Summarize this article:

Apple Inc.’s cash topped $200 billion for the first time as the portion of money held abroad rose to almost 90 percent, putting more pressure on Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook to find a way to use the funds without incurring U.S. taxes.

 Booming iPhone sales overseas are adding to Apple’s cash pile, pushing the company to embrace offshore affiliates to preserve and invest the money. Cook, who was called before U.S. Congress in 2013 to defend Apple against allegations of dodging taxes, is facing questions on what Apple will do with its cash pile and fielding calls from investors, such as billionaire activist Carl Icahn, to return shareholder capital.

 “They don’t really have that much on-shore cash,” said Tim Arcuri, an analyst at Cowen & Co. “They’re still sort of hamstrung on what they can do, barring the ability to repatriate a bunch of off-shore cash.”

 Cook has been vocal about his desire for U.S. lawmakers to amend the country’s tax laws so that companies can repatriate more cash. Apple’s overseas cash has climbed 70 percent since Cook spoke to Congress, and now makes up 89 percent of Apple’s $202.8 billion in cash and investments at the end of June, the company said Tuesday, up from 72 percent of $146.6 billion in cash two years ago.

 Driving that is Apple’s booming global revenue. Sales in greater China, for example, more than doubled to $13.2 billion in the latest quarter from a year earlier.

 At the same time, Apple’s U.S. federal lobbying spending has been climbing, and reached a record $4.1 million last year as it advocated on a wide range of issues. The company’s lobbying climbed 46 percent in the second quarter from a year earlier. The iPhone maker added three lobbyists on the issues of taxes in the past year, and is addressing concerns such as corporate and international “tax reform,” according to records filed with the U.S. Senate this week.

 Tax Policy

 Under current law, U.S. companies owe the full 35 percent corporate tax rate -- the highest of any industrialized nation - - on income they earn around the world. They receive tax credits for payments to foreign governments, and have to pay the U.S. the difference only when they bring the money home.

 That system encourages companies to shift profits to low-tax foreign countries and leave the money there. As a result, more than $2 trillion is being stockpiled overseas by U.S. companies.

 U.S. President Barack Obama and House Ways and Means Chairman Paul Ryan, R-Wisconsin, are trying to find a way to impose a one-time tax on the stockpiled money to encourage cash repatriation, change the underlying system and plow the proceeds into highways.

 Returning Cash

 Apple is also seeking to return more of its growing cash hoard to investors. In April, the company unveiled plans to boost capital return program by $70 billion, increasing a share-buyback authorization by $50 billion and increasing dividends by 11 percent. At the end of June quarter, the company had returned $126 billion of its $200 billion program, including $90 billion in share repurchases, Chief Financial officer Luca Maestri told analysts on Tuesday.

 To pay investors, Apple has issued almost $50 billion in debt around the world, including bonds denominated in yen and Swiss francs. Apple also used $10 billion in cash to pay U.S. taxes last year, according to a regulatory filing.

 On top of this, Apple has already assumed for accounting purposes that a lot of the cash has come home, suggesting that the impact of cash repatriation on future earnings would be minimal. At the end of its latest fiscal year, Apple estimated that bringing home the $69.7 billion in earnings on which it hasn’t taken a charge would cost about $23.3 billion in U.S. taxes.

 Cook has said that Apple is already the largest taxpayer in the U.S. and reiterated a need for “comprehensive” tax reform. A representative for Apple declined to comment.

 “It’s not smart for all of these companies, including us, to have all this money offshore, which can’t be invested in the United States,” the CEO said at a tech conference held by the Wall Street Journal last year. “It would be reasonable to, say, force a tax on the offshore piece but let it all flow free -- let the capital have a free flow.”

 (A previous version of this story removed a reference to Apple’s lobbying spending being at a record in the second quarter.)

 For more, read this QuickTake: Profit Shifting |||||

 Harvoni, a drug for treating Hepatitis C made by Gilead Sciences. (courtesy of Gilead Sciences, Inc.)

 Over the last few years, Gilead Sciences has grown into one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies, fueled by the sales of expensive specialty treatments for hepatitis C. The company’s revenue has tripled since 2012, to $32.6 billion last year.

 According to a report to be released Wednesday, Gilead has also developed another specialty: Avoiding billions in taxes.

 The California-based pharmaceutical giant moved some of its assets to Ireland, apparently allowing income from some U.S. drug sales to be shifted abroad and taxed at a lower rate, according to Americans for Tax Fairness, a liberal advocacy group. It has also avoided nearly $10 billion in taxes by not bringing some of its foreign profits back to the United States, the group says.

 Gilead declined to comment on the report.

 The study strikes at a simmering battle between the Obama administration and the business community over whether U.S. corporations are inappropriately avoiding billions in taxes by taking advantage of a flawed tax code.

 In 2013, Gilead launched the drug Sovaldi – a hepatitis C cure that carried an $84,000 list price for a 12-week course of treatment. That drug was followed by another treatment, Harvoni, which carried a list price of $94,500. Last month, Gilead received approval for a third treatment, Epclusa, which carries a list price of $74,760.

 Last year, a Senate Finance Committee investigated the company’s pricing of hepatitis C drugs and concluded the company had sought to maximize profits at the expense of making the remedies accessible to patients.

 The drugs’ prices also had a noticeable effect on overall prescription drug spending. In 2015, health care spending on prescription drugs grew more than 12 percent, according to an analysis published in the peer-reviewed medical journal Health Affairs, a rise attributed in part to the new generation of hepatitis C treatments.

 The new report by Americans for Tax Fairness shows that as Gilead’s revenues and profits have grown, driven largely by its hepatitis C franchise, a perplexing incongruity has developed: In 2015, nearly two-thirds of its revenues were generated by U.S. sales, but the U.S. accounted for only 37 percent of its profits before taxes. That’s despite the fact that the U.S. generally pays more for drugs than other countries.

 The report suggests that “transfer pricing” helps account for this disparity. In 2013, Gilead’s chief financial officer said the company’s tax rate would “decline over time” because its intellectual property for Sovaldi had been transferred to a subsidiary in Ireland, which has a lower corporate tax rate, 12.5 percent, than the United States.

 This strategy is common, legal and increasingly used by pharmaceutical companies, said Jeremy Scott, editor-in-chief of commentary at Tax Analysts, an organization specializing in tax policy.

 "People weren’t doing it as aggressively in the ‘90s as in the past five to 10 years," Scott said. “This is a recent trend."

 The new report notes that Gilead's effective tax rate tumbled to 16.4 percent last year compared with 27.3 percent in 2013. (The statutory U.S. federal tax rate in the is 35 percent.)

