Thread: PLEASE READ IMPORTANT ARTICLE-

THIS IS CRAZY , I WON'T BE ABLE TO SLEEP WELL ANYMORE THINKING WHAT'S GOING ON, WE MUST FORCE OUR LAWMAKERS TO TAKE ACTION: PLEASE SEE THIS TWO ARTICLES ...

http://charlotte.creativeloafing.com/gy ... oid%3A7141

Heres the story. Mr. Maxwell, we ARE listening!



http://charlotte.creativeloafing.com/gy ... id%3A47764

Security Clearance

Michael J. Maxwell has a lot to say about the status of homeland security -- if only someone would listen

By Tara Servatius

Published 06.28.2006
http://charlotte.creativeloafing.com/gy ... ?oid=47764
Creative Loafing Charlotte

Last fall, a loud brawl broke out in a corridor of the Rayburn building in Washington, DC, the kind of verbal feud you don't hear often in the halls of Congress.

On one side were a dozen highly hacked-off Congress members who were fed up with the Department of Homeland Security's stonewalling. They'd heard allegations that to process applications faster, its immigration department was awarding immigration papers to people from terrorist-harboring and -sponsoring nations without completing background checks to see who they were letting in. They'd heard allegations of fraud, bribery and employee corruption with national security implications, including cases of employees who may have aided terrorist-linked organizations or foreign governments in the circumvention of the immigration system and placement of their agents inside it. The Congress members were furious, and they wanted answers.

On the other side of the altercation in the hall were two higher-ups from Homeland Security who were determined to keep the Nov. 2 hearing on the matter from going forward.

And in the middle was Michael J. Maxwell, the subject of a rapidly escalating human tug-of-war between Congress and the Bush Administration that transcends partisan politics.

As a former police chief turned security contractor, Maxwell had guided dignitaries safely through war zones and set up security for government agencies and potential terrorist targets. But he'd never faced an enemy quite like the one he faced now -- namely, the enraged bureaucrats who run Homeland Security and those they answer to in the White House.

"They made my life a living hell," Maxwell said.

As the Director of the Office of Security and Investigations at the US Citizenship and Immigrations Services (USCIS), a branch of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Maxwell's job included policing the agency's employees, specifically the adjudicators who approve immigrant applicants for everything from travel documents to political asylum to green cards. His given mission had been to clean up an agency awash in fraud. In the process, Maxwell uncovered white-collar crime and national security breaches that would stand the average American's hair on end and fought a bureaucracy determined to shut him up in order to carry on with business as usual.

That day in the Rayburn building, the minders from DHS who always shadowed Maxwell when he attempted to talk to members of Congress won the shouting match.

Maxwell could testify, they said, but only if they were present. Because full whistle-blower protections don't extend to the Homeland Security employees, telling members of the Congressional Immigration Reform Caucus what he knew that day could have cost Maxwell his job. In the end, Maxwell left with the minders.

"I was there," Congressman John Culberson, R-Houston, told Creative Loafing. "The DHS officials were adamant about keeping Mr. Maxwell from talking to any of these angry."

That same day, Maxwell got an e-mail from USCIS Chief of Staff Tom Paar, effectively slashing his salary by 25 percent. The battle between Maxwell and department higher-ups had begun, and Maxwell was losing.

It wasn't the first time that DHS officials had blocked Maxwell from testifying. They canceled his scheduled testimony at a Sept. 14 caucus meeting, telling Congress members that he was in Louisiana, helping out in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. They pulled the same scam on House Judiciary Chairman Jim Sensenbrenner, who was also told by USCIS officials that Maxwell couldn't testify due to his Katrina trip.

"That was a lie," says Maxwell's attorney, Rosemary Jenks, who also works for NumbersUSA, a group that has lobbied for tougher immigration controls. Jenks says Maxwell never went to Louisiana, and she was sitting in her DC office when his appointment to testimony was canceled by DHS officials.

E-mails obtained by CL that were sent between high-ranking DHS legal officials appear to show a deliberate effort to concoct the Katrina story to keep Maxwell from testifying.

