SALON

Mark Benjamin

Tuesday, Oct 18, 2005 12:00 PM UTC

Biological alarm in Washington

Did terrorists attack Washington with a deadly pathogen?

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On Sept. 24, 2005, tens of thousands of protesters marched past the White House and flooded the National Mall near 17th Street and Constitution Avenue. They had arrived from all over the country for a day of speeches and concerts to protest the war in Iraq. It may have been the biggest antiwar rally since Vietnam. A light rain fell early in the day and most of the afternoon was cool and overcast.

Unknown to the crowd, biological-weapons sensors, scattered for miles across Washington by the Department of Homeland Security, were quietly doing their work. The machines are designed to detect killer pathogens. Sometime between 10 a.m. on Sept. 24 and 10 a.m. on Sept. 25, six of those machines sucked in trace amounts of deadly bacteria called Francisella tularensis. The government fears it is one of six biological weapons most likely to be used against the United States.

It was an alarming reading. The biological-weapons detection system in Washington had never set off any alarms before. There are more than 150 sensors spread across 30 of the most populated cities in America. But this was the first time that six sensors in any one place had detected a toxin at the same time. The sensors are also located miles from one another, suggesting that the pathogen was airborne and probably not limited to a local environmental source.

William Stanhope, associate director for special projects at the St. Louis University School of Public Health’s Institute for Biosecurity, has been closely following scattered government and news reports about the incident. He’s convinced it was a botched terrorist attack. “I think we were lucky and the terrorists were not good,” he says. “I am stunned that this has not been more of a story.”

The DHS scrambled for three days to confirm just what may have been in the air that day. On Sept. 27, it turned for help to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The CDC did its own tests, and on Sept. 30 — six days after the deadly pathogens set off the sensors and well into the incubation period for tularemia — alerted public health officials across the country to be on the lookout for tularemia, the deadly disease caused by F. tularensis.

“It is alarming that health officials … were only notified six days after the bacteria was first detected,” House Government Reform chairman Tom Davis, R-Va., wrote in an Oct. 3 letter to Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff. “Have DHS and CDC analysts been able to determine if the pathogen detected was naturally occurring or the result of a terrorist attack?”

Government officials say the sensors detected a natural event. “There is no known nexus to terror or criminal behavior,” Russ Knocke, spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security, told the Washington Post. “We believe this to be environmental.” “It is not unreasonable that this is a natural occurrence,” says Von Roebuck, spokesman for the CDC. “There are still no cases of tularemia.”

However, Salon has spoken to numerous people who were at the Washington Mall on Sept. 24. Four say they got sick days later with symptoms that mirror tularemia.

Relatively speaking, F. tularensis is an effective biological weapon. A little bit goes a long, deadly way. A tiny amount — 10 microscopic organisms — can cause tularemia. After an incubation period of three to five days (it can range from one to 14 days), tularemia attacks the lymph nodes, lungs, spleen, liver and kidneys. Symptoms include fever, chills, headache, muscle aches, joint pain, dry cough and progressive weakness. Left untreated, tularemia can kill 50 percent of those who’ve contracted it. Conventional strains of the bacteria do respond to antibiotics, reducing death rates to as low as 2 percent.

As with anthrax, the U.S. military weaponized and stockpiled F. tularensis in the 1960s. The Soviets are said to have engineered strains to be resistant to antibiotics and vaccines. A World Health Organization Committee in 1969 estimated that dispersal of 110 pounds of F. tularensis over a city of 5 million would incapacitate 250,000 people and 19,000 of them would die.

“The biggest concern is that a terrorist would use the organism because it has such a high infectivity rate with a low number of organisms,” says Dr. Steven Hinrichs, director of the University of Nebraska Center for Biosecurity.

Scientists have long said that if terrorists use tularemia in an attack, it will look like this: The bacteria will show up in the air in a city, rather than the country, and perhaps at a major event.

“If Francisella tularensis were used as a bioweapon, the bacteria would likely be made airborne so they could be inhaled,” the CDC warns in an information sheet on tularemia. In a June 2001 consensus statement titled “Tularemia as a Biological Weapon,” the American Medical Association warned an attack would come in “an aerosol release” in “a densely populated area.”

There is no evidence that terrorists have ever used tularemia as a biological weapon before, but it may have been used by the Soviets against German troops during the 1942 Battle of Stalingrad, according to a report by the Council on Foreign Relations. The report adds that microbe stocks in Russia, Kazakhstan, Georgia and Uzbekistan are insecure and terrorists could potentially steal weaponized strains of tularemia from them.

So far, there are no signs of a tularemia outbreak in the U.S. But because it comes on like the flu, it is unclear if the government would even know if a few people from the Mall that day scattered across the United States had tularemia. The amount detected in the sensors suggests a very small amount was in the air.

“Clinicians don’t often think of it, and it has a non-specific presentation,” says Jeff Bender, an infectious disease epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota. “It is basically flu-like symptoms that sound like every other disease you can get.”

