The Muckraker

Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin says she has fought against earmarks. Not according to the video record on YouTube. CIR's Will Evans blogs for the Secret Money Project on NPR.org:

My esteemed co-blogger (Peter Overby) has had a couple of broadcast pieces, on Tuesday's ATC and today's Morning Edition, examining Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin's complicated record on earmarks. We have some extra goodies on Palin's record here.

Gov. Palin and running mate John McCain have trumpeted her opposition to earmarks like the infamous Alaskan "bridge to nowhere," which became a rallying call against congressional pork projects. But when she was running for governor in 2006, Palin told voters she supported projects like the bridge. Here's a clip of Palin at an Alaska Conservation Voters candidate forum saying, "I do support the infrastructure projects that are on tap here in the state of Alaska that our congressional delegations worked hard for."




At another candidate forum, Palin had kind words for Rep. Don Young (R-AK) and his renowned ability to bring home the federal bacon.

"And our congressional delegation, God bless 'em. They do a great job for us," she said at the forum hosted by the Alaska Professional Design Council. "Representative Don Young, especially God bless him, with transportation -- Alaska did so well under the very basic provisions of the transportation act that he wrote just a couple of years ago. We had a nice bump there. We're very, very fortunate to receive the largesse that Don Young was able to put together for Alaska."




Now, it was Young who plopped the "bridge to nowhere" in federal legislation to begin with. But even that kind of influence doesn't help him these days. Not too many people are trying to cozy up with Young now that he's in trouble -- and clearly Palin has changed her mind about him.

What kind of trouble? The 18-term Alaska congressman is under federal investigation in a corruption scandal that has already nailed several state lawmakers and produced an indictment of Alaska's other earmark champion, Sen. Ted Stevens (R).

It's not even clear whether Young survived his primary election last week. His main opponent was Sean Parnell, Palin's lieutenant governor. The free-market Club For Growth ran ads attacking his free and easy use of federal tax money for earmarks. He seemed so vulnerable that Democrats actually spent money to help him because they thought he'd be weaker than Parnell in the general election. Palin, no longer feeling so rosy about Young's "largesse" for Alaska, backed Parnell.

Will Evans blogs for the Secret Money Project, a special project by CIR and NPR tracking independent campaign ads during the 2008 election:

A liberal group called Campaign for America's Future has a new ad designed, it seems, mainly to annoy the delegates to the Republican National Convention.

The ad starts with the words, "To the conservatives gathered in St. Paul: Thanks for the memories..." It goes on to show images of a submerged New Orleans, a gas pump with its dials spinning, a home-foreclosure sign and President Bush's "Mission Accomplished" banner. Get it?

Here's the thing, though. The ad, according to the group, is airing this week "in 365,000 hotel rooms across the country." So, either hotel guests are a key swing voter demographic we haven't heard about yet, or Campaign for America's Future decided the best way to spend its money was to pester Republican delegates trying to catch a break from the speeches in the solace of their hotel rooms.

Campaign for America's Future is a 501(c)(4) nonprofit, so it's hard to know who funds it, but the Service Employees International Union gave the group $50,000 in 2007 and the AFL-CIO gave $67,500 from 2006-07.

It was interesting to read the New York Times report on Monday revealing the reasons behind the Swiss government's destruction of evidence pertaining to a family of three Swiss engineers linked to AQ Khan's global nuclear sales enterprise. The Tinner family—father Friedrich and his two sons Urs and Marco—were under investigation for helping orchestrate Khan's sale of sophisticated nuclear technology to Libya and Iran; they were Khan's key European intermediaries.

In their story, William Broad and David Sanger revealed the key reasons for the destruction: Pressure from the CIA to hide the role played by the Tinners in supplying them with information that ultimately led to the dismantling of Khan's network. Broad and Sanger delve deeply into the Tinner case as an example of the tensions between two conflicting goals: First, to block nuclear proliferation; and second, to bring the key proliferators to justice. This presents a direct challenge to intelligence agencies, which are often unwilling to share how they gathered evidence on such operations.

