Well, These Guys Certainly Got What They Asked For…

It’s official: the Tea Party movement is getting out of control.  There is nothing wrong with groups pushing an agenda in public through grassroots organization, but this is just out of hand.  According to CNN, four conservative activists attempted to break into the New Orleans office of Senator Mary Landrieu yesterday to install wiretaps on the office phones.  Wiretaps other than by a Federal agent with a warrant are strictly illegal by themselves; the target was a local office of a United States Senator upgrades the seriousness of this crime.  While it is true that not all conservatives are members of the Tea Party movement, the actions of these people indicate that they are among those conservatives who are.

According to the article above, one of the suspects, James O’Keefe, is the same person who was at the center of the ACORN controversy a few months ago.  In addition, CNN observes that an activist website, CampusReform.org, sums up O’Keefe’s philosophy, in his words, “Don’t just respond to news, but create your own headlines.”  Sounds like a Tea Partier to me, but as if that wasn’t enough, a local blog covering events in the St. Louis area, St. Louis Activist Hub, connects another of the suspects, Joseph Basel to an event here on campus that most of us still remember.  Back in November, a campus political organization, Young Americans for Liberty, decided to “commemorate” the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall by building a mock gulag on campus.  Officially, it was supposed to “raise awareness about problems connected with Soviet communism that are connected with the Berlin Wall” according to the original Student Life account of the episode.  Unofficially, the gulag was seen as representing the belief that healthcare reform brings us closer to Socialism.  While we students all laughed at the episode, this latest incident is almost too much.

Can the U.S. State Department Trust its Contractors?

For the last several years, the State Department has been outsourcing embassy security to private military contractors. Recently, more evidence has surface that there are some problems with these companies, specifically relating to the conduct of their employees.  Yes, I am talking about the Blackwater incident from a few years ago.  More troubling, though, are the recent revelations that another private security company, ArmorGroup, has had employees accused of inappropriate conduct while guarding the embassy in Afghanistan.  While the conduct of the ArmorGroup personnel is considerably less egregious than that of the Blackwater guards, after these new accusations, one must wonder: where’s the oversight?

First, a little background.  We all know the story of the Blackwater incident by now, where five guards escorting a convoy through Baghdad opened fire in a crowded square, killing 17 and wounding 30 civilians in September of 2007.  The ArmorGroup story, however, is still coming out.  Apparently, not only were guards at the Kabul, Afghanistan embassy drinking on duty, they were having wild parties where alcohol was freely flowing.  As if this is not bad enough, high-ranking company officials did not know of these three separate incidents until a watchdog group, the Project On Government Oversight, published photos of the incidents.

The internal oversight on ArmorGroup was there, but it was seemingly ignored.  For over a year, a former manager named James Gordon has been trying to bring these allegations to light.  As often happens in America, he has filed a lawsuit claiming he was illegally fired from his job at ArmorGroup due to his attempts to provide oversight.  What makes the story more interesting, however, is that now it seems that his claims contradict the testimony of a vice-president of ArmorGroup’s corporate parent.  This is the second confirmed case of abuses of power and unprofessional conduct by private security personnel at key American embassies in the War on Terror.  As America’s primary diplomatic arm, the State Department should be conscious of its image abroad, and these incidents tarnish its reputation.  The State Department should increase oversight of these companies as well as every company that it does business with to ensure that these incidents stop as soon as possible and those who are behind them are brought to justice.

How Low can ACORN Go?

Today, Congress cut federal funding for ACORN after people working for the organization were caught giving advice to a couple who wanted to buy a house and set up a brothel in it.  The couple’s story was fake, and they had hidden cameras; understandably, ACORN is in a whole lot of trouble.  However, this is not the first time ACORN has been in trouble.  Last year, ACORN, or the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, was investigated for fraudulent voter registrations.  Later last year, there was a minor scandal that involved the internal investigation of this previous matter.  Essentially, ACORN fired two people who were working on the investigation because they were looking into embezzlement by the brother of a founder of the organization.  You read that right: ACORN asked a couple of employees to perform an internal investigation, and they were fired for discovering what they asked to investigate.  Obviously, we are dealing with an organization that is corrupt at its very core.

But how low can they go?  If they seem to be in the news every few months as a byproduct of some dirty revelation, who knows what else they may be hiding.  If months of internal investigations and retraining do not cause any perceptible change in the organization’s behavior, maybe the government should do more than revoke funding.  As a nonprofit organization, ACORN receives funding from many sources.  Cutting off the federal funds sends a very clear signal, and hopefully that will be enough to cause some change from within; I’m not holding my breath.  If there is still no obvious sign of permanent change in six months to a year, open a federal investigation into the organization.  If things stay the same, hand out some criminal charges; the people responsible for these systematic abuses must be held accountable.