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ONE NATION, UNDER SURVEILLANCE
The Last Roundup: Is the government compiling a secret list of
citizens to detain under martial law?
ARE YOU ON THE LIST? In the spring of 2007, a retired senior official
in the U.S. Justice Department sat before Congress and told a story
so odd and ominous, it could have sprung from the pages of a pulp
political thriller. It was about a principled bureaucrat struggling
to protect his country from a highly classified program with sinister
implications. Rife with high drama, it included a car chase through
the streets of Washington, D.C., and a tense meeting at the White
House, where the president's henchmen made the bureaucrat so nervous
that he demanded a neutral witness be present.
The bureaucrat was James Comey, John Ashcroft's second-in-command at
the Department of Justice during Bush's first term. Comey had been a
loyal political foot soldier of the Republican Party for many years.
Yet in his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, he
described how he had grown increasingly uneasy reviewing the Bush
administration's various domestic surveillance and spying programs.
Much of his testimony centered on an operation so clandestine he
wasn't allowed to name it or even describe what it did. He did say,
however, that he and Ashcroft had discussed the program in March 2004,
trying to decide whether it was legal under federal statutes. Shortly
before the certification deadline, Ashcroft fell ill with
pancreatitis, making Comey acting attorney general, and Comey opted
not to certify the program. When he communicated his decision to the
White House, Bush's men told him, in so many words, to take his
concerns and stuff them in an undisclosed location.
The Continuity of Governance program encompasses national emergency
plans that would trigger the takeover of the country by
extra-constitutional forces. In short, it's a road map for martial
law. Comey refused to knuckle under, and the dispute came to a head on
the cold night of March 10, 2004, hours before the program's
authorization was to expire. At the time, Ashcroft was in intensive
care at George Washington Hospital following emergency surgery.
Apparently, at the behest of President Bush himself, the White House
tried, in Comey's words, "to take advantage of a very sick man,"
sending Chief of Staff Andrew Card and then White House counsel
Alberto Gonzales on a mission to Ashcroft's sickroom to persuade the
heavily doped attorney general to override his deputy. Apprised of
their mission, Comey, accompanied by a full security detail, jumped in
his car, raced through the streets of the capital, lights blazing, and
"literally ran" up the hospital stairs to beat them there.
Minutes later, Gonzales and Card arrived with an envelope filled with
the requisite forms. Ashcroft, even in his stupor, did not fall for
their heavy-handed ploy. "I'm not the attorney general," Ashcroft
told Bush's men. "There" he pointed weakly to Comey "is the attorney
general." Gonzales and Card were furious, departing without even
acknowledging Comey's presence in the room. The following day, the
classified domestic spying program that Comey found so disturbing went
forward at the demand of the White House "without a signature from the
Department of Justice attesting as to its legality," he testified.
What was the mysterious program that had so alarmed Comey? Political
blogs buzzed for weeks with speculation. Though Comey testified that
the program was subsequently readjusted to satisfy his concerns, one
can't help wondering whether the unspecified alteration would satisfy
constitutional experts, or even average citizens. Faced with
push-back from his bosses at the White House, did he simply relent and
accept a token concession? Two months after Comey's testimony to
Congress, the New York Times reported a tantalizing detail: The
program that prompted him "to threaten resignation involved computer
searches through massive electronic databases." The larger mystery
remained intact, however. "It is not known precisely why searching
the databases, or data mining, raised such a furious legal debate,"
the article conceded.
Another clue came from a rather unexpected source: President Bush
himself. Addressing the nation from the Oval Office in 2005 after the
first disclosures of the NSA's warrantless electronic surveillance
became public, Bush insisted that the spying program in question was
reviewed "every 45 days" as part of planning to assess threats to "the
continuity of our government." Few Americans professional journalists
included know anything about so-called Continuity of Government (COG)
programs, so it's no surprise that the president's passing reference
received almost no attention. COG resides in a nebulous legal realm,
encompassing national emergency plans that would trigger the takeover
of the country by extra-constitutional forces and effectively suspend
the republic. In short, it's a road map for martial law.
While Comey, who left the Department of Justice in 2005, has
steadfastly refused to comment further on the matter, a number of
former government employees and intelligence sources with independent
knowledge of domestic surveillance operations claim the program that
caused the flap between Comey and the White House was related to a
database of Americans who might be considered potential threats in the
event of a national emergency. Sources familiar with the program say
that the government's data gathering has been overzealous and probably
conducted in violation of federal law and the protection from
unreasonable search and seizure guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment.