These are themes that we explored in our hour-long radio documentary, "Business of the Bomb", a collaboration with American RadioWorks, that aired on national public radio stations across the country last April and May.

In "Business of the Bomb," ARW correspondent Michael Montgomery and I visited the South African end of Khan's global operation, Tradefin Engineering, a factory outside of Johanessberg where a Swiss, a German and a South African trio of businessmen created key components for the Libyan enrichment facility purchased from Khan by Libya. Investigators found a videotape on the premises used by AQ Khan to advertise his capacity to build, on demand, nuclear enrichment and bomb-making facilities. (We obtained exclusive access to that tape, and present an audio excerpt here; you'll hear the voice of AQ Khan himself pitching to others his success at building Pakistan's nuclear arsenal).

In the Tradefin case, the US Department of Energy refused to cooperate with South African authorities in a public trial due to their concerns about revealing intelligence sources and methods. The result? South Africa's ultimately unsuccessful effort to keep the trial secret established an important principle of openness in that country, and, some in South Africa suspect, led to lighter sentences for the principle players, none of whom ultimately had to serve time in prison. "I'd rather not discuss that," said the DoE's head of non-proliferation James Tobey, deputy undersecretary for nuclear non-proliferation at the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration when we asked him about the case.

Back in March, up to the last minute before recording our narration, we were trying to confirm the Swiss destruction of evidence in the Tinner case, which I'd learned from an anonymous tip. The tip was confirmed by Margrit Meyer, chief assistant to Swiss Federal Magistrate, who said that the evidence had been destroyed as the case was transferred from the Swiss Attorney General's office to that of the Federal Magistrate for further investigation "Some evidence is not there anymore," she told me in a March telephone interview from her office in the Swiss capital of Berne. Meyer refused to identify the nature of the evidence or how or why it was destroyed.

I was astounded to see that his U.S. address was that of the CIA in Washington DC. His given phone number was the CIA switchboard in Langley, Virginia. His title was "Agent."Two months later, in May, Switzerland's President, Pascal Couchepin, announced to the world that the Tinner files, including nuclear bomb designs, had been destroyed. Now Broad and Sanger have added considerable rich detail suggesting it was the United States which requested the file's destruction "less to thwart terrorists than to hide evidence of a clandestine relationship between the Tinners and the CIA." The three men, they report, received at least $1 million in payments from the agency for their inside tips on Khan's operation.

One other point of interest to a story that no doubt will continue to unfold: When we were conducting our final reporting back in March, I researched Urs Tinner—the one of the three considered most deeply involved in Khan's illicit enterprise—through the electronic database Accurint. I was astounded at the time to see that his U.S. address was that of the Central Intelligence Agency in Washington DC. His given phone number was the CIA switchboard in Langley, Virginia. His title was "Agent." This seemed so outlandishly brazen at the time that I didn't trust it, that such a secret could be hidden in such full sight (with the help of a subscription to Accurint). Congratulations to Broad and Sanger for confirming the long and extraordinary story behind that address.

In a new episode of iWitness, FRONTLINE/World's web series, curator Joe Rubin talks to Gigi Ugulava, the mayor of Georgia's capital Tbilisi and a confidant of President Mikhail Saakashvili.

Ugulava describes the mounting refugee crisis facing his city as Georgians flood in from Gori and other towns bombed by the Russian army, and how the city is reacting as Russian tanks remain less than 40 miles from the capital. Ugulava tells FRONTLINE/World that when it comes to Tbilisi, Georgians are drawing a red line. "If Russia will succeed here, they will be halfway to reestablishing the Soviet Union and nobody can stop them then."

>> Watch the episode on the iWitness website.

CIR's Will Evans has this report on the Secret Money Project blog:

Attack Ad Veteran Teams With Attack Book Author

Jerome Corsi may be getting all the attention right now for his anti-Obama attack book, but there's another veteran political operative who has been toiling away to take down the Democratic candidate with a Swift-Boat-style campaign. And now, the two are working together.

