Nathaniel
Last week, we asked if American television networks were going to cover the story that the Pentagon coordinated pro-government statements in secret meetings with the news networks' on-air employees. In a word: No. They aren't going to cover that.
Politico: 'Deafening' silence on analyst story
Showing posts with label North America. Show all posts
Showing posts with label North America. Show all posts
Thursday, May 8, 2008
USA: Pentagon Who?
Wednesday, May 7, 2008
USA: Whistleblower Protection Office Raided
LA Times: "Federal agents Tuesday swarmed the home and office of the Bush administration official responsible for protecting government whistle-blowers, part of an investigation into whether the official retaliated against his employees and obstructed justice."
Washington Post:More than a dozen agents participated in the daylong raid, temporarily shutting down the e-mail and computer systems of the Office of Special Counsel and confiscating several desktop computers, including that of Scott J. Bloch, the agency head. Bloch's home in suburban Virginia also was raided, and agents from the FBI and the Office of Inspector General for the White House Office of Personnel Management were seen carting off boxes of documents in unmarked government sedans.
As Global Integrity has previously reported, according to the watchdog group Government Accountability Project (GAP), "the Whistleblower Protection Act (WPA) has been eroded to the point that federal workers have virtually no protections from agency retaliation."
Bottom line: if the head of the whistleblower protection agency is retaliating against employees, we have problems.
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
USA: Military Ran Media Manipulation Campaign
Global Integrity considers press freedom to be a key driver of accountability in any country. Most Western nations offer a largely unrestricted press environment -- intimidation of journalists is almost unheard of, with some notable exceptions. However, press freedom is a necessary condition, not the whole story.
The press has to use this freedom to full effect, as watchdogs of government and corporate power. An uncritical press that parrots government talking points isn't advancing the cause of accountable government. In this area, the Western media has rather less enthusiasm than they could.
The latest drama comes in two parts.
1) A hard hitting story by the New York Times, published Sunday, exposes a coordinated effort from within the Pentagon to manipulate US television networks' and newspapers' coverage of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, using retired military officers who frequently appear on news programs as "independent" analysts to counter growing criticism of then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.
NYTimes:Kenneth Allard, a former NBC military analyst who has taught information warfare at the National Defense University, said the campaign amounted to a sophisticated information operation. “This was a coherent, active policy,” he said.
2) Despite the impressive legwork done by the Times, the US television networks have apparently taken a pass on this story. While coverage critical to the government may be welcome, coverage critical of the media itself is exiled to overseas and small town papers. The Times, to its credit, points out the numerous times the paper has published Pentagon-groomed material as supposedly independent op-eds. Will the cable news networks do the same?
Thursday, April 17, 2008
USA: $50M Air Force Contract Was Rigged
The Department of Defense's Inspector General has investigated a relatively small US$50 million Air Force contract, painting a vivid picture of how conflicts of interest play out at the highest levels of government.
Despite the distress of employees involved in the contracting, the weight of rank pressed the deal forward, which awarded a contract for entertainment at the Air Force's Thunderbirds air shows to retired military officers with ties to the Thunderbirds. After complaints from an opposing bidder (one of which bid to do the work at half the price), the contract was canceled, but no criminal charges were filed.
Washington Post: The report offers a searing, blow-by-blow account of how a relatively mundane Air Force contract spun out of control, highlighting serious conflicts of interest in the selection process, officers stacking the deck in favor of friends, and others influencing a system designed to eliminate such favoritism in spending taxpayer dollars.
Washington Post coverage here.
Our previous coverage of the funding struggles of the Inspectors General.
