The Daily Muck

FBI Director Robert Mueller admitted to Congress yesterday that his agency had improperly spied on Americans through the use of administrative subpoenas called national security letters. According to Mueller, a Justice Department report will soon document the agency’s recurring invasion of Americans’ privacy in 2006. An FBI audit shows that the FBI potentially violated laws or its own policies on more than 1,000 occasions from 2003 to 2005. (Washington Post)

The newly proposed Office of Congressional Ethics, if enacted into law, will only be allowed to initiate new investigations during July and August. Moreover, any investigation that OCE pursues must be approved by the House ethics committee but that committee is notorious for its glacial movement. One GOP aide notes that “it’s interesting Democrats have devised an ‘ethics reform’ bill that basically guarantees that investigations are punted until after Election Day.” It’s also interesting that Democratic leaders failed to rally support for their own measure and bring the bill to a vote (sub. req.) yet again. (Politico, Roll Call)

President Bush seems intent on securing a conviction of a Guantanamo Bay detainee (other than that of the Australian prisoner who made a plea deal) before his term expires. With new charges just filed against another Guantanamo prisoner, the trial calendar is full and resources for defendants are scarce. This appears to be an effort to set “up dry runs of the untested legal process that will be used to prosecute self-professed Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and five other “high-value” prisoners later this year.” (LA Times)

Kellogg Brown & Root (formerly a Halliburton subsidiary), the nation’s top Iraq war contractor, lists 21,000 employees as employees of a Caribbean-based company that has neither an office nor a phone number. By creating such shell companies KBR has saved hundreds of millions of dollars in federal taxes. The Department of Defense has known about this since 2004 and rationalized KBR’s scheme by asserting that it allowed KBR to work more cheaply and thus save DOD money (at the expense of the Social Security and Medicare trust funds). (Boston Globe)

Senior Center for Disease Control scientists and outside experts allege that CDC officials, under the leadership of Dr. Julie Gerberding, are responsible for the loss of the agency’s top scientists and demoralizing many of the CDC’s 7,000 employees. The problem stems to at least 2005, when “five of the agency’s last six directors charged in an unprecedented letter that Gerberding’s management and politicization of the agency were harming CDC’s unparalleled international reputation in the field of public health.” (The Washington Independent)

A new Army mental health report shows that as violence has increased in Afghanistan, so has depression among U.S. soldiers fighting there. Soldiers in their third or fourth tours of duty, in this seven-year war, are experiencing significantly higher rates of mental health problems. (USA Today)

Over the past five years, the Department of Homeland Security has had a pattern of announcing ambitious projects in response to various crises which then fall short of their goals. According to “former officials, private-sector partners and independent analysts” the “agency remains hindered by a crisis-of-the-moment environment, in which the rush to fulfill each new mandate or meet every threat undermines its ability to hold a strategic course and deliver promised results.” (Washington Post)

The Senate will vote soon on a measure to overhaul the Consumer Product Safety Commission by doubling its budget, increasing its staff, banning lead from children’s products, and establishing a consumer database. The White House and some GOP lawmakers oppose the Senate’s tough new standards, in part because new “requirement[s] could disrupt imports of children’s products from countries where government laboratories are the primary testing entities.” (USA Today)