Floyd Brown, whose most famous effort was the "Willie Horton ad" that damaged Democrat Michael Dukakis' presidential campaign in 1988, has been working on a viral campaign to send anti-Obama videos to millions of voters. His main organization, the National Campaign Fund, runs the Web site ExposeObama.com, which features videos linking Obama to gang violence and questioning Obama's assertion that he's never been a Muslim (below).



(The Obama campaign's "Fight the Smears" Web site has a special entry for Brown.)

Brown, in an interview today, says he has two more upcoming videos based on a collaboration with Corsi, co-author of the book that launched the crippling Swift Boat veterans critique of Democrat John Kerry in 2004. The new ads are based on Corsi's new book, "The Obama Nation."

But this election is different from the ones that produced Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and the Willie Horton ad.

Brown is running a strictly regulated political action committee funded only by small donors, instead of a 527 organization with unlimited donations like the Swift Boat group. That 527 and others were later fined by the Federal Election Commission for violating election laws, and Brown says that's enough to scare him off. "Would you go to jail for a political message?" he asked rhetorically.

And instead of concentrating on televised ads as he did in 1988, Brown is focusing almost all of his resources on a viral email and web campaign to spread his message.

"An ad on Monday Night Football where the guy's getting up to grab a beer [during commercials] is not more effective than where someone sits down and clicks an ad to watch all the way through," said Brown, who also notes that Web ads are much cheaper.

"We have just had a blitzing program, to blitz conservative websites and conservative email lists," he said. "We've sent millions of emails."

Brown says he's focusing on swaying conservatives because, when his group launched its effort earlier this year, some religious conservatives had a positive view of Obama. That—thanks to controversy over Obama's former pastor and, Brown says, the ExposeObama.com campaign—has faded.

Certainly, Brown's group has gained some traction. From April through June it raised nearly half a million dollars from small donors, according to FEC filings.

But why hasn't his or any other ads had the same impact as the Swift Boat ads or Willie Horton?

Brown tried casting one of his Obama ads as "Willie Horton II," (below), but that hasn't panned out.



Brown thinks the Horton ad—which blamed Dukakis for temporarily releasing a convicted felon who then raped a woman—gets too much credit, anyway. Dukakis, he says, helped do himself in. President Clinton, on the other hand, was much better at deflecting attacks. And what about Obama?

"If television and Hollywood manipulation are what decide this election, then Obama wins hands down," Brown says. "He's got the dough, he's got people like [David] Geffen and the whole Dreamworks crew. He's had a very effectively crafted campaign."

But it's not over yet.

"The Willie Horton ad didn't air till Labor Day," Brown says. "There's still a lot of time for things to happen."

—Will Evans

A new project by CIR and NPR follows the money behind independent campaign ads leading up to the 2008 election. The Election 2008: Secret Money Project tracks the funders of ads intended to sway voters—much like the ones launched by Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, the independent organization that attacked Senator John Kerry in 2004.

Watch the ads. Read the analysis. See who's paying, and who they're connected to. A recent post on the Secret Money Project by CIR's Will Evans:

Former Swift Boat Donor Finds New Target

Mark Udall, meet Bob Perry.

Udall, a Democratic member of Congress from Colorado, is running for Senate this year in a race that is attracting out-of-state money from all sides.

Perry, a Texas developer, gave $4.4 million to Swift Boat Veterans for Truth to help defeat John Kerry in 2004. FEC reports reveal that the Texan dropped $400,000 this month to air an ad criticizing Udall for "wasteful" spending.

Perry gave the money to the Club for Growth. The group said in a press release that the ad will be up for 2 weeks.

Watch the ad:

This week, the Online News Association announced the finalists for its Online Journalism Awards, honoring excellence in digital journalism. Among them were nine investigative reports, many of which used multimedia tools to get behind the story with powerful visuals, databases and original documents.

Investigative, Large Site

> Unequal Justice | DallasNews.com, The Dallas Morning News
Five-part series uses video, print and interactive features to probe why so many Dallas County murderers are on probation. Also nominated for the Knight Award for Public Service.