 Meanwhile, Gilead has kept a growing amount of its foreign profits overseas, reaching $28.5 billion in 2015. The company would have to pay about $9.7 billion in taxes if it brought those profits back to the United States, according to the report.

 “Gilead excels at tax dodging and price gouging," Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Tex.) said in an e-mail. "Instead of innovation, it has spent more on stock buybacks for executives and shareholders than on research and development. Gilead’s formula for success: prices up, profits up, tax avoidance up."

 Gilead is just one of dozens of large pharmaceutical and technology companies that is using a variety of tactics to potentially lower its taxes. Apple has nearly $200 billion in profits overseas, Microsoft has about $100 billion, while Gilead's competitor, Pfizer, has about $193 billion. If they were to bring those back to the United States, the companies would owe billions in taxes.

 "It is quite amazing what the pharma companies can pull off, and it’s a global issue," said Steven M. Rosenthal, a senior fellow at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center. |||||

 Sovaldi, an expensive Hepatitis C treatment, is made by Gilead Sciences. (AP Photo/Courtesy of Gilead Sciences)

 This story has been updated.

 Gilead Sciences executives were acutely aware in 2013 that their plan to charge an exorbitantly high price for a powerful new hepatitis C drug would spark public outrage, but they pursued the profit-driven strategy anyway, according to a Senate Finance Committee investigation report released Tuesday.

 "Let's not fold to advocacy pressure in 2014," Kevin Young, Gilead's executive vice president for commercial operations, wrote in an internal email. ‘‘Let’s hold our position whatever competitors do or whatever the headlines."

 Gilead gained federal approval for its drug Sovaldi in late 2013 and ultimately settled on the price of $84,000 for a 12-week course of treatment. To the company, that price seemed to deliver the right balance: value to shareholders while also not so high that insurers would "hinder patient access to uncomfortable levels," according to internal documents. But they also got more than they bargained for: an outpouring of outrage from the public, a backlash from government and private payers, and political scrutiny.

 The 18-month Senate committee investigation reviewed more than 20,000 pages of company documents.

 “The documents show it was always Gilead’s plan to max out revenue, and that accessibility and affordability were pretty much an afterthought," said Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), who co-led the investigation with Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), in a news conference.

 In a statement released Tuesday, Gilead disagreed with the conclusions of the report, saying that the price was "in line with previous standards of care.” The company noted that it has programs in place to help uninsured patients and those who need financial assistance access the treatments. More than 600,000 patients around the world have been treated with Gilead’s hepatitis C drugs since 2013, according to the company.

 Here are four key takeaways from the investigation:

 1. It could have been priced at $115,000 for a course of treatment.

 Gilead considered a range of prices for Sovaldi and weighed the value to its shareholders against the "reputational risks," meaning the potential outrage from patients, physicians and payers. The potential prices ranged from $50,000 to $115,000.

 Executives believed a $50,000 price would build good will and ensure easy access to the drug because it would be covered by most plans. But it would cause "significant foregone revenue," and activists would still critique the price, even at this relatively low level.

 At $115,000, executives were concerned about "external considerations" and predicted: "High levels of advocacy group criticism and negative PR/competitive messaging could be expected at $115K and it would be increasingly difficult to manage at these levels."

 2. Gilead priced Sovaldi partly based on the expectation it would set a benchmark for the next drugs in the pipeline.

 A company presentation noted that Gilead has "considerable pricing potential" for Sovaldi, but that future pricing for next-generation drug launches would be limited by competition -- what it referred to as a second wave of treatments.

 "Wave 1 will set a price benchmark against which Wave 2 will ultimately be evaluated," the presentation stated.

 "By elevating the price for the new standard of care set by Sovaldi, Gilead intended to raise the price floor for all future hepatitis C treatments, including its follow-on drugs and those of its competitors," the report states.

 Its next hepatitis C drug, Harvoni, was priced at $94,500.

 3. Patients were warehoused to limit access to Sovaldi.

 Facing pent-up demand for a hepatitis C treatment, insurers quickly began to implement restrictions -- essentially, warehousing patients by putting sick people aside until they were even more sick. Medicaid programs in 27 states limited which patients could get access to Sovaldi. Private insurers did, too.

 In a letter, the Oregon Health Authority reported that while more than 10,000 Medicaid patients were deemed good candidates for Sovaldi and its competitors in fall 2014, the estimated cost of treating half of them would more than double the entire $600 million spent on all drugs in the previous year. Instead, because treating more advanced patients would be more cost effective, the state implemented a plan to treat at the rate of 500 patients a year for the first six years.

 Kentucky's Medicaid program noted that the state's heroin epidemic exacerbated its hepatitis C problem -- people who had injected drugs were being tested for the disease, raising the tricky question of when to start treatment.

 "Given the current cost of the newer treatment options and to remain fiscally responsible we will be forced to make difficult decisions regarding who does and does not get access to treatment medications upon diagnosis," Samantha McKinley, pharmacy director of the Kentucky Department for Medicaid Services, wrote in a letter to Grassley and Wyden.

 4. Cost-per-cure, not cost of development.

 The report suggests that the factors Gilead used to set its price were not based on the research and development needed to bring the drug to market, or on the $11.2 billion it paid for Pharmasset, the company that developed Sovaldi. Instead, Gilead executives looked at what previous treatments had cost and the effect of future waves of competition on the revenue it could bring in.

 "Company officials surmised that its drug had a ‘value premium' because of increased efficacy and tolerability, shorter treatment duration, and its potential to ultimately be part of an all-oral regimen," the report states.

 In its statement Tuesday, the company said, “We stand behind the pricing of our therapies because of the benefit they bring to patients and the significant value they represent to payers, providers, and our entire healthcare system by reducing the long-term costs associated with managing chronic [hepatitis C virus].”

 With another Senate committee now probing price increases at four other pharmaceutical companies, the final conclusion of the report may be one we see repeated.

 "This might be an example that received the most attention in some time, but it won't be the last," Grassley said in a statement.

 Correction: The story formerly misidentified patients in Oregon as enrollees in Medicare, not Medicaid. |||||

– A pharmaceutical company that has in recent years made billions of dollars on hepatitis C treatments—the three the FDA has approved range from $75,000 to $94,500—has been named a "price gouger" and "tax dodger" in a new report. Gilead Sciences, the sixth richest drugmaker in the world, "is making a fortune selling essential drugs to the very government and taxpayers that helped pay to develop them, and then dodging taxes on the resulting profits," says Frank Clemente, executive director of Americans for Tax Fairness, which issued the report this month. Gilead has avoided some $10 billion in taxes by moving assets to Ireland, where there is a lower tax rate, and then not bringing some $28.5 billion in profits back into the US. Per the Washington Post, the California-based company's revenues in 2015 hit $32.6 billion, up three times from 2012. As for the accusation of gouging: Last year, a Senate investigation found that the company "pursued [a] profit-driven strategy" with its hepatitis drugs, rather than making the drugs more accessible at a lower price (it had considered $50,000). As the Post notes, Gilead, which declined to comment on the report, isn't alone in looking overseas for tax relief. Plenty of other pharmaceutical and technology companies do it. Apple, for instance, has squirreled away nearly $200 billion abroad, Bloomberg reported last year. According to Citizens for Tax Justice, that's enabled the company to avoid paying $59.2 billion in US taxes. Pfizer has some $193 billion abroad, per the Post. The new report singling out Gilead, the Post points out, highlights the "simmering battle" between President Obama and big business over the practice of sending assets to foreign countries.


