Senator: Red Cross Misled Congress, Refused To ‘Level With the People’ on Haiti Money

“One of the reasons they don’t want to answer the questions is it’s very embarrassing,” says Sen. Charles Grassley, who just finished a yearlong investigation of the Red Cross.

By:   Justin Elliott and Laura Sullivan

WASHINGTON (Propublica) - A blistering Senate report on the American Red Cross raises fundamental questions about the integrity of the country’s most storied charity and its stewardship of donors’ dollars.

The report, which was released today by Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, and contains nearly 300 pages of supporting documents, found:

After the 2010 Haiti earthquake, the Red Cross spent tens of millions of dollars more than it has previously acknowledged on internal expenses. The Red Cross told Grassley that the money was largely spent on oversight to make sure the Haiti aid was used properly. But Grassley’s office found that the charity “is unable to provide any financial evidence that oversight activities in fact occurred."

Red Cross CEO Gail McGovern made false statements to Grassley’s office about whether the charity cooperated with congressional investigators.'

McGovern and her subordinates have kept the charity’s own internal investigations and ethics unit “severely undermanned and underfunded.” The charity is “reluctant to support the very unit that is designed to police wrongdoing within the organization.”

There are “substantial and fundamental concerns about (the Red Cross) as an organization,” the report concludes.

In an interview about the report, Grassley said that even after a year of back-and-forth with the Red Cross, “we did not get satisfactory answers. It was like pulling teeth.”

Grassley launched his investigation following stories by ProPublica and NPR on Red Cross failures in providing disaster relief, including after the Haiti earthquake. The group raised nearly half a billion dollars after the disaster, more than any other nonprofit. But our reporting found that, for example, an ambitious plan to build housing resulted in just six permanent homes.

Red Cross officials, including McGovern, have repeatedly told the public that the charity retains 9 percent of donations to cover management and administrative costs. But Grassley found that a full 25 percent of donations — or around $125 million — were spent on fundraising and management, a contingency fund, and a vague, catchall category the Red Cross calls “program costs.”

On top of that 25 percent, the Red Cross sent the bulk of the donated money to other nonprofits to do the work on the ground. Those other nonprofits then took their own cuts for overhead costs — as much as 11 percent.

Over a year of written exchanges with Grassley’s staff, the Red Cross repeatedly revised its figures for the same projects.

“The most important thing (from the report) is an unwillingness to level with the people about exactly where the money went,” Grassley said in the interview. ”There’s too many questions in regard to how the money was spent in Haiti that it gives me cause to wonder about money being donated for other national disasters.”

“One of the reasons they don’t want to answer the questions is it’s very embarrassing,” Grassley added.

In a statement, the Red Cross said that while it has not yet seen the senator’s report, the charity and McGovern have been transparent, and donors’ money was properly spent. The statement says the costs of the projects are “entirely justifiable given the size and complexity of the Haiti program, the scale of the destruction and the challenging and sometimes dangerous conditions of working in Haiti.”

The Red Cross was created by congressional charter more than a century ago, and receives a range of special benefits from the government.

Here are more details from the report:

The Red Cross wasn’t able to detail how tens of millions of dollars were spent

On a page recently added to its website, the Red Cross says the so-called program costs for Haiti — roughly $70 million — went to “monitoring the use of donations, informing donors about how their money has been spent, paying skilled staff members to carry out the work, renting secure office space, and ensuring that dollars are leveraged as far as possible.”

But pressed by Grassley’s investigators, the Red Cross could not give an accounting of the oversight it says it did with the money. After repeated requests by Grassley’s investigators over the course of months, the Red Cross finally last month produced a document with a narrative description of oversight but no financial details.

In general, the Red Cross itself doesn’t know how much money it spent on each project in Haiti because of a “complex, yet inaccurate” accounting system, the report found.

More of Our Red Cross Reporting

The Red Cross’ Secret Disaster

After Superstorm Sandy, Americans opened their wallets to the Red Cross. They trusted the charity and believed it was up to the job. They were wrong. Read the story.

How the Red Cross Raised Half a Billion Dollars for Haiti and Built Six Homes

The Corporate Takeover of the Red Cross

Red Cross CEO Gail McGovern, who was hired to revitalize the charity, has cut hundreds of chapters and thousands of employees. Read the story.

See the full series.

The report echoes confidential findings made by consultants hired by the Red Cross, which were previously reported by ProPublica and NPR. An internal evaluation of one of the group’s water and sanitation projects found there was “no correct process for monitoring project spending.” Another assessment found that the group’s figures on how many people helped in a hygiene project were “fairly meaningless.”

In response to Grassley’s investigation, the Red Cross for the first time posted online a list of specific projects in Haiti. But the accounting on the list, along with other materials provided to Grassley, raises more questions than it answers.

Documents provided by the Red Cross to Grassley show that the charity at times spent large sums of money on management even when it appeared to be simply writing a check to other organizations that were doing actual projects.

In 2010, the Red Cross gave $4.3 million to its sister organization, the International Federation of the Red Cross (IFRC) for disaster preparedness work. On top of the $4.3 million, according to budget figures the charity provided Grassley, the American Red Cross spent another $2 million on its own — to “manage” granting money to another organization.

The IFRC then took out its own overhead and administrative costs before using the money to help Haitians.

When asked why the Red Cross needed $2 million dollars to give money to its sister organization, the group said in its statement the costs were “incurred to ensure accountability, monitoring and evaluation of work performed and ensure our partners meet their contractual requirements.”

The Red Cross added that “Implementing a tracking system by project would take a lot of time and would be a waste of donor dollars that could be better spent on delivering services.”

CEO Gail McGovern and her aides tried to stymie congressional oversight — and then made false statements about it

In 2014, Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., of the House Homeland Security Committee asked the Government Accountability Office to examine the Red Cross’ disaster services, in part because of problems in its response to Superstorm Sandy in 2012.

McGovern recently told Grassley’s investigators that the Red Cross “gave [the GAO] everything that they asked for.”

That statement was untrue, according to the report: “This is contrary to the documentary evidence of communications between GAO and [the Red Cross].”