Image: (cc) Elaine Mesker-Garcia
Monday, March 3, 2008
USA: Inspectors General Lack Crucial Resources
Our friends at the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) have a new report on the U.S. inspectors general, a constellation of watchdog agencies distributed throughout the government. POGO finds that many IGs lack required resources, limiting their independence. Global Integrity also reported on this trend earlier this year in the Global Integrity Report: United States. The real irony of this underfunding is that the IGs actually turn a substantial "profit" by catching more waste and fraud than they cost to operate. This really only leaves one explanation for underfunding them -- elected officials find effective oversight to be inconvenient. Many of the nation's inspectors general (IGs) lack the resources they need to function as independent government watchdogs, according to a new report released by POGO last Friday. POGO sent a questionnaire to all 64 statutory IG offices, and discovered that many IGs are being forced to operate with minimal funding and staffing, a lack of in-house legal counsels, limited control over their own websites, and competition from similar investigative units within their agencies. As POGO points out in the report, "calling someone who lacks independence of agency leadership an 'Inspector General' not only confuses the press and public, but can also create pitfalls for potential whistleblowers." Click here to read POGO's report, which has been covered in the Washington Post and Government Executive. You can also learn more by reading POGO's press alert and blog post.
Quoting from the POGO newsletter --
Quoting Ken Stier from the Global Integrity Report: United States --There are close to 12,000 employees working [in the IGs] with a combined budget of US$1.9 billion, up from US$1.5 billion in 2002. (Although the Central Intelligence Agency has an IG, neither the size of its staff nor its budget is made public.) The IGs seem to be a very good investment for taxpayers. Collectively they recovered US$6.8 billion for the public coffers from fines, settlements or recoveries, and investigations. The investigations also yielded 8,400 successful prosecutions, 7,300 suspension or debarments, and 4,200 personnel actions, all in a single year (2006), according to the most recent report from the President's Council on Integrity and Efficiency, a supervisory board chaired by the deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget.
Read the rest here.
An additional US$9.9 billion in potential savings has been identified through audit recommendations. "These performance levels are consistent with previous years' efforts: IGs have been and continue to be a primary means by which we identify and eliminate waste, fraud and abuse," OMB Deputy Director Clay Johnson III told a Senate oversight committee in July. "The IGs play a critical role in identifying mismanagement of scarce taxpayer dollars," added David M. Walker, U.S. comptroller general. "As we enter a period where great transformation will be needed in the way government does business [because of escalating deficits and limited resources], it will be increasingly important to consider the IGs' role in this process, and to take advantage of the opportunities to make the IG offices more efficient and effective."
But rather than investing in these "profit centers" OIGs are generally under-funded, particularly when compared with the growth of their agencies, the multiplying complexity they face and their increased reporting demands. The Justice Department, for instance, has grown about 30 percent in the last 15 years, from 83,000 employees to 110,000, but the OIG there has essentially remained the same - with about 400 staff rather than the 520 it would have if it were keeping pace. "I am concerned that inadequate resources can affect both the thoroughness and timeliness of projects that are, by necessity, staffed more thinly than warranted…[and] that our employees may be burned out when we continually ask them to do more with less," Glenn Fine, the Department of Justice's inspector general, told Congress recently.
Friday, February 29, 2008
Wikileaks Court Fight Heats Up
Update: Cnet.com reports that Wikileaks has won its domain name back after a 90-minute court proceeding.
There are now nearly a hundred fillings in the case Bank Julius Baer & Co. Ltd. et al v. Wikileaks et al, with a battalion of media outlets and activist groups filing friend-of-the-court briefs. You can read all of them here.
Both sides have abandoned their early low profile, with a Baer press release stating that Wikileaks is putting account holders at risk and that, "This matter has nothing whatsoever to do with censorship or The First Amendment." Wikileaks has responded with a flurry of press releases of their own.
The following are press releases I received via email over the last week. They are presented as received and without endorsement. Global Integrity has not confirmed the facts represented here.
Julius Baer STATEMENT ON Wikileaks.org CASEZURICH / NEW YORK, February 28, 2008 --- Julius Baer wishes to address certain misconceptions relating to a recent court decision to take the Wikileaks.org website off line.
This decision was arrived at only after a month long effort on the part of Julius Baer and its advisors had failed to identify and engage the operators of Wikileaks in a dialogue regarding the unlawful posting of stolen and forged bank records. This matter has nothing whatsoever to do with censorship or The First Amendment. Instead, Julius Baer’s sole objective has always been limited to the removal of these private and legally protected documents from the website.