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 A medieval well that was once believed to heal eye diseases and wash away sins has been uncovered in Rainhill .

 After a series of excavation works by Historic England, St Anne’s Well was uncovered at a private farm in the area.

 The historic well was located by looking at a photograph from 1983 which showed it was still visible and by using a description on the National Heritage List which said the well was large, made of sandstone and with steps to the water.

 A local legend suggested St Anne’s Well was associated with a nearby priory, lost during the Dissolution of the Monasteries.

 Holy wells were an important part of Christianity in the Middle Ages and St Anne’s Well continued to be revered even after the Dissolution, and by the 19th century it was even thought to cure eye diseases.

 A Historic England spokesman said: “Part of our role at Historic England is to speak up for and champion heritage. ‘Archaeology is just a load of lumps and bumps in a field’ is an oft-defended accusation but in the case of St Anne’s Well, we had to concede the description was fairly apt!

 “Situated in a large field, it had become completely filled with earth due to years of arable ploughing.

 “Just a patch of barren grass and a couple of stones marked its location. It had been on the Heritage at Risk Register since 2010, and was clearly in need of help.”

 Historic England’s Heritage at Risk team commissioned an archaeological investigation to discover what remained.

 After two days of careful excavation, Oxford Archaeology North uncovered the well and at almost 2m x 2m it’s a substantial size.

 Three steps lead down to a pool of water where medieval pilgrims submerged themselves, hoping to benefit from its healing properties.

 Having uncovered the well, the next step for the team was to protect it for the future.

 Stones, which had fallen in to the well, were replaced and a management agreement was set up with the farmer to ensure weeds don’t encroach.

 New wooden edging to the perimeter of the excavation was set up to prevent soil falling in, and to provide a buffer to protect the well from damage by farm machinery.

 The spokesman added: “It can now come off the Heritage at Risk Register.

 “St Anne’s Well is on private land, but the farmer kindly allowed members of Rainhill Civic Society and Merseyside Archaeological Society to visit the newly repaired well with Historic England.

 “The Inspector of Ancient Monuments and Heritage at Risk Projects Officer led a lively group visit of about 20 members and one dog.

 “One member had come to see the well as a boy in the 1950s and hadn’t seen it since.

 “Everyone must have been feeling healthy and sin-free, as nobody tried to take a sneaky healing dip.” ||||| The seed for Wide00014 was:

 - Slash pages from every domain on the web:

 -- a ranking of all URLs that have more than one incoming inter-domain link (rank was determined by number of incoming links using Wide00012 inter domain links)

 -- up to a maximum of 100 most highly ranked URLs per domain

 - Top ranked pages (up to a max of 100) from every linked-to domain using the Wide00012 inter-domain navigational link graph ||||| Archaeologists in the UK have uncovered a small well that was traditionally used by religious pilgrims, who believed it could wash away their sins and cure various ailments such as poor eyesight.

 The team thinks that the well – which is more like a shallow spring used for bathing – was built to honour Saint Anne, the supposed mother of the Virgin Mary, who had a cult following in Britain during the late Medieval Period (1066-1485 AD). And according to folklore, that well was cursed.

 Researchers from the Historic England Heritage have named the religious site St. Anne’s Well, and it was found buried on a piece of privately owned land near Liverpool.

 Local archaeologists and the owner of the property were aware of the well for some time, but until now, no one had excavated it, and it had only been identified by photographs taken in 1983.

 Now that it's original structure has been uncovered, researchers have been given new insight into when and how the well was used.

 "When we first got to the well we found that there was very little indication of it on the surface, but after excavation, it was found to be in reasonable condition," the team’s supervising archaeologist, Jamie Quartermaine, told Rossella Lorenzi at Seeker.

 "This well was probably a late Medieval foundation as the cult of St. Anne did not become widespread in England until after the end of the 14th century."

 During the time it was constructed, healing wells were all the rage in Britain, and St. Anne was commonly attributed to them – though many other healing wells were built in honour of other saints, too.

 This well in particular would have seen pilgrims stepping into a pool of spring water roughly 1.2 metres (4 feet) deep, where they could wash away sins or attempt to be healed through divine powers.

 The well was thought to be maintained by a priory of 12 local monks that were so successful, they even managed to turn a profit from the land, and the well grew so popular that two of the monks became full-time caretakers of it.

 "The well attracted numbers of pilgrims, necessitating the building of a small three-roomed structure around the well and the custodianship of two of the monks," Quartermaine told Seeker.

 The well’s popularity wasn’t the only thing that made it stand out – legend says it was 'cursed' sometime during the 16th century.

 According to a newspaper report from 1877, the story goes that a neighbouring landowner by the name of Hugh Darcy was upset with the amount of space the well was taking up, prompting a dispute with Father Delwaney, one of the monks who helped run the monastery.

 The feud reached a tipping point when the two were arguing near the well, and Darcy told the monk that he wouldn’t be in business for much longer.

 A few days later, a messenger from the king at the time – most likely Henry VIII, who had a thing for closing monasteries – came to close the facility and well, and an upset Father Delwaney promptly cursed Darcy and told him he would be dead in under a year.

 Moments after the curse was muttered, the legend states that Delwaney fell over dead.

 To be clear, this story is based on nothing more than hearsay, that has probably been exaggerated more and more with each telling.

 But according to the folklore, a series of unfortunate events followed Darcy around for the next year – such as his son dying mysteriously, and his finances taking a turn for the worst.

 Finally, after a night of drinking, Darcy was found at the well with his head smashed in, and no one knows how he managed to suffer such a fate.

 Again, it's just a legend, but it's a good one.

 The researchers suspect that religious pilgrims continued bathing in the well’s waters up until the 19th century, until it was eventually abandoned and ploughed over.

 Now that it's been unearthed, the team plans on adding some wood around the water to ensure that it doesn’t get covered up again or damaged, and will be working with local farmers to ensure the site is maintained.

 The team’s work has yet to appear in a peer-reviewed journal for verification, so for now, we're taking their word for it that this is the well of St. Anne from the stories.

