"We don't want to go that far": DPS misleads AMICC, AMICC easy to mislead
Via a brief Josh Marshall item, I learned on Tuesday that the Department of Homeland Security's Office of the Inspector General (OIG) released its report on the collaboration of AMICC (Air and Marine Interdiction Coordination Center) with Texas DPS (Department of Public Safety) law enforcement officials in their politically motivated search for a plane belonging to one of the so-called "Killer D's" -- Democratic representatives who had left the state to block a redistricting vote. I downloaded the report, and resolved to look it over myself. So for whatever it's worth, this is an independent view of the contents, before re-reading Marshall, Kuffner, the Washington Post, or others.

In the first contact between AMICC and the DPS, the DPS caller (likely Texas trooper Wes Crais***) disingenuously inquired,

Got a problem. Hope you can help me out. We had a plane that was supposedly to be going from Ardmore, Oklahoma to Georgetown, Texas. It had state representatives in it, and we cannot find this plane.

So far, so understandable: a plane was missing, possibly crashed. Homeland security and drug interdiction mission or not, lives may have been at stake, and the AMICC officer was immediately helpful.

One of the main questions has always been whether the DHS agency ever became aware or not that the plane in question was not presumed down, and that it was merely participating in some other kind of search, say, a politically motivated hunt that had nothing to do with the agency's or its department's purpose.

I think the telephone transcripts provide some indications that AMICC personnel became aware or should have become aware of this relatively soon. A difficulty with these transcripts is that they're so redacted (i.e., blacked out) that it becomes very hard to tell who's calling whom. So everywhere I've assigned a name to the speaker, it's a guess on my part, based either on earlier statements in the conversation, the "ping pong" nature of conversations, and/or context. According to the OIG report "Details" section, a single employee handled all the calls. Via references to prior conversations, it appears that the phone transcripts are in chronological order. With that, some of the more interesting exchanges:

(1) DPS call to AMICC, p.10*: [...]
AMICC: Outside of Mineral Wells. And I do have the police authority there going out and looking at the airport to see if XXXX* can find the aircraft there.
DPS : That's all we want to do is --
AMICC: Yeah.
DPS : No contact being made.
AMICC: Yeah.
DPS : Okay.
AMICC: No contact at this time, you know, we're just going out there to see. I just want to let you know on the update that we hadn't forgot about you.
DPS : Great. [...]

(2) AMICC call to Plainview Airport, p.13: [...]
AMICC: And these people up in Oklahoma** they said that these people were like government officials, and they're trying to find them.
Plainview, Texas: Yeah, I'm kind of familiar with that whole -- deal.
AMICC: Okay.
Plainview: It made the paper today.
AMICC: Okay. I don't know what's going on. I'm just trying to find the people that's all. [...]

(3) AMICC call to Texas DPS, p. 21-22:
AMICC: Okay. And this was the city of Ardmore --
DPS : Yeah.
AMICC: -- airplane. And did it have -- you said it had have [sic] government officials onboard?
DPS : Yeah.
AMICC: Is it just city of Ardmore officials or -- [...on behalf of the city of Ardmore: HEY!! -- ed.]
DPS : No U.S. -- I mean Texas representatives.
AMICC: Texas?
DPS : Right.
AMICC: Reps?
DPS : Uh-huh. We're trying to locate, you know, I don't know -- well, we're trying to do some checking down here on it. Since there was no flight plan and all that we're -- we're checking some other things. I guess I'm really not at liberty to go too much further than that.
AMICC: Okay.
DPS : Okay.
AMICC: All right. It's no problem. I can given you XXXXXXXXX, and they can do a search and rescue for you.
DPS : No, that's okay.
AMICC: Okay.
DPS : We don't want to go that far.
AMICC: Okay. All right. All right. No problem. They also had a XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX I think, number that I had in the book here for the airport for the hanger [sic] that it should be -- [...] (emphases added)

Some comments on each of these conversations:

(1): So DPS wants "no contact" this early in the game. OK; let's assume it's enough to just find the plane; then you know it hasn't crashed, and everyone can breathe a sigh of relief. Except...

(2): ...AMICC is trying to find the people after all. Maybe this is just being lazy with words on the phone, though. But the other thing is the lack of interest or response to the Plainview caller's knowledge of the wider story. The AMICC caller seems positively eager to avoid learning about what "made the paper."

This could be the conversation the Plainview airport official Marvin Miller remembers ("never any inference that the plane might be down, or something like that"), although this part of it is not at the end of the conversation. If so, one might argue Miller was misled by the AMICC employee's unemotional tone. Still, Miller would be right about the conversation per se: there really never was a strong implication that the plane was missing or down, although AMICC did say early on, "...And the people up in Oklahoma is trying to find the airplane. They have not heard from it in a while. They were just wondering if it made it there?"