Like anthrax, F. tularensis is a naturally occurring bacteria. It is typically found in small mammals like squirrels, water rats and rabbits, which is why tularemia has also been called rabbit fever. Those critters get it mostly from bites by ticks, flies and mosquitoes. People have contracted tularemia from insect bites or from handling or eating infected material or skinning dead animals. F. tularensis is a concern mostly in central and Western states, particularly Missouri, Arkansas, Oklahoma, South Dakota and Montana. Nearly all cases occur in rural areas, according to the CDC. Around 125 people in the United States get tularemia each year. Most cases in the United States appear to have come from insect bites or handling animals.

Although insects mostly transmit the disease, there have been cases where the bacteria appears to have become aerosolized in the natural environment. Bacteria from a dead animal could contaminate some soil. In the right conditions, the bacteria might stay viable in the environment for weeks. The soil might then get stirred up and cause the bacteria to be airborne. Fifteen cases of tularemia were reported in Martha’s Vineyard in 2000, apparently after lawn mowers or brush cutters stirred up contaminated material into the air. One person died. Public officials have theorized something similar happened in Washington: The bacteria got into the soil on the mall and it was the marchers themselves who kicked it up into the air.

It is unclear if such a scenario explains what happened on Sept. 24. “The fact that it happened in six locations would have supported an attack scenario,” says Hinrichs from the University of Nebraska Center for Biosecurity. Hinrichs has not seen any test results proving that what was in the air that day was a deadly pathogen. Still, he says that government officials would have to consider the incident as more than a natural event. “To have found it in all six would have raised their level of suspicion,” says Hinrichs. “It could be a failed attack.”

The sensors that picked up on the pathogen are part of the Department of Homeland Security’s Bio Watch program. Since Sept. 11, sensors have been placed in 30 of the most populated cities in the United States. Most cities have roughly 12 sensors, although Washington is thought to have more.

The exact locations of the sensors are a secret. Some are piggybacked onto existing air monitoring stations, used by the EPA to measure pollution. The sensors look for signs of the six pathogens scientists consider most likely to be used as biological weapons by terrorists, including F. tularensis. (Other pathogens include anthrax, smallpox and plague.)

Sept. 24 was not the first time the Bio Watch sensors had detected possible biological weapons pathogens. Since the system was deployed, sensors around the United States have identified pathogens that could be used as biological weapons on five separate occasions, Jeffrey Stiefel, program manager for Bio Watch chemical countermeasures, said at an open lecture at the National Institutes of Health on Oct. 6. In all of those cases, the detections were apparently the result of natural phenomena. Indeed, some critics have long worried that one weakness of the Bio Watch program might be the difficulty of distinguishing between natural events and terrorism.

In 2003, two Bio Watch sensors detected F. tularensis near Houston in what the government later determined was a natural event, though the environmental source was never identified. But this was the first time anything popped up in Washington. “This is the first time we have had a situation there that I am aware of,” says the CDC’s Roebuck. It is also the first time six sensors simultaneously picked up on the same thing. “It has never happened that way before — that many,” Stiefel of the DHS said in his lecture.

Just after the antiwar rally, DHS officials faced a perplexing situation. While the six sensors detected something, at first it was not clear what it was.

Filters are removed from the sensors usually every 24 hours. A laboratory then performs a preliminary test to look for signs of a deadly pathogen. Six filters from the Mall showed the existence of a possible pathogen during that first round of tests.

A second round of tests could confirm the presence of F. tularensis using polymerase chain reaction techniques, which detect DNA signatures. The second round of tests was conducted sometime between Sept. 25 and Sept. 27. But in the second round of tests, none of the samples from the filters was a full DNA confirmation that what was floating around Washington that day was definitely F. tularensis. But it looked like it could be.

“The collectors were concentrated along the Mall,” Stiefel said in his lecture. “That starts to say, ‘Something looks a little funny here. The bottom line here is that there is something out there.”

This posed a quandary for department officials. Under the Bio Watch program, substances detected that are not confirmed positive pathogens can be ignored. But six sensors had detected the same thing in Washington during the biggest peace march in a generation. And Washington, D.C., is not exactly tularemia country.

There was another troubling thing. One of the sensors that went off was located at the Lincoln Memorial on the far western end of the Mall. Another was located near Judiciary Square, roughly two miles to the east and two blocks north of the Mall. A third was at the Army’s Fort McNair, more than two miles from the Lincoln Memorial down the Potomac River past the Mall, on the point of land where the Washington Channel and Anacostia River meet. The locations of the other three sensors have not been disclosed.

This makes a natural event on Sept. 24 more difficult to imagine. Under the government’s scenario, soil on or near the Mall somehow became contaminated with the bacteria, perhaps from the body or blood of a dead or injured small rabbit or squirrel. That soil then got stirred up — possibly by the marchers themselves — and floated across the Mall and beyond. Marchers and book festival attendees contacted by Salon say it was dusty on the Mall in the morning. But it rained early that day and stayed moist, making the dust theory perhaps less likely, at least after that rain.

