Host/Sponsor: Medill National Security Journalism Initiative

Overview: It’s clear that the role of whistleblowers has never been more in the news or important. This week, it was learned the Associated Press was being surveilled by the government to determine its reporters’ sources for a story about a failed al-Qaida plot. This webinar will give reporters the facts about laws regarding whistleblowers as well as what reporters need to know when reporting on information gained from whistleblowers or leaks and when reporting on investigations of whistleblowers.

Dan Meyer

Presenter: Dan Meyer, the Pentagon’s director of whistleblowing and transparency, was a whistleblower himself to the Senate Armed Services Committee following the explosion onboard the battleship IOWA (BB-61) in 1989. He now advises the Inspector General of the Department of Defense on the protection of sources to the Department’s audits, investigations, inspections and evaluations. Over the past six months, he has been the chair of an informal working group coordinating the implementation of PPD-19, the president’s whistleblower protection program for the intelligence community.

Register: Visit this page. 

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the webinar.

This webinar is hosted by the Medill National Security Journalism Initiative. For questions, contact Natalie Jones at natalie.jones@northwestern.edu.

“My fear is that the Boston bombers may have succeeded because our system failed,” said Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas, chairman of the House Homeland Security committee at the first public Congressional hearing on the terrorist attack.

“We learned over a decade ago, the danger in failing to connect the dots. The cornerstone of the 9/11 Commission Report was that agencies had stove-piped and intelligence, which prevented us from seeing potential terrorist plots,” McCaul said.

In the 9/11 attacks, U.S. intelligence agencies had information regarding the hijackers prior to the attacks, yet the agencies weren’t communicating with one another.  From these events, the Department of Homeland Security was created, along with other government agencies, and the U.S. took stronger measurements to prevent future terrorism acts.

Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, and brother, Dzhokhar, 19, carried out the attack at the Boston Marathon.  It’s been reported that Russian authorities notified the CIA and FBI, on separate accounts, about Tamerlan possibly becoming radicalized and seeking more fuel from groups in Dagestan, part of the North Caucasus of Russia and home of Islamist militants.

Tamerlan was put on the U.S. Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment database in late 2011, which keeps a list of all terrorism suspects and has reached 875,000 names. It’s maintained by the National Counterterrorism Center. The information on the list is available to all counterterrorism professionals throughout the Intelligence Community, including the Department of Defense, according to a description on its website.

But according to an LA Times article, this database doesn’t serve as a watch list.

“The database is so large and the records can be so vague that there often is little a law enforcement agency is willing or able to do in response to a TIDE match,” wrote the author. Therefore, “too vague to flag Boston suspect.”

This year, the Government Accountability Office, which serves as a watchdog, found that the sharing and managing of terrorism-related information between government agencies is a “high risk.” The GAO updates this high-risk list every two years with programs that need continued attention “due to their vulnerabilities to fraud, waste, abuse, and mismanagement, or are most in need of transformation.” The report found that the federal government is working to better the sharing of information but said it has  “not yet estimated and planned for the resources needed” to tackle this issue.

Michael Weiser, who studied international relations and Middle East politics at Tel-Aviv University and California State University said communication across all government agencies is important, but isn’t sure if the Boston attacks could have been prevented.

“In this case it might have increased the chance of detection, but I don’t know it if would have been decisive,” Weiser said.

The problem, he said, is many think of terrorism threats coming from a specific region.

“The radicalized Islamist movement is not necessarily isolated to a localized area,” Weiser said, adding that it could come from anywhere from the Philippines to Yemen to America. But cautioned that he does not know whether or not federal agencies examined Tamerlan with this in mind.

“The idea is to think globally. Jihadism is a global movement,” he said.

With this, some believe the focus should now be on homegrown terrorism and also cyber-radicalization, like extremists who post videos on YouTube that can reach millions across the world. Even President Barack Obama has said he believes the brothers acted alone in the attacks.

“One of the dangers that we now face are self-radicalized individuals who are already here in the United States,” Obama said at a news conference.

A New York Times article reports that the “Tsarnaev brothers appear to have been radicalized and instructed in explosives not at a training camp but at home on the Internet.” The author writes that Dzhokhar told investigators that he and his brother followed manuals and “do-it-yourself articles” on how to carry out attacks in the U.S. without having to go abroad.

With this being an ongoing investigation, there will be many more details revealed as time comes.  But, I will have to agree with Weiser that we, as a nation, have to start looking at these events as a “global threat” rather than coming from one specific region or area. We must also examine how agencies can control the growing trend of cyber-radicalization.