The documents in question are protected and prohibited from unauthorized publication under U.S., California and foreign consumer banking and privacy protection laws. The posting of confidential bank records by anonymous sources significantly harms the privacy rights of all individuals.
It is not and has never been Julius Baer’s intention to stifle anyone’s right to free speech. Indeed, Julius Baer has specifically made no attempt to remove material on the website which refers to the organization but which does not include information personal to its customers. However, Julius Baer denies the authenticity of this material and wholly rejects the serious and defamatory allegations which it contains.
Contacts:
Neil Shapiro, Intermarket Communications, 212-754-5423 or 917-470-6570
Jenna Agins, Intermarket Communications, 212-754-5610 or 917-470-6563
Martin Mosbacher, Intermarket Communications, 212-754-5449
Wikileaks statement: Wikileaks_blasts_Cayman_Islands_bankThursday February 28, 2008
Bank Julius Baer & Trust -- the Swiss-Cayman "private banking" entity currently attempting to sue Wikileaks before US Federal court Justice Jeffery White in San Francisco today released a press release onto the "Business Wire" vanity wire service. The press release was subsequently picked up by Reuters and other wire services.
Wikileaks responds.
Bank Julies Baer & Trust, from here on in, simply referred to as Baer, claimed in relation to Wikileaks:
"It wasn't our intention to shut down the Web site".
This is a lie.
Baer's requests to the court to do just that are a matter of public record. The only change made by Judge Jeffery White to Baer's proposed "Wikileaks.org' takedown order was to cross out the word 'proposed'! Baer also wrote-for-the-judge a separate order in relation to the documents alone, which was similarly granted. Further, at any time subsequent Baer could have asked the court that its earlier request on the shutdown order be rescinded. It has not done so. While one might be tempted to blame the bank's Hollywood lawyers Lavely & Singer for running amuck, Baer continues to employ the same law firm. This can only be seen as an endorsement of its conduct.
A Wikikeaks statement also highlights court filings of graduate student Daniel Mathews, who says that he has been sued simply for moderating a Wikileaks discussion group on the social networking site Facebook. Coverage here.
Declaration of Daniel Mathews [Exerpt]On February 13, 2008, I was served via email (and also personally) with the Summons, Complaint, and other papers in this action. The emails from Plaintiffs’ counsel stated that I was a “WL Officer.” I am not an “officer” of “Wikileaks” or any other formal or informal organization responsible for the administration or management of Wikileaks. The Wikileaks site lists members of an “advisory board,” but I am notlisted as, and am not, one of them. I immediately responded that I did not know why I was being served with the documents, but that I “presume[d]” plaintiffs’ counsel had served me with the summons “because I am a registered user ofthe wikileaks website and have written some material there. ButI have no other connection to this case, have not read the documents
- 4 -
from Bank Julius Baer which are the subject of this case, have not written anything about them, and generally know very little about the case.”
12. Plaintiffs’ counsel responded: “Wikileaks lists you as an officer of the company on its Facebook page. As an officer of a defendant in this action, my client is entitled to serve you a copy of the summons and complaint pursuant to Rule 4(h)(1)(B) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure.” Facebook is a website created for college students (and now used by others) as a social networking site. The Wikileaks website had invited people to start discussion groups on Facebook and other websites. The Facebook page at issue had identified me as the “Stanford rep.” of the discussion group, and the Facebook term “officer” has no significance; the fact that I am an “admin” merely indicates that I was a moderator of that discussion group. I responded to Plaintiff’s counsel: “I am an officer of a facebook group, which is essentially a message board for discussion of issues relating to wikileaks. I am not, and never have been, an officer of wikileaks,and I request you not to represent that I am.”