“One sensor, I’d say maybe,” says biosecurity expert Stanhope of the dust theory. “Two sensors is a stretch. Six sensors? I’m sorry, you don’t have enough money to buy enough martinis to make me believe that it is naturally occurring at six different sites. I don’t think you could get me that drunk to believe that.”

As for how the bacteria may have erupted through natural processes, says Hinrichs of the University of Nebraska Center, “I can’t imagine how it could have happened.” Asked if he could imagine a scenario whereby F. tularensis could float around the Mall in the dust, Bender, an infectious disease epidemiologist, says, “Theoretically, it is possible.” Asked if it could have been an attack, he says, “The question you are asking, ‘Was this real or not?’ That is a very valid question.”

Another possibility is that somebody was testing U.S. biological weapons defenses. How sensitive are the sensors? How quickly and effectively can the government react?

“The Department of Homeland Security would have to consider the possibility that it was neither natural nor an attack, but that it was a testing of the system,” says Alan Pearson, a former DHS official, who is now the biological and chemical weapons director at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, a nonpartisan organization. “Was somebody trying to see what would happen?”

Regardless of the source, Pearson says, he was troubled that it took the government nearly a week to alert the public. “It points out that the system is still not working fast enough,” he says. “If it turned out to be something that really affected people, which it turned out not to be, the system was too slow.”

The federal government says that the most compelling argument against a terrorist attack is that nobody got tularemia. That may be true. But some people say they caught something that day.

Mike Phelps, 45, says he attended the rally in Washington that day, traveling round trip by bus from Raleigh, N.C. On Sept. 27, he came down with a fever, sore throat and headache. Within days, he was coughing up dark phlegm. When he blew his nose, it would bleed. “It was gross,” he says. “I literally vomited out cup loads of phlegm. Most of it was dark-colored. I’ve never had anything like this before.”

Phelps’ doctor said he had pneumonia and prescribed antibiotics. A few days later, Phelps read about the tularemia scare and called his doctor. His doctor told him that if it was tularemia, he would have prescribed him the same antibiotics. Phelps says he called the CDC but was transferred to an automated system. Frustrated, he hung up.

Several members of the women’s peace group, Code Pink, also from North Carolina, who attended the march, say they got sick afterward. Stephanie Eriksen, a 46-year-old network engineer for AT&T, says she developed swollen glands and cold symptoms in her throat and chest. She developed a persistent cough that still lingers. “My throat has still not recovered completely,” she says. Eriksen says her 14-year-old daughter marched in Washington and got sick. She was tested for strep throat. Eriksen said the results were negative.

Aimee Schmidt, a Code Pink member and student at North Carolina State, says that she developed flu-like symptoms and a raging headache that lasted three days after the march. She says her eyes hurt and her whole body ached. She never went to the doctor. “I made a choice, wise or not, to just deal with it,” she says.

Of course, there are countless benign explanations for these symptoms. And it could be true that nobody got sick from F. tularensis on Sept. 24. But bioterror experts say that doesn’t prove it wasn’t a terrorist attack. The Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo, they point out, made several unsuccessful biological weapons attacks before the sarin attack in the Tokyo subway system on March 20, 1995. Previous efforts by the cult to release a botulin toxin from a vehicle in 1990, and anthrax spores from a building in 1993, apparently failed to sicken or kill anyone because of faulty dispersal methods.

Terrorists may have made a similar screw-up in Washington on Sept. 24. “One of my working hypotheses is that there was an attack and they failed in their dispersion system,” says Stanhope. “They dispersed an incredibly low concentration.”

Government assurances that there is “nothing to see here” are reminiscent of the federal government’s initial response to the infamous anthrax attacks in fall of 2001. In an Oct. 4, 2001, press conference, then-Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson emphasized that anthrax occurs naturally in the environment and that “there’s no evidence of terrorism.”

“I want everyone to understand that sporadic cases of anthrax do [naturally] occur in the United States,” Thompson said. Thompson said the first victim to fall ill, a Florida man, was an “outdoorsman” and that investigators were looking into a stream he may have drank from in North Carolina. That man, Bob Stevens, 63, died the next day from inhaling weaponized anthrax that was apparently sent to the offices of American Media Inc. in Boca Raton, Fla.

Soon after, anthrax was sent to the office of Sen. Tom Daschle, D-S.D. Government officials claimed it was a “common variety” and not the weaponized agent most feared. Of course, further investigation proved otherwise.

Currently, the investigation into what happened on Sept. 24 is ongoing. Government officials have apparently been taking soil samples around the Mall, attempting to pinpoint a natural source for F. tularensis. In the meantime, on Oct. 5, the National Institutes of Health announced it would award two contracts worth a total of $60 million to develop new tularemia vaccine candidates. The announcement said nothing of the events 11 days earlier.

Monday, Oct 25, 2010 12:01 PM UTC

The 10 most terrifying would-be congressmen

Slide show: One may have dry-fired a gun near his ex-wife, another may have gotten away with murder

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The 10 most terrifying would-be congressmen

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The thing about wave elections is that you never know until the very end who will wash ashore.