"I would use the same mantra that I gave today ... 'we are committed to immigration and border security and welcome the opportunity to discuss all issues; however, due to 'all hands on deck,' Katrina etc. ... we cannot at this time do the briefing,'" Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security Office of Legislative Affairs Amy McKennis wrote to the USCIS head of congressional relations Sarah Taylor, one of the "minders" who argued with the Congress members at the attempted caucus hearing.

"Do not commit to anytime in the future either," McKennis added.

In a subsequent e-mail to Maxwell from Taylor, she informs him he won't be attending the hearing the Congress members had invited him to.

"Careful not to commit to anything if they call directly -- or better yet, refer the calls down here," Taylor wrote.

When Congress members found out Maxwell never left town, they were furious. Ten members of the caucus wrote to DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff, accusing his agency of deceiving them. Senator Charles Grassley, the chairman of the Senate's committee on finance, fired off a letter to Chertoff as well, demanding copies of Maxwell's travel records for the alleged trip to New Orleans, records Grassley's office still has not received. Grassley also demanded a later meeting with Maxwell and members of the Senate and House judiciary committees.

"If employees of the federal government are aiding and abetting foreign nationals and helping them obtain benefits and avoid deportation, Congress needs to exercise oversight in this area to ensure the problems are corrected," Grassley wrote.

Since then, members of Congress have been fighting a war over terrorism, and it's not the one in Iraq. It's a war over information, one that Washington University law professor Kathleen Clark says is long overdue.

"The efforts of this executive branch of this administration to prevent effective congressional oversight or any public oversight of its actions are really remarkable," said Clark, an expert on whistle blowers and their role in government. "It sounds to me like Michael Maxwell's situation is an example of that."

Culberson says Congress members know what has to be done. The immigration system must be torn down and rebuilt from the ground up.

"Then we need to identify the terrorists who walked over the border unmolested or through the front door at USCIS and had their applications rubber stamped," he says.
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But before any of that can happen, Congress has got to figure out exactly what is going on inside USCIS. On that count, they're getting nowhere fast. Members of at least three congressional committees are waiting for answers from the Department of Homeland Security that still haven't come.

Working with Blinders on

Maxwell, 35, didn't have any illusions when he took the job at USCIS in May 2004. Director Eduardo Aguirre Jr. made it clear that his job was to clean house.

"He said to me, 'Your job is to regain the public's trust in the immigration system,'" Maxwell says. "We were dirty as the day is long and he knew it. He knew it wasn't a big step from taking a bribe to give somebody a green card to taking a bribe from a foreign intelligence agency or a terrorist group or an organized crime family for that same green card."

To make his point, Aguirre held a teleconference with 120 of the agency's senior managers nationwide with Maxwell at his side. He warned them that he had told Maxwell to go after those who were "dirty" and "squish them like an apple."

Aguirre had authorized the hiring of 130 more full-time employees who would work for Maxwell, ferreting out corruption. But before Maxwell could hire them, Aguirre and the second-ranking official at USCIS departed suddenly for reasons that aren't clear.

Maxwell says that the new acting deputy director, a Bush appointee named Robert Divine, abruptly changed course. Divine set staffing levels so low that investigations into employee corruption cases, including some involving allegations of espionage and links to terrorism, were jeopardized.

Maxwell was left with just four full-time investigators to handle 2,771 internal affairs complaints, including more than 500 that involved bribery, extortion and influence by foreign intelligence services trying to place their citizens inside the country.

Only six security specialists were charged with handling a backlog of 11,000 employee background checks.

Maxwell soon learned, to his horror, that without a full background check to make sure they aren't terrorists or criminals themselves, employees who process immigration applications don't qualify for the "Level 3" security clearance that allows them to access databases that contain terrorist watch lists, information about ongoing national security and criminal investigations, and full criminal histories. They were essentially approving these applications blindly.

Maxwell says about 43 percent of the adjudicators who worked at USCIS when he did didn't have the security clearance they needed to determine if they were approving a green card for a terrorist or a tomato picker. Maxwell estimates that these employees processed over 645,000 applications in the fiscal year of 2005 alone.