(3): Not much of a humanitarian mission at this point, is it? That didn't seem to really faze the AMICC caller. On the other hand, the AMICC employee was still confused about who was in the plane. Also, this was the next to last substantive phone call**** included in the OIG report's phone transcripts, and in the last one, Trooper Crais and the great State of Texas change their minds and request advice on initiating a search and rescue. Nevertheless the first two phone calls above could have at least provided an inkling that there was no humanitarian emergency involved. If it turns out that much more AMICC activity continued after call (3), that would be a "smoking gun" for willful ignorance on AMICC's part.

The OIG report synopsis states,

...The AMICC personnel involved in this incident described this assistance as a typical request from a law enforcement agency, which reportedly occurs at least thirty times a day and is in compliance with their standard operating procedures. [...]

There was every indication that the employee rendering assistance to the DPS on the telephone believed he was searching for a missing aircraft.

Certainly the transcripts point to initial deception by the DPS. But they also point to an AMICC process that made no effort to vet the DPS request even as it became clear -- from the phone calls -- that this was more of a "missing persons" than a "missing plane" situation.

Sadly, I think, the DPS has created a situation where AMICC ought to now waste a certain amount of time demanding binding assurances from law enforcement agencies requesting their help that there is a legitimate law enforcement or safety objective being pursued. As I've written before, it's possible there are already penalties for what the DPS did with AMICC; I just don't know.


"Off The Kuff" reporting "Texasgate" story under "Killer D's" heading
Mr. Charles Kuffner, a political consultant (I think) who runs the "Off the Kuff" blog -- motto: "Knowledge is Good" -- was kind enough to briefly mention my own ongoing coverage of the "Texasgate" affair. Thank you, Charles!

But Kuffner's Texasgate stuff is more frequent than mine, and above all it's better: he's closer to the source, and is particularly knowledgeable about the politics and Texas State House processes involved in the redistricting fight. Plus he has one of those nifty Moveable Type blogs that lets him categorize his stories about all this as "Killer D's", and lets you focus on just those stories if you want. So check out Off the Kuff's "Killer D's" stories (and his other stuff too, of course).


=====
* Page numbers are the numbers on the phone transcript page. Note that some pages were collated out of sequence within the OIG document. "XXXX" indicates something was blacked out in the OIG report.
** This is odd. The first caller said he was from Texas, and the OIG report says that "the AMICC phone system displayed that the call originated from a "Texas Government" phone line." It's possible there was confusion because of the plane's ostensible Ardmore, OK flight origin.
*** Amusingly, given all the blacking out throughout the document, Mr. Crais' name is left legible on page 23 of the phone transcript.
**** For no reason made clear in the report, the final three phone calls included in the transcript are to a "Sato Travel" answering machine. Their office is currently closed. Their menu options have changed.
EDIT, Thursday AM: It turns out you can comment on Kuffner's "Killer D's" stories when aggregated as such, so a mistaken comment to the contrary was deleted.
EDIT, Thursday PM: AMICC "city of Ardmore" question in bold, in fairness.

posted by Thomas Nephew at 2:31:00 AM -- |    

 
"Underground Church" story update: Blount County police "did not participate"
In a post last weekend ("That whole church state thing"), I noted South Knox Bubba's item about a strange "Underground Church" event at a Baptist church in Maryville, Tennessee. The event, designed to simulate religious persecution by the state, resulted in a lawsuit against the church by a girl and her family who felt she had been traumatized by the event. An element of the story that stood out for me was the possibility that Blount County police were directly involved in staging the event: the Maryville Daily Times reported that the girl "saw law enforcement vehicles with their lights and sirens on."

I took the time to write the Blount County Sheriff's Office (BCSO) an e-mail about this, CC'ing the Daily Times reporter, Ms. Anna Irwin, asking

I'm specifically curious about the propriety of Blount County Sheriff's Department vehicles and officers apparently being used as security, and more than that, as stage props for the event. Is it customary for Blount County tax money to be spent in direct support of church activities in this way? This goes beyond merely directing traffic on Sundays, I think.

Ms. Irwin replied first; curiously, she denied that she'd written of police involvement, but then suggested that "If they were assisting with the event, it could have been as volunteers or in a private capacity under the sherifff's guidelines for off-duty work by officers." So I sent a second e-mail to the BCSO asking about that. Today, I got the following e-mail from Captain Jim Long of the BCSO:

MR. NEPHEW,

IN RESPONSE TO YOUR E-MAIL DATED 06/16/03.** WE AT THE SHERIFF'S OFFICE RESPONDED TO A COMMUNITY REQUEST AT FOREST HILL BAPTIST CHURCH AS WE DO OTHER REQUESTS FROM ALL OVER THE COUNTY. IT IS A COMMON OCCURRENCE FOR VBS PROGRAMS, YOUTH RALLYS, AND OTHER COMMUNITY EVENTS TO REQUEST OUR PRESENCE. WE WERE THERE FOR THE SAFETY OF THE CHILDREN IN AN AREA THAT IS VERY DANGEROUS DUE TO TRAFFIC. OUR DEPUTIES ASSISTED WITH LIGHTS WARNING MOTORISTS TO SLOW DOWN SO THE CHILDREN WOULD BE SAFER CROSSING THE ROAD. WE DID NOT PARTICIPATE IN THE EVENINGS EVENTS. IF YOU HAVE ANY FURTHER QUESTIONS FEEL FREE TO CONTACT ME AT THE BLOUNT COUNTY JUSTICE CENTER. @ ###-####.*

THANK YOU!!