That the Republicans will gain seats — probably a lot of seats — in next week’s midterms is not in dispute. But don’t be fooled by their claims of a looming mandate: They really haven’t done anything to deserve it. The GOP is simply benefiting from the same rule of politics that boosted Democrats in 2008 and 2006: When voters are angry, they take it out on the party that runs Washington.

In House districts across the country, many voters will head to the polls next week intent on voting for the Republican candidate, even if they don’t know a thing about him or her — a perfect opportunity, in other words, for GOP candidates with checkered backgrounds to slip undetected into the halls of Congress.

We’ve looked around and identified the 10 Republican House candidates with the most bizarre, unnerving and downright alarming baggage who just might sneak through next week. So when someone expresses bafflement that, say, a guy who allegedly dry-fired a gun outside his estranged wife’s bedroom could become a member of Congress — well, don’t say you weren’t warned.

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Thursday, Oct 14, 2010 6:25 PM UTC

“War on terror” psychologist gets giant no-bid contract

The Army has handed a $31 million deal to Dr. Martin Seligman, who once blasted academics for "forgetting 9/11"

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Left: Marty Seligman. A Guantanamo detainee sits alone inside a fenced area during his daily outside period, at Guantanamo Bay U.S. Naval Base, Cuba.

The Army earlier this year steered a $31 million contract to a psychologist whose work formed the psychological underpinnings of the Bush administration’s torture program.

The Army awarded the “sole source” contract in February to the University of Pennsylvania for resilience training, or teaching soldiers to better cope with the psychological strain of multiple combat tours. The university’s Positive Psychology Center, directed by famed psychologist Martin Seligman, is conducting the resilience training.

Army contracting documents show that nobody else was allowed to bid on the resilience-training contract because “there is only one responsible source due to a unique capability provided, and no other supplies or services will satisfy agency requirements.” And yet, Salon was able to identify resilience training experts at other institutions around the country, including the University of Maryland and the Mayo Clinic. In fact, in 2008 the Marine Corps launched a project with UCLA to conduct resilience training for Marines and their families at nine military bases across the United States and in Okinawa, Japan.

Government contracting regulations allow sole-source contracts, but only under very limited conditions, such as when only one company has the ability to do the needed work, according to Trevor Brown, a contracting expert at Ohio State University.

Brown said inappropriately awarding sole-source contracts is an “endemic” problem throughout the Department of Defense.

“I am not an expert on resilience training,” he said, “but I know enough to know they could have put out a tender, and my guess is they would have gotten a number of bids. My first reaction was that there is a market for this stuff.”

Army resilience training is the pet project of Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Casey, previously the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq during the darkest days of the war there, from July 2004 through February 2007. Army sources say the director of the Army’s resilience program, Brig. Gen. Rhonda Cornum, rammed the training contract through the Army bureaucracy on Casey’s behalf.

Seligman is most famous for his work in the 1960s in which he was able to psychologically destroy caged dogs by subjecting them to repeated electric shocks with no hope of escape. The dogs broke down completely and ultimately would not attempt to escape through an open cage door when given the opportunity to avoid more pain. Seligman called the phenomenon “learned helplessness.”

Government documents say that the goal of Bush-era torture was to drive prisoners into the same psychologically devastated state through abuse. “The express goal of the CIA interrogation program was to induce a state of ‘learned helplessness,’” according to a July 2009 report by the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility.

Seligman, described as politically conservative by a psychologist who knows him well, once chastised his fellow academics for “forgetting” 9/11. “It takes a bomb in the office of some academics to make them realize that their most basic values are now threatened, and some of my good friends and colleagues on the Edge seem to have forgotten 9/11,” Seligman once wrote on the Edge Foundation website. In that post, Seligman was arguing that any science advisor to the president “needs to help direct natural science and social science toward winning our war against terrorism.”

Previous reports have explored how Seligman’s fingerprints show up on the CIA and military torture programs — including his interactions at key moments with individuals and institutions that helped set up and carry out government torture. Seligman told Salon he never intended for the government to use his ideas for torture and described the timing of the meetings as coincidental.

Understanding Seligman’s connection to torture requires a bit of background. Bush-era torture was designed by a small group of current and former military psychologists who had been training elite U.S. soldiers to resist torture, an effort that has been in existence in the military for decades in what is called the Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) program.

In late 2001, both the CIA and the Pentagon first requested interrogation assistance from various SERE psychologists, according to a November 2008 report by the Senate Armed Services Committee and a 2004 CIA inspector general report. A small group of those SERE psychologists agreed to reverse-engineer their torture-resistance training tactics into brutal interrogation methods.

Seligman shows up early on. In December 2001, one of the SERE psychologists who helped establish and run the CIA torture program, James Mitchell, attended a small meeting at Seligman’s house along with Kirk Hubbard, then the CIA’s director of Behavioral Sciences Research. The New York Times has described this meeting as “the start of the program.”