Data below compiled from weekly TSA Blog updates on the number and type of weapons confiscated during carry-on searches at airports. Data is updated weekly (current data through May 9, 2013). (Download CSV file).

The number of confiscations was up 14% in the first quarter of this year compared to a year earlier, with a significant bump in January driving the increase. (Full story on Quarter 1 2013 vs. 2012) Data in these charts, and the download file, is up to date to include confiscations through Jan. 31.

Use your mouse to roll over the bars on the top chart to see totals for each week.

Daily Data

Download Data

→ Download year-to-date data. (Click on File | Download As and choose your format).

Thanks to NSJI’s Natalie Jones for help with data entry.

Ohio Attorney General cracks down on fraudulent veterans charities

Raising money in the name of veterans can be a lucrative business, but those doing so in Ohio should watch out — the state’s attorney general’s office has been rooting out and cracking down on offenders in recent years.  Josh Sweigart of the Dayton Tribune reports on recent investigations.

Sexual assault survivor shares story IN washington

As military sexual assault continues to make headlines, a former Army. Spc. volunteers to speak about her own past traumas to groups at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, southwest of Tacoma, Wash. Christina Jones hopes that sharing her experiences will encourage other victims to come forward. Connie Lincoln-Pinheiro of Northwestmilitary.com reports.

Unexploded WW II-era Bomb found at Explosive Ordnance Disposal School

Lauren Sage Reinlie of the Northwest Florida Daily News reports that finding unexploded bombs on the grounds of the Eglin Air Force Base in northwest Florida is not uncommon. Last Wednesday, the discovery of one such bomb at, of all places, the Navy’s Explosive Ordnance Disposal school caused evacuations. Full story.

As his time in office goes on, however, it becomes increasingly apparent that this drive for transparency does not extend to the president’s counterterrorism programs, and, more specifically, his use of drone strikes.

Although drone strikes are a more recent phenomenon in the public eye, their use in Pakistan and Yemen actually dates back to 2004 and the Bush administration.

During his tenure, President George W. Bush authorized an estimated 49 strikes within these countries. Though the official death toll from these strikes is unknown, the New America Foundation estimates they killed between 211and 356 militants, 118 and 135 civilians and 65 and 72 unknowns. Obama, on the other hand, has launched approximately 379 drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen, killing an estimated 1,771 to 2,895 militants, 158 to 233 civilians and 135 to 258 unknowns, according to the Washington think tank. The New America Foundation attributes the wide range of these estimates to several factors, including the lack of verifiable information about the actual number of people killed, and whether they were civilians or combatants.

Authorizing nearly eight times more covert drone strikes than Bush has Obama’s State of the Union promise this last February to make drone strikes “even more transparent to the America people and to the world” ringing somewhat hollow. It also has more and more critics’ fingers pointing to a foreboding moment in his 2009 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech: “There will be times when nations — acting individually or in concert — will find the use of force not only necessary, but morally justified.”

The qualifier of moral justification found itself under siege when drone strikes that resulted in the death of three American citizens in Yemen were made public; the intentional killings of Anwar al-Awlaki, Samir Khan and, a victim of collateral damage, Awlaki’s 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki.

The lack of charges against these men, even though they were labeled as loyal affiliates of al-Qaida, were largely seen as immoral by the advocacy community, including the American Civil Liberties Union, which is attempting to sue the government on the Awlaki family’s behalf. The ACLU claims that Awlaki’s speeches advocating violence against the United States should have been protected under the 1^st Amendment.

In response, the government claims Awlaki was actually an al-Qaida operational leader, actively participating in the planning and execution of terrorist attacks. This justification for attacks against American citizens is documented in an Obama administration “white paper,” a memo written by Justice Department lawyers and first made public in a report by NBC News.

An excerpt of this memo describes the parameters through which the administration can lawfully execute a “lethal operation directed against a U.S. Citizen who is a senior operational leader of al-Qaida or an associated force” without due process on foreign soil.

Prior to the publication of the white paper, there were a number of indications that drone strikes against American citizens would be accepted if the targets were known affiliates of al-Qaida, including the following speech by Attorney General Eric Holder at Northwestern University in 2012:

“Now, it is an unfortunate but undeniable fact that some of the threats we face come from a small number of United States citizens who have decided to commit violent attacks against their own country from abroad. Based on generations-old legal principles and Supreme Court decisions handed down during World War II, as well as during this current conflict, it’s clear that United States citizenship alone does not make such individuals immune from being targeted.”

