Monthly Archive for August, 2007

Tommy K’s Secrets (Confirmed)

August 31, 2007, by Seth Hettena. 0 Comments

As I noted here August 10th, Cunningham briber Tommy Kontogiannis was working with the U.S. intelligence community on a terrorism-related manner. Freshly released court transcripts now confirm this.

As I said a while back, Kontogiannis’ cooperation had nothing to do with the Cunningham case. He was cooperating in an ongoing terrorism case in some other jurisdiction, and most of the transcripts involve a discussion of how to keep the public from finding out what was going on.

Kontogiannis pleaded guilty in February behind closed doors at U.S. District Court in San Diego. No one objected in the 20 hours that a generic notice to seal unspecified proceedings was posted at the court. That justified locking the doors in Judge Larry Burns’ mind.

According to the heavily redacted transcripts of the proceedings, Judge Burns makes reference to the Joint Terrorism Task Force and Kontogiannis himself says he wanted to help out beause of the “2001 situation.”

At another sealed hearing in May, Burns heard from an FBI special agent and a Mr. X, possibly a CIA agent, who were running the case. Kontogiannis was allowed to travel outside the United States accompanied by a government agent.

It’s worth noting here that in the FBI and the rest of the intelligence community, terrorism trumps public corruption. In the FBI’s priority list, combating terrorism is No. 1 while public corruption is No. 4.

So if Kontogiannis had something to offer the intelligence community in a terrorism investigation, as it appears he did, they were almost obligated to offer some sort of inducement to secure his cooperation.

He’s not Jack Bauer, he’s just using whatever he can to save his own hide.

Hunter’s Folly

August 23, 2007, by Seth Hettena. 0 Comments

The Congress has thankfully cut off funding for the DP-2, a plane that never flew and cost taxpayers $63 million.

The DP-2 program was a bad idea that refused to go away. It has been funded for nearly 20 years exclusively by earmarks from congressman and presidential aspirant Duncan Hunter. DuPont Aerospace, the company that developed the plane, was based in El Cajon, California in the heart of Hunter’s district.

It was only a matter of time before someone got killed trying to fly this thing. The DP-2 suffered four mishaps in the past four years. In November 2004, a test pilot struck the ceiling of the cockpit as the cabin floor cracked and the aircraft filled with hot exhaust. He exited through the cabin window because the door had been jammed shut.

Tony DuPont dreamed up the concept of a jet that could hover and fly backwards in the 1960s. In the 1980s, he convinced Hunter that the DP-2 could ferry small teams of special operations forces in and out of remote war zones.

Government officials rejected the concept, but Hunter insisted on seeing it through. Report after report came out detailing the deep misgivings that unbiased government engineers had with the project. And year after year, Hunter continued earmarking money for the DP-2. He requested another $6 million this year.

Finally, in June, the House Committee on Science and Technology convened an unusual hearing to find out what the government was getting for its money. The hearing got little attention in the press, but here are some highlights:

John Eney, a Navy aerospace engineer, recalled how disturbed he was during a 1999 visit to duPont’s test platform at a small commercial airport in El Cajon, California:

“That platform was permanently located on the public airport property, less than 30 feet from the chain-link fence on the boundary between the airport property and a public thoroughfare including sidewalks, office and automobile parking in the city of El Cajon. The risk to off-airport property and pedestrian traffic was immense and of little apparent concern to duPont Aerospace.”

Also disturbing to Eney were duPont’s plans to use an ejection seat commandeered by “suspect means” from an F-14:

“That ‘free gift’ F-14 ejection seat was simply plopped into the DP-2 cockpit area with over a foot or more of the seat head box protruding well above the top of the enclosed cabin structure. This was unexplained by duPont management when challenged.”

Several witnesses said that while the DP-2 might be a good idea worth exploring, duPont Aerospace was not the company to do it. Tony duPont is the company’s president, his brother, Rex, is vice president and his wife, Carol, is director of administration. Tony did not like hearing he was wrong, as a former duPont engineer testified:

“The general rule of thumb was, Tony gets his way.”

Whatever merits the DP-2 concept had were doomed by mismanagement, poor morale, bad engineering judgments. DuPont even billed the government $1,700 for polo shirts with the company’s logo, $2,000 for an annual picnic and $3,000 for a family vacation on a cruise ship.

Duncan Hunter appeared blind to the problem:

Although the Pentagon may not have a firm requirement for something and may not have requested funds for it, my job is to listen to our warfighters, to set a vision, and to help the warfighter get the best tools possible to do his or her job. I am willing to take some risks to get there.

If that really was Hunter’s motivation, if the DP-2 was indeed critically important to our armed forces, he should have been the first to recognize that Tony duPont was not the man for the job. He should have worked to ensure that the plane was built by a company with the wherewithal to get the job done.