In a lengthy correspondence with Salon over the previous months, Seligman described that meeting at his house as a small gathering of professors and law enforcement personnel as well as at least one “Israeli intelligence person,” to conduct an academic discussion about the so-called war on terror. “It was about isolating Jihad Islam from moderate Islam,” Seligman said of the meeting. “It did not touch on interrogation or torture or captured prisoners or possible coercive techniques — even remotely.”An interview with another attendee as well as an agenda for that meeting, obtained by Salon, support Seligman’s description of that meeting.

Seligman said he interacted with Mitchell at that meeting infrequently, but does recall the SERE psychologist “telling me that he admired my work at a coffee break.”

Another interaction between Seligman and the architects of Bush-era torture came a few months later, in the spring of 2002. Jane Mayer’s 2008 book “The Dark Side” shows that Seligman made a three-hour presentation at the Navy’s SERE school in San Diego in the spring of 2002. Mayer said Hubbard, the CIA official, was involved in arranging Seligman’s presentation. Hubbard confirmed that in an e-mail to Salon.

In e-mails to Salon, Seligman said that Hubbard, the CIA official, also attended the presentation. So did Mitchell and Mitchell’s partner in setting up government torture, another SERE psychologist named Bruce Jessen. Seligman said the audience included 50 to 100 SERE officials. “I was invited to speak about how American troops and American personnel could use what is known about learned helplessness to resist torture and evade successful interrogation by their captors,” Seligman wrote.

Seligman did allude to discussions at that time with SERE officials about interrogating al Qaida suspects, but said those talks were limited because of security clearance issues. “I was told then that since I was (and am) a civilian with no security clearance that they could not detail American methods of interrogation with me,” he wrote. “I was also told then that their methods did not use ‘violence’ or ‘brutality,’” he wrote.

Seligman’s colleagues estimate that the famous psychologist charges between $20,000 and $30,000 to present a speech. Seligman waived his fee when he presented to the SERE officials.

The Senate report says that at around the same time during that spring of 2002, Mitchell’s partner, Jessen, wrote for the military a “draft exploitation plan” for use on detainees. The Senate report says that at the same time, a number of SERE officials became involved in developing the torture program. “Beginning in the spring of 2002 and extending for the next two years (SERE officials) supported U.S. government efforts to interrogate detainees,” the Senate report says. “During that same period, senior government officials solicited (SERE) knowledge and its direct support for interrogations.”

Another related thing was going on at the same time in the spring of 2002. The CIA had also just recently taken custody of al Qaida suspect Abu Zubaydah, the first so-called “high-value” detainee subjected to CIA abuse. Mayer’s book documents how Mitchell, the SERE psychologist, led the team that tortured Zubaydah that spring of 2002. She quotes an unnamed source present at the scene who says Mitchell described his plans for Zubaydah “like an experiment, when you apply electric shocks to a caged dog, after a while, he’s so diminished, he can’t resist.”

(Mayer’s book also explores the ironic leitmotif of Bush-era torture: that SERE officials are not trained interrogators and the methods they employed were originally designed by Communists to produce forced confessions, not good intelligence.)

In his correspondence with Salon, Seligman said the CIA and military appear to have hijacked his learned helplessness work without his knowledge or consent. “I am grieved and horrified that good science, which has helped so many people overcome depression, may have been used for such dubious purposes,” he wrote in an e-mail. “Most importantly, I have never and would never provide assistance in torture. I strongly disapprove of it.”

Similarly, Seligman says he doesn’t know anything about how or why the military early this year steered the $31 million resilience-training contract to his psychology center with no other competition allowed. “I just don’t know,” Seligman wrote. “Government contracting is way above my level of knowledge or competence.”

“You will need to ask General Cornum and (Army Chief of Staff.) Gen Casey about their process,” Seligman added.

Gary Tallman, an Army spokesman, said in an e-mail that the Army steered the contract to Seligman for the benefit of soldiers. “The decision not to compete was affected by a compelling reason to execute this contract as quickly as possible, as the impact of current operations (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder [PTSD] incidents) and a suicide rate reported to be sixty percent higher than in 2003 posed significant concern for the well-being of our Soldiers,” Tallman wrote. He said the contract also went to Seligman because the psychologist had “the only program available that demonstrated it could meet stated requirements such as ‘longitudinal efficacy in randomized clinical trials, with improvement well documented in published research.’”

Tallman said Casey and Cornum declined Salon’s interview request.

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Friday, Oct 1, 2010 7:48 PM UTC

“Everyone just wants to kill people at any cost”

What Adam Winfield, one of the U.S. soldiers accused of killing civilians in Afghanistan, told his father

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Emma and Christopher Winfield hold a photograph of their son, 22-year-old U.S. Army Spc. Adam Winfield, at their home in Cape Coral, Fla., Friday, Sept. 3, 2010. Adam is accused of murdering civilians during his deployment to Afghanistan, a charge he and his family firmly refute. (AP Photo/Erik Kellar)(Credit: Erik Kellar)

One of the five U.S. soldiers accused of murdering Afghan civilians in a grisly case now unfolding in Washington state sent Facebook messages to his father early this year in which he claimed to be mortified that his fellow soldiers had purposely killed a civilian. In the messages, Spc. Adam Winfield also indicated that the murder was an open secret among the members of his platoon, and that no one seemed to think it was a big deal.