Holder went on to say that targeting an American citizen would be lawful “at least” in circumstances where the individual posed an imminent threat of violent attack against the U.S., the capture of the individual was not feasible and the operation would be conducted “in a manner consistent with applicable law war principles.”

In addition to the white paper, the deaths of three American citizens also increased awareness about the Obama administration’s clandestine “kill list.” Assembled by the CIA and the Pentagon, the list is essentially an al-Qaida yearbook; except those terrorists pictured have only two options for their ‘future plans’: death or capture.

The Editor-in-Chief of the kill list selection process is the president; he designates the top terrorist threats to the U.S. and finds replacements when prior threats are eliminated.

Viewed as a whole, these components add up to a surprisingly aggressive counterterrorism strategy and a significant expansion of executive powers that has Democrats and Republicans alternating between pleased and concerned. But perhaps what is most surprising of all is the relative lack of backlash from the liberal community in Congress that condemned similar actions by the Bush administration.

One of the few Democrats to actively speak out against Obama’s drone usage and the seeming hypocrisy of his transparency claims is Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon. Interestingly enough, Wyden was also the only Democrat to support Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., in his recent 13-hour filibuster that called into question the government’s authority to kill American citizens.

“The executive branch should not be allowed to conduct such a serious and far-reaching program by themselves without any scrutiny because that’s not how American democracy works,” Wyden said during the filibuster. “That’s not what our system is about.”

Speaking later at a Sunshine Week event, Wyden said there is still a “long way to go” with regard to improving White House transparency around drone strikes. But he remains strong in his belief that “every American has the right to know when their government believes it has the right to kill them.”

Although similar dissenters have since stepped forward, the majority of the Democratic Party is remaining silent. There seems to be a feeling of general consensus that if the president believes his usage of drone strikes is what’s right and necessary to alleviate threats of terrorism, then it must be permitted.

It’s a level of inherent trust that has not been seen for some time between an executive and his party in Congress, and, under normal circumstances, it would be an encouraging trend. In this case however, the party’s silent acceptance is aiding in the establishment of controversial precedent that will carry over to the next administration — one that they may not find as trustworthy.

The Obama administration wanted to “see credible, free and fair elections on a timely basis,” said U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan Richard Olson, but is playing no favorites among candidates from the ruling Pakistan People’s Party or its political foes.

Pakistan’s government, modeled after the democratic parliamentary system of the United Kingdom, includes a bicameral federal legislature, consisting of the Senate, and the National Assembly. Voting will take place in the four regional provinces: Punjab, Sindh, Baluchistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

In a video statement issued from the U.S. embassy in Islamabad on April 23, Olson praised the strides made by Pakistan’s government to ensure a fair election, saying that the “United States supports the strengthening of civil and democratic institutions through the election process.”

But Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif., has questioned why the U.S. has a relationship with a country that protects terrorist insurgents.

“They [Pakistan] are terrorists’ friends,” Rohrabacher said to Secretary of State John Kerry during a House Foreign Affairs hearing in April. “Shame on us. Not you, Mr. Secretary, but shame on us.”

Kerry disagreed, saying cutting support to Pakistan would hurt the progress the country has made. Pakistan is facing an escalation of attacks because of the upcoming election. In some parts of Pakistan, local elections have been postponed. Several Pakistani candidates running for seats have been killed. In total, 90 people have been killed since April, preventing candidates from openly campaigning.

On Monday, a bomb killed 25 and injured 65 people attending a political rally in Peshawar, the capitol of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. And Thursday, gunmen abducted the son of Pakistan’s ex-prime minister Yousuf Raza Gilani. His son, Ali Haider Gilani, a candidate for the Pakistan People’s Party, is running for a seat in the Punjab provincial assembly.

The Pakistan Taliban has claimed responsibility for the recent string of attacks, calling the elections “un-Islamic” and the democratic system a breach of Islamic teachings. The Taliban uses fear and intimidation tactics to control many parts of Pakistan, and has also directly threatened several coalitions, including the Pakistan People’s Party, the Muttahida Quami Movement and the Awami National Party. The militant group has vowed to carry out suicide attacks on polling day.

This comes on the heels of testimony provided by Assistant Secretaries of Defense Michael Sheehan and Derek Chollet, who said terrorist groups like al-Qaida and the Taliban are “significantly diminished” because of U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

To counter the potential attacks, the Pakistani military plans to station troops at polling stations across the country on Election Day to provide security. Army Chief Gen. Asfhaq Parvez Kayani said last week that soldiers will do everything they can to limit disruptions.

