Texasgate: FAA internal investigation released
It turns out that many Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) employees were aware they were involved in a Texas political dispute when they helped track a Texas legislator's plane in May. The Department of Transportation's Office of Inspector General (OIG) investigated the incident at Senator Joe Lieberman's (D-CT) request, and released a report on Friday.

Before going to excerpts from that report, a comment: this is a far superior report to the Homeland Security "investigation" of related events at AMICC; the OIG interviewed and reinterviewed subjects, particularly one David Balloff, considered the wider ramifications of the story, and presented a number of recommendations for the FAA to tighten up its procedures. With that, excerpts from the OIG letter to Lieberman (Report CC-2003-123):

We found that at least 13 FAA personnel were involved in responding to the various requests for information about N711RD [Texas Representative Laney's plane -- ed.] on May 12, beginning with an FAA office in Oklahoma City, which was contacted by the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) around 1:00 p.m. EDT. This FAA unit is responsible for law enforcement liaison agency-wide. According to the FAA employee who received the inquiry, the caller said that over 50 Texas legislators were in hiding and that the Governor of Texas had issued a warrant for their apprehension. [...]

At least two controllers in FAA’s Fort Worth Center were aware of the purpose of the inquiries at the time they were received and processed. A supervisory controller told us he first learned of the search for the absent Texas legislators from local news reports prior to reporting for work on May 12. He advised that later, in fielding the call from DPS, he stated to the DPS officer, “You must be looking for the missing Democrats,” which the officer acknowledged. A second Fort Worth controller related that in contacting an Air Traffic Control facility in Lubbock, pursuant to a call he received from the Department of Homeland Security, the controller with whom he spoke said, “You know who that [plane] belongs to, don’t you? It’s the outgoing Speaker, Laney, Speaker of the House.” [emphases added]

The report adds that the Texas DPS later provided documentation that it arguably* had legal authority to conduct the search, and that some (but not all) of the information provided to the Texas DPS and/or Tom DeLay was publicly available:

Using known internet search engines, we were able to quickly determine the current locations (near real-time, 5-10 minute lag) and destinations of airborne general aviation aircraft, as well as historical aircraft destination data [...]

In our internet searches, we used such search terms as, “Real time tracking of general aviation aircraft” and “How do I find the current location of a general aviation aircraft? ” [links added]

Following up on that, I've found services like FlyteComm and FltPlan.com. Even so, there's an inconvenience cost to such services -- finding them, learning how to use them, and getting results -- that DeLay, his staff, and the DPS were not willing to pay. Instead they used FAA employees. DeLay's staff used one Mr. David Balloff in particular.

Mr. Balloff is a bit of a story in his own right within the OIG report. Balloff said in one OIG interview that when he read May 13 newspaper reports about the wider significance of the plane search he'd helped with,

... I just felt like I had been used. . . I don’t do anything for political purposes. . . and I just did not like. . . somebody calling me for political reasons. . . I would never use my office to help somebody out politically, for any political reasons, period.”

Balloff claims he did not ask why DeLay's office made the request to locate the plane, and that he believed a "safety issue" was involved. But the OIG report leaves the clear impression they're not so sure, since it took them a while to pry loose information about various occasions when he could and arguably should have informed other FAA staff of his efforts. The OIG report concludes:

While Balloff did not make any statements during our four interviews with him to indicate he intentionally withheld disclosure to his superiors of the request from Rep. DeLay’s staffer, the circumstances outlined above, collectively, are of a nature to foster such an appearance.

Balloff's position in the FAA -- Assistant Administrator for Government and Industry Affairs-- makes him a higher-up in the FAA's liaison office with Congress, state and local officials and industry. At best, Balloff's rather zealous gophering for DeLay's staffer may have been intended to curry favor with DeLay's office. The claim of "safety issues" seems disingenuous; transcripts of Balloff's phone conversations do not betray an urgent sense of lives at stake (e.g., "I've got a meeting at five. I'll probably call you back around six."). Some of the FAA staff Balloff contacted clearly reacted to his title and assumed some kind of Congressional investigation was going on -- just the reaction Tom DeLay et al were counting on, no doubt.

It will be interesting to see whether any additional details emerge about Balloff's role. In the meantime, Mr. Balloff will apparently receive "counseling" about sharing unusual requests like DeLay's with his superiors at the Transportation Department.

The OIG report also identified at least two policy issues related to the FAA's involvement in the Texas story. First, FAA lacks clear internal guidance about how to process requests from law enforcement and other agencies. Second, the OIG report cites Representative Oberstar and Turner's concerns about the "homeland security implications" of relatively easy public access to plane flight information.

An AP report (via New York Times) gets Senator Lieberman's response to the OIG report:

"This report makes clear that the FAA was used to search for a private plane to pursue a partisan political end,'' said Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., who requested the investigation. "This strikes me as a clear abuse of the federal government's resources -- and an invasion of privacy -- and one that shouldn't happen again.''