Winfield wrote his father, Chris, on Feb. 14 about his concern that two members of his platoon had the previous month murdered “some innocent guy about my age just farming.” The correspondence from that day illustrates the young soldier’s horror at the murder, and also reveals a shocking indifference about the killing among the other troops in his platoon.

“Well, it was two guys who did it actually killed the dude (sic) but the whole platoon knew about it,” Winfield wrote to his father. “Theres (sic) no one in this platoon that agrees this is wrong.”

Winfield is one of five soldiers in an Army Stryker Brigade from Joint Base Lewis-McChord, near Tacoma, that the Army has accused of being involved in the murders of at least three civilians in Afghanistan between January and May. Details have emerged about rampant drug use in Winfield’s platoon of around 30 soldiers, and of troops posing for photos with corpses. Soldiers in the unit say the alleged ringleader in the murders, Staff Sgt. Calvin Gibbs, severed and collected body parts, including teeth and fingers, apparently to make a necklace. Members of the platoon allegedly used drop weapons to cover up their crimes.

It’s too early to blame what occurred in Winfield’s platoon on soldiers’ moral compasses spinning out of control after repeated, violent tours in Iraq and Afghanistan (Gibbs was on his third combat tour). But it is easy to imagine that seemingly endless wars contributed to the moral turpitude Winfield described to his father.

“There are no more good men left here,” Winfield wrote in the Feb. 14 exchange released to Salon by Chris Winfield through his attorney, Neal Puckett. At one point, Winfield seemed to echo Sen. John Kerry’s haunting 1971 testimony about Vietnam when Kerry asked rhetorically, “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?”

“I started to think whether I should quit and just give up because it’s stupid to get smoked in Afghanistan,” Winfield wrote. “The Army really let me down when I thought I would come out here to do good maybe make some change in this country I find out that its all a lie (sic).”

Winfield said he raised concern about the January murder with someone there, but received a blasé response. “Well I talked to someone and they told me this stuff happens all the time and that when we get back there is always someone that spills the beans so it normally works its way out,” he wrote.

Winfield claimed he gave up his position in the platoon as a team leader because of the murder. “I stepped down I cannot be a leader in a platoon that allows this to happen,” he wrote.

In the correspondence from Feb. 14 Adam’s father, Chris, expressed shock at the indifference to the killing. “No one else thought it was wrong?” he asked his son. “No,” Adam wrote back. “Everyone just wants to kill people at any cost they don’t care the Army is full of a bunch of scumbags I realized.”

Adam Winfield also wrote that he feared for his own safety if he reported the murder, harkening back to the fragging incidents in Vietnam. “Pretty much the whole platoon knows about it,” Winfield wrote about the January killing. “It’s okay with all of them pretty much. Except me,” he added. “I want to do something about it the only problem is I don’t feel safe here telling anyone.”

Chris Winfield has said that he made multiple calls to the Army (including at least four to various offices at Fort Lewis) in an effort to report the murder his son described to him. On Friday, the Army announced that it is investigating this claim.

Winfield’s phone records, reviewed by Salon, show phone calls to those numbers taking place between 3:43 p.m. and 4:18 p.m. on Feb. 14. Mostly, Winfield says, he left messages, though he also talked to a sergeant in his son’s unit’s office. “I said my son is in [Stryker Brigade] and he told me there is a rogue sergeant over there committing murders,” Winfield told Salon. “I was pretty upset. I was frantic.”

He said nobody ever got back to him. Members of his son’s platoon allegedly committed at least two more murders in the months that followed. The Army has now implicated Adam Winfield in one of those later killings.

“The Army had the opportunity and they dropped the ball,” Chris Winfield said. “The Army has the blood on their hands on those two [later] murders. They want to sweep it under the carpet and make it disappear,” he claimed. “I’m not going to let them do that.”

The Army is not commenting on the cases.

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Wednesday, Sep 29, 2010 10:10 PM UTC

What Islamophobia really threatens

Two new reports shine light on the crucial role American Muslims play in stopping terrorism in the United States

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What Islamophobia really threatensA young Muslim American woman holds the U.S. flag at the Islamic Center of America in Dearborn, Michigan on March 26.

With the volume of Islamophobia on the rise in the United States, a recent report prepared for Congress and new law enforcement data are shining fresh light on the significant role American Muslims play in foiling terrorist plots, particularly those of the domestic “homegrown” variety.

The report from the Congressional Research Service, sent to Congress with little fanfare on September 20, contends that soon after 9-11, American Muslims “recognized the need to define themselves as distinctly American communities who, like all Americans, desire to help prevent another terrorist attack” and explores how federal, state and local law enforcement organizations responded by tapping into American Muslims’ language skills, contacts, information and cultural insights.