 But hopefully, after further analysis, the researchers will share the details of their work with the public and the rest of the scientific community.

 And if all goes well with the excavation, one of the most long-lasting holy wells in the UK will be revived, and fingers crossed it's curse-free. |||||

– In medieval times, pilgrims flocked to England in quest of St. Anne's Well, which was said to cure ailments and wash away sins. Archaeologists now say they've rediscovered that large sandstone well on a private farm near Liverpool using only a 1983 photo and a description, reports the Liverpool Echo. When archaeologists arrived at the site, there was little evidence of the well at all as "it had become completely filled with earth," says a rep for Historic England. Once excavated, however, it was "found to be in reasonable condition," per an archaeologist. Legend has it that the supposed mother of the Virgin Mary herself descended the medieval well's three steps and bathed in its 4-foot-deep pool, located near a priory of monks, reportedly giving the water the ability to cure eye and skin diseases, per Seeker and ScienceAlert. But the well—believed to have healing properties into the 19th century—also features in a more ominous legend suggesting it's cursed. During a dispute over the well in the 16th century, the prior reportedly cursed the estate manager of a neighboring landowner, whom he believed had a hand in the monastery being seized by the king. The prior said a "year and a day shall not pass ere St. Anne thy head shall bruise"—then the prior himself collapsed and died, according to an 1877 newspaper recounting of the legend. The estate manager is said to have disappeared after a night of drinking, only to be found dead in the well with "his head crushed in." ScienceAlert points out the discovery has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal. (These ancient Greek tablets also told of a curse.)


Last year, Harvard University welcomed the first female president in its history. In a few months, the university will mark another milestone: the installation of the first black female as dean of Harvard College.

 In a statement Tuesday, the university announced the appointment of Evelynn Hammonds, Harvard’s senior vice provost for faculty development and diversity and a professor of the history of science and African-American studies, to the top post in Harvard College. The appointment comes just as Yale administrators are launching an effort to encourage more racial diversity within the upper ranks of the University’s administration.

 “This is an exciting moment of change for the College, and Evelynn’s academic values and leadership qualities promise to serve our undergraduates well,” Harvard President Drew Gilpin Faust, who last year became the first woman to be elevated to Harvard’s presidency after nearly four centuries of male rule, said in a statement.

 Hammonds, 55, will be the first female and first black person to hold the position of dean of the college. Yale has never had a black or female dean of Yale College, although Judith Rodin, who went on to become the first female president of the University of Pennsylvania, was appointed Dean of the Graduate School in 1991.

 Hammonds’ job places her in charge of matters ranging from academic affairs to student life to the general administration of Harvard College, the oldest undergraduate school in the United States.

 “I am honored to have this extraordinary opportunity to lead the College with its exceptional students at such an important period in its history,” Hammonds said in a statement. “I know that there are many challenges facing the College, and I am ready to tackle them with my colleagues’ help.”

 The appointment marks the second milestone for the university in breaking down gender barriers; Harvard, America’s oldest university, went 371 years before appointing Faust, its first female president, last year.

 Faust was the permanent successor to former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, who was all but driven out of Cambridge in 2006 when faculty discontent with the president peaked following a controversial comment he made about the relative aptitude of women in the sciences compared to their male counterparts.

 Hammonds came to Harvard in 2002 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she served as founding director of the Center for the Study of Diversity in Science, Technology and Medicine.

 In July 2005, she was named senior vice provost for faculty development and diversity; in that position she worked with Harvard’s president and provost on teaching appointments and the recruitment and advancement of minorities and women on the Harvard faculty.

 In that capacity, Hammonds visited Yale on Feb. 18 to participate in a panel discussion organized by Yale’s Women Faculty Forum. During the discussion, Hammonds and other administrators discussed the steps their institutions are taking to promote gender equality among its faculty.

 Hammonds also spoke about initiatives Harvard has launched to help women and their families, such as hiring spouses or providing grants that allow faculty to take family along with them during field research.

 “We hire families,” she said during the panel. “We support [women] in meeting their family responsibilities.”

 Harvard’s announcement, meanwhile, comes at a time when Yale administrators have reaffirmed their commitment to encouraging diversity — particularly of the racial sort — in Yale’s top administrative ranks. University President Richard Levin announced that commitment in an e-mail to the Yale community in January, sent in advance of the holiday commemorating the birthday of civil-rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.

 University administrators are scheduled to attend a retreat this spring to discuss a strategy for encouraging racial diversity in the Yale administration, and the Yale Corporation, the University’s highest governing body, received a presentation from administrators on the subject at its meeting in December. Last year, Yale hired its first chief diversity officer, Nydia Gonzalez, who is spearheading the University’s diversity efforts.

 Yale already has significant gender diversity in its top administrative ranks; four of the seven officers of the University are women, and several former top female administrators — Rodin among them — have gone on to assume presidencies of other universities in recent years. But none of the senior officers is an ethnic minority.

 Hammonds is a graduate of Spelman College, the historically black women’s college in Atlanta, and the Georgia Institute of Technology. She later received advanced degrees from MIT and Harvard.

 Yale Graduate School Dean Jon Butler, who served on a committee with Hammonds about a decade ago for the Organization of American Historians, predicted Tuesday that Hammonds will thrive in her new role.

 “She’s smart, she’s savvy, she’s engaged,” Butler said, “and she’s committed, among other things, to faculty diversity.”

 Hammonds will take over the deanship from Acting Dean David Pilbeam GRD ’67, who had served in that post since Harvard College Dean Benedict Gross stepped down last summer after four years on the job. Hammonds will take office on June 1, and the university will immediately begin a search for her successor as senior deputy provost, according to a statement.

 —Sophia Chen contributed reporting. ||||| ESSDRAS M SUAREZ/GLOBE STAFF Evelynn M. Hammonds says she will return to academia.

 The Harvard College dean at the center of the controversy over covert searches of instructors’ e-mail accounts last fall announced Tuesday that she is stepping down.

 While the dean of the college, Evelynn M. Hammonds, says she was not asked to resign the leadership post she has held for five years, her departure was widely viewed by professors and students as the culmination of a chain of painful episodes that engulfed the campus over the course of the academic year.

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 The troubles began at the end of August when the university announced that it was investigating 125 students for possible cheating on the take-home final exam in an introductory government class. The severity of punishments — many students were forced to withdraw temporarily — led to criticism that Harvard had overreacted.

 The e-mail searches stemmed from Hammonds’s and other officials’ concerns that confidential information about the disciplinary process in that case was leaking to the media.

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 “I was never asked to step down. I have been in discussions to return to academia and my research for some time,” Hammonds said in brief comments provided by a spokeswoman. “The e-mail controversy was difficult, but it was not a motivating factor in my decision to step down as dean.”