“I assure you, that we stand committed to wholeheartedly assist and support in the conduct of free, fair and peaceful elections to the best of our capabilities and remaining within the confines of the constitution,” Kayani said during a speech that was televised in Urdu on Geo News, a Pakistani news channel. “This indeed is a golden opportunity, which can usher in an era of true democratic values in the country.”

The question: is today’s news media coverage of Iran’s nuclear capability falling into the same trap?

Two experts at the Center for International and Security Studies at the University of Maryland delved into the issue with a report released this week. It analyzed U.S. and U.K. coverage of Iran’s nuclear program between 2009 and 2012 and said media coverage failed in some ways to keep the public in the loop.

Four periods of heightened coverage in Iran’s nuclear timeline were selected for the analysis of six influential, English-language newspapers – the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the Financial Times, the Guardian, and the Independent.

Semantics took center stage in the breakdown. Co-authors Jonas Siegel and Saranaz Barforoush calculated the “average nuclear phrase frequency per article” – or how often certain phrases were used to characterize the situation.

The study found that phrases that implied both the presence of and absence of nuclear weapons were used interchangeably – in some cases giving the impression that Iran was building nuclear weapons without actual proof.

“There was a very vague and inconsistent use of terminology over time,” Siegel said.

The phrases “nuclear weapon(s)” and “nuclear program” far exceeded the use of any other phrase. The co-authors argued that about half of writers assume that nuclear weapons are in the picture and the other half do not – muddling the overall message.

“What term is used and in what context matters quite a deal. It matters in that it affects that assumption made by the newspapers and the public who consume them,” Siegel said.

The report also found that journalist placed a heavy reliance on government officials, which constituted almost 70 percent of the sources used in the articles. The largest category was unsurprisingly US officials. Researchers found that Iranian sources were relied upon far less often.

“Ayatollah Khomeini was rarely quoted – despite his centrality to the Iranian domestic policy,” Siegel noted.

Susan Moeller, director of the International Center for Media and the Public Agenda, agreed that there was a sourcing problem.

“Many journalists and many news outlets tended to ignore what the White House ignored, and vice versa,” Moeller said. “Stories tended to be calibrated as important in the same way the executive branch did.”

Researchers also noticed an abundance of overhyped commentary and opinion articles on the subject.

“The opinion pieces emphasized the more sensational aspects of the dispute – especially the risk,” Moeller said. The profusion of commentary pieces often led to an underlying attitude of suspicion and hostility toward Iran, according to the report.

But researchers were clear to note that they found “no evidence that newspaper editors and writers were trying to deceive anyone” and gave journalists like longtime Washington Post reporter Walter Pincus an opportunity to respond to the findings.

“This is a political issue inside both Iran and the U.S.,” said Pincus, who recognized many of the report’s findings through his own news consumption. “If there’s one thing that solidifies political support – it’s talking about a threat.”

He also argued that there were different attitudes on the subject even within the same paper, and said research like this generalizes across the board unfairly.

“Newspapers can’t provide depth on every side, in deep depth, on every issue,” Pincus said. “There’s an underlying implication that we’re supposed to go deeply into every side. But it’s not the responsibility of press to settle these arguments.”

Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, and his brother Dzhokhar, 19, are ethnic Chechen Muslims who came to the U.S. a decade ago, according to reports.  That two immigrants are allegedly responsible for the attacks that killed three and injured hundreds more has forced new light on the immigration reform debate and raised doubts about whether the Senate’s latest immigration bill strengthens national security or weakens it.

“It’s not surprising that we’re seeing people talk about this, especially since the suspects are immigrants themselves,” said Philip Wolgin, senior policy analyst for immigration at the Center for American Progress, a nonpartisan Washington think tank.

Though Wolgin said immigration is “disconnected from what happened in Boston,” he noted that “there is going to be added scrutiny on national security” because of the attacks.

In the days following the bombings, a number of Congressmembers pointed to the events as a reason to slow down the immigration reform bill’s progress through Senate.

The attacks “are reminders that our immigration system is directly related to our sovereignty and national security matters,” Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, said during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing for the bill last month.

“I have not advocated that we quit talking about immigration reform,” he said.  “Rather, I am advocating that we carefully review the immigration laws and the administrative policies in place to ensure that we are addressing critical national security issues.”

Grassley and Sen. Dan Coats, R-Ind., have been two of the most vocal opponents of the reform bill, saying it doesn’t do enough to track those coming into the country or those who are already here.  Grassley, the top Republican on the Judiciary Committee, compared the Tsarnaev brothers to the 9/11 hijackers, who he said “abused our immigration system” by overstaying their visas.

