But Did They Lose Any Alcohol or Tobacco?

An audit has found that the Justice Department's Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms Bureau has lost quite a few weapons (ATF lost 76 weapons).

(AP) The ATF lost 76 weapons and hundreds of laptops over five years, the Justice Department reported Wednesday, blaming carelessness and sloppy record-keeping.

Thirty-five of the missing handguns, rifles, Tasers and other weapons were stolen, as were 50 laptops, the internal audit found. Two of the stolen weapons were used in crimes.

The audit by Justice Department Inspector General Glenn A. Fine found "inadequate" oversight of weapons and laptops resulted in "significant rates of losses" at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

"It is especially troubling that that ATF's rate of loss for weapons was nearly double that of the FBI and DEA, and that ATF did not even know whether most of its lost, stolen, or missing laptop computers contained sensitive or classified information," he added.

What's going on over there at ATF? Guys, this is embarrassing. If one of the firearms dealers you regulate 'lost' that many weapons you would yank his licence.

Equivocal Victory in Sanaa

The attack that occurred this morning at the U.S. Embassy in Sanaa, Yeman, was a failure for the attackers, in that they did not get their vehicle-borne bombs inside the chancery's perimeter or manage to kill any U.S. citizens, but that doesn't make it a victory for the other side. Such incidents, in which robust security measures prevent an attack from succeeding, are at best equivocal victories. They lost, but we didn't really win. No matter how well the security works to prevent a greater tragedy, innocent people are still killed. In this incident, one of the innocent victims was an Indian nurse who happened to be visiting the embassy on business.

There is much I could say about the scenario employed by the attackers, and how it illustrates a rising trend in multiple/sequential vehicle bombs. But since I'm trying to avoid 'matters of official concern' to the State Department, I'll hang back a day or two before commenting further on that. For now, suffice it to say that there are big lessons to be learned from this incident, and I hope the Department will conduct the same sort of accountability review that it would undertake if U.S. government employees had been killed.

Here's the official Department statement:

Attack on Embassy Sana’a, Statement by Secretary Condoleezza Rice

Washington, DC
September 17, 2008

The United States strongly condemns today’s terrorist attack on the U.S. Embassy in Sana’a, Yemen. This attack underscores the malicious disregard for human life shown by the terrorists perpetrating this attack. No political cause justifies the murder of innocent people.

Fast action by Embassy security personnel and host nation Embassy forces, aided by the Embassy’s security systems and its emergency procedures, were vital in limiting the harm to Embassy employees and to the public who regularly visit the Embassy. This callous attack reminds us that American and locally-employed staff at our embassies serve the United States in many dangerous environments worldwide, often at great personal risk. We are proud of the work that they do.

I extend my condolences to the families and loved ones of those who were tragically killed or injured in the attack. Their sacrifices reinforce our commitment to remain vigilant and ready to defeat the forces of global terrorism.

FBI = Fallacious Bacillus Investigation

FBI Director Mueller appeared before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee today and repeated his performance at yesterday's House Judiciary Committee oversight hearing. That is to say, he flatly refused to answer their questions about the Amerithrax investigation.

Not all the Senators on the Committee took this lying down. According to the Washington Post (Lawmakers Question Results of Anthrax Investigation ):

Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont) told FBI leaders this morning that he does not believe "in any way shape or manner" that lead anthrax suspect Bruce E. Ivins acted alone.

Leahy, an intended recipient of one of the anthrax-packed 2001 letters, publicly cast doubt on the bureau's conclusion last month that the bioweapons researcher carried out the notorious attacks as the sole culprit.

See Salon.com for more (Key senators dispute FBI's anthrax case against Bruce Ivins).

When will the Congress finally stand up and pimp-slap Director Mueller? Leahy seemed mad enough to demand answers; it remains to be seen whether his fellow Congressmen are ready, at long last, to conduct actual oversight of the FBI.

FBI = Fugacious Blindsiding Insult

The House Judiciary Committee held an FBI oversight hearing today, one they had prepared for by sending the FBI Director a set of specific questions. FBI Director Mueller appeared at the hearing - the sole witness - and blithely declined to answer those questions; instead, he provided this boilerplate written statement and then blew off the Committee's surprised responses.

Here's Salon.com's reaction to today's hearing:

But after just an hour of the hearing, it is painfully clear that -- as is true in virtually all of these hearings now before a pitifully powerless Congress -- Mueller won't provide the Committee with even a single answer of import, won't even pretend to, and the Committee has no intent to compel him to do so. Indeed, the hearing began with an angry statement from Chairman Conyers about the fact that the FBI, in general, simply ignores all inquiries for information and answers from the Committee for months and months and months and then shows up at these hearings unprepared to answer even the questions they are advised will be asked, knowing that each member only has five minutes and can't actually accomplish anything.

In response, Mueller, with palpable boredom at Conyer's angry outburst, dutifully recited a series of standard bureaucratic buzz-phrases about how the FBI endeavors to respond to the Committee's inquiries as promptly and fully as possible, how he is happy to meet with Committee members to address their concerns, how the need to carefully scrutinize the Bureau's responses makes delays inevitable, etc. etc. In response, Conyers literally pleaded with Mueller to be more forthcoming in the future, observed that the hearing was likely to be worthless -- it's certainly hard to argue with that -- and then assured Mueller that Conyers "wasn't trying to force you to give this information." Your impotent Congress in a nutshell. (The oversight joke)

It never ceases to amaze me how the FBI gets away with this sort of nonsense.

Passport to Prison

Two types of passport criminality were in the news today. First, the State Department announced mass arrests in a passport fraud investigation (Diplomatic Security Investigation Results in 112 Suspects Charged With Federal Passport Fraud ).