The problem was compounded by the fact that the more sensitive -- and serious -- the national security information was on an applicant, the tougher it was for USCIS employees to access it. Even if the employee had earned the Level 3 database security clearance available to USCIS employees, usually they still weren't qualified to see much of this information.

That means that when an employee sees a note in a database about an ongoing CIA, FBI or DEA investigation, they have to contact those agencies for clarification and wait for an answer they may not legally be allowed to receive. And they don't actually have to receive an answer to approve the application. Merely asking why an alien is flagged is enough to approve the application, regardless of whether the employee actually obtains any data.

One of the first lessons employees are taught is that they must approve these applications unless they can find a legal reason to deny them, said Maxwell.

"Without the national security information from the law enforcement agencies, the employee must grant the benefit unless there is another ground on which to deny it," Maxwell said.

E-mails obtained by CL show the state of chaos and frustration among mid-level officials and department heads that this caused.

"The lack of access continues to drive USCIS employees crazy," USCIS Director of Field Operations Terrance O'Reilly wrote to Maxwell in an August 2005 e-mail about the situation.

If USCIS hasn't ruled on the application in 120 days, the court can order the agency to make a decision. Unfortunately, the team of employees forced to make that final decision, a group called FOCUS, doesn't have higher security clearances than the ones who got the application in the first round.

While USCIS officials have denied this, the e-mails and other internal documents obtained by CL suggest otherwise.
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"In FOCUS there are employees that have LIMITED access," O'Reilly wrote in the e-mail to other frustrated USCIS officials about the lack of access to security data.

A draft of a press response that wasn't meant for public release also shows the agency's public affairs and legal offices trying to get the story straight.

"Here we need to fashion 2-3 sentences basically saying No, we do not have FULL access and state the reasons why," the draft states. "We need to emphasize how even without full access, we ensure that no application is approved without resolution of other national security and safety concerns." Other internal documents show that this is not the case.

Ironically, Maxwell's team had the necessary clearances to view the information the FOCUS team couldn't see. But Maxwell says that Divine and the USCIS higher-ups barred them from assessing classified information for the FOCUS team, instead giving that job to the agency's Fraud Detection and National Security Unit (FDNS), which lacked the security clearances needed to fill in the blanks on national security matters for the FOCUS team.

The potentially lethal national security implications of Divine's decision are captured in another series of e-mails from last September between USCIS FOCUS employees. The employees were trying to decide whether to grant citizenship to a man who was under investigation by the Secret Service for moving large sums of money in and out of the country.

FDNS had recommended that the employees approve the application, claiming that there was no negative national security information on the man, but the employees felt uneasy about it.

As it happened, the case was one of the last Maxwell's team had checked out, and they had gotten negative information on the man from the Secret Service that the FDNS team didn't have the security clearance to access.

Maxwell had to go all the way up the chain of command to get permission to tell the FOCUS employees the background check had turned up negative information. The man's application was denied. It was the last one Maxwell's team was ever permitted to work on.

After that, for the FOCUS team, the lights were turned out. Every immigration application they approved was another major national security decision made partially and sometimes completely in the dark.

The Struggle to go Public

In the beginning, most of the interest in Maxwell's claims came from Republicans like Tom Tancredo who oppose immigration expansion of any kind. But as news of Maxwell's claims and DHS officials' efforts to block him from talking to Congress spread, so did the interest in what he had to say.

Democrat Brad Sherman of California expressed his outrage over the situation at a recent meeting.

"We haven't even checked the checkers, and we've instead decided to blindfold them," he said.

Most subcommittee meetings on the Hill are sparsely attended, but the room was packed with Congress members of both parties when Maxwell testified before the Committee on International Relations Subcommittee on International Terrorism and Nonproliferation in April.

That testimony cost Maxwell dearly, because he had to resign from his job to be able to give it.

"I sit before this committee having lost my career, my passion for service to the government, my faith that someone, somewhere would do the right thing within DHS," Maxwell told the crowd.