Tamerlan, killed in a police shootout four days after the bombing, was already on an F.B.I. watch list and had caught the attention of Homeland Security when he took a trip to Russia in 2012, though no action was taken.  Dzhokhar is currently in police custody and facing charges of use of a weapon of mass destruction.

Jill Wilson, senior research analyst at the Brookings Institution, said current immigration laws aren’t to blame for the attacks.

“The immigration admission process couldn’t have predicted or prevented” the events, she said.

The new Senate bill, released in mid-April after months of negotiations, outlines a number of measures to tighten borders, track entry and exit visas, and establish a pathway to citizenship—beginning with a series of criminal background checks— for the more than 11 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S.

“It seems like that would be a boost to national security,” Wilson said.

Chairman of the Judiciary Committee Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., said at a recent hearing that he is “troubled” by what he called attempts to exploit the Boston bombings to argue against immigration reform.

He and other prominent senators, including Republican Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, have pointed to the attacks as a reason to speed up the bill’s progress through the Senate.  They say it has only highlighted the necessity of finding out exactly who is in our borders.

Despite talk of delays, the bill continues to progress through Senate; markup began May 9, with more than 301 amendments up for discussion.  A House immigration bill is in negotiations but has yet to be unveiled.

Wilson said the Boston attacks won’t have much impact Congressional or public views on immigration, but might make the case for reform “a little bit stronger.”  She said that now, more than ever, the U.S. will realize the need for an overhaul of the immigration system.

“If anything, this bombing should be a wakeup call,” she said.

In a three-month investigation, a team of graduate  student reporters from Northwestern University’s Medill School found that the United States’ unquenchable thirst for oil has shaped nearly every aspect of the country’s domestic and foreign policy for more than five decades,  often in controversial and dangerous ways.

The graduate student team today (May 9) published its findings on the national security implications of U.S. energy policy on a website created by the team. An overview story linking to the project is featured on Global Post, the award winning online international reporting network.

→ Complete details.

On the Beat

The latest headlines from On The National Security Beat, Scott Anderson’s column that provides fresh tips, news and resources to help national security reporters excel on their beats.

• More staggering military sexual assault stats
• High-rate storefront lenders proliferate near bases, despite U.S. law against predatory loans, ProPublica finds
• TBI a contributor to military suicide?
• Reporting tips from a military insider
• Words you might not hear often about FEMA
• Browse or download the DoD’s 2012 Annual Report on Sexual Assault in the Military

Where did the students travel? 

The students traveled to the Persian Gulf, the Philippines, Ecuador (the smallest OPEC nation), the U.S. national labs in Berkeley, Calif., the Strategic Petroleum Reserve in Louisiana, and other locations.

Over the course of the three months, what did the students do, or discover that surprised you?

I was surprised by their ability to creatively come up with great stories and ways around unhelpful or even obstructive government officials. And I was extremely impressed by their perseverance and ingenuity, especially in coming up creative and innovative ways of telling those stories. We always wanted to have this project be “digitally native,’’ or conceived first and foremost for online, interactive and multimedia presentation. Our National Security Journalism Initiative stresses finding new and innovative ways of doing national security journalism, so we’re very proud of it.

What was your reaction to the students’ work over the course of the three-month project? 

Our nine Medill students went to the ends of the earth, literally, to get their stories for this project, and they have delivered an extremely well-reported and well-told examination of an issue that is of huge importance to all Americans. I think it’s a model of the kind of cutting-edge work that students can do that is in demand not only by the public, but by the most prestigious professional media outlets operating today.

How will this experience prepare the students working on the project for life after Medill? 

The students learned how to work and act like professional reporters in perhaps the most competitive journalistic environment anywhere – Washington DC – from Day One of the project, an invaluable experience. They also learned how to grapple with an extremely complex subject and do enough reporting and source-building to make sense of it all and tell their stories in compelling ways that will resonate with readers.

How unique do you think this project is, particularly when it comes to the access the students had? 

I think this is an extremely unique project, in terms of giving the students such reporting and writing responsibilities, and also in terms of helping conceptualize and execute such innovative multimedia and interactive components.

Is there anything else you would like to add? As the students will attest, this wasn’t easy. It was an incredible amount of hard and sometimes frustrating work, given the nature of the subject and the reluctance of the U.S. government to discuss what they are up to. But the students really rose to the occasion and landed a project that they, Medill and our funder, the Robert R. McCormick Foundation, can really be proud of.