Nevertheless, on February 22, 2008, Plaintiffs counsel declared to this Court that “Plaintiffs served a copy of the TRO and OSC on the Wikileaks Defendants via e-mail, per the Court’s prior order, … to the personal e-mail address for a listed officer of Wikileaks.”
Wednesday, February 20, 2008
Wikileaks Responds to Bank Julius Baer
Wikileaks responds to Bank Julius Baer, which has sued Wikileaks and successfully requested that their website Wikileaks.org be blocked. According to a Wikileaks press release, Baer filed papers for an IPO a mere three days before obtaining the censorship order. Wikileaks points out that the ongoing PR disaster for Baer was not well timed.
The current censorship controversy will now inevitably complicate the IPO deal. Says the Wikileaks press release, which I received via email, "Attempting to censor Wikileaks was a very, very expensive mistake for Baer."
Wikileaks has published documents (earlier coverage) which allegedly implicate Baer in money laundering. Baer claims that Wikileaks published and altered documents stolen by a former executive.
Global Integrity has not confirmed the content of this release. Via email: Wilileaks Press Release
Wed Feb 20 23:03:44 GMT 2008
Wikileaks has discovered Bank Julius Baer was preparing to take their US operation public via an a billion dollar IPO. They filed the prospectus with the SEC on Feb 12, a mere three days before convincing Federal court Judge Jeffery White to order total censorship of the transparency site. ( SEC LINK ): "We are an asset management company that provides investment management services to institutional and mutual fund clients. We are best known for our International Equity strategies, which represented 92% of our assets under management as of September 30, 2007." They were going to call the business "Artio" (ticker symbol ART, to be listed on the NYSE). Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch were to underwrite the IPO according to Bloomberg (BLOOMBERG LINK)
So the last thing they needed was to be the subject of a New York Times story and all over the world press, associated with money laundering. Now the deal goes under a microscope. Their underwriters have to take a second look and the SEC may have questions. Julius Baer will probably have to file a "material event" 8-K report with the SEC. Newspaper and magazine reporters will be looking at Baer. The question will be raised that the rather high returns Baer reports may be achieved via money laundering.
All this is happening in a down market, in which it is hard to do an IPO and in which investors are very sensitive to unexpected risk. The whole deal may evaporate, or be repriced downward.
Attempting to censor Wikileaks was a very, very expensive mistake for Baer.
Analysis of Orders Against Wikileaks
Judge Jeffery S. White, the judge who ordered Wikileaks.org scrubbed from the Web has begun backpedaling, saying that the site can stay up, as long as it doesn't post any documents (Amended order: pdf download).
Meanwhile, the Law Librarian Blog and Wikileak.org (a blog independent* of Wikileaks.org) have analysis of the judge's rulings. I am amused to note that the court orders were emailed to wikileaks.org after the judge had ruled that the wikeleaks.org domain name be inactivated. This means that while the orders were sent, they weren't received, because the courts had deactivated the defendants email.
Also of interest is the list of parties bound by the order, which must number in the hundreds:"all of the Wikileaks Defendants’ DNS host service providers, ISP’s, domain registrars, website site developers, website operators, website host service providers, and administrative and technical domain contacts, and anyone else responsible or with access to modify the website"
UPDATE: A nice breakdown of the first amendment implications by The California First Amendment Coalition.
*Correction: an early draft stated that wikileak.org and wikileaks.org were affiliated. Wikileak.org is an independent critic of wikileaks.org.
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
Internet Censorship: A Comparative Study
Using data from the Global Integrity Index, we put a U.S. court's recent order to block access to anti-corruption site Wikileaks.org into context. In summary: The Wikileaks.org shutdown is unheard of in the West, and has only been seen in a handful of the most repressive regimes. Good thing it doesn't work very well.
Starting in 2007, Global Integrity added specific questions about Internet censorship to the Integrity Indicators, which are a set of 304 questions addressing the practice of anti-corruption in national governments. We have always held that a free and critical media is an essential component of good governance; adding an analysis of Internet censorship was an overdue refinement.