By then, he had dropped detail after detail on the shocked crowd. The USCIS Headquarters Asylum Division has a backlog of almost 1,000 asylum cases it had not reported to Congress. The cases fell into two categories -- those accused by their home countries of supporting terrorism and those who actually have provided material support to terrorist organizations. While awaiting a decision on their asylum applications, most of these individuals continue to live in the United States, Maxwell said.

In one case, Maxwell told them, an Iraq-born US citizen with negative national security information in his file and a history of traveling to terrorist-harboring nations -- who was rejected by other federal agencies he applied to work at -- managed to get a job approving immigration applications at USCIS. The man later failed a polygraph about trips throughout the Middle East -- including to terrorist-friendly nations -- taken during his tenure at USCIS, where he approved 180 applications, 24 of which later turned out to have potential national security problems.

Maxwell says that eliminating the backlog of immigration applications was the agency's top priority, even if that meant risking national security to meet quotas and letting individuals with questionable backgrounds process applications.

"Employees were pressured to keep pumping out the applications, regardless of whether they had the ability to determine if an applicant was a known terrorist or presented some other threat to national security or public safety," Maxwell told the subcommittee.

Maxwell also said that it had gotten so bad that some district offices were holding competitions and offering rewards like cash bonuses, time off, movie tickets and gift certificates to employees with the fastest processing times for applications.

In one of the few public acknowledgements of the charges Maxwell made against the agency, USCIS Director Emilio Gonzalez, who took over control of the agency in December, has told other media outlets that the practice of rewarding adjudicators for faster processing times hasn't occurred under his watch. Gonzalez was traveling last week and couldn't respond to questions, USCIS Assistant Director of Communications Angelica Alfonso Royals told CL.

Ask Royals, and she'll tell you that the agency has referred Maxwell's charges, and the 3,000 pages of material documenting them that he has provided to officials, to other federal agencies for investigation, and that USCIS has no plans to comment until the inquiry is completed.

But then, as she shuffles through papers looking for reference to an item Maxwell testified about, she mumbles that there were so many of Maxwell's claims that "had no foundation that it gets a little confusing." Royals can barely keep the bile out of her voice when talking about Maxwell.

But Maxwell's claims about USCIS were bolstered by a recent report by the Government Accountability Office that documents many of the same problems with fraud within USCIS that Maxwell pointed out. The report says that adjudicators have limited access to databases and that data provided by USCIS indicates that most immigration and fraud detected by the USCIS did not result in criminal investigations or prosecutions.

Unlike many Congress members, because the committees he sits on deal with classified intelligence, Culberson, the congressman from Houston, has a security clearance that allows him to review classified materials others can't see; this permitted him to actually view most of the 3,000 pages of data that Maxwell submitted to various government agencies in support of his claims.

Culberson states that he has held several meetings with the FBI and confirmed almost everything Maxwell has said.

"I wish I could tell you publicly what I know," said Culberson. "It is so terrifying and outrageous that the public would demand that heads roll at DHS if they knew what I know."

Culberson states that he has held several meetings with the FBI and confirmed almost everything Maxwell has said.

"I wish I could tell you publicly what I know," said Culberson. "It is so terrifying and outrageous that the public would demand that heads roll at DHS if they knew what I know."

They would demand more than DHS heads
see alipac thread posted today
http://www.alipac.us/modules.php?nam...=33581&start=0

Thanks for posting this. It just confirms what we already "know". The corruption in our government runs in every direction. Money is the driving force and the cost is our America if it isn't stopped and stopped soon.

I'll repost this definition here for anyone who has any question as to what's going on:

Main Entry: trea·son
Pronunciation: 'trEz-&noun
Function: noun
Etymology: Anglo-French treison crime of violence against a person to whom allegiance is owed, literally, betrayal, from Old French traïson, from traïr to betray, from Latin tradere to hand over, surrender
: the offense of attempting to overthrow the government of one's country or of assisting its enemies in war; specifically : the act of levying war against the United States or adhering to or giving aid and comfort to its enemies by one who owes it allegiance —trea·son·ous /-&s/ adjective


Source: Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of Law, © 1996 Merriam-Webster, Inc.