Written by GAP Public Health & Safety Associate Jonathan Cantú. Versions of this op-ed also appeared in the Ashville Citizen-Times (NC), Sun Advocate (UT), Columbia Daily Herald (TN), and Davis Standard Examiner (UT).

The Food and Drug Administration’s management has got it wrong again: The agency’s troubles aren’t due to bad public relations. At least they weren’t until recently.

2008 has been yet another tormented year for the FDA. February brought Congressional hearings into the agency’s lax regulation of fatal drugs. March brought a Congressional report scorching the FDA for its woefully inadequate inspection of foreign products entering the US, shockingly illustrated by that month’s Chinese ingredient-tainted Heparin scandal that involved at least 81 American deaths. The summer months brought the FDA’s long struggle to contain a salmonella outbreak that it attributed to tomatoes but was caused by peppers.

What was the FDA’s response to this string of spotlighted failures? To hire a marketing firm to remake the agency’s public image. Comically, the FDA botched that task, too. Investigative reports show the agency circumvented the mandated competitive bidding process in order to steer the PR contract to a Washington, D.C.-based consulting firm.

This op-ed was written by GAP Homeland Security Director Jesselyn Radack, with contributions by Keri Nash.

Nearly a month after Hurricane Ike devastated the Texas Coast, major media outlets reported that over 300 people were missing. The first organized search for bodies did not take place until October 2, nearly three weeks after the hurricane made landfall. The local and state searchers were working with the Laura Recovery Center, a Texas-based missing children organization.

The Government Accountability Project (GAP) in Washington, D.C. has been tracking this information since the hurricane struck, and our numbers of missing are more than double those being reported publicly. GAP used two separate missing persons lists – Houston’s ABC 13 Person Locator and the Laura Recovery Center list – to determine how many people remain unaccounted for. After correcting for persons duplicated on both lists (30), GAP compiled a single missing persons list. Using the Red Cross “Safe and Well List,” GAP’s missing persons list was then updated to reflect survivors. In total, GAP estimates that 683 people remain missing as of November 19.

by GAP Homeland Security Director Jesselyn Radack

Hurricane Ike is being hailed by some as a victory for disaster preparedness, but it should really serve as a warning. Local congressmen on both sides of the aisle have accused the Federal Emergency Management Agency of botching the response in Texas, just as it did with Katrina. The storm made landfall early on Sept. 13. Yet FEMA did not begin to open any relief centers, necessary to provide critical supplies, until Sept. 15.

FEMA blamed the delay on logistics and . . . bad weather.

Thousands have been left homeless. Millions were without electricity for days. People are still desperate to find food, water, ice and gasoline. They are trying to locate family members through disorganized “survivor lists.”

Michael Chertoff, secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, which now contains FEMA, toured flooded areas and then held a news conference during which he tried to shift responsibility for delays in receiving meals and supplies to the local city and county government. He said it was the fault of state officials, who handed his department the “unexpected challenge” of having to prepare distribution points in addition to delivering supplies.

by GAP Public Health and Safety Associate Amanda Hitt

Recent food scares are prompting American consumers to double-check food product labels — not just where items are coming from, but the precise ingredients and chemicals being ingested. But what if the labels are themselves misleading? You would hope this would be illegal, but Food and Drug Administration (FDA) guidelines allow for this every day.

Consumers should be able to rely on the reassuring “100 percent Beef” label on the package when making a purchase. But from the label, you would never know that much of the commercial beef on the market actually contains a chemical commonly found in floor cleaners! Anhydrous ammonia, which appears nowhere on the label, is now being intentionally added to meat by one of the nation’s largest beef distributors.

Beef Product Inc. (BPI) sells its ammoniated product (used in frozen hamburger patties, taco meats, low-fat hot dogs, beef-stick snacks) to major fast-food chains and food distributors as well as the federal Child Nutrition Program.

Written by GAP Homeland Security Director Jesselyn Radack

Recent reports from the Justice Department’s watchdog agencies focus on politicized hiring, but not politically motivated firing. Unfortunately, the department under President George W. Bush has engaged in both. I know. I have the scars to prove it.

The report released on July 28 by the Justice Department’s Office of Inspector General and its Office of Professional Responsibility concluded that the department had systematically and illegally inserted politics into its hiring process for career prosecutors and immigration judges. That report follows another that looked at partisanship infecting the honors and intern hiring programs. The focus of media coverage has been on actions taken after Alberto Gonzales became attorney general in early 2005.

I’ve no interest in defending Gon­zales, but it didn’t start with him. It started with his predecessor, John Ashcroft.

These days Ashcroft is enjoying a flurry of favorable notice, a function of historical amnesia. It should be remembered that he was the one who first decided that the honors program—long overseen by career attorneys and viewed as highly competitive and apolitical—would benefit from more direct participation by himself and other political appointees.

Written by GAP National Security Director Jesselyn Radack. Versions of this op-ed also appeared in: Fall River Herald News (MA), Anchorage Daily News, Sheridan Press (WY), Key West Citizen, Standard-Examiner (Utah), Albuquerque Journal, Daily Sun News (WA), San Marcos Daily Record (TX), The Keene Sentinel (NH), and the Charleston Gazette (WV).

When I recently learned that a CNN reporter was put on the federal "No-Fly List" shortly after his investigation of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) aired, my first reaction was, "Welcome to the club!"

