Thread: Corruption, crime inside Homeland Security

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Corruption, crime inside Homeland Security
By Michael Hampton
Posted: December 8, 2006 10:17 pm
Updated: December 9, 2006 2:26 am
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Buried in what would otherwise have been a dry summary of financial audits and inspections, the Department of Homeland Security Inspector General’s semiannual report to Congress (PDF) also contains dozens of reports of misconduct and criminal activity perpetrated by DHS employees themselves.

Twice a year the IG’s office reports to Congress with a summary of its activities for the past six months. The report released this week covers the time period April 1 to September 30, 2006.

And nowhere is the corruption more evident than within Immigration and Customs Enforcement, where the reports of crime conducted by ICE employees eclipse the management report summaries.

“Our investigations resulted in 321 arrests, 333 indictments and 243 convictions,” inspector general Richard Skinner wrote in the report’s cover letter.

Clark Kent Ervin, a former DHS inspector general, said the Transportation Security Administration rushed to hire screeners and air marshals in 2003 without running background checks on the applicants.

“Knowing DHS dysfunction and disingenuousness, it wouldn’t surprise me if DHS doesn’t fully vet employees for criminal backgrounds before hiring them or periodically recheck them,” Ervin said.

Russ Knocke, press secretary for DHS, would not comment on the agency’s policy on background checks but dismissed Ervin’s criticism as “pure speculation” and “without merit.”

Knocke said the problems were due mainly to a few individuals.

“No law enforcement agency of any government in the world is going to be immune to inappropriate behavior on the part of its employees, particularly one that is as large as we are,” Knocke said. “… There’s no tolerance for unethical behavior at this department and we use every authority to confront it.” — Los Angeles Times

Perhaps, then, there is something fundamentally wrong with law enforcement itself, that attracts people predisposed to “inappropriate behavior.”

Aside from the many people who attempted to rip off the Federal Emergency Management Agency in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the report documents several FEMA employees who themselves committed fraud and took bribes. One even went looting.

But the biggest section of the report was for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which is charged with protecting the nation’s borders, where dozens of agents were prosecuted for various crimes such as harboring fugitives, allowing illegal aliens and drugs to pass through border checkpoints, bribery, worker’s compensation fraud, identity theft, and sexual assault.

Transportation Security Administration employees, including federal air marshals, found themselves arrested for stealing from passengers, child pornography, money laundering, and drug smuggling.

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, responsible for throwing red tape in front of people who mistakenly think this is a free country and still want to immigrate here, was not immune either. Some of their officers got in trouble for harboring illegal aliens, forging passports, visas and green cards for aliens, or just issuing them outright when they should not have, and sexual assault.

These, of course, are just a few bad apples in an agency of 160,000 charged with keeping the nation secure, just a drop in the bucket. But the number of arrests is on the rise, with 321 this period, 200 the last six month period, and only 54 the period before that. How many corrupt officials haven’t been caught?

Separately, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has been cracking down on corruption since September 11, netting 1,060 convictions of corrupt officials in 2004 and 2005, according to FBI statistics. Most of the prosecutions detailed in the inspector general’s report are not included in the FBI’s tally


http://www.homelandstupidity.us/2006/12 ... -security/

Yeah, the law has been bought. We need stiffer penalties for these traitors, otherwise it is just going to keep happening..