According to a senior government official who served with high-level
security clearances in five administrations, "There exists a database
of Americans, who, often for the slightest and most trivial reason,
are considered unfriendly, and who, in a time of panic, might be
incarcerated. The database can identify and locate perceived 'enemies
of the state' almost instantaneously." He and other sources tell
Radar that the database is sometimes referred to by the code name Main
Core. One knowledgeable source claims that 8 million Americans are
now listed in Main Core as potentially suspect. In the event of a
national emergency, these people could be subject to everything from
heightened surveillance and tracking to direct questioning and
possibly even detention.
Of course, federal law is somewhat vague as to what might constitute a
"national emergency." Executive orders issued over the past three
decades define it as a "natural disaster, military attack, [or]
technological or other emergency," while Department of Defense
documents include eventualities like "riots, acts of violence,
insurrections, unlawful obstructions or assemblages, [and] disorder
prejudicial to public law and order." According to one news report,
even "national opposition to U.S. military invasion abroad" could be
a trigger. Let's imagine a harrowing scenario: coordinated bombings
in several American cities culminating in a major blast say, a
suitcase nuke in New York City. Thousands of civilians are dead.
Commerce is paralyzed. A state of emergency is declared by the
president. Continuity of Governance plans that were developed during
the Cold War and aggressively revised since 9/11 go into effect.
Surviving government officials are shuttled to protected underground
complexes carved into the hills of Maryland, Virginia, and
Pennsylvania. Power shifts to a "parallel government" that consists
of scores of secretly preselected officials. (As far back as the
1980s, Donald Rumsfeld, then CEO of a pharmaceutical company, and Dick
Cheney, then a congressman from Wyoming, were slated to step into key
positions during a declared emergency.) The executive branch is the
sole and absolute seat of authority, with Congress and the judiciary
relegated to advisory roles at best. The country becomes, within a
matter of hours, a police state.
In case of a wide-scale attack, the executive branch becomes the sole
and absolute seat of authority. The country becomes, within a matter
of hours, a police state. Interestingly, plans drawn up during the
Reagan administration suggest this parallel government would be ruling
under authority given by law to the Federal Emergency Management
Agency, home of the same hapless bunch that recently proved themselves
unable to distribute water to desperate hurricane victims. The
agency's incompetence in tackling natural disasters is less surprising
when one considers that, since its inception in the 1970s, much of its
focus has been on planning for the survival of the federal government
in the wake of a decapitating nuclear strike.
Under law, during a national emergency, FEMA and its parent
organization, the Department of Homeland Security, would be empowered
to seize private and public property, all forms of transport, and all
food supplies. The agency could dispatch military commanders to run
state and local governments, and it could order the arrest of citizens
without a warrant, holding them without trial for as long as the
acting government deems necessary. From the comfortable perspective
of peaceful times, such behavior by the government may seem
far-fetched. But it was not so very long ago that FDR ordered 120,000
Japanese Americans everyone from infants to the elderly be held in
detention camps for the duration of World War II. This is widely
regarded as a shameful moment in U.S. history, a lesson learned. But
a long trail of federal documents indicates that the possibility of
large-scale detention has never quite been abandoned by federal
authorities. Around the time of the 1968 race riots, for instance, a
paper drawn up at the U.S. Army War College detailed plans for
rounding up millions of "militants" and "American negroes," who were
to be held at "assembly centers or relocation camps." In the late
1980s, the Austin American-Statesman and other publications reported
the existence of 10 detention camp sites on military facilities
nationwide, where hundreds of thousands of people could be held in the
event of domestic political upheaval. More such facilities were
commissioned in 2006, when Kellogg Brown & Root then a subsidiary of
Halliburton was handed a $385 million contract to establish "temporary
detention and processing capabilities" for the Department of Homeland
Security. The contract is short on details, stating only that the
facilities would be used for "an emergency influx of immigrants, or to
support the rapid development of new programs." Just what those "new
programs" might be is not specified.
In the days after our hypothetical terror attack, events might play
out like this: With the population gripped by fear and anger,
authorities undertake unprecedented actions in the name of public
safety. Officials at the Department of Homeland Security begin
actively scrutinizing people who for a tremendously broad set of
reasons have been flagged in Main Core as potential domestic threats.