We asked our local research teams to investigate two questions:
The Many Flavors of Internet Censorship
A few countries, however, are deeply committed to trying to make censorship work. On this list in 2007 are Algeria, China, Egypt, Kazakhstan, Russia and Thailand. Each has it's own flavor to the repression of online speech -- Internet censorship is still in an experimentation phase, and even the most aggressive approaches don't seem to work very well.
- Algeria has no firewalls or filters, but outlaws hosting content critical of the government, and monitors chat rooms for political speech. [source]
- China is home to 1.3 billion people and has a highly scalable technological approach based on extensive content filters known satirically as the Great Firewall of China. China is also uses technology to discourage content creation, deploying cute animated police characters (pictured above) to remind Internet users they are being watched. [source]
- Egypt has limited technical means to discourage content creation, so it relies on an old-fashioned technique -- harassment, beatings and arrests. Hala Al-Masry used to publish in a blog entitled "Cops Without Boundaries" until the government harassed her, "unknown people" beat her father, and she and her husband were arrested and signed a commitment to shut down the blog. Similar techniques have shut down websites of opposition parties. [source]
- Kazakhstan has little Internet capacity. The government uses this to mask censorship -- rather than block sites, it slows them down, frustrating the users of political content into looking elsewhere. The KNB (formerly the KGB) has a special program called Bolat, which slows down, but does not stop, access to sites of terrorist organizations. Popular opinion holds that it is used to slow opposition party sites as well. [source]
- Russia has a mixed bag of state persecution and neglect, allowing a rare opening for free expression in a country with highly restricted media. However, the sophistication of the attacks that do occur is frightening, with hackers singling out individual online targets. For instance, the website of Ekho Moskvy, a liberal Moscow radio station critical of the Kremlin, was brought down by a DDoS attack last year. [source]
- Thailand's military junta moved aggressively to shut down message boards and the formerly-ruling party Thai Rak Thai website after taking over the country in 2006. But the junta's censorship cops work to keep the thinnest appearance of tolerance -- message boards were allowed to reopen under the condition that they did not "provoke any misunderstandings." Message received. [source]
The court order that muzzled Wikileaks.org (covered here) was prompted not by the government but by a bank registered in the Cayman Islands. The bank used American courts and a compliant domain registrar to scrub the wikileaks.org URL from the Internet. It is extremely unlikely that this decision will stand up in an appeals court, but the larger point is that there is no reason this case should even be fought. Wikileaks should not need a legal team to explain to the courts that the First Amendment requires freedom of speech.
The whole event seems to encapsulate the constant criticism of governance in the United States: that the government has been captured by corporate interests, and that the world-leading rule of law and technocratic mechanisms in place can be hijacked to serve as tools for narrow, wealthy interests.
Online Censorship: Sounds good, but it never works.
While there is much diversity in the style of Internet censorship among the world's worst offenders, one common thread unites them: Internet censorship doesn't work. Cut off one site, and a thousand more pop up. In China, censorship online is sparking criticism that off-line censorship has rarely seen.
So Wikileaks.org went offline, but Wikileaks mirror sites hosted overseas hold the same content, and the original site is still up and running from Sweden (http://88.80.13.160) without its easier-to-type URL. As it turns out, shutting down Wikileaks-the-website has focused our attention on Wikileaks-the-idea, which is spreading at the speed of light.
UPDATE: for more reading on anti-corruption, governance and censorship, try the Global Integrity Report. For more on online censorship, try the Electronic Frontier Foundation or the Open Net Initiative.
Friday, February 15, 2008
Canada: Cash for Access, And Not Subtle About It
Liberal Party of Canada officials have literally auctioned access to members of Parliament. This from Democracy Watch's Duff Conacher (a Global Integrity contributor), who notes that a "huge loophole still exists in the Canada Elections Act that allows secret, unlimited donations to nomination race and party leadership candidates, if they don’t use what is donated for their campaign."
Read background at the Global Integrity Report: Canada.
Monday, February 11, 2008
United States: An election disputed, but who notices?