The Red Cross, the committee found, “failed to provide to GAO a substantial volume of requested material.”

The report lists eight examples of things the Red Cross declined to provide to government investigators. They range from descriptions of the charity’s internal oversight processes to interviews with chapter officials involved in the response to Superstorm Sandy.

In its statement to ProPublica and NPR, the group doubled-down on McGovern’s earlier assertion: “At no point did the Red Cross refuse to provide requested information.”

Sen. Charles Grassley. (Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

McGovern has publicly portrayed the Red Cross as a beacon of openness. “We made a commitment that we want to lead the effort in transparency," she said at the National Press Club in 2011. But Grassley’s report notes that, as ProPublica revealed last year, McGovern had tried outright to kill the GAO investigation.

Grassley’s report found that while the Red Cross couldn’t kill the investigation, it “was able to limit the scope of the GAO’s inquiry."

In meetings and email correspondence over the course of several months, Red Cross General Counsel David Meltzer questioned GAO’s legal authority to look at the Red Cross.

The Red Cross argued that investigators’ “requests for internal decision-making, internal oversight, and internal funding allocation are outside of GAO’s authority,” according to a GAO’s account included in Grassley’s report.

The negotiations reached an almost absurd denouement when the American Red Cross — or ARC — presented a hypothetical about why handing out blankets would not be subject to federal oversight.

As Grassley’s report puts it:

In a September 26, 2014 follow up phone call with GAO, ARC elaborated on its position and provided an example to provide additional clarity: if ARC is in the coordination tent with FEMA and a need for blankets is identified, and ARC has blankets to dispense, the implementation of the delivery of the blankets is outside the scope of federal involvement, but the conversation in the tent is within the scope of federal involvement. At the end of the September 26, 2014, conversation, GAO notes of that conversation state that ARC did not want “to open the door to a long, endless GAO review,” particularly on internal oversight.

As Grassley’s report notes, the Red Cross’ congressional charter explicitly gives the GAO the authority to scrutinize the group.

The Red Cross undercut its own ethics unit

The Red Cross has about 20,000 employees. But its ethics office, which investigates waste, fraud, and abuse, is composed of just three people, according to the Grassley report. That’s down from roughly 65 staffers a decade ago.

One of the three remaining employees, the “compliance coordinator,” does intake of phone calls and does not do investigations. Another, the chief investigator, is based in New York, away from Red Cross headquarters in Washington.

Requests by the head of the unit, Teala Brewer, for more staff have gone unfulfilled by the general counsel, Meltzer, according to the report.

The report concludes that the Office of Investigations, Compliance, and Ethics was left so under-resourced that it is “unable to perform its primary function; namely, to perform investigations, ensure compliance, and maintain ethical standards.”          

Extraordinary Measures: How an Arabic Translator Got Caught in a Net Designed for Terror and Gang Leaders

Mohammed Yousry never imagined that he would see the inside of a jail cell. An adjunct lecturer at the City University of New York, Yousry was completing his doctoral dissertation in Middle Eastern Studies when a series of events upended his quiet academic life.

By: Murtaza Hussain

NEW YORK (TheIntercept) - In 1993, Yousry received a job offer to work as an Arabic translator for the defense team of Omar Abdel Rahman, also known as the “Blind Sheikh.” Abdel Rahman, the spiritual leader of the Egyptian militant group Gamaa Islamiya, had been arrested earlier that year on accusations of plotting terrorist attacks against public landmarks in New York City.

In 1997, the Federal Bureau of Prisons placed Abdel Rahman under “special administrative measures,” or SAMs, a legal regimen that restricts certain prisoners from communicating with the outside world.

First established 20 years ago, in May 1996, SAMs were designed to prevent alleged gang leaders and terrorists from maintaining contact with their followers outside prison. In the years since 9/11, the controversial measures have been used extensively in terrorism cases. A 2014 report by Human Rights Watch found that the number of prison inmates subjected to SAMs more than tripled between 2001 and 2013. As of 2013, a total of 55 prisoners were held under SAMs; roughly 30 were “terrorism-related inmates,” while the remainder were mostly inmates jailed on organized crime and espionage charges.

“The premise behind SAMs is that there is a certain class of prisoner so dangerous that even solitary isn’t enough. They need to be kept so under wraps that a special regime is necessary where their communication with the outside world is completely shut down,” says Wadie Said, a law professor at the University of South Carolina and expert on terrorism prosecutions. “The problem with these types of extraordinary measures, however, is that when you start putting them in the hands of government bureaucrats, the rationale starts to break down and they are enforced more liberally.”

That is precisely what happened to Yousry. Lynne Stewart, the defense team’s lead attorney in the Abdel Rahman case, was charged with violating the SAMs by disseminating her client’s political statements to the media and surrogates of a terrorist group. But in an unprecedented move, the government also decided to prosecute the legal team’s translator, who had never signed the SAMs order.

Yousry suddenly found himself accused of supporting a terrorist. He and several others involved in Abdel Rahman’s defense are the only people ever to have been prosecuted by the federal government for violating the SAMs.

Mohammed Yousry was born in 1955 in Cairo, Egypt. At a young age, Yousry developed what would be a lifelong infatuation with studying, spending hours immersed in books by Arab, American, and European writers. After graduating from Cairo University and completing his compulsory military service, at 24, he immigrated to the United States, eventually settling in New York City.

Yousry spent many years working a variety of odd jobs and taking college courses at night, while nursing dreams of a future in academia. During this time, he also met his future wife, a fellow student and naturalized immigrant from the Dominican Republic. She was a devout Christian, something that Yousry, as a non-practicing Muslim, didn’t see as an obstacle. The couple fell in love, got married, and soon after had a daughter.

In 1990, Yousry was admitted to New York University for a graduate program in Middle Eastern Studies. Around that time, New York City was facing an acute shortage of court translators, including those with knowledge of Arabic, and Yousry found part-time work translating for lawyers and news agencies.

Two years after Yousry started his graduate research, a truck bomb detonated in the parking garage of the World Trade Center’s north tower, killing six people and injuring more than a thousand others. The bombing triggered chaos throughout lower Manhattan and alerted law enforcement to the threat of terrorism posed by extremist groups. Searching for possible links to the attackers, investigators cast a wide net on the city’s Arab and Muslim communities, seeking out connections to radical movements.

Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind leader of Gamaa Islamiya, was among those who attracted the FBI’s attention. Though he lived in the United States, he remained an influential figure in Egypt, where his group was fighting an insurgency against the government. Copies of his sermons inveighing against the oppression of the Mubarak government were widely disseminated in Cairo and Alexandria. A few months after the 1993 bombing, Abdel Rahman was arrested and accused of conspiring in a separate plot to attack city landmarks.

After the arrest, Yousry was hired by Abdel Rahman’s legal team, headed by Lynne Stewart, a radical lawyer with a reputation for taking controversial cases, and asked to work as an Arabic translator. As a scholar of contemporary Middle Eastern history, the potential controversy of working with such a client gave him pause. But after speaking with academic advisers and deciding it could provide useful experience for his future dissertation, he decided to accept.

For the next year and a half, Yousry translated reports, news articles, and phone conversations for Abdel Rahman and Stewart’s legal team.

The first time he actually met with Abdel Rahman, Yousry was surprised to find that the image he had of the cleric, whose Gamaa Islamiya movement had killed thousands of people in Egypt, did not comport with the prisoner’s ironic personal demeanor. “He had a certain charisma that stemmed from his blindness and his very profound sense of humor,” Yousry said, even comparing him to the legendary Egyptian comedian Adel Imam. The two disagreed vociferously on politics, but over time developed a reasonable working relationship.

In 1995, Abdel Rahman was convicted on terrorism charges and sentenced to life imprisonment. While Stewart continued to represent him during the appeals process, bringing Yousry back on as a translator in May 1997, the restrictions placed on Abdel Rahman were about to make the case much more perilous.

With the Egyptian government’s war against Gamaa Islamiya still raging, the SAMs were intended to prevent Abdel Rahman from issuing orders to the group’s members from inside prison. According to the measures, any statements made by an inmate can be kept under seal if a judge agrees that “there is a substantial risk that a prisoner’s communications or contacts with persons could result in death or serious bodily injury to persons, or substantial damage to property that would entail the risk of death or serious bodily injury to persons.”

Stewart signed the SAMs agreement, legally precluding her from publicly disseminating her client’s statements. Stewart chafed under these restrictions and over time began to openly rebel against them. As a translator, Yousry was never asked to sign the order. “The lawyers worked out a system in which they’d review communications and determine what is consistent with the terms of the SAMs,” Yousry said, adding that it was his understanding that regardless of what tactics Abdel Rahman’s legal team employed, as a translator he would not be targeted under the SAMs regulations.

Over time, Stewart became so sympathetic to her client that she came to support the Gamaa Islamiya’s goal of overthrowing the Egyptian regime. Yousry, who grew up in Egypt, never shared this opinion, viewing the Gamaa as simply another evil within Egypt’s political milieu.

“Gamaa Islamiya and Omar Abdel Rahman advocated violence against the totalitarian Egyptian regime, which, to be clear, also employed heinous violence against Egyptian citizens,” Yousry said. “I would have chosen the regime as a lesser evil, however. Mubarak was a dictator but the Gamaa were religious extremists and I thought they would set Egyptian society backwards if they came to power.”

Not long after the SAMs went into effect, the leaders of Gamaa Islamiya reached a truce with the Egyptian government. Declaring that violent confrontation with Egypt’s rulers had served no constructive purpose, the Gamaa pledged to cease its struggle and integrate into Egyptian political life.

In return for an end to violence, the government promised to release key Gamaa leaders from prison and ease pressure on their families. The truce caused divisions within the group. When it seemed as though the government was not holding up its end of the bargain, Gamaa supporters sent a letter to Abdel Rahman, through his legal team, asking for his opinion on maintaining the cease-fire.

Any public comment on the cease-fire from Abdel Rahman could constitute a breach of the SAMs. However, Stewart decided to take a risk and disseminate a public statement on the issue by Abdel Rahman.

In his statement, Abdel Rahman told Yousry in Arabic that the cease-fire should be maintained, but that public rhetoric against the Egyptian government should be escalated over the its failure to uphold agreements with the Gamaa. “Abdel Rahman had supported the initial cease-fire and had never changed his view on that,” Yousry said.

On June 13, 2000, Stewart spoke to a Reuters reporter based in Cairo, Esmat Salaheddin, and communicated something different: that the sheikh had effectively nullified the cease-fire. The next day, newspapers in the region were reporting that the leader of Gamaa Islamiya had called for a resumption of hostilities in Egypt, triggering a major controversy.

Initially, the government did not file charges for violation of the SAMs order. Behind the scenes, however, a criminal investigation was initiated into the entire legal team.

Then, on September 11, 2001, two hijacked planes flew in the World Trade Center towers in New York. The highly aggressive law enforcement posture that followed the attacks immediately heightened the sensitivity of the Abdel Rahman case. 

“Two days after September 11, two FBI agents came to my house,” Yousry says. For over an hour, the agents probed him with questions about Omar Abdel Rahman, Stewart, and his own political views, and asked him to become an informant inside the legal team — an offer he refused. Before leaving the house, Yousry recalls one of the agents telling him that she was giving him “one final opportunity to jump on board the train.”

“I’m already on the train,” Yousry replied. “I don’t have anything to do with violence or radicalism. I’m just doing the job as a translator that I was hired for by the government.”

On April 9, 2002, roughly seven months after the FBI’s initial visit, agents came back to Yousry’s house to arrest him. Lynne Stewart and two other co-defendants were placed under arrest that same day. The four were charged with multiple terrorism offenses, including conspiracy to provide material support for terrorism, soliciting acts of violence, and conspiracy to defraud the United States. Yousry’s bail was set at $750,000, significantly higher than Stewart’s bail, set at $500,000.

The case was soon caught up in the broader fight against global terrorism. In an appearance on The Late Show with David Letterman, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft said, “We simply aren’t going to allow people who are convicted of terrorism to continue to achieve terrorist objectives by sending messages and directing the activity from their prison.”