Some of these individuals might receive a letter or a phone call,
others a request to register with local authorities. Still others
might hear a knock on the door and find police or armed soldiers
outside. In some instances, the authorities might just ask a few
questions. Other suspects might be arrested and escorted to federal
holding facilities, where they could be detained without counsel until
the state of emergency is no longer in effect.
It is, of course, appropriate for any government to plan for the
worst. But when COG plans are shrouded in extreme secrecy,
effectively unregulated by Congress or the courts, and married to an
overreaching surveillance state as seems to be the case with Main
Core even sober observers must weigh whether the protections put in
place by the federal government are becoming more dangerous to America
than any outside threat.
Another well-informed source a former military operative regularly
briefed by members of the intelligence community says this particular
program has roots going back at least to the 1980s and was set up with
help from the Defense Intelligence Agency. He has been told that the
program utilizes software that makes predictive judgments of targets'
behavior and tracks their circle of associations with "social network
analysis" and artificial intelligence modeling tools.
"The more data you have on a particular target, the better [the
software] can predict what the target will do, where the target will
go, who it will turn to for help," he says. "Main Core is the table
of contents for all the illegal information that the U.S. government
has [compiled] on specific targets." An intelligence expert who has
been briefed by high-level contacts in the Department of Homeland
Security confirms that a database of this sort exists, but adds that
"it is less a mega-database than a way to search numerous other agency
databases at the same time."
A host of publicly disclosed programs, sources say, now supply data to
Main Core. Most notable are the NSA domestic surveillance programs,
initiated in the wake of 9/11, typically referred to in press reports
as "warrantless wiretapping." In March, a front-page article in the
Wall Street Journal shed further light onto the extraordinarily
invasive scope of the NSA efforts: According to the Journal, the
government can now electronically monitor "huge volumes of records of
domestic e-mails and Internet searches, as well as bank transfers,
credit card transactions, travel, and telephone records." Authorities
employ "sophisticated software programs" to sift through the data,
searching for "suspicious patterns." In effect, the program is a mass
catalog of the private lives of Americans. And it's notable that the
article hints at the possibility of programs like Main Core. "The
[NSA] effort also ties into data from an ad-hoc collection of
so-called black programs whose existence is undisclosed," the Journal
reported, quoting unnamed officials. "Many of the programs in various
agencies began years before the 9/11 attacks but have since been given
greater reach."
"We're at the edge of a cliff," says Bruce Fein, a top justice
official in the Reagan administration. "To a national emergency
planner, everybody looks like a danger to stability." The following
information seems to be fair game for collection without a warrant:
the e-mail addresses you send to and receive from, and the subject
lines of those messages; the phone numbers you dial, the numbers that
dial in to your line, and the durations of the calls; the Internet
sites you visit and the keywords in your Web searches; the
destinations of the airline tickets you buy; the amounts and locations
of your ATM withdrawals; and the goods and services you purchase on
credit cards. All of this information is archived on government
supercomputers and, according to sources, also fed into the Main Core
database.
Main Core also allegedly draws on four smaller databases that, in
turn, cull from federal, state, and local "intelligence" reports;
print and broadcast media; financial records; "commercial databases";
and unidentified "private sector entities." Additional information
comes from a database known as the Terrorist Identities Datamart
Environment, which generates watch lists from the Office of the
Director of National Intelligence for use by airlines, law
enforcement, and border posts. According to the Washington Post, the
Terrorist Identities list has quadrupled in size between 2003 and 2007
to include about 435,000 names. The FBI's Terrorist Screening Center
border crossing list, which listed 755,000 persons as of fall 2007,
grows by 200,000 names a year. A former NSA officer tells Radar that
the Treasury Department's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, using
an electronic-funds transfer surveillance program, also contributes
data to Main Core, as does a Pentagon program that was created in 2002
to monitor antiwar protesters and environmental activists such as
Greenpeace.