 She will take a sabbatical before returning as head of a new program for the study of race and gender in science and medicine.

 Neither Hammonds, her boss, Faculty of Arts and Sciences dean Michael D. Smith, nor Harvard’s president, Drew Faust, would make themselves available for an interview Tuesday. Hammonds also retained a public relations firm to represent her, an unusual move for an academic administrator who is rejoining the faculty.

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 Many professors said Hammonds had become ineffective at her job, and the student newspaper, The Harvard Crimson, had called for her resignation. But some professors said Tuesday that she was unfairly blamed for the e-mail searches, when other officials were also closely involved.

 “She was all trussed up to be the scapegoat here for what was in the main a shared set of decisions,” according to a faculty member familiar with the situation, who declined to be identified to avoid embarrassing colleagues.

 The Globe first reported in March that Harvard administrators searched the e-mail accounts of 16 resident deans because, Hammonds and Smith said, they were concerned that leaks might have threatened the privacy and due process of students facing discipline in the cheating case.

 Weeks later, Hammonds told faculty that the e-mail search had been more extensive. She attributed inaccuracies in the statement she and Smith had made earlier to her “failure to recollect the additional searches.” For the additional queries, she said she consulted with legal counsel but not Smith.

 Hammonds and Smith repeatedly apologized to faculty and the resident deans at a faculty meeting in April.

 Hammonds spoke of her commitment to rebuilding trust and repairing relationships and even made a poignant reference to her effort to raise her 10-year-old son as a good man.

 “As I look out at all of you, I am seeing his eyes,” she said at the faculty meeting, according to the text of her remarks. “I always tell our son how important it is to own up to your mistakes, to apologize and to make amends.”

 At the time, Faust made it clear she did not blame individuals alone.

 “We have highly inadequate institutional policy and process around the rapidly and constantly evolving world of electronic communication,” she said. She appointed an outside lawyer to conduct an inquiry; the probe is expected to be completed by the end of June.

 Professors who have raised questions about the e-mail searches took pains Tuesday to thank Hammonds for her hard work on behalf of undergraduate students.

 “It’s important to bear in mind, the circumstances under which all those decisions were made were very difficult,” said history professor Maya Jasanoff, noting the dean’s obligation to protect students’ privacy through the disciplinary process. “I’m sure Dean Hammonds was operating in what she felt to be with the best interests of the people she was primarily concerned to protect.”

 In statements Tuesday, Faust and Smith praised Hammonds’s accomplishments, which Smith said will benefit “generations of undergraduates to come.”

 Other colleagues also spoke of her accomplishments, such as creating a winter session from scratch to give students more offbeat or career-oriented learning opportunities and helping to revamp residential houses for modern life.

 “To have someone of her stature, her quality of mind, with her own recognition of the transformative possibilities of higher education — as it was [transformative] in her own life — at the helm, making life better for Harvard undergraduates, I think that really set a standard that’s going to be hard to meet,” said Martha L. Minow, dean of the Harvard Law School.

 Former Harvard provost Steven E. Hyman worked closely with Hammonds in her last job, when she was the university’s first senior vice provost for faculty development and diversity. That position was made more challenging because of controversy swirling around former Harvard president Lawrence H. Summers.

 “She was level-headed and effective at a time of great turmoil for Harvard,” Hyman said. “As dean of the college, she has put students first, invariably.”

 Hammonds said in a statement that she is looking forward to redesigning her classes in light of new technological innovations. She is a professor of the history of science and African and African-American studies.

 Her new program, at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard, will look at the role of race in science and medicine. ||||| Amid a buzz of controversy about her role in invading the privacy of several Harvard staff members, Evelynn Hammonds, the 60 year old Dean of Harvard College, will step down on July 1, five years and one month after she became both the first African-American and first female to occupy the highest office in Harvard's undergraduate school. On Tuesday morning Harvard officials announced Hammonds' ouster among a list of her accomplishments during her tenure as Dean, including the establishment of "two academic integrity committees focused on strengthening academic integrity at Harvard College" and an array of student services. Understandably, the list omits Hammonds' decision to authorize the search of staff members' Harvard.edu email account after the contents of a confidential message were divulged to The Harvard Crimson.

 According to The Crimson, Hammonds announced on April 2 that she had authorized the search of staff members' personal Harvard email accounts because university officials believed that a resident dean (an individual who advises students who live in Harvard's house system) had leaked to several Crimson reporters a sensitive message pertaining to the massive cheating scandal that struck Harvard's Introduction to Congress course in the spring of 2012. In the weeks beforehand, Hammonds had characterized the search as much less invasive, targeting only resident deans' administrative email accounts — which stay the same even as resident deans come and go — instead of the same resident deans' personal Harvard addresses. (In the end, a single dean was "threatened" with sanctions — but not fired.) "I and others, entrusted with administering our university business, made serious mistakes, and I stand here to apologize and to join in the commitment to learn lessons for the future," Hammonds said in early April.

 Within a month of admitting to the wider scope of the email search, Hammonds began preparing to step down, and reportedly spent much of April and May negotiating the terms of her departure. According to Tuesday's announcement, Hammonds will land at Harvard's W.E.B. Du Bois Institute, where she will study the impact of race and gender in scientific fields. Before arriving, however, she plans to take a sabbatical of unspecified length. Given the events of the past year — rampant cheating, uproar over how Harvard planned to treat accused cheaters, and finally the controversial email searches she authorized — Hammonds is going to need it.

 Want to add to this story? Let us know in comments or send an email to the author at jtrotter at theatlantic dot com. You can share ideas for stories on the Open Wire.

 J.K. Trotter |||||
What is a one-paragraph summary of the above article?

– The dean of Harvard College is stepping down amid controversy over her decision to authorize searches of faculty email accounts in relation to the school's cheating scandal, the Boston Globe reports. While the email announcing Evelynn Hammonds' departure didn't specifically mention the email snooping, Hammonds was in the thick of that scandal, admitting last month to having conducted the searches even as the school's president agreed with angry staffers that something else should have been done. Rumors have been swirling that Hammond would depart ever since. Hammonds, the Atlantic Wire points out, is the school's first black, female dean. She'll stay with the school, leading a new program on race and gender in science and medicine, but only after taking a sabbatical of undisclosed duration.


In his first public account of the shooting, Timothy Loehmann told grand jurors he thought he was facing an ‘active shooter situation’

 The officer who shot and killed 12-year-old Tamir Rice in Ohio has delivered his first public account of the killing, over a year after the incident occurred, arguing his actions were justified as he was engaged in an “active shooter situation” and believed Tamir was 18 years old.