And second, one of the State Department contractor employees who was caught peeping into passport application files several months ago was charged with unauthorized computer access, a Class A misdemeanor (Contractor Charged In Passport Snoop).

Half a Million of my Fellow Civil Servants are Deadbeats

It seems that The Honorable Congressman Charles B. Rangel (D-New York) isn't the only civil servant with a low regard for the Internal Revenue Service. According to WTOP News, there were 171,549 current federal workers who did not voluntarily pay their federal income taxes in 2007, and nearly half a million federal employees of all types - both active and retired, military and civilian - who are delinquent (see Federal workers owe billions in unpaid taxes).

WASHINGTON — The Internal Revenue Service is trying to collect billions of dollars in late taxes from nearly half a million federal employees.

Documents obtained by WTOP radio through the Freedom of Information Act show the federal employees and retirees did not pay more than $3.5 billion in taxes owed last year. The agency with the most delinquent employees was the U.S. Postal Service. Nearly 4.2 percent of its 747,000 workers are delinquent.

The IRS would not provide comparable data for the general population. The Executive Office of the President, which includes the White House, has 58 employees who did not pay more than $319,000. More than 1,000 Capitol Hill workers are on the list. About 152,000 of the delinquent federal workers have entered into payment plans.

The most interesting thing about this story is that the IRS tracks federal worker non-payment by agency. According to the agency-by-agency breakdown that is linked to the WTOP report, the biggest deadbeats are at the General Printing Office, at 7.23%. Guys, get your heads out of those books and file a 1040! The lowest rates of delinquency were among those goody-two-shoes at the Justice (1.72%) and Treasury (1.13%) Departments.

My own agency, the [REDACTED] [the foreign affairs department] was reasonably law-abiding with only 3.03% non-payers, and I'm sure they all had good excuses, like being deployed to Iraq. The Defense Department delinquency rate was up there, at 5.0%, and the rates for the CIA and FBI were mysteriously unlisted.

A Public Historian Who Actually Respects the Public

Retired Chief Historian of the National Park Service, Dwight Pitcaithley









There is a terrific interview with America's foremost public historian ["public," meaning one who practices history for the enlightenment of the general population, rather than for consumption within academic circles] at the Thunderbear web-zine (see: THE LAST WORD---DWIGHT PITCAITHLEY). Parts of it were excerpted by the National Park Service (here: A Historian's Take on the National Park Service), from which Dr. Pitcaithley recently retired as Chief Historian.

Dr. Pitcaithley changed the direction of the NPS from politically safe 'cultural resource management' of our national parks and heritage sites to the more important, but unavoidably contentious, task of historical interpretation. This especially affected how the NPS ran the Civil War battlefields that it inherited from the War Department in the 1930s, where the long-standing memorializing of the South's Lost Cause was increasingly challenged by an interpretation that found the primary cause of the war in the institution of slavery.

NPS today has an admirable record of correcting - gently, and always with respect for all parties - the conspicuous lack of historical legitimacy at many of the nation's most cherished and heavily-visited sites. These include Washington's birthplace, where the 'birth' house that was actually constructed in 1931 has finally been correctly labeled a Memorial House rather than a true replica, and the Lincoln birthplace site, where the log cabin, which is actually the somewhat jumbled remains of a traveling display built 30 years after Lincoln's death, has been re-named the 'symbolic' cabin. The NPS history staff is often in the uncomfortable position of telling the public, including its pressure groups and their Congressional representatives, that some of the things they've 'known' all their lives aren't true.

A few quotes:

NPS has a fundamental educational role to play in this country inside parks and outside parks. We require the study of history in our schools to develop a more informed citizenry, so that the decisions we make today are based on some knowledge of how similar issues were handled in the past. The value of historical parks is their infinite capacity to inspire us at places where this experiment in democracy, this journey of participatory government, plays out.

The stories embedded on the landscape of Gettysburg and Manzanar, and Little Bighorn, in the library at Adams NHS, and in the asphalt of the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma all provide lessons in courage and determination and hope. They make us proud and they make us sad, and most of all we hope, they make us think about the future of the country and how we as individuals can improve it. Natural parks also contain stories, quoting from the Advisory Board report again, useful to "building a citizenry that is committed to conserving its heritage and its home on earth."

I especially liked this one:

If your question is "is it possible to keep politics out of the interpretation of history by the NPS?" I think the answer is probably a qualified "yes." In my thirty years as a historian in the Service, I never was required, or even asked, to change a message or text for political reasons. When one is interpreting history in the public sector or, as Ed Linenthal describes it, "committing history in public," there will always be those who have a different view of the past and will argue the point. The antidote is a strong understanding of the past based firmly on primary source material. Quoting, in context of course, the voices of the participants of historic events does not leave much room for argument.

Dr. Pitcaithley has an unusual background for an academic, which I'm sure contributes to his notable empathy for his dear, but often mis-educated, fellow citizens. His parents were Vaudeville performers who traveled throughout the country during the Depression. He dropped out of college to join the Marines, and was a forward artillery observer in Vietnam for six months in 1966 until badly wounded during a battle with two North Vietnamese Army regiments. As he relates in the interview, the fact that he could wear a Purple Heart lapel pin helped him to find common ground with the frequently furious Civil War heritage groups who objected to the NPS placing its interpretation of the cause of the war on the sacred ground of battlefields.

I got to know Dr. Pitcaithey slightly when he taught a course in historic preservation at a Washington-area university while working at NPS Headquarters, and I treasure the brief association I had with him. It was clear to me that he is an astute historian, but also, and just as importantly, a man who genuinely likes the American public and assumes the best of them. Would that all my fellow civil servants followed his example.