In the trial of Yousry and his co-defendants that began in the summer of 2004 and lasted nearly eight months, the prosecution focused on the terrifying specter of Omar Abdel Rahman and the Gamaa Islamiya, suggesting that his legal team had helped support a terrorist who was planning to “kill Americans everywhere.”

During Yousry’s cross-examination by the prosecution, the government questioned him at length about his ideological beliefs, as well as his knowledge of the communications restrictions. Yousry maintained his position: He had never signed the SAMs and was simply translating for the lawyers.

Asked by the prosecutor about his knowledge of the restrictions, Yousry replied:

I believed in general that the SAMs were imposed on the client to restrict his communication with the outside world. However, I also believed that the lawyers were in charge of implementing these administrative measures. They are the one who understand the legality of it. They are the one that signed the affidavit. They are the ones who were responsible for telling me what to do. So I took guidance from them.

While prosecutors portrayed Yousry’s co-defendants as active supporters of terrorism, they were forced to concede that the translator was different. Yousry, the bookish, wine-drinking academic, was a hard person to portray as a supporter of Islamic extremism. “Mohammed Yousry is not a lawyer. He is not a practicing Muslim. He is not a fundamentalist,” said prosecutor Anthony Barkow. “He is not a supporter of Abdel Rahman or of the Islamic Group.”

Yet, the government argued that by translating the communications between Abdel Rahman and Stewart, Yousry had supported a conspiracy. “[Yousry] doesn’t need to know that he violated any particular law,” the prosecutor said. “He needs only to be aware of the generally unlawful nature of what he did.”

When the convictions came down on February 10, 2005, Yousry was stunned. “During the sentencing, while the judge was reading his verdict, I was sure at the end that he was going to vacate my sentence or give me probation,” he recalled. “I honestly couldn’t believe I was being sent to jail by the government for translating a court case, the job they’d hired me to do.”

Released in 2011 after spending 16 months in prison, today Yousry is free, but his criminal record has prevented him from finding employment. “Never in a million years did I imagine that anything like this could happen,” Yousry reflects years later. “Not only was I sent to prison, but my academic career, my translation career, and my research career were all destroyed by the government.”

Of the dozens of prisoners believed to be detained under SAMs today, some of them are people with deep links to international terrorism, like World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef and 9/11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui. But others are younger men like Fahad Hashmi and Mahdi Hashi, whose cases are far murkier, but who nonetheless are held under the same draconian regime. A number of individuals whose cases are still in pretrial, such as 30-year-old Muhannad al-Farekh, are also being held under SAMs today.

Lawyers and human rights advocates claim that the restrictions and surveillance the SAMs impose make defending clients in such cases nearly impossible. “SAMs completely undermine the concept of attorney-client privilege and the relationship of trust necessary for a lawyer to do their job,” says Khurrum Wahid, a lawyer who has defended clients subjected to the measures. “It creates a conflict of interest between an attorney and their client. Instead of focusing on zealously defending them, many lawyers end up being concerned that they might say something inartfully that could get themselves into trouble.”

While Stewart’s prosecution raised some alarm within the legal community, it was the prosecution of her translator that stands out as a particularly gross example of government overreach. “The prosecution of Yousry was really ugly,” says Said.

“It sent a message to translators that even if they didn’t sign any agreement, they can still be held legally responsible for SAMs violations,” he continued. “Although the government has not prosecuted any lawyers or translators for SAMs violations since this case, the fact that they did it even once set a precedent that is really chilling.”

In the years since Yousry’s arrest and trial, the U.S. government has struggled to find competent Arabic-language translators. In sensitive legal cases, like the ongoing military-court hearings at Guantánamo Bay, the inability to find such translators has often proven disastrous. “In practice, Arabic interpreters [at Guantánamo] often not only flunk the accuracy test, but sometimes even fail to competently understand or communicate in the detainees’ native language,” says Omar Shakir, a lawyer at the Center for Constitutional Rights representing clients at Guantánamo Bay, who describes the shortage of capable Arabic translators as a systemic issue.

Yousry was in many ways the ideal prototype for a U.S. government translator. Fluent in both Arabic and English, a scholar of Middle Eastern history, and deeply committed to his adopted country, he could navigate both Western and Arab cultures with ease. But because of his criminal record, his services are no longer available to the United States.

In the collective mania prompted by 9/11, Yousry, a soft-spoken Egyptian-American professor with a visceral opposition to political Islam, was branded in the media and the courts as a supporter of terrorism. And in its zeal to find enemies, the American government targeted someone whose services it could have used most.

Speaking to him today, Yousry expresses a quiet resignation about his case, as well as the demise of his academic career. “I’m 61 years old now and my health is not what it was before all this started. I’m not trying to build a future, nor is that really possible anymore.”

Yousry believes that little has changed in the 12 years years since his trial. The government, he maintains, is still pursuing people “undeserving of prosecution” in its efforts to demonstrate that it is fighting terrorism.

“To try and project strength to the public during a period of uncertainty,” he says, “sometimes the government decides that people have to suffer.”          

Why the ‘lone-wolf’ terrorist is a myth

President Obama says don’t worry, the Orlando terrorist was just another “lone actor” operating in isolation, unconnected to any larger group of supporters. In fact, these so-called “lone wolves” are running in packs, and suggesting otherwise gives the public a false sense of security.

By:  Paul Sperry

 

President Obama says don’t worry, the Orlando terrorist was just another “lone actor” operating in isolation, unconnected to any larger group of supporters. In fact, these so-called “lone wolves” are running in packs, and suggesting otherwise gives the public a false sense of security.

Yet Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson echoed Obama, saying Omar Mateen was “self-radicalized” without any religious, ideological or operational support from friends, family or others in the Muslim community.

“What we do know at this point is it appears this was a case of self-radicalization,” Johnson said. “He does not appear to have been part of any group.”

A more accurate picture is that Mateen, an Afghan-American, was part of a disturbingly large Muslim family of sympathizers, supporters and even co-conspirators.

A more accurate picture is that Mateen, an Afghan-American, was part of a disturbingly large Muslim family of sympathizers, supporters and even co-conspirators.