 Cleveland police officer Timothy Loehmann told grand jurors he shot because Tamir pulled a gun – which turned out to be a pellet gun – from his waistband. “The suspect had a gun, had been threatening others with the weapon and had not obeyed our command to show us his hands,” he said.

 Tamir Rice family lawyers call reports into fatal shooting 'preposterous' Read more

 Loehmann fatally shot Tamir, who was black, within two seconds of arriving at a local park on 22 November last year, after a 911 caller reported that there was a juvenile in the area with a weapon that was “probably fake”. The full details of the call were not passed on to the officers, according to other accounts released by the Cuyahoga County prosecutor Timothy McGinty.

 A Cuyahoga County grand jury is currently considering whether to bring charges against Loehmann, 27, and his partner, 47-year-old Frank Garmback, both of whom are white. Garmback was the driver of the patrol car on the day of the shooting.

 The officers, who had previously declined to be interviewed by county investigators, provided written testimony that was released by prosecutors after being read to grand jurors on Tuesday.

 Loehmann said he told Tamir to raise his hands repeatedly as the boy was “reaching into his waistband” before the officer opened fire and had exited his patrol cruiser because he had been trained that “the cruiser is a coffin”.

 “I observed the suspect pulling the gun out of waistband and his elbow coming up,” Loehmann wrote in his submission, dated 30 November 2015.

 He continued: “With his hands pulling the gun out and his elbow coming up, I knew it was a gun and it was coming out … the threat to my partner and myself was real and active.”

 Lawyers for the Rice family have repeatedly dismissed claims that Loehmann and Garmback could have given the 12-year-old sufficient warnings or commands, given the fraction of time that passed between the officers arriving on the scene and opening fire.

 On Tuesday, Rice family lawyers described the prosecutor’s decision to allow the officer’s unsworn statements before the grand jury as “a stunning irregularity”.

 “No regular target of a criminal investigation would be afforded this opportunity,” the group said in a statement.

 In Garmback’s statement, he concedes that the patrol car had slid along the ground and “did not stop where and when I intended”.

 The steady release of evidence presented to the grand jury, including three expert testimonies that concluded the shooting was justified, has been staunchly criticised by Tamir’s parents and protesters in Cleveland, who argue that the drip feed of information is designed to prepare the public for a non-indictment.

 Rice family lawyers have requested the grand jury also hear testimony from two experts who concluded the shooting was not justified.

 Asked for a statement on the officers’ behalf, their attorney, Henry Hiler, said in an email on Tuesday: “We respect the grand jury process and have faith in our judicial system.”

 The officers’ statements were read to the jurors a day after Tamir’s mother, Samaria, testified to the panel about the loss of her son. In a statement, her attorney said she had asked the jurors whether the officers’ actions “could possibly be ‘reasonable’ or ‘justifiable’”.

 “She believes that the answer is plainly no,” the statement said, “and hopes and prays that the grand jury agrees that there is probable cause to indict the officers and hold them accountable for her son’s death.” ||||| A white Cleveland patrolman who shot a 12-year-old black boy carrying a pellet gun told investigators that he and his partner continuously yelled "show me your hands" before he fired the fatal shots, according to the officer's statement released by prosecutors Tuesday.

 The rookie officer said that Tamir Rice didn't obey his commands and that he saw the boy pulling a weapon out of his waist band.

 "I knew it was a gun and I knew it was coming out," officer Timothy Loehmann said in the statement given to investigators.

 It turned out Tamir was carrying a nonlethal, Airsoft-type gun that shoots plastic pellets when Loehmann shot him twice outside a recreation center on Nov. 22, 2014. He died a day later.

 A grand jury will decide if Loehmann or his field training officer should be charged criminally for Tamir's death.

 Prosecutors in recent weeks released a frame-by-frame analysis of the surveillance camera footage from the shooting, along with expert reports that called the shooting justified.

 Attorneys for the Rice family have asked Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Tim McGinty to step aside and allow a special prosecutor to take over the case. They called the prosecutor's presentation to the grand jury "biased" and "improper" after releasing the reports that found no fault with the officers' actions.

 They said Tuesday that allowing both officers to make unsworn statements that won't be subject to cross examination "further taints these proceedings."

 The statements from Loehmann and patrolman Frank Garmback describe in detail action that the surveillance video shows took about two seconds.

 They were responding after a 911 caller reported that a man was waving a gun and pointing it at people. The caller told the dispatcher that the gun might not be real. The call also said the man might be a juvenile, but that information wasn't passed on to the officers.

 Loehmann said he and his partner thought Tamir was going to run as they drove up to him, but Tamir turned toward the cruiser.

 "The suspect lifted his shirt, reached down into his waistband. We continued to yell 'show me your hands,'" Loehmann said in the statement. "I was focused on the suspect. Even when he was reaching into his waistband, I didn't fire. I still was yelling the command 'show me your hands.'"

 The rookie officer said he was getting out of the cruiser when he saw a weapon in the boy's hand coming out his waistband. "The threat to my partner and myself was real and active," Loehmann said.

 He said he fired two shots and heard his partner still yelling "show me your hands" after Tamir fell to the ground.

 Garmback, who was driving the cruiser, said in his statement that he wanted to keep the boy away from the recreation center and that the patrol car slid when he hit the brakes. The car didn't stop where he intended, Garmback said.

 He said he saw the gun Tamir was carrying when Loehmann opened his door. "I thought the gun was real," Garmback said.

 Subodh Chandra, an attorney for Tamir's family, said Tuesday that the officers' statements were contradictory and did not make sense.

 "Loehmann, for example, insists that he observed things and took action that would have been physically impossible for any human being to do in the under two seconds it took him to shoot a 12-year-old child," he said in a statement.

 Chandra also noted that Loehmann said he issued at least three commands to "show me your hands," but that Garmback said he thought the cruiser's windows were rolled up as they drove toward Tamir.

 ___

 This story has been corrected to drop reference to officer's account of the estimated two-second encounter because the officer did not specifically say which moments he was describing.

 ___

 Associated Press writer Andrew Welsh-Huggins in Columbus, Ohio, contributed to this report. ||||| Surveillance video shows the police car pull up very close to Tamir and Loehmann getting out of the vehicle and firing within seconds. Garmback said the car, which he estimated to be going between 10 to 12 mph, slid. "The car did not stop where and when I intended," he said.

 The officers both said that Garmback told Loehmann he thought Tamir was going to run, and were afraid he was going to enter the recreation center.

 Loehmann said in his statement that as the car slid, "I started to open the door and yelled continuously, 'show me your hands' as loud as I could."

 Garmback said in his statement he believes the windows were up, but isn’t sure.