If previous FEMA and FBI lists are any indication, the Main Core
database includes dissidents and activists of various stripes,
political and tax protesters, lawyers and professors, publishers and
journalists, gun owners, illegal aliens, foreign nationals, and a
great many other harmless, average people. A veteran CIA intelligence
analyst who maintains active high-level clearances and serves as an
advisor to the Department of Defense in the field of emerging
technology tells Radar that during the 2004 hospital room drama, James
Comey expressed concern over how this secret database was being used
"to accumulate otherwise private data on non-targeted U.S. citizens
for use at a future time." Though not specifically familiar with the
name Main Core, he adds, "What was being requested of Comey for legal
approval was exactly what a Main Core story would be." A source
regularly briefed by people inside the intelligence community adds:
"Comey had discovered that President Bush had authorized NSA to use a
highly classified and compartmentalized Continuity of Government
database on Americans in computerized searches of its domestic
intercepts. [Comey] had concluded that the use of that 'Main Core'
database compromised the legality of the overall NSA domestic
surveillance project."
If Main Core does exist, says Philip Giraldi, a former CIA
counterterrorism officer and an outspoken critic of the agency, the
Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is its likely home. "If a
master list is being compiled, it would have to be in a place where
there are no legal issues" the CIA and FBI would be restricted by
oversight and accountability laws "so I suspect it is at DHS, which as
far as I know operates with no such restraints." Giraldi notes that
DHS already maintains a central list of suspected terrorists and has
been freely adding people who pose no reasonable threat to domestic
security. "It's clear that DHS has the mandate for controlling and
owning master lists. The process is not transparent, and the criteria
for getting on the list are not clear." Giraldi continues, "I am
certain that the content of such a master list [as Main Core] would
not be carefully vetted, and there would be many names on it for many
reasons quite likely including the two of us."
Would Main Core in fact be legal? According to constitutional scholar
Bruce Fein, who served as associate deputy attorney general under
Ronald Reagan, the question of legality is murky: "In the event of a
national emergency, the executive branch simply assumes these
powers" the powers to collect domestic intelligence and draw up
detention lists, for example "if Congress doesn't explicitly prohibit
it. It's really up to Congress to put these things to rest, and
Congress has not done so." Fein adds that it is virtually impossible
to contest the legality of these kinds of data collection and spy
programs in court "when there are no criminal prosecutions and [there
is] no notice to persons on the president's 'enemies list.' That
means if Congress remains invertebrate, the law will be whatever the
president says it is even in secret. He will be the judge on his own
powers and invariably rule in his own favor." Compared to PROMIS,
Richard Nixon's enemies list or Senator Joe McCarthy's blacklist look
downright crudeThe veteran CIA intelligence analyst notes that Comey's
suggestion that the offending elements of the program were dropped
could be misleading: "Bush [may have gone ahead and] signed it as a
National Intelligence Finding anyway."
But even if we never face a national emergency, the mere existence of
the database is a matter of concern. "The capacity for future use of
this information against the American people is so great as to be
virtually unfathomable," the senior government official says. In any
case, mass watch lists of domestic citizens may do nothing to make us
safer from terrorism. Jeff Jonas, chief scientist at IBM, a
world-renowned expert in data mining, contends that such efforts won't
prevent terrorist conspiracies. "Because there is so little
historical terrorist event data," Jonas tells Radar, "there is not
enough volume to create precise predictions."
The overzealous compilation of a domestic watch list is not unique in
postwar American history. In 1950, the FBI, under the notoriously
paranoid J. Edgar Hoover, began to "accumulate the names, identities,
and activities" of suspect American citizens in a rapidly expanding
"security index," according to declassified documents. In a letter to
the Truman White House, Hoover stated that in the event of certain
emergency situations, suspect individuals would be held in detention
camps overseen by "the National Military Establishment." By 1960, a
congressional investigation later revealed, the FBI list of suspicious
persons included "professors, teachers, and educators; labor-union
organizers and leaders; writers, lecturers, newsmen, and others in the
mass-media field; lawyers, doctors, and scientists; other potentially
influential persons on a local or national level; [and] individuals
who could potentially furnish financial or material aid" to unnamed
"subversive elements." This same FBI "security index" was allegedly
maintained and updated into the 1980s, when it was reportedly
transferred to the control of none other than FEMA (though the FBI
denied this at the time).