For starters, his wife could face criminal charges in the attack on the gay Orlando nightclub, the deadliest act of terrorism in the US since 9/11. Noor Zahi Salman, who wed Mateen in 2011, reportedly told the FBI she knew about her husband’s planned attack and even drove him to the site of the massacre as part of a scouting operation. She also is said to have helped him case the Disney Springs shopping complex. What’s more, Salman allegedly was with Mateen when he bought ammo and a holster used in the attack.

Prosecutors have convened a grand jury to present evidence against Salman, a Palestinian immigrant, who ultimately could be indicted as an accessory to the murders of 49 people and the attempted murders of 53 others. Possible other charges include failing to report a terrorist attack and lying to federal agents.

It appears the seeds of Mateen’s hatred were planted at home.

His Afghan immigrant father, who founded a nonprofit group to support the Taliban, preached gays should be punished. In a video Seddique Mir Mateen posted on the Web, he expresses gratitude toward the Afghan Taliban, who stone homosexuals to death, calling them “our warrior brothers.”

Other statements make it clear the elder Mateen could have passed anti-gay views onto his son.

“God will punish those involved in homosexuality,” the elder Mateen said in the wake of his son’s rampage. He seemed to rationalize the targeting of gays by pointing out that his son was offended by two gay men kissing in front of his 3-year-old son during a recent family trip to Miami.

Other Mateen videos are full of anti-US rhetoric regarding America’s military role in Afghanistan. That influence may have showed up in his 29-year-old son’s statement to a 911 operator during the mass shooting.

“He said the reason he was doing this was he wanted America to stop bombing his country,” said a survivor who overheard the conversation.

His father’s anti-American views may have seeped into the terrorist’s psyche at an earlier age. High-school classmates recall a 14-year-old Mateen jumping up and down and cheering the attacks on 9/11. “That’s what America deserves,” he reportedly exclaimed, while praising Osama bin Laden.

Mateen likely absorbed more anti-gay and anti-US messaging at the small Fort Pierce, Fla., mosque his father helped run. Authorities say the radical Islamic center has been a “breeding ground” for terrorists, including the first American suicide bomber in Syria, alongside whom Omar Mateen prayed. Mateen worshipped there for more than a dozen years, praying up to four times a week. State incorporation records show the senior Mateen served as the mosque’s vice president and sat on its board for several years.

Seddique Mateen insists he did not know his son was radicalized and was angered by his actions. “If I did know, 1 percent, that he was committing such a crime myself, I would have arrested him myself,” he claimed. Also serving on the board of his pro-Taliban nonprofit, The Durand Jirga Inc., are two daughters and an Afghan-born son-in-law, who’s also active in politics in Afghanistan.

Just weeks before the attack, property records I’ve obtained show Omar Mateen transferred his interest in a Fort Pierce condo over to one of the sisters and and the Afghan brother-in-law, a possible indication the family could have had some knowledge of his martyrdom plans. Authorities say the fatally wounded Mateen clearly was prepared to die in a gun battle.

The mysterious brother-in-law — Mustafa Abasin, aka Mustafa Aurakzai, who shows an intense hatred for Donald Trump on social media — has been questioned by federal investigators, along with other family members. I’m also told FBI agents have expanded the investigation overseas to family connections in Afghanistan. On Friday, both Mateen’s widow and father were placed on the federal no-fly list.

 December 2015: San Bernardino terrorist Syed Farook’s father shared his hatred for Jews and even knew his son followed ISIS, while his mother lived with him and his accomplice wife in their bomb factory they called home, and was an active member of an extremist Pakistani front group. Investigators found targets and GoPro camera packaging in mom Rafia Farook’s car. Both parents were placed on a federal terrorist watchlist. Meanwhile, his sister took target practice with him. Most recently, the FBI arrested Farook’s brother, sister-in-law and another relative on terrorism and immigration fraud charges.

July 2015: The Chattanooga, Tenn., military base shooter, Mohammad Youssef Abdulazeez, was influenced by his devout Muslim father who appeared at one point on a federal terrorist watch list and is said to also have been radicalized by a pro-jihad Muslim Brotherhood uncle in Jordan who was under terrorism investigation. In addition, Abdulazeez attended a local mosque founded and controlled by the radical Brotherhood, according to property records I’ve obtained.

April 2013: The Boston Marathon bombers, Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, were radicalized by their devout, America-hating Chechen mother, who forced them to go to an extremist mosque and study hardcore Islamic texts.

“I told Tamerlan that we are Muslims, and we are not practicing our religion, and how can we call ourselves Muslims,” Mrs. Tsarnaev said. “And that’s how Tamerlan started reading about Islam, and he started praying, and he got more and more and more into his religion.”

The change was dramatic in both boys, who stopped partying and started hating — Jews, Christians, America. Suddenly they were growing out Islamic beards and saying they were “willing to die for Islam.”

As you can see, the bad apple doesn’t fall far from the terror tree.

Tamerlan Tsarnaev appeared to have a sympathetic wife, moreover. He stored pressure cookers and bomb parts at the home where he lived with his Muslim convert spouse, who investigators suspect helped purchase the equipment from Macy’s. On the day of the bombings Katherine Tsarnaev expressed no sympathy for the victims, texting a friend that “a lot more people are killed every day in Syria and other places . . . Innocent people,” according to court testimony.

 

In a WhatsApp message, Dzhokhar and Tamerlan’s mother also said America “is the real terrorist” and will burn “in the flames of an eternal and terrifying fire.”

Obama’s “rogue” homegrown Muslim terrorist is a myth. In virtually every case, the terrorist suspect’s radicalization spokes off into family, local mosques and the larger Muslim community. Family and friends knew they were radicalized. And in some cases, they even helped them pull off their evil plots. The shock and denials from relatives and clergy are for the most part for public consumption.

In fact, suspects in all but a handful of the roughly 90 ISIS terror cases prosecuted in America since 2014 were part of a group of up to 10 co-conspirators who met in person to discuss their plans or who made contact via text messaging or e-mail, Reuters found in a recent review of Justice Department case files. Only 11 percent of cases involved a terrorist acting entirely alone. “Wolf dens, not lone wolves, [are] the norm in US Islamic State plots,” the wire service concluded, further casting doubt on the official White House line.

