes it harder for Blackwater to prove its innocence as it faces a grand jury investigation and multiple lawsuits over the shooting. The company is the target, too, of an unrelated investigation into whether its contractors smuggled weapons into Iraq.
hey CCM you out there? some of the people i've talked to that were over there said the private mil types were rude as hell to the real Military types...
-------------------- Don't envy the happiness of those who live in a fool's paradise. Posts: 36378 | From: USA | Registered: Sep 2003
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-------------------- No longer eligible for government service due to lack of tax issues. Posts: 5178 | From: Up North | Registered: Dec 2005
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I dunno...maybe I'm overreacting but to me Blackwater seems little better than the militant groups over there putting car bombs together.
And the damage they can do the mission is so much greater than what a non US group is capable of accomplishing just by the fact that they are Americans.
I think Blackwater should be pulled out.
-------------------- No longer eligible for government service due to lack of tax issues. Posts: 5178 | From: Up North | Registered: Dec 2005
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That, if nothing else, will limit the amount of snooping that the Patriot act allows.
All that monitoring is very expensive and I doubt Congress are going to be pleased when they hear the bills that are being racked up and money mis-spent.
-------------------- No longer eligible for government service due to lack of tax issues. Posts: 5178 | From: Up North | Registered: Dec 2005
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they are replacing the Marines in their protection of State Dept officials..
early on ('04)? it was 4 Blackwater guys that got murdered and dragged out of their cars.
the press just called them "contractors" they made it sound like they were non-militiants simply protecting food deliveries...
U.S. expects more attacks in Iraq Residents hang slain Americans' bodies from bridge
Thursday, May 6, 2004 Posted: 2:16 PM EDT (1816 GMT) BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- As the date to transfer governing power from the U.S.-led coalition to the Iraqis gets closer, U.S. officials said they expect more attacks like the one that killed four American civilian contractors Wednesday in Fallujah.
U.S. officials said the civilians were killed in a grenade attack by suspected insurgents.
Afterward, residents cheered and pulled charred bodies from burning vehicles and hung them from a Euphrates River bridge.
Crowds gathered around the vehicles and dragged at least one of the bodies through the streets, witnesses said.
Residents pulled another body from one of the cars and beat it with sticks.
But the Bush administration vows it will stay the course in Iraq even beyond the transfer of power set for June 30, and the military remains resolute.
The four American civilians killed were employees of Blackwater Security Consulting, a U.S. government contractor providing security for food deliveries in Fallujah, the company said. (Full story)
A company statement said their exact identities were not yet known, but "our thoughts and prayers are with their families."
Witnesses of the incident said two Mitsubishi vehicles left a military base east of Fallujah to make their way into the city, about 30 miles (48 kilometers) west of Baghdad.
The vehicles turned onto a Fallujah street as men -- whose faces were covered by head scarves -- split into two groups and threw hand grenades at the cars, witnesses said.
The assailants then sprayed the burning cars with small-arms fire.
Video showed crowds chanting and cheering at the scene, with charred corpses hanging from the bridge over the Euphrates.
Fallujah is part of al Anbar province in the Sunni Triangle, a region north and west of the capital that has been a hotbed of opposition to the U.S. presence.
posted
did you know that "the occupation" officially ended in June '04?
. But they also said that since the United States insists that the occupation will formally end on June 30, when limited powers will be handed to the interim Iraqi government, the Geneva Convention requires that the Americans bring charges against their prisoners of war or release them. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F01EEDB1130F936A25755C0A9629C8B6 3
-------------------- Don't envy the happiness of those who live in a fool's paradise. Posts: 36378 | From: USA | Registered: Sep 2003
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posted
some deeper reading thru articles poses a serious question about the March 31 '04 incident...
it happened in Falujah and the contractors were providing security for food deliveries...
but who were they feeding? we pulled out of Fallujah very early in the war and didn't have much presence there..
Citizens of Fallujah had to defend their own homes and property from these looters and criminals in the absence of peace-keeping authorities.[citation needed] The new mayor of the city—Taha Bidaywi Hamed, selected by local tribal leaders—was strongly pro-American. When the US Army entered the town in April 2003, they positioned themselves at the vacated Ba'ath Party headquarters. A Fallujah Protection Force composed of local Iraqis was set up by the US-led occupants to help fight the rising resistance.