If it is of any consolation to CNN Investigative Correspondent Drew Griffin, he stands in good company with the likes of Sen. Ted Kennedy and other congressmen, singer Cat Stevens, ACLU attorneys, peace activists, and even Nelson Mandela. But this is of cold comfort to those of us who have had the dubious distinction of being on the secret terrorist watch list.

In March 2006, the "No-Fly List" contained 44,000 names. This month, according to a tally maintained by the ACLU, based upon the government's own reported numbers, it hit one million.

Written by GAP Senior Counsel, Richard Condit. Versions of this op-ed also appeared in the East Oregonian and Hermiston Herald.

The Oregon Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) and Environmental Quality Commission (EQC) are responsible for overseeing the disposal of chemical warfare agents stored at the Umatilla Chemical Weapons Depot, including 2,200 tons of mustard agent.

Prior to 2007, the plan was to simply incinerate the waste, a practice defended because it is a quick fix. In theory, dangerous byproducts of the incineration process (lead, dioxin, PCBs) would not be emitted in harmful quantities because of the purported maturity of the incineration technology and the addition of filtration systems.

There's a big problem. The mustard agent contains a significant amount of mercury — which incineration can't destroy and filters won't completely capture. If the plan to incinerate proceeds, which the DEQ and EQC want, it is a certainty that mercury will be released into surrounding communities and the environment, including the Columbia River.

written by GAP Homeland Security Director Jesselyn Radack

It is no surprise to me that the Justice Department systematically and illegally inserted politics into its hiring process. This was glaringly obvious to me when I was forced out of the DOJ upon blowing the whistle on DOJ violations in the case of “American Taliban” John Walker Lindh in 2002.

In my 2006 book, The Canary in the Coalmine, I wrote about how the Attorney General’s Honors Program, founded by President Eisenhower’s first AG and long overseen by career attorneys, was first hijacked by Attorney General John Ashcroft. When I started at Justice after graduating from Yale Law School, the Honors Program was highly-competitive, well-regarded, and had the laudable distinction of being apolitical. Ashcroft decided in 2002 that the program would benefit from more direct participation by him and other political appointees. This continued during the tenure of his successor, Alberto Gonzales, and extended beyond the Honors Program into political hiring for the Department’s most senior career positions, which were soon populated by graduates of the likes of Regents University and Bob Jones University. It eventually climaxed in what I refer to as the 2007 “U.S. Attorney Massacre,” when nine United States attorneys were fired, according to the Justice Department, for their “poor performance” despite stellar records.

Being politically purged from Justice and subject to a pretextual investigation by the DOJ Office of Inspector General and Office of Professional Responsibility myself, I’m glad that the DOJ has finally seen the light. But I am grossly disappointed that it took six years, countless destroyed careers, and hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars to reach the conclusion I highlighted for them all the way back in 2002.

Written by GAP International Program Director Bea Edwards and International Program Officer Shelley Walden. Versions of this op-ed also appeared in Garden City Telegram (NJ).

The United Nations was scrambling. Reports were surfacing, based on firsthand knowledge, of U.N. peacekeepers grossly exploiting their positions by sexually abusing destitute citizens entrusted to their care.

While a remarkably similar story is currently unfolding, the allegations above emerged four years ago. Former U.N. employee Dr. Andrew Thomson witnessed these atrocities in the early part of this decade and recounted his experiences, together with other staffers, in his 2004 memoir, “Emergency Sex and Other Desperate Measures.” That book not only exposed sexual abuse by U.N. forces, but also described senior U.N. officials’ inactions in the face of dysfunctional U.N. security and rampant financial corruption.

Thomson’s reward for coming forward with the truth? Initially, he was fired. Due to media pressure and legal assistance from our group and others, he was rehired months later and promoted to a position of greater responsibility. In the wake of Thomson’s revelations and the Oil-for-Food scandal, then-U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan announced he was working to improve whistleblower protections for all U.N. workers. In late 2005, Annan issued a whistleblower protection policy that was a breakthrough for freedom of expression at intergovernmental organizations. This crucial response had impeccable logic: given the breadth of the organization, U.N. officials could not possibly monitor all staff all the time. The organization had to rely on its own staffers to report on serious misconduct and gross ethical lapses.

Written by Telecom whistleblower Mark Klein and whistleblower and GAP client Babak Pasdar

In 2005, the exposure of a sprawling domestic spying program shocked the nation. President George W. Bush directly authorized the violation of the law and the Constitution by spying on citizen phone calls and e-mails without a warrant. People were shocked and appalled at the flouting of our civil liberties. The backlash against this perceived "Big Brother" world we were entering was palpable; sure enough, the next election cycle saw great turnover of the president's party.

However, the scandal may end on July 8, with no one held responsible, when the U.S. Senate is expected to ignore the corporate violation of civil liberties and approve a bill that provides retroactive immunity to the telephone companies that allowed the Bush administration to spy on customers without a warrant.

By letting the Bush administration continue to spy on innocent citizens, by legalizing the illegal spying regime he secretly ordered in 2001, by expanding secret surveillance powers even further and by granting telecoms retroactive immunity, Congress is set to deal a blow to the Constitution itself.

Underlying this debate is the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, which was enacted to curb Watergate-era abuses. The act created a special secret court to which the government had to apply for individualized surveillance warrants involving foreign intelligence, thereby providing some very limited oversight of eavesdropping and upholding the warrant requirement of the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.