“The relationships between accused co-conspirators range from casual acquaintances to lifelong friends, from married couples to cousins and from roommates to college buddies,” said the report, which did not examine connections in the Orlando attack. In virtually every case, the co-conspirators attended the same mosques. In fact, mosques are the connective tissue in all these attacks and plots.

The president is desperately trying to disconnect these dots, but the hard truth is there’s a much broader network of support for these so-called “lone wolf” terrorists within their Muslim families and the larger Muslim community than the public is being told.

“If there’s anyone out there who thinks we’re confused about who our enemies are,” Obama lectured Americans last week in a post-Orlando speech, “that would come as a surprise to the thousands of terrorists who we’ve taken off the battlefield.”

 

What he still doesn’t get is, “the enemies” aren’t just terrorists overseas but terrorists at home — along with their friends and relatives — and “the battlefield” is in our own communities. Until we grasp that shocking reality, we won’t be able to stop this cancer from spreading deeper into our own back yards.

Immigration, abortion, race rulings due at Supreme Court

Immigration activists rally outside the U.S. Supreme Court as justices hear arguments in a challenge by 26 states over the constitutionality of President Barack Obama's executive action to defer deportation of certain immigrant children and parents who are in the country...

By: Joshua Roberts

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Supreme Court is heading into its home stretch, with major rulings due by the end of the month on President Barack Obama's unilateral immigration plan, racial preferences in university admissions and a restrictive Texas abortion law.

Producing decisive rulings has been complicated by the fact that the court has been down one justice since conservative Antonin Scalia died in February, leaving it evenly split with four conservatives and four liberals.

The justices also are set to rule on whether to overturn Republican former Virginia governor Robert McDonnell's 2014 corruption conviction, one of the 13 cases yet to be decided.

The court appeared divided along ideological lines when it heard arguments on April 18 over whether Democrat Obama exceeded his constitutional powers in bypassing the Republican-led Congress with a 2014 plan to spare millions of immigrants in the country illegally from deportation and give them work permits.

Twenty-six states led by Republican-governed Texas brought the lawsuit. A 4-4 ruling, which appeared to be one possibility after the arguments, would deal Obama a huge defeat because it would affirm a lower-court ruling invalidating the plan.

Split rulings do not set nationwide legal precedents, but a 4-4 decision would effectively kill Obama's immigration plan.

The court also seemed split along ideological lines during March 2 arguments in a challenge to a Texas abortion law brought by abortion providers backed by the Obama administration.

A 4-4 ruling would deliver a victory to Texas because it would affirm a lower-court ruling upholding the law. Because such a ruling would set no nationwide precedent, it might not serve as a legal blueprint for other conservative, Republican-dominated states to enact similar laws.

The question before the justices is whether the law, which imposes strict regulations on abortion doctors and clinic facilities, violates a woman's constitutional right to abortion as established in the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling.

There cannot be a 4-4 ruling in a challenge by a white woman, enlisted by a conservative legal activist, to a University of Texas student admissions policy giving preferences to racial minorities in a program aimed at fostering campus racial diversity. Only seven justices heard that case.

Liberal Elena Kagan, the Obama administration's solicitor general when it supported the university in earlier litigation, recused herself. That means four conservatives and three liberals will decide the case. Conservative justices expressed reservations about the affirmative action admissions policy during Dec. 9 arguments.

On Agent Orange, VA Weighs Politics and Cost Along With Science

Although veterans advocates say the VA should be guided by science as it makes benefit decisions, documents and interviews show that other considerations also come into play.

By:   Charles Ornstein, ProPublica, and Mike Hixenbaugh

An outside panel of experts had already determined that the scientific evidence showed the vets were likely exposed to the toxic herbicide.

The scientists within the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs agreed the airmen had a strong case. But they had a more calculated concern: If the VA doled out cash to these veterans, others might want it too, according to an internal document obtained by ProPublica and The Virginian-Pilot.

The group put their worries in writing. In a draft memo, they warned the secretary of Veterans Affairs that giving benefits to the airmen might prompt “additional pressure” from other veteran groups.

Such political and financial concerns aren’t supposed to play into decisions about Agent Orange benefits, veterans advocates and some legal experts say. Federal law requires that, in most cases, these decisions be guided strictly by science.

But an examination of two recent cases illustrates how dueling considerations of liability, responsibility and evolving scientific evidence weigh into VA deliberations.

“This shows what we’ve already suspected: At the VA, they’re more interested in politics, and protecting their turf and their bonuses than fulfilling their mission to assist veterans,” said John Wells, a Louisiana lawyer who has spent more than a decade advocating for 90,000 Navy vets fighting for Agent Orange benefits.

VA officials say they are committed to making sure qualified vets get benefits, and they believe the law allows them to consider the ramifications of their decisions when weighing the eligibility of new groups.

“Considering second order effects of a decision does not in any way violate the Agent Orange Act,” the VA’s general counsel’s office wrote in response to questions.

For the past year, ProPublica and The Pilot have been examining the effects Agent Orange has had on a growing group of veterans and their families. Decades after the end of the Vietnam War, many are suffering an array of health consequences and are struggling to prove they were exposed. In interviews, they blame the VA for obstructing their claims through denials or ever-escalating requests for information, a process some call “delay, deny, wait till I die.”

Some 2.6 million Vietnam veterans are thought to have been exposed to — and possibly harmed by — Agent Orange, which the U.S. military used to defoliate dense forests, making it easier to spot enemy troops. But only vets who set foot in Vietnam or the Korean demilitarized zone — earning a status called “boots on the ground” — or served on ships that entered Vietnam’s rivers are automatically eligible for compensation for illnesses linked by the VA to the herbicide. Coverage for other groups may be added at the VA’s discretion, at a cost the VA has estimated could be billions of dollars.

As the VA studies whether to expand its list of Agent Orange-related conditions, the possibility that outside factors may be influencing its decisions worries veterans’ advocates and lawyers.