Sadly, Hunter’s motive seems to have been to help out a friend and keep jobs in his district, and that does not augur well of the leadership abilities of a man who is seeking your vote for president.

More fun with Wikiscanner: The U.S. Senate

August 21, 2007, by Seth Hettena. 0 Comments

Following up on yesterday’s post, I decided to look at anonymous postings from the U.S. Senate on Wikipedia. Here’s what senators and/or their staff have contributed to the general body of Internet knowledge:

  • Things You Didn’t Know About Sen. Robert Byrd, D-WVa.: “Robert is 180 years old.”
  • Things You Didn’t Know About Sen. Ken Salazar, D-Colo.: “Salazar has also earned the nickname ‘Shifty Eyes’ Salazar due to his constant and rapid screening of the Senate chamber.”
  • Things You Didn’t Know About Cow Tipping: “In Arkansas, however, anything is possible. DUDE you GOTTA tip em with a pickup truck. Yeeeeaaahhhh…city boy.”
  • Things You Didn’t Want to Know About a Dirty Sanchez: “When performed as a masturbatory act, the practice is also refered to as a ‘Bauer‘ – and involves the participant smearing their own feces under their nose.” (Note: this computer was later used to edit out an unflattering reference from former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist’s page)
  • Things You Didn’t Know about Zak Baig: “Zak, also known as Zackaroo, currently works for U.S. Senator David Vitter as his projects director.”
  • More Things You Didn’t Know About Zak Baig: “Zak is Kyle Ruckert‘s hero. Kyle wishes he could be more like Zak.” (Ruckert is Vitter’s chief of staff)
  • Still More Things You Didn’t Know About Zak Baig: “Zak‘s arch enemy is Kyle Ruckert. This is attributable to the fact that Kyle is better than Zak at everything, including fantasy football, life, and spelling (ref: ‘arch enemey’ used as 2 words).”

Fun with Wikiscanner: The U.S. House

August 20, 2007, by Seth Hettena. 0 Comments

I’ve been having some fun with Wiki Scanner, a Web-based program that allows you to uncover anonymous posters on the online encyclopedia, Wikipedia. Wiki Scanner is the brainchild of Virgil Griffith, a grad student with a devilishly clever imagination.

Turns out that some of these anonymous postings — 3,733 of them — came from users logged on to computers at the U.S. House of Representatives. All the posts come from a single IP address, but it’s apparently used by many people.

Here’s what the people of the House has been up to (see here for yourself):

  • Score Settling. Edited Rep. Eric Cantor’s entry to read: “He is a bad person and member of the House Ways and Means Committee” and “Cantor is also Chief Deputy Majority Whip and smells of cow dung.”
  • Trivia about Masturbation. “According to one biography, Allen Ginsberg came up with the idea for his celebrated poem “Howl” while masturbating with a broom.”
  • Expressing opinions about monster-themed cereals: “It [Boo Berry] is by far the most delicious of all the monster themed cereals.”
  • Posting at least six entries to the Wikipedia entry on Dimples
  • Calling a whole long list of people gay.
  • Vandalizing the entry for basketball player Ray Jackson: “JOHN SANTORE: SUCKS?”
  • Giving a shout out to a friend who shares the name of a dead British poet: “Thomas Dermody is an awesome intern who was born in Stockton, CA. He went to school at Cal Berkeley. He is now going to GWU to earn his masters degree in environmental policy planning. If you don’t know him yet, you’re missing out.”
  • Oh, and removing unflattering references from a long list of Republican members of Congress.

So far, only Timothy Hill, a spokesman for Rep. David Davis of Tennessee, has admitted editing entries about his boss and his brother, who’s also a congressman. So who’s the Boo Berry lover?

KPBS-FM “These Days”

August 19, 2007, by Seth Hettena. 0 Comments

I’ll be live on the KPBS-FM show “These Days” with host Tom Fudge on Tuesday, August 21 from 9 a.m. to 9:30 a.m. PDT talking about my book and the proceedings in the Brent Wilkes case that I’ve been blogging about. You can listen in via the Internet on the station’s Website.

Tommy K’s Secrets

August 10, 2007, by Seth Hettena. 0 Comments

The Justice Department’s guilty plea with a Greek-born businessman and convicted felon who happened to be a friend of Randy “Duke” Cunningham is extreme even for an executive branch that is not known as a model of openness.

Thomas “Tommy K” Kontogiannis secretly entered a guilty plea on February 23, 2007. Tommy K ran a New York mortgage business (among other things) and admitted paying off Cunningham mortgages in Arlington, Virginia and Rancho Santa Fe, California with what he knew were illegal bribes from Duke and others.