JIM LONG, CAPTAIN

PATROL DIVISION (capitalization his, emphasis added)

So the BCSO officers were on duty for traffic safety purposes. Not being a Maryville resident, and not having a detailed version of the girl's story, I think I can't take it much further than this. I've maybe had the wrong impression of the squad cars lingering around the church for an extended period of time; why this would be necessary for traffic safety for a scheduled event is not clear to me, but maybe that's how it's always done and I've just never noticed.

Also, while I can imagine having the squad car lights on for traffic safety purposes, the use of sirens seems unusual to me; Maryville residents will be more familiar with the BCSO's procedures than I am. Were I the girl's attorney, I'd want to depose someone from the BCSO about this just to get it on the record under oath. But that's just years of experience watching TV shows talking.

Sirens aside, it may be that the event coordinator or volunteer who dropped the girl off "ad-libbed" using the presence of the squad car to make the event more dramatic. On the other hand, it may be that calling in the BCSO for seemingly routine traffic work was a part of the "Underground Church" event plan. For lack of a strong reason not to, I'm inclined to take Captain Long's word for it that the BCSO was not involved in the evening's events, although the (alleged) use of sirens sets off, well, some faint warning sirens.


=====
* I'm reluctant to share the particular e-mail and phone numbers in my correspondence on this web site. I've forwarded the various e-mails involved to South Knox Bubba.
** For those of you keeping score at home, that would be the first e-mail. posted by Thomas Nephew at 11:07:00 PM -- |    

 
I vouch for this
I'll respond soon to Eve Tushnet's recent piece in Jewish World Review, titled School vouchers and the myth of neutrality, which Eve says was conceived at least in part as a reply to a May 7 item of mine, "Vouchers for madrassas? Just don't make me pay for them." (I followed up with a couple of additional posts on May 20 and May 21.) Have a look at Eve's article and mine, and see what you think.

See also Equal Treatment is not Establishment, by Eugene Volokh, and referenced by him in a "Volokh Conspiracy" post last week about extending historic preservation funding to sites like churches or synagogues. Why have one dispute when you can have two: offhand, I'm against this policy, too, if the buildings remain in use as sites of religious worship. Let their congregations pay for upkeep, or find someone other than taxpayers to help offset the costs of their house of worship. Comments welcome here.

How soon? Not sure; I have a bunch of work piled up again, and will need to take it easy with blogging again for a while. I want to make the response one of the next two or three posts; that may take until next weekend. posted by Thomas Nephew at 1:22:00 AM -- |    

 
Tory slams colonial viewpoint
Early on in a somewhat vapid piece by Timothy Garton Ash -- and how could anything titled "The banality of the good" be otherwise -- Ash describes hobnobbing with Joschka Fischer, the German foreign minister, who's decked out in sunglasses, sandals, and an "American Eagle" baseball cap in some Berlin cafe. Ash says of Fischer:

An old '68er, he is sharply critical of the current policies of the Bush administration. At one point he leans forward and says, teasingly: "Don't you think we need a new Boston tea party?"

Whatever, Joschka; the whole thing sounds almost as if he and Tim had been, you know, inhaling more than the Oranienburgerstrasse atmosphere.

I'm not sure what the heck Fischer was talking about. But it's equally puzzling that ex-Brit Andrew Sullivan finds this alarming:

Isn't it a little, er, undiplomatic for a foreign minister of a putative ally to be speaking of the need to overthrow the current American constitution? Or is it a clue to what he really believes?

Huh? I'm trying to sift the clues to what Sullivan really believes: Germany or Europe are colonies of the United States? Being sharply critical of the Bush Administration is the same as wanting to overthrow the current American constitution? Those pesky colonials in Boston Harbor had no point in opposing taxes they had no voice in deciding? That's similar to Europe and the U.S. today exactly how?

Some of the same questions could be posed to Fischer, of course. And Sullivan can actually make intermittent sense elsewhere with his concerns about the European Union. But it's not European independence that is a concern -- that's a fact, and always has been. European hostility and overreach inside and outside Europe are another matter. It would be a shame if Sullivan turned the issue into another one of his neurotic personal vendettas. posted by Thomas Nephew at 11:56:00 PM -- |