“Their charge is not to decide who they give stuff to,” said Rick Weidman, legislative director for Vietnam Veterans of America. “It’s a question of what (veterans) deserve because of scientific and medical evidence that’s related to the exposure.”

Typically the VA’s internal deliberations are conducted in secret, with only the final decisions made public. ProPublica and The Virginian-Pilot were able to learn details of two recent Agent Orange decisions by obtaining internal memos and interviewing a participant.

One decision involved the Air Force personnel and reservists who, in the years after the war, served on C–123 aircraft that had sprayed Agent Orange in Vietnam. In January 2015, an expert panel of the Institute of Medicine, now part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, found evidence suggesting these vets “would have experienced some exposure to chemicals from herbicide residue when working inside” the aircraft.

In response, the VA formed an internal working group to help senior officials brief VA Secretary Robert McDonald on options for compensating these veterans.

The working group drafted a memo acknowledging that the scientific evidence was “fairly straightforward.” In weighing how to respond, however, it listed pros and cons of various options for granting benefits to the reservists that had nothing to do with the science. One con noted that such a decision “may result in additional pressure by other veteran groups to further expand the presumption of exposure.” In parentheses, the report named specific groups of Vietnam-era veterans that might be encouraged by the change, including those who served on a base in Thailand where Agent Orange was sprayed, those who believed they were exposed on ships off the coast of Vietnam, and those who served at U.S. bases where the chemicals were tested.

On the pro side, a decision favorable to the vets “would demonstrate commitment by the VA to this group of veterans” and was “supported by science,” the memo said.

The working group recommended that the VA review claims from C–123 aircrew on a case-by-case basis rather than automatically approve them for the group. This, VA staffers calculated, could lead to “possibly reduced pressure by other veteran groups” who desired benefits while also satisfying members of Congress worried about the growing tab for Agent Orange-related benefits, according to the memo.

McDonald ultimately granted disability benefits to all Air Force and Air Force Reserve personnel who regularly served aboard the aircraft, a group estimated at between 1,500 and 2,100, saying in a statement that it was “the right thing to do.”

The VA, in an email, said the process was intended to ensure McDonald had all the information necessary to make a decision. “When making important policy decisions, the Secretary is presented with a broad array of potential courses of action, each of which have their own implications and 2nd/3rd order effects which need to be considered and discussed,” it said.

Bart Stichman, co-executive director of the National Veterans Legal Services Program, which has tangled with the VA in court on numerous Agent Orange-related issues, said it’s reasonable to expect the VA to consider a host of issues, including costs, when making decisions.

“There should be a full flow of advice,” he said. “I wouldn’t want to chill people from giving advice to the secretary and say you can’t talk to the secretary about political things.”

But Michael Wishnie, a Yale Law School professor who worked with the C–123 veterans seeking benefits, said it was against the law for the the VA staff to point out how the decision to give aircrews benefits could embolden or dampen the enthusiasm of other veterans groups.

The VA estimated the decision to compensate that relatively small group of Air Force vets would cost the government $47.5 million over 10 years.

Several years earlier, in 2009, in another internal deliberation reviewed by ProPublica and The Pilot, the VA was considering a far more expensive proposition: To grant Agent Orange benefits to veterans with Parkinson’s disease, ischemic heart disease and hypertension, more commonly known as high blood pressure.

The Institute of Medicine had found evidence suggesting a connection between Agent Orange exposure and those three conditions, and the VA’s internal working group of scientific experts wanted to recommend the department grant benefits to veterans with those conditions, according to Dr. Victoria Cassano, a member of the group who at the time was acting chief consultant for the VA’s Environmental Health Strategic Healthcare Group. But the group’s superiors at the VA told the panel to change its position and instead recommend against providing benefits for heart disease and hypertension, Cassano said. It recommended in favor of Parkinson’s disease.

In an interview, Cassano said the evidence to link those conditions with Agent Orange was at least as strong as for other diseases officially tied to the herbicide. The group was given no reason for the directive to change the recommendation, she said.

“I remember having trouble rewriting the recommendations and recommending against what I originally recommended,” Cassano said. “I understood that there were other things going on beyond the science and that my perspective at that time was that these people had more experience with the system and how this stuff falls out than I certainly did.”

In late 2009, under pressure from veterans groups, former VA Secretary Eric Shinseki said he would add ischemic heart disease and Parkinson’s disease to the VA’s list, but not hypertension, a condition that affects a third of adults in the U.S., including potentially hundreds of thousands of Vietnam veterans. According to Shinseki’s testimony to Congress in 2010, “the evidence regarding hypertension was less compelling” than for the other conditions.

But Cassano said that’s not what she, and other panel members, had found.

In an email relayed by a VA spokesman, Dr. Ralph Erickson, the VA’s chief consultant of post-deployment health services, said he and Dr. Peter Rumm, director of pre–9/11 era environmental health, were not at the VA in 2009, when Cassano was there.

“Honestly, even if we had been VA employees then, it would be inappropriate for us to discuss these internal deliberations,” Erickson wrote.

Since that time, Erickson noted, the VA has twice reconsidered whether to add hypertension to its list but declined to do so. “Each time the Secretary (who is the ultimate decision-maker) decided that the totality of the scientific evidence did not support creation of a new presumption,” he wrote.

Dr. Kenneth Ramos, who chaired a different Institute of Medicine panel that issued a report on Agent Orange earlier this year, said the evidence linking high blood pressure to Agent Orange is at least as strong as the evidence for other conditions already on the VA list. But given the prevalence of the condition in the U.S. – “a disease of aging and of lifestyle” – he said he understands the VA’s reticence.

“There’s evidence that says as (veterans exposed to Agent Orange) aged, hypertension rates have been higher,” Ramos said. “So now are you able to say the condition is service connected? It’s a really hard question to answer.”

Advocates for veterans still fighting for benefits say they are worried about the way in which the VA deliberates such issues. This is especially true among those pushing for benefits for 90,000 so-called Blue Water Navy vets, who served off the coast of Vietnam.