CRS is a branch of the Library of Congress that conducts research on a confidential basis for members of Congress and committees. Its report was obtained by the Federation of American Scientists and released on September 24, but a CRS spokeswoman would not say who in Congress originally requested it.

Meanwhile, the Muslim Public Affairs Council has crunched FBI data, information in government press releases, and media reports on potential al Qaida-related plots and determined that since 9-11, Muslim Americans have helped thwart 11 al Qaida-related plots, nearly one-third of all such planned attacks that threatened the United States. (A vivid example of an American Muslim warning authorities of a problem: a Muslim was the first to report to law enforcement last May the suspicious vehicle in Times Square which turned out to be a dud car bomb.)

The cooperation from American Muslims is no secret to law enforcement officials, who have established, all the way down to the local level, formal and informal connections to American Muslim communities to cultivate the flow of intelligence — like the Muslim Community Affairs unit of the Los Angeles Sheriff Department, established in August 2007. For their part, Muslim-Americans have established a litany of organizations to better understand and refute extremism, like the Muslim American Society’s “Straight Path Initiative,” which focuses on rooting out potential extremism, particular on Muslims aged 15 to 30. The CRS report on American Jihadist terrorism contains a list of examples of American Muslim organizations established to rebut extremism and an appendix listing federal, state and local authorities’ efforts to work with American Muslim communities.

Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert at Georgetown University, agreed that the American Muslim community has played a crucial but often overlooked role in the fight against extremism, actively reporting to law enforcement about potentially dangerous developments. “We can’t expect the intelligence community to spot these aberrations on the fringe,” Hoffman said. “That work comes from communities who are best poised to work with the authorities to prevent problems from even surfacing.”

Ironically, the American Muslim community is simultaneously facing what seems to be a swelling wave of Islamophobia, fueled, in part, by specious rhetoric that fuses terrorism and Islam.

Earlier this month, columnist and birther Frank Gaffney, Rep. Pete Hoekstra, R-Mich., the ranking Republican on the Intelligence Committee, and others held a news conference on Capitol Hill to release a report on Muslim religious law entitled “Shariah: The Threat to America.” That document alleges that Muslim adherents to Shariah law are categorically “making a determined, sustained, and well-financed effort to impose it on all Muslims and non-Muslims, alike.”

“This is laughable. This is pure prejudice and fear mongering,” is how Nihad Awad, executive directory of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, reacted to Gaffney’s report. “What they are presentingis contrary to Islamic ethics. They are just trying to scare people. This is the new McCarthyism. They are exploiting fear and public unawareness of Islam in general.”

Some American Muslims are also frustrated by grappling with anti-Muslim sentiments while simultaneously working so hard against extremism and assisting law enforcement to root out terrorists. “Ironic doesn’t even begin to explain this,” said Alejandro Beutel from the Muslim Public Affairs Council. He said Islamophobes are “failing to see who are the potential enemies and who are the potential allies.” Beutel predicted, however, that this new evidence of American Muslims’ role in thwarting attacks wouldn’t change the minds of many Islamophobes, saying, “Nothing we do is going to be good enough for them.”

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Thursday, Sep 23, 2010 8:15 PM UTC

So, did Christine O’Donnell break the law?

And if she has spent campaign money illegally, will she pay any price for it?

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So, did Christine O'Donnell break the law?FILE - In this Friday, Sept. 17, 2010 file photo, Delaware Republican Senate candidate Christine O'Donnell delivers remarks at Values Voter Summit in Washington. Comedian Bill Maher is digging up clips of Delaware GOP Senate candidate Christine O'Donnell's past appearances on his shows, including one in which she says she "dabbled in witchcraft." (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta, File)(Credit: Manuel Balce Ceneta)

Christine O’Donnell has been accused twice recently of violating campaign finance laws. The Tea Party-backed GOP Senate candidate in Delaware has dismissed the allegations, characterizing the complaints as unwarranted, politically motivated smears.

A review of her campaign finance records filed with the Federal Elections Commission, interviews with attorneys familiar with campaign finance law, and a review of her own public statements suggests O’Donnell has almost certainly flouted the law. The attorneys agree, but say she is likely to face little penalty from the FEC.

Earlier this month, the Delaware Republican Party filed a complaint with the FEC alleging that O’Donnell accepted illegal contributions from the Tea Party Express. On Monday, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington filed complaints with the FEC and the U.S. attorney in Delaware alleging that O’Donnell had violated the law by using campaign contributions for personal use, paying for gas, bowling, even the rent on her house.

“I am confident that we have been ethical,” O’Donnell said this week to a scrum of reporters who had cornered her at a forum held by the First State Patriots. “I personally have not misused the campaign funds.” When a CNN reporter pressed her specifically about using campaign money to pay the rent on her house, however, O’Donnell would not answer. In fact, she ran away.