 Garmback said he saw the gun at around the time that Loehmann got out of the police car, and he thought it was a handgun. Garmback said he and Loehmann told Tamir to show his hands.

 "Even when he was reaching into his waistband, I didn't fire. I still was yelling the command 'show me your hands,'" Loehmann said in his statement. Loehmann said he fired twice. "I shot towards the gun in his hands," he said.

 Related: Officer Who Killed Tamir Rice Found Unfit in Previous Police Job

 A grand jury will determine whether criminal charges should be brought against Loehmann. Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Timothy McGinty said he released the statements "in keeping with our determination to be as transparent as possible in this and other police use of fatal deadly force cases." ||||| CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Both Cleveland police officers involved in the fatal shooting of Tamir Rice said in statements released Tuesday that the 12-year-old boy was pulling what they thought was a real gun out of his waistband when one officer opened fire.

 The officers also stated why they approached Tamir by driving their cruiser over a curb and across the lawn of a West Side recreation center, an approach that some criminal justice experts have criticized as reckless.

 Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Timothy J. McGinty made public the two statements, each two typewritten pages, citing an interest in transparency as he presents evidence in the case to a grand jury.

 The statements from Timothy Loehmann and Frank Garmback mark the first time the public has formally heard the officers' side of the shooting that made Tamir's name a national rallying cry for protesters of police use of deadly force across the country.

 Loehmann and Garmback were investigating a 911 report of a "guy with a gun" outside the Cudell Recreation Center about 3:30 p.m. Nov. 22, 2014. At the time, Tamir had an airsoft pellet gun.

 Garmback drove his cruiser over the curb, and skidded to a stop beside a gazebo in the park next to the recreation center. As Tamir walked toward the cruiser, Loehmann jumped from the passenger seat and shot Tamir within seconds.

 Both officers wrote in their statements that they thought Tamir, who according to an autopsy report was 5 feet, 7 inches tall and weighed 195 pounds, was an adult.

 Garmback stated that he drove up to the park from West 99th Street to get a clear view of the swings where the 911 caller said the suspect was standing.

 He also said that barriers at the park's main entrance prevent cars from getting into the park. Garmback said that he drove over the curb and across the grass because he did not see Tamir at the swings.

 Loehmann wrote that he opened the door and yelled "show me your hands" as the cruiser approached Tamir. He repeated the order as Tamir reached into his pants, he said.

 "I saw the weapon in his hands coming out of his waistband and the threat to my partner and myself was real and active," he wrote.

 The statements, dated Monday, were given to the Cuyahoga County Sheriff's Deputy assigned to the investigation, Loehmann's attorney Henry Hilow said.

 Loehmann gave the statement "against legal advice" because he is the target of a criminal investigation and has the right not to give a statement, Hilow said. But Loehmann gave the statement "in the interest of the investigators having the facts," Hilow said.

 Subodh Chandra, the attorney who is representing the Rice family in a wrongful death lawsuit against the officers and the city, released a statement accusing McGinty of allowing the officers to submit "unsworn statements" instead of testifying before the grand jury.

 "Submitting self-serving, unsworn written statements -- rather than appearing live before the grand jury so that the officers' versions of events are subject to vigorous cross examination -- shows that these officers know their story will not withstand real scrutiny," Chandra wrote.

 Chandra said that the shooting happened too quickly for Loehmann and Garmback to observe and react to the movements they said Tamir made.

 McGinty's spokesman Joe Frolik rebutted Chandra's comments.

 "These plaintiff's lawyers have no idea what went on behind the closed doors of the grand jury," Frolik said. "No witnesses, including these police officers, were permitted to give unsworn statements to the grand jury."

 Neither officer gave a statement to internal investigators in the days after the shooting. They also did not give a statement in January, when sheriff's deputies took over the investigation.

 The only statements included in the sheriff's investigation before this week were those Loehmann made to other officers at the scene.

 McGinty criticized the union over the officers' refusals to make statements in June, when he made public the evidence gathered by the sheriff's department. McGinty accused the union of operating on a "double standard" by asking witnesses of crimes to come forward with information, but then instructing its officers not to cooperate with investigations into police shootings.

 Union president Steve Loomis defended the decision by saying McGinty refused to grant the officers legal protection for their statements, and they were exercising their constitutional rights not to provide a statement.

 The statements come as McGinty's office is presenting evidence to a grand jury, which will decide whether to charge Loehmann and Garmback with a crime.

 What experts said about key issues in Tamir Rice case

 McGinty and attorneys for Tamir's family have released a combined five reports by criminal justice experts who reviewed the case.

 Three current and former law enforcement officials hired by McGinty found the shooting was "objectively reasonable" under the totality of the circumstances. They wrote that surveillance video of the shooting appeared to show Tamir's hands moving toward his waistband as Loehmann got out of the car, which would have given the officer reason to believe Tamir was reaching for a gun.

 But the reports that Rice's family attorneys released on Saturday criticized the officers' tactical response, saying their "reckless" approach to Tamir made them vulnerable to a threat, and that the video was too grainy to see if Tamir had reached for his waist.

 The experts the Rice family commissioned, also former law enforcement officers, wrote that it was improper for McGinty's experts to guess what the officers perceived. Because Loehmann and Garmback had not given formal statements about the shooting at the time, the experts did not know what the officers saw, the experts wrote.

 Tamir's mother, Samaria Rice, her lawyers and some activists have been critical of McGinty's handling of the investigation, and have called for him to turn the investigation over to a special prosecutor.

 McGinty has repeatedly said he will not step down.

 Update: This post was updated with a comment from Joe Frolik, spokesman for Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Timothy J. McGinty. |||||
What is a one-paragraph summary of the above article?

– The two Cleveland police officers involved in the shooting of 12-year-old Tamir Rice are telling their side of the story for the first time. In two statements, officers Timothy Loehmann and Frank Garmback say they were investigating a report of a "guy with a gun" in a park outside a recreation center on Nov. 22, 2014, when they saw Tamir pulling what they believed to be a real gun from his waistband, per Cleveland.com. Garmback, 47, says he drove over a curb and across a lawn because the park's main entrance blocked cars from entering. Loehmann, 27, says he yelled "show me your hands" three times, then opened fire on Tamir—who the officers believed was an adult, per the AP. "Even when he was reaching into his waistband, I didn't fire,'" Loehmann says, per NBC News. Then "I saw the weapon in his hands coming out of his waistband and the threat to my partner and myself was real and active." Loehmann's lawyer says his statement was given "against legal advice" since the officer is the target of a criminal investigation and evidence is now being presented to a Cuyahoga County grand jury. She adds, however, it was "in the interest of the investigators having the facts." The statements were read to grand jurors on Tuesday, per the Guardian. Lawyers for the Rice family accuse the local prosecutor of allowing the officers to give "unsworn statements" so as to avoid the "vigorous cross examination" that comes with testifying before the grand jury. "No regular target of a criminal investigation would be afforded this opportunity," they say. They add Loehmann "is suggesting that he observed things and took action that would have been physically impossible for any human being to do in the less than two seconds it took him to shoot this 12-year-old boy." (Read Loehmann's comments from the scene.)