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* At the time, the DPS had a State Attorney General statement to rely on. Since then, a Texas judge has ruled (Houston Chronicle report) that Texas law limiting DPS authority superseded Texas Speaker Craddick's authority to request their help with rounding up missing legislators. Not surprisingly, the Texas Attorney General's office spokesman says an appeal is possible.

YOUR ROCKY TOP UPDATE, 7/14: Visiting via South Knox Bubba? You might be interested to know Mr. Balloff has Tennessee roots -- and not just any old Tennessee roots, either. From his FAA bio: "Balloff was also a three-time elected member to the Tennessee State Republican Executive Committee." Sing it with me: Good.. old.. Rocky Top! Rocky Top, Tennessee! I'm welling up here, I'm -- sniff -- so proud.

Given his state GOP background, I'm now assuming he's pretty partisan, although he should maybe still get the benefit of the doubt about "feeling used." The FAA bio indicates he has background in aviation policy issues, so he's not just a case of a political hack getting appointed to the FAA.

UPDATE, 7/15: An anonymous friend warmly defends Mr. Balloff in the first comment about this post, and rightly pins the primary blame on Tom DeLay and his unnamed staffer. posted by Thomas Nephew at 10:05:00 PM -- |  

 
The fall of Michel Friedman
Today, Michel Friedman, a conservative-abrasive-TV-host-who-happens-to-be-on-the-German-Jewish-Central-Council (Zentralrat Deutscher Juden) went on the air (link to Frankfurter Rundschau) to announce he was stepping down from all official posts, and to admit his culpability in drug- and prostitution-related charges. Friedman had already been kicked off his TV show ("Caution! Friedman" [Vorsicht! Friedman]), and lost his girlfriend -- and fellow TV personality! -- Baerbel Schaefer.

A police raid on his Frankfurt home in June had suggested small scale cocaine use. Further investigation, however, suggested he had used cocaine while with prostitutes, and invited them to join him -- punishable no matter the amounts involved. The raid grew out of a Berlin investigation of Eastern European prostitution rings; phone taps led investigators to Friedman. As the Rundschau article points out, though, he remains the only publicly known target of the investigation, despite indications the Rundschau has that at least two other subjects did the same things Friedman did.

Even though Friedman was guilty, something still smells fishy about the whole thing. Not only did the investigation appear remarkably focused on one coke-sniffing john, and remarkably unable to keep that confidential, but Friedman's figurative fall from the heights followed an political enemy's literal one by only a couple of weeks.

Juergen Moellemann, the FDP renegade who committed a spectacular "the hell with my parachute" suicide in early June, had created a great deal of press for himself by attacking Friedman for fomenting anti-Semitism with his "intolerant, hateful style." (Moellemann's suicide followed political and legal setbacks in a criminal investigation of alleged misuse of party funds.) In another notorious episode, Moellemann's regional FDP distributed a campaign flyer in September 2002 juxtaposing peace-seeking Moellemann with war-mongering Ariel Sharon and ... Michel Friedman.

As Mark Landler writes for the New York Times (via International Herald Tribune), the scandal has been "catnip for the German press." For example, Germany's premier "we're not as bad as Bild because we use glossy paper" periodical Stern made it their mid-June cover story. If you like that sort of thing, the article, by Hans-Ulrich Joerges, Dieter Krause, and Werner Mathes, was a rather well executed bit of veiled anti-Semitism masquerading as unctuous concern and bluff German virtue:

It was an honor if he spoke with you. But it was hard work, too. He came too close, was always touching. And he always created the impression that you couldn't do him justice... Especially his role as speaker for the Jews. No verbal missteps! Caution -- Friedman! [...]

The strangely exaggerated aura around him was nowhere better recorded than in a film ... showing Friedman's [Frankfurt night life]. ... He and his friends go to the "Main-Tower" bar and have pompous discussions fueled by red wine about mini bananas, Moellemann, drugs, sex, 9/11. And everything is always a little too loud and jaunty and tasteless [keck und grell]. [...]

Friedman orders his fresh squeezed orange juice "a la minute" -- one likes it a little more rustic in these parts [hierzulande]. He seems himself as an aggressive "citoyen" and dreams of the "dissent society" -- but Germans yearn for a great coalition. And many don't like it if someone publicly filets their elected representatives on a red sofa.

No, the Jew Michel Friedman never really settled into the land of the perpetrators [Taeter] - the descendants always let him feel that. But he also needed the ... mediocrity and repression [Verdruckstheit] that he sensed everywhere -- even if only as a backdrop for his own superiority.