Fairly straightforward, but…the transcript of that plea hearing has been sealed ever since and is the subject of an ongoing battle between prosecutors who want it to stay that way and Larry Burns, the judge in the case who thinks the public is entitled to know more.

This week, the dispute was the subject of a unusual closed-door hearing before the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Prosecutors apparently didn’t like the way the winds were blowing in that hearing so they have agreed to release most of the transcripts at issue.

So what is going on here? There’s a lot of speculation in the blogosphere about a trip to Saudi Arabia that Cunningham made with Tommy K. But I think the truth is that all this secrecy has nothing to do with the Cunningham case.

The court documents help clear the fog a little bit. Following his guilty plea, Tommy K wasn’t fingerprinted for security reasons. (They already have them on file from Tommy K’s guilty plea years earlier to passport fraud)

More interesting, as part of the conditions setting his release, Tommy K was allowed to travel outside the United States in the company of “agents.” The court’s order setting release says: “Surrender passport to specific agents w/in 2 weeks. Dft can travel w/agents.”

Hmmm. There’s a lot of “specific agents” at a certain three-letter agency that does all its work (we hope) overseas. Bear in mind that while trying to keep the information about the plea secret, prosecutors invoked a law dealing with the handling of classified information, a law that almost always applies to CIA work. At least one transcript of a hearing was stamped “classified” by the government.

Given the extraordinary precautions in this case, it’s apparent that Tommy K had something to offer the U.S. intelligence community in this case. Since the intelligence community is all about rooting out terrorists, I would suspect that, unlikely as it may sound, he had something to offer in that department.

We’ll see what the transcripts say when they’re released. Judge Burns was out of town this week, so we’ll have to wait.

Eskimo defense contractors

August 1, 2007, by Seth Hettena. 0 Comments

The frozen, northernmost reaches of the United States are home to the Inupiat people, more commonly known as Ekimos. They subsist on fishing and the hunting of seals, walrus and whales. They also run a successful defense contracting firm providing services to the U.S. intelligence community. To that, they owe a debt to Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska.

TKC Communications LLC of Anchorage, Alaska, does work for the Department of Justice, the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Center, the Foreign Terrorist Tracking Center, the Counterintelligence Field Activity, and the National Security Agency, according to its Website. The company also contracts with all four branches of the military, including for work in Iraq, as well as the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of State (which is sometimes a wink-wink way of saying the CIA).

TKC Communications is one of more than 150 Alaskan native-owned companies doing government work. Others include Alutiiq Management Services LLC which is renovating State Department offices in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Ahtna Technical Services Inc. is hiring cooks for a federal jail in Texas.

Government contractors like these companies because they are a quick, easy and legal method of awarding contracts of any value, and in 2004, the Alaskan native companies received more than $1 billion worth of government work, according to a Government Accountability Office report. Profits from these ventures are returned in the form of shares to the Inupiat.

Their special status allows them to receive contracts without any competition, so-called “sole source” contracts. There have been numerous problems with some of these sole-source contracts, which is how I came across this subject. TKC Communications’ $100 million, 10-year contract to provide office space for CIFA in Arlington, Va., not only cost too much but also may have violated the law. But that’s more the fault of the boobs at CIFA, who when told the contracts might violate the law, refused to halt them.

The Alaskan Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971 created the Alaskan native companies as a way of settling the Inupiat’s aboriginal land claims. The act divided nearly $1 billion and 44 million acres amongst Alaskan native peoples, and allowed construction of the Alaskan pipeline. The bill was introduced by Ted Stevens, then in his first term, and was subsequently ratified by the Inupiat. Stevens, now one of the Senate’s old bulls, had his home searched earlier this week in a widening criminal bribery probe.

In 2003, shortly before his 80th birthday, Stevens told a gathering of Alaskan natives:

“I have long been concerned about what will happen when I can no longer deliver the funds you need. I want to ensure, to the best of my ability, that we have built programs for the Native community that are sustainable well into the future. I have been working toward that end. “

That’s a worthy goal. Stevens may or may not be corrupt. He may be out-of-touch likening the Internet to “a series of tubes.” But he deserves our praise for giving the Inupiat a seat at the rich government contracting feast. There is no way that a group of walrus-hunters could have gotten there without help from the man who represents them. Compare that to Duke Cunningham, who gave favors away to people like Mitch Wade who couldn’t even vote for him.

Instead of ruining their Native lands by plopping a casino-resort in the middle of it (casinos aren’t allowed in Alaska), the Inupiat are creating a business venture and acquiring the skills that come with to the benefit of future generations. There’s the old saw about teaching a man to fish vs. giving him one. I suspect the Inupiat know all about that.