FEMA, however then known as the Federal Preparedness Agency already
had its own domestic surveillance system in place, according to a 1975
investigation by Senator John V. Tunney of California. Tunney, the
son of heavyweight boxing champion Gene Tunney and the inspiration for
Robert Redford's character in the film The Candidate, found that the
agency maintained electronic dossiers on at least 100,000 Americans
that contained information gleaned from wide-ranging computerized
surveillance. The database was located in the agency's secret
underground city at Mount Weather, near the town of Bluemont,
Virginia. The senator's findings were confirmed in a 1976
investigaion by the Progressive magazine, which found that the Mount
Weather computers "can obtain millions of pieces [of] information on
the personal lives of American citizens by tapping the data stored at
any of the 96 Federal Relocation Centers" a reference to other
classified facilities. According to the Progressive, Mount Weather's
databases were run "without any set of stated rules or regulations.
Its surveillance program remains secret even from the leaders of the
House and the Senate."
Ten years later, a new round of government martial law plans came to
light. A report in the Miami Herald contended that Reagan loyalist
and Iran-Contra conspirator Colonel Oliver North had spearheaded the
development of a "secret contingency plan," code-named REX 84 which
called "for suspension of the Constitution, turning control of the
United States over to FEMA, [and the] appointment of military
commanders to run state and local governments." The North plan also
reportedly called for the detention of upwards of 400,000 illegal
aliens and an undisclosed number of American citizens in at least 10
military facilities maintained as potential holding camps. North's
program was so sensitive in nature that when Texas congressman Jack
Brooks attempted to question North about it during the 1987
Iran-Contra hearings, he was rebuffed even by his fellow legislators.
"I read in Miami papers and several others that there had been a plan
by that same agency [FEMA] that would suspend the American
Constitution," Brooks said. "I was deeply concerned about that and
wondered if that was the area in which he [North] had worked."
Senator Daniel Inouye, chairman of the Senate Select Committee on
Iran, immediately cut off his colleague, saying, "That question
touches upon a highly sensitive and classified area, so may I request
that you not touch upon that, sir." Though Brooks pushed for an
answer, the line of questioning was not allowed to proceed.
Wired magazine turned up additional damaging information, revealing in
1993 that North, operating from a secure White House site, allegedly
employed a software database program called PROMIS (ostensibly as part
of the REX 84 plan). PROMIS, which has a strange and controversial
history, was designed to track individuals prisoners, for example by
pulling together information from disparate databases into a single
record. According to Wired, "Using the computers in his command
center, North tracked dissidents and potential troublemakers within
the United States. Compared to PROMIS, Richard Nixon's enemies list
or Senator Joe McCarthy's blacklist look downright crude." Sources
have suggested to Radar that government databases tracking Americans
today, including Main Core, could still have PROMIS-based legacy code
from the days when North was running his programs.
In the wake of 9/11, domestic surveillance programs of all sorts
expanded dramatically. As one well-placed source in the intelligence
community puts it, "The gloves seemed to come off." What is not yet
clear is what sort of still-undisclosed programs may have been
authorized by the Bush White House. Marty Lederman, a high-level
official at the Department of Justice under Clinton, writing on a law
blog last year, wondered, "How extreme were the programs they
implemented [after 9/11]? How egregious was the lawbreaking?"
Congress has tried, and mostly failed, to find out.
HISTORY'S LESSONS Japanese Americans moved to internment camps in
World War II In July 2007 and again last August, Representative Peter
DeFazio, a Democrat from Oregon and a senior member of the House
Homeland Security Committee, sought access to the "classified annexes"
of the Bush administration's Continuity of Government program.
DeFazio's interest was prompted by Homeland Security Presidential
Directive 20 (also known as NSPD-51), issued in May 2007, which
reserves for the executive branch the sole authority to decide what
constitutes a national emergency and to determine when the emergency
is over. DeFazio found this unnerving.
But he and other leaders of the Homeland Security Committee, including
Chairman Bennie Thompson, a Mississippi Democrat, were denied a review
of the Continuity of Government classified annexes. To this day,
their calls for disclosure have been ignored by the White House. In a
press release issued last August, DeFazio went public with his
concerns that the NSPD-51 Continuity of Government plans are
"extra-constitutional or unconstitutional." Around the same time, he
told the Oregonian: "Maybe the people who think there's a conspiracy
out there are right."