> Talking to the Taliban | TheGlobeandMail.com
Provides a portrait of Taliban foot soldiers in their own words, based on interviews conducted by a single researcher with a video camera and standardized questionnaire. All 42 transcribed, raw videos are included in the six-part series, along with graphics, maps and discussions with reporter Graeme Smith. Also nominated in the Multimedia Feature, Large Site category.

> Inside the CIA's Notorious "Black Sites" | Salon.com, Mark Benjamin
The "first in-depth, first-person account from inside the secret U.S. prisons," given by Mohamed Farag Ahmad Bashmilah, a Yemeni held for 19 months without being charged.

> Big Phat Liar | TheSmokingGun.com
Print story unravels how "a federal inmate duped the Los Angeles Times, fabricated FBI reports, and linked Sean 'Diddy' Combs to 1994 ambush of Tupac Shakur."

Investigative, Small Site

> Schools Promote Students Despite Widespread Failure | Azstarnet.com, Arizona Daily Star
Three-part series uses print and video storytelling to uncover social promotion of failing students in Tucson-area schools, then provides original documents and a database of local school performance to dig deeper.

> Blood and Money | EastValleyTribune.com, East Valley (Ariz.) Tribune
Traces the path of human smuggling from Mexico to Arizona using a three-part print series, videos in both Spanish and English, and interactive route maps.

> Coincidence or Cluster | NWHerald.com, The Northwest (Ill.) Herald
Six-part series on the McCullom Lake brain cancer lawsuits and the stories behind them, told through videos, interactive maps and original documents gathered over a six-month investigation.

> The Permanent Republican Majority | RawStory.com, The Raw Story
Five-part investigation into the "architects and the execution of backroom Republican politics," starting with the jailing of Don Siegelman, former Democratic governor of Alabama.

> 'I Didn't Do That Murder': Lebrew Jones and the death of Micki Hall | RecordOnline.com, The Times Herald Record (Middletown, N.Y.)
Uses videos, graphics and original case files to investigate the 20-year-old murder case of a New York City prostitute, and the man who says he was wrongly convicted.

The winners will be announced at the 2008 ONA Conference Awards Banquet on Sept. 13 at the Capital Hilton in Washington, D.C.

A type of "safe" pesticide found in household products—from lice shampoo to Raid bug spray—is responsible for a surge in injuries and deaths over the past decade, according to Environmental Protection Agency data acquired by the Center for Public Integrity. In a new report, "Perils of the New Pesticides," CPI reveals that "the number of reported human health problems, including severe reactions, attributed to pyrethrins and pyrethroids increased by about 300 percent over the past decade ... [the chemicals] accounted for more than 26 percent of all fatal, 'major,' and 'moderate' human incidents in the United States in 2007, up from 15 percent in 1998."

Pyrethrins, extracted from the chrysanthemum plant, and their synthetic relatives, pyrethroids, have exploded in popularity over the last decade. They are now used in thousands of consumer products from Hartz Dog Flea & Tick Killer to Raid Ant and Roach Killer. These chemicals are found in bug-repellant clothing, flea collars, automatic misting devices, lawn-care products, and carpet sprays. Manufacturers developed them as safer alternatives to a class of compounds, derived from Nazi nerve gases, called organophosphates, found in products such as Dursban. The chemicals were widely used in American homes as recently as the late 1990s but are no longer approved by the Environmental Protection Agency for indoor use.

The EPA released its pesticide incident-reporting database in response to a Freedom of Information Act request from CPI earlier this year. The database was called one of the “Ten Most Wanted Government Documents” by the Center for Democracy and Technology.

>> Read "Perils of the New Pesticides" by the Center for Public Integrity.

While the Occupational Safety and Health Administration handed out its third largest fine in history, outside critics and an internal whistleblower are calling for more stringent regulations and for the agency to better police its own workers.

The Imperial Sugar explosion in February, which killed 13 workers, put OSHA in the spotlight. While OSHA announced an $8.7 million fine on Friday, Imperial Sugar said that it met OSHA regulations and will fight the fine, according to an article in the New York Times.

Critics, on the other hand, want OSHA to tighten rules and ramp up oversight. Safety violations are often grouped into the agency’s “general duty” clause, allowing inspectors to cite companies for unsafe practices that are not specifically regulated.