Following a caucus vote that will help decide who is the Republican presidential candidate, the Washington state Republican party decides to quit counting votes with only 87 percent of precincts reporting, calling the race for Senator John McCain. His margin of victory? Only 242 votes. But who's counting?
For context, you have to consider that the Republican Party is working to consolidate support behind the presumptive nominee John McCain, a man with questionable support in the Republican base. On Saturday, upstart populist Mike Huckabee wins Louisiana, runs away with Kansas (winning a whopping 60 percent of the vote), and is running neck and neck with McCain in Washington. A sweep for Huckabee would be unflattering to the presumed nominee, McCain.
And with McCain ahead by 242 votes in Washington, the state party chairman stops counting ballots and calls the race for McCain. Why bother counting the remaining 1500 or so votes? Huckabee is contesting the result. The party has since said they will begin counting votes again.
This seems like a ready-made media drama, but it's not happening. The national media have taken a pass on this story over the weekend. Sunday night, the online homepage of the Washington Post carried eight stories on the presidential race. Only one headline mentioned Huckabee at all, and it was the campaign blog, not a full print edition story.
Wednesday, February 6, 2008
U.S.: Key leaked for all Diebold e-voting machines
Diebold, a politically well connected maker of touch-screen voting machines used in some parts of the United States, comes under new fire for the lax security of their machines.
Some months ago, researchers at Princeton demonstrated that someone with only 60 seconds of access to an unlocked Diebold box could insert a virus which could silently switch votes without a trace. The virus could then spread from machine to machine, potentially affecting the entire voting system. The Princeton researchers pointed out that a mechanical key was required to get into the box. Until now.
Voting security advocate Brad Friedman is reporting that Diebold has made two seemingly unfathomable errors. Friedman reports that:
1) Every Diebold machine use the same low-tech key to open the door to the box.
2) Diebold posted photos of the keys on their website, which have been used to make working copies.
I am not an expert, but it seems clear to me that a voting system without paper receipts is, and will remain, a terrible idea.
Friday, February 1, 2008
Reporter's Notebook: Canada
By Lisa Fitterman
Until early this year, Jean Lafleur was a suave ad man on the lam, living it up in Belize. A Montreal businessman who had his own company and socialized with Canada's top Liberal Party movers and shakers, he was renting a luxurious two-bedroom home set amid bougainvillea and hibiscus bushes near the beach. He owned a 22-foot-long motorboat that was moored nearby, and he had a habit of spending up to 600 Canadian dollars (US$567) a week at a local gourmet shop on fine wines and cheeses. He loved to travel, taking off on occasion for places as far-flung as Italy, Brazil, France and Mexico.
Lafleur's good life abruptly ended just before Easter, when the Royal Canadian Mounted Police issued an international warrant for his arrest on charges related to nearly 1.6 million Canadian dollars (US$1.51 million) he received from the federal government as payment for work he had never done. Rather than be chased down, he decided to come home of his own volition. Sporting a deep tan and handcuffs, he was ignominiously escorted into the prisoner's dock of a Montreal courtroom and remanded into custody.
Read the rest here...
Thursday, January 31, 2008
Bill Clinton goes to Kazakhstan and everyone wins
A blockbuster story from the New York Times by Jo Becker and Don Van Natta Jr. It's lengthy, so I'll hit the highlights here.
A Canadian mining mogul, Frank Giustra, flies to Kazakhstan and meets with de facto president-for-life Nursultan A. Nazarbayev. Bill Clinton tags along. The three have dinner together, and shortly afterwards, everyone wins.
Two days later, Giustra secures a lucrative mining deal to extract uranium from Kazakhstan. Nazabayev secures the endorsement of Bill Clinton, receiving praise for “opening up the social and political life of your country.” (Which for the record, our data shows has not occurred). And a few months later, Bill Clinton's foundation receieves US$31.3 million from Giustra. A nice little thank you.