Friedman wants this ... real Germans want that. Friedman isn't one of us. Friedman reminds us of that bad stuff we didn't do. Friedman puts on airs. Friedman is sly, a trickster (Joerges begins a second article with "The silver-tongued one is silent.") Friedman is touchy. Friedman touches us too much.

Editor-in-chief Thomas Osterkorn* administered the editorial coup de grace:

As vice president of the German Jewish Central Council, Friedman was in many ways invulnerable -- as long as he didn't make himself vulnerable. Now the moralist stands in the dock himself.

Since I don't watch German TV, I'm at a disadvantage, but Osterkorn seems to miss the mark according to at least some observers. Friedman's show seems to have had a John McLaughlin-like style -- interrupting, haranguing -- but apparently in order to get definite answers, not just to get the ones he preferred. Max Brym writes in "hagalil Online":

The "Friedman" show ... goes against the grain for many. Friedman is usually not satisfied with cheap phrases, but keeps digging. To call him a "apostle of morals" (Stern headline) is completely mistaken. No matter what you think of him, Friedman has never asked politicians about their private lives, or tried to make hay with their alleged womanizing [Frauengeschichten].

It's worth noting that another "Promi-Kokser" (prominent cocaine user) case was spun quite differently by the German media. Just before the World Cup last year, a famous soccer coach, Christoph Daum, was accused (accurately, as it turned out) by another German soccer personality, Uli Hoeness, of using cocaine. According to accounts like this one, it was Hoeness who got the publicity black eye in this case, while Daum got generally sympathetic "innocent till proven guilty" treatment from the press and the public.

So what, you say: "Schadenfreude" is probably the best known German word in the English speaking world, and dark suspicions aside, maybe that's all we have here. But as Die Zeit editor Michael Naumann comments to Der Spiegel,

The proportionality of means can be debated in the Friedman case. In the private home of a suspect, three or four packets typical of the [drug] scene were found with cocaine-like traces, apparently so impure, that one couldn't even precisely prove that. Simultaneously, and this keeps getting overlooked, the name of this suspect is not kept secret, but is instead shared by whomever with the press. Other suspect names remain unknown.

Naumann, who said the Berlin prosecutor in charge of the case had "lost his marbles" (Naumann's own translation of "durchgeknallt"), is now being sued by the prosecutor and the prosecutor's SPD boss for slander. (Naumann says he's not worried, perhaps feeling the prosecutor has proved his case for him.)

Henryk Broder, a well known German (and Jewish) journalist, sums up:

Michel "Mischu" Friedman was the archetypal Jew for philo- and anti-semites alike, feared, admired, hated, envied. Now he has arrived where he never wanted to be: in Germany's reality. [...]

... [N]o one even considers the idea that someone set up Friedman to even a score. Purely theoretically, that would be a possible explanation for a dubious story. After all, a whole slew of prominent people were in the investigators' crosshairs, but Friedman's name was the only one that was released. [...]

Friedman is the "Jew Suess" of our day. He is educated, gifted, ambitious, eloquent, hard-working, and -- let's admit it -- a little greasy [schmierig]. [link added]

I don't mean to minimize drug abuse, scofflaw behavior, or the plight of prostitutes. But the timing and specificity of the Friedman case makes makes it hard not to think political scores were being settled. The Frankfurter Rundschau reports that the same investigation that bagged Friedman had around 130 other johns under surveillance -- in part via about three dozen Bundestag [German Congress] phone numbers. Another odd element of the story is how information seemed to spontaneously leak out of control, whether via theft of an investigator's laptop, or a mysteriously misdirected defense lawyer's fax.

We may never know whether German law enforcement or the East European pimps themselves saw how to make an example of Friedman, or at least use him to advantage. In theory, laws authorizing more efficient anti-terror investigative powers -- the wiretaps were authorized under laws enacted after 9/11 -- or strongly restricting hard drugs help fight drugs or terrorism. But in practice, this case suggests how such measures can be abused.

Especially if the victim already has other "strikes" against him, like being Jewish in Germany. If a Friedman "makes himself vulnerable for some other reason," why, then let's all pile on yesterday if not sooner, right, Herr Osterkorn? Michel Friedman was a TV personality who might have been tempted to be inconspicuous, humble and self-effacing. But we all know how interesting that is to watch. Friedman decided instead to make a living skewering celebrities and politicians a la Tim Russert. By golly if he didn't almost get away with it.

Michel Friedman was admittedly guilty as charged. But no one else has much to be proud of in this story either.


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* For my money, Osterkorn is the reigning champion in the crowded "smug and annoying" category of German media -- now that the unlamented (by me, anyway) Rudolph Augstein is rotting in his grave somewhere. Max Brym points out, by the way, that about 20 years ago Augstein successfully weathered a bust for a substantial amount of hashish. posted by Thomas Nephew at 1:52:00 AM -- |