So while there were 44 violations issued for spark-producing electrical equipment, which is regulated, under the general duty clause there were only two, one at each plant, for faulty ventilation and two for failing to maintain dust collection systems.

“It’s basically an admission that their standards have gaps,” Mr. [Eric] Frumin said.

For example, many safety violations aren’t on OSHA’s list of regulations, so inspectors have to cite them as general violations.

Large explosions and other tragedies briefly spotlight draw attention to workplace safety. But job-related health issues, as opposed to accidents, account for 80 percent of all workplace problems, Adam Finkel, OSHA’s former director of health standards, notes.

In 2002, Finkel leaked documents showing that OSHA was not testing its own inspectors for beryllium exposure. Finkel was transferred to a non-supervisor position within OSHA later that year. OSHA did not start testing inspectors until 2004. A year ago, a federal judge ordered OSHA to release the inspection data after Finkel filed a Freedom of Information Act request. Alternet reports:

The results were "a big eye-opener" for Finkel. Of OSHA's 989 inspectors in March 2005, 271 were tested, and 10 – or 3.7 percent ¬– were confirmed positive for sensitization. Based on information from Newman, the beryllium expert, Finkel had expected only 1 to 2 percent would be positive. As of March 2008, the numbers had increased only slightly, to 11 confirmed positives out of 301 tests.

What do those results mean for the hundreds of other OSHA inspectors -- not to mention 1,000 or more retirees? "I don't know if it's the tip of the iceberg or the whole iceberg," Finkel says. So he went back into the ring with OSHA, filing a Freedom of Information Act request to find out how much beryllium the inspectors were exposed to. Then he went a step further, requesting records from all inspections where OSHA took samples for air contaminants.

>>Learn more about whistleblowers in the CIR and Salon report The War on Whistleblowers.

The American Journalism Review features the Chauncey Bailey Project in its August/September issue, with senior writer Sherry Ricchiardi calling it "the biggest journalistic show of force since 1976."

From AJR:

During the past 10 months, media professionals in the Bay Area have taken collaborative journalism to new heights as they produced more than 140 stories related to Your Black Muslim Bakery and Bailey's assassination.

It's the biggest journalistic show of force since 1976, when reporter Don Bolles' car was blown up by a bomb while he was investigating organized crime in Phoenix. Journalists from all over the country gathered to continue Bolles' work under the banner of the Arizona Project.

At the first anniversary of Bailey's death, reporters continue to peel away layers of intrigue about a Bay Area crime family that for years confounded Oakland police and city officials. Leadership of Your Black Muslim Bakery, founded by Yusuf Ali Bey in 1971, has been implicated in such crimes as torture, murder and child rape.

As the project broke important stories, a one-for-all-and-all-for-one mentality took hold among the core group of reporters and news managers. "We're competitive with each other until something like this befalls one of us," says [Oakland Tribune reporter Josh] Richman, who has devoted large blocks of time to the investigation. "Then we work as a team to get to the truth."

More recent news on the Chauncey Bailey Project:

>The National Association of Black Journalists has honored the project with its Best Practices Award, reports the Oakland Tribune:

"It is horrendous when a journalist is killed for reporting on a story that needs to be told," said Barbara Ciara, president of the association. "This is really something that deserves to be honored, so it was an easy decision."

>The trial of Devaundre Broussard, the bakery handyman charged with murder in the 2007 slaying who since recanted, has been postponed. From the Oakland Tribune:

Judge C. Don Clay granted the delay to allow Broussard's attorney, LeRue Grim, more time to review evidence in the case. Clay set Sept. 19 for a hearing to set a trial date.

According to Grim, the secret police video released by the Chauncey Bailey Project on June 18 may exonerate his client. From KCBS:

Grim claims law enforcement videotape shows Devaughndre Broussard was ordered by Yusuf Bey IV, the leader of the now-defunct Your Black Muslim Bakery, to falsely confess to Bailey's murder.

Watch the video or share it with others on Vimeo, YouTube or blip.tv.
See more stories by the Chauncey Bailey Project.