Clinton says it's all coincidental and they never discussed mining. When Giustra is pressed by the Times, he says he “may well have mentioned my general interest in the Kazakhstan mining business" to President Nazabayev on the night they met.
New York Times has the full story.
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
Clean Elections No Guarantee of Strong Democratic Society
New Report Assesses Anti-Corruption Mechanisms and Government Accountability in 55 Countries, Including First Investigation of
(Washington D.C.) – Although elections are often touted as the linchpin of governance reform efforts around the world, a new report finds long-term benefits offered by elections are often undermined by a lack of government accountability and the absence of strong anti-corruption mechanisms. The report, a major investigative study of 55 countries, was released today by Global Integrity, an international nonprofit organization that tracks global governance and corruption trends.
“We have to stop using elections as a simplistic litmus test for a government’s commitment to democracy,” said Global Integrity’s Managing Director Nathaniel Heller. “We now know there is little linkage between elections and the much tougher reforms that must be made, especially in countries at political crossroads such as Pakistan, Ukraine, Georgia, and Kenya.”
The Global Integrity Report: 2007 covers most of the Group of 8 (G8) countries as well as dozens of the world’s emerging markets and developing nations, from Argentina to China to Zambia. Rather than try and measure corruption directly, the report investigates and assesses the government accountability mechanisms and transparency measures needed to prevent corruption and promote good governance.
Many of the findings of the report should be sobering for policy makers and investors alike. The weaknesses found in China’s anti-corruption framework, for example, raise questions as to the true risks facing investors rushing to capitalize on the country’s economic boom– and to the risks Chinese investment funds pose to Western markets. “China’s lack of strong anti-corruption mechanisms could soon be to foreign investment what subprime mortgages have been to the U.S. economy,” stated Heller. “The message from our report to investors should sound a lot like ‘buyer beware’.”
Other major findings of the report include the following:
· The US and other G8 countries suffer from many of the same corruption challenges as developing countries, especially in election and campaign financing. While many observers tend to assume that wealthier countries have developed to a point where corruption is no longer a problem, Global Integrity’s 2007 data for the United States, France, Italy, Japan, and Canada paints a decidedly different picture.
· Despite the conventional wisdom that changes in governance and anti-corruption performance take many years to manifest themselves, several countries exhibited significant improvements or backsliding from 2006 to 2007. The biggest gainers in the past year were Bulgaria, Nepal and Azerbaijan; Nigeria and Georgia were the countries that experienced the greatest declines.
· Poor ratings for several close allies of the United States highlight the challenges the U.S. faces in promoting democratic reforms in countries where it has competing security interests. The report found that countries like Pakistan and Georgia posted ‘weak’ or ‘very weak’ ratings for many of the anti-corruption, accountability and transparency indicators.
· A widespread lack of government accountability among foreign aid recipients presents serious dilemmas for Western and multilateral aid agencies. Despite a growing awareness by aid donors of the need to direct aid to non-governmental stakeholders, like civil society groups, aid agencies continue working primarily with the very same executive branches that are often hindering democratic reforms.
“This report should be a roadmap for change and a wake-up call to policy makers, investors, and aid donors around the globe,” said Global Integrity’s International Director, Marianne Camerer. “It’s also a take-action toolkit for public officials and citizens who want to fight corruption and increase government accountability.”
The report is the product of months of on-the-ground reporting and data gathering by a team of more than 250 in-country journalists and researchers who prepared more than a million words of text and 20,000 data points for their respective countries. Twenty-four countries were repeated from Global Integrity’s 2006 assessments, while 31 were newly assessed.
To access the Global Integrity Report: 2007, please visit http://report.globalintegrity.org. For more information about the organization, visit http://www.globalintegrity.org. Global Integrity is an independent, non-profit organization tracking governance and corruption trends around the world. Global Integrity works with local teams of researchers and journalists to monitor openness and accountability. Its data and reporting are used routinely by aid donors, governments, grassroots advocates, and investors to prioritize governance challenges in countries and develop roadmaps for reform.