On the evening of April 28, 2003, a crowd of 200 people defied a curfew imposed by the Americans and gathered outside a secondary school used as a military HQ to demand its reopening. Soldiers from the 82nd Airborne stationed on the roof of the building opened fire on the crowd, resulting in the deaths of 17 civilians and the wounding of over 70. [4]. The events leading up to the event are disputed. American forces claim they were responding to gunfire from the crowd, while the Iraqis involved deny this version, although conceding rocks were thrown at the troops. A protest against the killings two days later was also fired upon by US troops resulting in two more deaths. The shootings aggravated feelings against the occupation. Over the next year, various Sunni rebel groups, including foreign terrorists aligned to al-Qaeda[citation needed], entrenched themselves in the city, using it as a command base and a symbol of defiance against the multinational forces and the interim Iraqi government, to whom sovereignty was returned in July 2004.
On March 31, 2004, Iraqi insurgents in Fallujah ambushed a convoy containing four American private military contractors from Blackwater USA, who were conducting delivery for food caterers ESS.[5]
The four armed contractors, Scott Helvenston, Jerry (Jerko) Zovko, Wesley Batalona, and Michael Teague, were dragged from their cars, beaten, and set on fire. Their burned corpses were then dragged through the streets before being hung over a bridge crossing the Euphrates.[6][7] This bridge is unofficially referred to as "Blackwater Bridge" by Coalition Forces operating there.[8][9]
This led to an abortive US operation to recapture control of the city in Operation Vigilant Resolve, and a successful recapture operation in the city in November 2004, called Operation Phantom Fury in English and Operation Al Fajr in Arabic. Operation Phantom Fury resulted in the reputed death of over 1,350 insurgent fighters. Approximately 95 American Marines were killed, and over 2,000 wounded.
The U.S. military first denied that it has used white phosphorus as an anti-personnel weapon in Fallujah, but later retracted that denial, and admitted to using the substance against iraqis as an offensive weapon. [10] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallujah
then you follow who they were supposedly protecting and it sound just like the oil for food scanadal that was another excuse for invading:
Eurest Support Services (ESS) is a subsidiary of the giant catering company, the Compass Group.
ESS first came to wide public light after being embroiled in the multibillion-dollar United Nations procurement scandal. ESS used a broker company to get United Nations procurement contracts with the use of corruption of the U.N. official Alexander Yakovlev (UN procurement). It was also investigated by the Congress of the United States House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Government Reform for its role in contracting arrangements in providing dining services to the US Army in Iraq as a subcontractor to Halliburton subsidiary KBR. A multi-million dollar contract to provide food to U.N. peacekeepers was awarded to ESS, days after Andy Seiwert, a senior executive at ESS, allegedly received confidential bid information. At the time U.N. officials estimated the total value of ESS food contracts with the United Nations at $237 million, with renewals and add-ons that could reach $351 million.
Attached to the e-mail were commercially sensitive U.N. documents that no one outside of highly restricted circles within the U.N. was supposed to have access to; and that the contracts committee itself would not ponder for five more days.
* The first document was a draft of the official recommendation by the UN procurement department that a $62 million contract for U.N. peacekeepers in Liberia be awarded to Eurest Support Services. * The second document was a detailed United Nations evaluation of the technical abilities of 12 different food supply firms to meet U.N. requirements for feeding separate UN peacekeeping missions. * The third document was a detailed list of the price bids, that three of the five firms had submitted for the UN contract. The document showed that ESS had bested its nearest rival, a food services firm known as Es-Ko, by literally pennies per ration unit, and had also underbid its competitors in virtually every other service category.
it's just one rip-off after another...
-------------------- Don't envy the happiness of those who live in a fool's paradise. Posts: 36378 | From: USA | Registered: Sep 2003
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posted
So damned much of the Iraq war is nothing other than a supposed secret and clever way to pay back financial backers of the Party and pay off Party favorites.
Posts: 11304 | From: Fort Worth, Texas | Registered: Mar 2005
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