Although the herbicide wasn’t sprayed over the ocean, Navy veterans believe the chemicals contaminated the coastal waters sucked into their ships for drinking water. A study for the Australian Department of Veterans’ Affairs lends support to that theory. (ProPublica and The Pilot have previously written about their push for benefits.)

Rep. Chris Gibson, R-N.Y., who is co-sponsoring legislation that would force the VA to compensate the Blue Water vets, said the VA should not be basing decisions on whether they’ll spur others to demand compensation.

“The fact that they were looking at the impacts on other groups such as Blue Water Navy … this is outrageous,” Gibson said. “The focus of the veterans administration is to help our veterans, to ensure they get the health care that they have earned, the other benefits.”

Rory Riley-Topping, a former staff director for the House VA Subcommittee on Disability Assistance and Memorial Affairs, said her sense is that the VA is “very adamantly opposed” to providing benefits to the Blue Water veterans, in part because of the cost.

When she worked for the House, Riley-Topping said, VA officials were nervous that 2012 legislation that now provides health care for vets exposed to contaminated water at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina would leave an opening for the Blue Water vets. “That was one of the concerns the VA had raised at that time,” she said, echoing some of the arguments later raised about the airmen.

The VA has estimated that providing benefits to Blue Water vets would cost taxpayers $4.4 billion over 10 years, and the first year would cost the most – $1.3 billion — because of pent-up demand. A recent Congressional Budget Office estimate is substantially lower, pegging the cost at about $1.1 billion over a decade.

“On the one hand, yes, I get that’s a concern of theirs,” Riley-Topping said of the VA. “But on the other hand, those are not the types of things they should be looking at when they’re making that determination. Whether groups are empowered one way or the other has nothing to do with scientific evidence. It just doesn’t.”

Democrats Embrace Secretive, Flawed Terror Watchlist in Fight Against Gun Violence

Democratic leaders came out in force on Wednesday in favor of a proposal to prohibit Americans who are on federal government terrorist watchlists from purchasing firearms.

By:     Alex Emmons and Zaid Jilani







                                                                                

WASHINGTON (TheIntercept) - A group of Democratic senators waged a fillibuster on the Senate floor. And after presumptive GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump announced that he intends to meet with the powerful National Rifle Association to discuss a similar restriction, presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton welcomed him to the cause.

For Democrats, however, the move amounts to a strong endorsement of a system that civil liberties advocates have called a “Kafkaesque bureaucracy,” and which some Democrats have previously criticized for being secretive, unaccountable, and discriminatory.

Getting your name on a watchlist is much easier than getting it off. According to interagency watchlisting guidelines The Intercept published in 2013, it takes neither “concrete facts” nor “irrefutable evidence” to add someone’s name as a terror suspect. The guidelines allow the administration to name individuals as representatives of terrorist groups they have no demonstrable connection to, or to name entire “categories” of people on to the no-fly list.

There was no way for anyone to know ahead of time if they were on the no-fly list until 2014, when a federal court ruled that the government had to inform citizens when they were place on it. But the Department of Homeland Security still refuses to tell people why, or offer a form of judicial redress.

Before the September 11 attacks, the U.S. government only banned 16 people from flying on planes for their connections to terror groups. During the George W. Bush administration, that number swelled dramatically, leading to some high-profile embarrassments.

In 2004, Sen. Ted Kennedy told a congressional committee that he had been stopped and questioned at airport security five times because his name appeared on the watchlist. A Bush administration official told the Washington Post anonymously that “T. Kennedy” was a common terrorist alias.

On the same day, former civil rights activist Rep. John Lewis, D.-Ga., announced that he had been “held up” more than 35 times that year while trying to fly.

But placement on a terror watchlist can have far worse consequences than harassment at airport security. Lyman Latin — a disabled U.S. marine veteran who was wrongly placed on the list and later joined an ACLU lawsuit in response — was unable to get a Veterans Administration disability evaluation completed because he was blocked from flying from Egypt to the United States. As a result, his disability payments were reduced, and he had to move into lower-cost housing, exacerbating the impact of his disability. Another Army veteran represented by the ACLU was stuck in Colombia for years due to his inability to fly home.

Individuals who have been placed on the government’s watchlists have even been subject to extra scrutiny in court for cases completely unrelated to terrorism — as their designation on the watchlist can end up on their rap sheets for judges to see.

“The federal watchlists that the compilers of rap sheets draw on for these notations are notoriously arbitrary and inaccurate. People are placed on these lists without ever being told why or given an opportunity to contest their listing. And the lists appear to focus disproportionately on individuals with Muslim-sounding names,” Ramzi Kassem, an associate professor at CUNY School of Law, told The Intercept in March.

In 2014, the Associated Press reported that more than 1.5 million names have been added to various watchlists in the five years after Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, colloquially known as “the underwear bomber,” failed to blow up an airplane over Detroit in 2009.

Documents published by The Intercept in 2014 showed that nearly half of the people on the government’s shared list of terror suspects are marked as having “no recognized terrorist group affiliation.”

In April, the Council of American-Islamic Relations in Michigan filed a class action lawsuit alleging that the sweeping watchlist system is arbitrary and discriminatory against Muslims. One of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit was a 7-month old infant whose mother was stopped at airport security while he was patted down, subjected to “chemical testing,” and had his diapers searched – all because the baby’s boarding pass labeled him a “known or suspected terrorist.”

In the past, some Democrats recognized these problems. Rep Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Tex., chaired a hearing on the watchlist in 2008, saying that she was “not very happy” with a list that misidentifies individuals “who innocently come to use the airlines and to visit Grandma, to go on a family vacation, to try to make deadlines to a funeral, and whatever else the airlines are used for.” By December of last year, she was pushing the list’s use to bar gun purchases. “We’re just asking for terrorists not to be able to walk into a gun shop and buy a gun,” she said.

“Over the years, this list has grown to have over 1.1 million entries. With so many different names on the list, it is not surprising that every single day countless Americans are misidentified as terrorists,” Rep. Yvette Clark, D-N.Y., said in February 2009. But after the San Bernardino massacre, and when House Republicans blocked action on a bill to bar gun purchases from those on the list this past December, she tweeted out an article about House Democrats excoriating the move.