Global Integrity is grateful to the Legatum Institute for Global Development ( www.ligd.org) for its continued support of Global Integrity’s work. LIGD is an independent policy, advocacy and advisory organisation within the Legatum group of companies (www.legatum.com). The Institute’s mission is to research and promote those principles that drive the creation of global prosperity and the expansion of human liberty and well-being, including the rule of law, transparency, and accountable government as the pillars of a prosperous and free society. Other supporters of the Global Integrity Report: 2007 were the Australian Agency for International Development, the Wallace Global Fund, and the World Bank.
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
The War Card: Orchestrated Deception on the Path to War
Global Integrity co-founder Charles Lewis is not one to let untold stories slip from sight. At the moment, the popular mood has turned against the Bush administration's rush to war in Iraq. But history is slippery and subject to revision, where truth becomes a game of that's-your-opinion, and 'balance' means giving the truth equal time with carefully orchestrated lies.
Unless, of course, single-minded journalists like Lewis stake down the truth in such clear and meticulously researched language that there is no room for spin. Their result is unequivocal:
President George W. Bush and seven of his administration's top officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, made at least 935 false statements in the two years following September 11, 2001, about the national security threat posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Nearly five years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, an exhaustive examination of the record shows that the statements were part of an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses.Read the report at The War Card, published by The Center for Public Integrity.
We are proud to have Charles Lewis as a member of Global Integrity's advisory board.
Tuesday, January 22, 2008
U.S. Congress steamrolls White House on earmarks
Here in the U.S. we've seen 7 years of radical expansion of executive branch power. The most frustrating aspect of this power-grab has been the near unanimous lack of opposition from Congress. With a few exceptions, the legislative branch has been unwilling to really push back against the Bush White House. Until today, when both parties rallied to defend their turf from Mr. Bush's meddling.
Congressional leaders of both parties, who are scheduled to meet on Tuesday with the president, said Mr. Bush would provoke a huge outcry on Capitol Hill if he ignored those earmarks. (New York Times)On what crucial issue is the Congress so determined to prevail? Protecting Congress's ability to secretly channel money to pet projects.
At issue are earmarks, a non-transparent budget practice that allows members of Congress to send federal money to specific projects, without disclosing the member's connection to the project, or even the name of the person who included the earmark. Bush wants to ignore them unless they are written into the actual law. Congress rather likes their closed-door system. The only thing that keeps this from being scandal material is the fact that it happens all the time:
A new tally by the White House Office of Management and Budget shows that the 2008 spending bills signed by Mr. Bush include more than 11,700 earmarks, totaling $16.9 billion. (New York Times)If only Mr. Bush's insistence on warrentless wiretapping, military tribunals, or the expansion of political appointments had met with such determined resistance.
Photo: D. B. King
Sunday, January 20, 2008
New Blog Design
With the help of some talented programmers who offer their work to the open-source community, as well as some good old fashioned poking-around-with-code, we have a new layout for the Commons. Not all features are up to speed yet, but the outline is here.
Sunday, December 23, 2007
Little Wonder the U.S. Suffers from Political Financing Scandals
This Washington Post story puts to rest the quaint notion that U.S. Federal Elections Commission (FEC) still matters in any meaningful way when it comes to controlling the influence of money in American politics.
Friday, December 21, 2007
Los Angeles drug police required to disclose assets
LOS ANGELES: Push back started quick on a requirement that L.A.P.D. drug and gang unit officers disclose their assets, with the police union promising to sue. The measure affects about 600 narcotics and anti-gang officers who handle confiscated drugs and cash. Los Angeles police have been under federal control since the 2000 Rampart scandal which implicated dozens of officers.
While the police union is determined to block the rule, let's look at the details: officers are required to disclose their assets every two years. They report not to the public, but to their bosses. And officers assigned to the unit now get a two years grace period before being required to disclose anything. Seems like plenty of time to get their paperwork in order.
Los Angeles Times:
L.A. police panel requires financial disclosure for some officers; union sues
Photo: Andy Sternberg (cc)