None of the leading presidential candidates have been asked the
question, "As president, will you continue aggressive domestic
surveillance programs in the vein of the Bush administration?"Congress
itself has recently widened the path for both extra-constitutional
detentions by the White House and the domestic use of military force
during a national emergency. The Military Commissions Act of 2006
effectively suspended habeas corpus and freed up the executive branch
to designate any American citizen an "enemy combatant" forfeiting all
privileges accorded under the Bill of Rights. The John Warner
National Defense Authorization Act, also passed in 2006, included a
last-minute rider titled "Use of the Armed Forces in Major Public
Emergencies," which allowed the deployment of U.S. military units not
just to put down domestic insurrections as permitted under posse
comitatus and the Insurrection Act of 1807 but also to deal with a
wide range of calamities, including "natural disaster, epidemic, or
other serious public health emergency, terrorist attack, or incident."
More troubling, in 2002, Congress authorized funding for the U.S.
Northern Command, or NORTHCOM, which, according to Washington Post
military intelligence expert William Arkin, "allows for emergency
military operations in the United States without civilian supervision
or control."
"We are at the edge of a cliff and we're about to fall off," says
constitutional lawyer and former Reagan administration official Bruce
Fein. "To a national emergency planner, everybody looks like a danger
to stability. There's no doubt that Congress would have the authority
to denounce all this for example, to refuse to appropriate money for
the preparation of a list of U.S. citizens to be detained in the
event of martial law. But Congress is the invertebrate branch. They
say, 'We have to be cautious.' The same old crap you associate with
cowards. None of this will change under a Democratic administration,
unless you have exceptional statesmanship and the courage to stand up
and say, 'You know, democracies accept certain risks that tyrannies do
not.'"
As of this writing, DeFazio, Thompson, and the other 433 members of
the House are debating the so-called Protect America Act, after a
similar bill passed in the Senate. Despite its name, the act offers
no protection for U.S. citizens; instead, it would immunize from
litigation U.S. telecom giants for colluding with the government in
the surveillance of Americans to feed the hungry maw of databases like
Main Core. The Protect America Act would legalize programs that
appear to be unconstitutional. Meanwhile, the mystery of James
Comey's testimony has disappeared in the morass of election year
coverage. None of the leading presidential candidates have been asked
the questions that are so profoundly pertinent to the future of the
country: As president, will you continue aggressive domestic
surveillance programs in the vein of the Bush administration? Will
you release the COG blueprints that Representatives DeFazio and
Thompson were not allowed to read? What does it suggest about the
state of the nation that the U.S. is now ranked by worldwide civil
liberties groups as an "endemic surveillance society," alongside
repressive regimes such as China and Russia? How can a democracy
thrive with a massive apparatus of spying technology deployed against
every act of political expression, private or public? (Radar put
these questions to spokespeople for the McCain, Obama, and Clinton
campaigns, but at press time had yet to receive any responses.)
These days, it's rare to hear a voice like that of Senator Frank
Church, who in the 1970s led the explosive investigations into U.S.
domestic intelligence crimes that prompted the very reforms now being
eroded. "The technological capacity that the intelligence community
has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny,"
Church pointed out in 1975. "And there would be no way to fight back,
because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to
the government, no matter how privately it was done, is within the
reach of the government to know."
UPDATE
Since this article went to press, several documents have emerged to
suggest the story has longer legs than we thought. Most troubling
among these is an October 2001 Justice Department memo that detailed
the extra-constitutional powers the U.S. military might invoke during
domestic operations following a terrorist attack. In the memo, John
Yoo, then deputy assistant attorney general, "concluded that the
Fourth Amendment had no application to domestic military operations."
(Yoo, as most readers know, is author of the infamous Torture Memo
that, in bizarro fashion, rejiggers the definition of "legal" torture
to allow pretty much anything short of murder.) In the October 2001
memo, Yoo refers to a classified DOJ document titled "Authority for
Use of Military Force to Combat Terrorist Activities Within the United
States." According to the Associated Press, "Exactly what domestic
military action was covered by the October memo is unclear. But
federal documents indicate that the memo relates to the National
Security Agency's Terrorist Surveillance Program." Attorney General
John Mukasey last month refused to clarify before Congress whether the
Yoo memo was still in force.
Meanwhile, congressional sources tell Radar that Congressman Peter
DeFazio has apparently abandoned his effort to get to the bottom of
the White House COG classified annexes. Penny Dodge, DeFazio's chief
of staff, says otherwise. "We will be sending a letter requesting a
classified briefing soon," she told Radar this week.
Thanks to Radar Magazine for the above article. |