That’s probably because even under notoriously equivocal campaign finance laws, there is no gray area when it comes to using campaign money to pay the rent on your house. “Well, that is a clear violation,” said Richard Briffault, who teaches election law at Columbia Law School. Indeed, according to FEC rules, “the campaign may not pay for mortgage, rent or utilities for the personal residence of the candidate or the candidate’s family even if part of the residence is being used by the campaign.”

The Wilmington News Journal in March of this year figured out that a sheriff’ sale for O’Donnell’s Wilmington home had been set for Aug. 1, 2008, because O’Donnell was in default on her mortgage. A month before the sale, however, O’Donnell sold the house to Brent Vasher, who was also her campaign attorney and her boyfriend at the time. (O’Donnell ran for the Senate in 2008 against Joe Biden.) She then rented the house from Vasher until sometime last summer.

The FEC files of O’Donnell’s campaign committee, Friends of Christine O’Donnell, document payments of $750 to Vasher during this time period. Also, back in March, O’Donnell admitted she was using campaign money to pay that rent, “because she also uses the town home as her Senate campaign headquarters,” the News Journal reported. “I’m splitting it, legally splitting it and paying part of it,” the paper reported her saying about her rent. “This is our technical headquarters,” she said about her house.

O’Donnell’s campaign expense files do show a number of unusual expenditures, including charges at gas stations and stores like Dollar Tree, Trader Joe’s, Target and Kmart, among others. O’Donnell was also very tardy in reporting those expenses, failing to file at least two required campaign finance reports with the FEC last year that were supposed to disclose contributions and expenses from April through the end of September. Twice the FEC wrote O’Donnell letters warning her that, “failure to file … may result in civil money penalties, an audit or legal enforcement action.”

During the same time period, the FEC also learned that Friends of Christine O’Donnell’s was operating without a treasurer after the departure of Susan M. Dixon sometime after April 2009. “It is required that for any committee to conduct any business, they must have an active treasurer,” the FEC wrote O’Donnell in April and then again in October. “Failure to appoint a treasurer will result in the inability of the committee to accept contributions and make disbursements.” Campaign finance lawyers agree that the rules on this are clear.

An FEC spokeswoman would not comment on O’Donnell’s records, but said that, in general, the commission tries to negotiate with a delinquent candidate like O’Donnell to hire a treasurer and report on time. That may have occurred in this case. In January of this year, O’Donnell sent in a campaign finance report covering the missing months in 2009. In that report, O’Donnell lists herself as the treasurer of her campaign committee.

Campaign finance attorneys say it’s unusual for a candidate to serve as her own treasurer, but may not be illegal. Paul Ryan, an attorney at the Campaign Legal Center, said that rules clearly require a treasurer, though they don’t seem to rule out a candidate putting herself in that position. “I don’t read the regulation as having anything to say about who should or may serve as the treasurer,” Ryan wrote in an e-mail.

In yet another twist, the Daily Beast reported earlier this month that her campaign committee also cut checks for $3,500 to O’Donnell’s mother, Carole O’Donnell. The first payment, dated Feb. 26, 2010, lists $500 for “bookkeeping and reporting.” A second payment on July 13, 2010, for $3,000 describes Carole O’Donnell as performing “financial consulting services.” Attorneys say those payments are legal if Carole O’Donnell did real work for the money.

Blogger Judson Bennett noticed an “unusual pattern of reimbursements” on O’Donnell’s FEC forms early this year, and when he asked her about it, O’Donnell responded, “I’m not rich, I’m not working. It is perfectly legitimate for me to use campaign funds for my living expenses while campaigning — food, gasoline, etc.”

Yes and no, campaign finance lawyers say. Ryan said O’Donnell could use campaign money only for expenses that are directly related to campaigning, like a fundraising dinner. When asked if she can use campaign money to pay for her regular groceries, for example, Ryan said, “The answer is a clear ‘No.’”

Still, attorneys familiar with campaign law say that based on the FEC’s track record, O’Donnell is unlikely to face much in the way of consequences, even if she did violate the law. “Generally what they try to do is resolve it informally or have her repay her campaign funds with her own funds,” Briffault said. “It is very, very, very rare that there are criminal prosecutions.”

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Page 1 of 47 in Mark Benjamin

Mark Benjamin is an award-winning investigative reporter with Salon.com’s Washington bureau. Since 2001, Benjamin has focused on national security issues with an emphasis on the plight of returning veterans and detainee abuse. He was hailed for exposing problems caring for veterans at Walter Reed starting in early 2005 and also

obtained for Salon the Army’s entire Abu Ghraib investigative files. Benjamin is the winner of a Raymond Clapper Memorial Award for the best reporting from Washington, a Fourth Estate Award from the American Legion, a Mental Health Media Award from the National Mental Health Association, an Outstanding Media Coverage Award from the National Gulf War Resource Center, a GLAAD Media Award for Outstanding Digital Journalism, and a Project Censored Award and was twice a finalist for the Online News Association’s Online Journalism Awards. He previously worked at UPI.

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