Summarize this article:

Jihan Nassar, a homemaker in Corona, Calif., is listed as a $500 donor to the campaign of Florida Gov. Charlie Crist. But she insists she never gave a dime.

 ''I can't make any donations, financially,'' Nassar said Friday. "We never made any donations, sir. I have no idea what you are talking about.''

 Nassar and her husband, Waleed, are among more than three dozen California donors listed as giving to Crist's campaign on June 19, 2006 -- donations bundled by a controversial Delray Beach defense contractor now under scrutiny for contributions to GOP presidential candidate John McCain.

 On Thursday, the McCain campaign said it would return $50,000 in donations tied to businessman Harry Sargeant III, finance chairman of the Florida Republican Party and a college buddy of Crist's. Sargeant has said the California donors were solicited by a business partner, Mustafa Abu Naba'a, a Jordanian with an apartment in Miami-Dade, records show.

 McCain -- a champion of campaign-finance reform in the U.S. Senate -- said he would return the donations after news articles in the Washington Post and the New York Times raised questions about their legitimacy.

 In a letter to the donors, the campaign warned that foreign nationals cannot donate money to U.S. campaigns and contributors cannot be reimbursed by another donor as a way to get around contribution limits.

 Some donors whose contributions are being returned by McCain's campaign were also listed as contributors to Crist on June 19, 2006.

 That day, Crist received more than $25,000 in contributions from California, records show, including $500 checks from two stereo stores and two Wienerschnitzel hot-dog restaurants outside Los Angeles.

 Zouhair El Srouji, a 40-year-old accountant in Wildomar, Calif., initially told a reporter on Friday that he had no memory of a $500 donation to the Florida governor.

 After reviewing campaign records, however, he said he recalled that a campaign contribution was requested by his employer -- though he couldn't recall who asked him to give.

 ''It took a lot of convincing, but they said he was a good man and needed our help, and I guess I'm a sucker for helping good people,'' El Srouji said.

 Reached briefly to talk about his just-announced Dec. 12 wedding date with fiancee Carole Rome, Crist said he wasn't familiar with the specifics and referred questions to his former campaign manager, George LeMieux. ''It's all good,'' Crist said.

 Earlier in the week, he called Sargeant "a great patriot.''

 LeMieux said he would review the donations highlighted by The Miami Herald.

 He said every effort was made during the campaign to verify all donations and make sure they did not exceed campaign finance limits. Crist received more than 18,000 checks in the Republican primary, he said.

 ''With that volume of checks, we're not going to know everyone who gives money,'' LeMieux said. "I remember many a long weekend trying to look up information about donors on the Internet.''

 The controversy over the donations comes at an awkward time for Crist, one of several politicians auditioning to be McCain's vice-presidential candidate.

 Sargeant, a fraternity brother of Crist's at Florida State University, was one of the governor's biggest supporters in the 2006 campaign, and he has emerged in recent months as a top fundraiser for McCain as well.

 Sargeant is among 63 McCain fundraisers nationwide who have bundled more than $500,000 in checks each. Donations to presidential candidates are capped at $2,300, but bundlers get around the limit by collecting checks from friends, business associates and relatives.

 Sargeant also donated $30,000 of his own money to a joint McCain-GOP fund in May, records show. Before turning his attention to McCain, Sargeant also raised money for presidential candidates Rudy Giuliani and Hillary Clinton.

 On March 5 -- the same day President Bush received McCain at the White House as the GOP's presumptive nominee -- Sargeant hosted a fundraiser for McCain at his $8.3 million Delray Beach home.

 Sid Dinerstein, chairman of the Palm Beach County Republican Party, attended the affair at the waterfront home. He said McCain is ''bending over backwards'' by returning contributions.

 ''By giving the money back he is raising flags that weren't even there,'' Dinerstein said. "John McCain puts the ethics bar higher than anyone in national politics.''

 Sargeant could not be reached for comment on Friday, and a lawyer for his company did not respond to a list of e-mailed questions.

 Tallahassee lobbyist Brian Ballard, a top fundraiser for both Crist and McCain, said the reason Sargeant took the position as the state GOP's finance chairman was simple: Crist asked him to do it.

 Sargeant was not involved in President Bush's campaigns, which took the practice of bundling to new heights by designating its biggest givers as ''Rangers'' and "Pioneers.''

 ''Harry does politics now only because his friend of 30 years asked him to take this role,'' Ballard said. "He's very much apolitical. He runs tankers and ports.''

 Under Sargeant's leadership, the Republican Party of Florida raised $15 million in 2007, a record for a nonelection year. Chairman Jim Greer said he has no reason to review the checks Sargeant has delivered to the party.

 ''He continues to have my full support and appreciation for his service,'' Greer said. "He's very dedicated and exhibited a high degree of integrity.''

 For someone at the top of the fundraising heap, Sargeant has kept a low profile. Several activists and fundraisers who have been involved in Republican politics for years said they had never met him.

 But Sargeant's business has received some unwanted attention.

 Sargeant is a partner with Abu Naba'a in International Oil Trading Co., a Boca Raton firm with Defense Department contracts to ship oil to the military in Iraq. Federal records show the company received $601 million in the 2007 budget year.

 In June, U.S. Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., head of a congressional oversight committee, sent a letter to Sargeant seeking records in a probe of alleged overcharging of the military for fuel costs.

 Sargeant and Abu Naba'a have also been accused of fraud by the brother-in-law of the king of Jordan, who filed a lawsuit in West Palm Beach in April saying the pair cut him out of the Pentagon contracts after he helped them secure the deal.

 The ex-partner, Mohammad Al-Saleh, said he helped the company win the blessing of the Jordanian government to ship the oil through that country to Iraq -- a requirement of the Pentagon contracts, according to the suit. Al-Saleh said Sargeant and Abu Naba'a failed to pay him at least $13 million.

 In court papers, lawyers for Sargeant and Abu Naba'a denied any wrongdoing and said the suit should be moved to Jordan. Sargeant and his family also own domestic shipping and asphalt companies, records show. ||||| You've probably never heard of Marty Martin. He spent most of his life as an anonymous CIA operative. But he very recently came out of the closet as the man Bush put in charge of finding Osama bin Laden in the aftermath of 9/11, and guess what? It turns out the man Bush put in charge of finding bin Laden is an extremely shady and allegedly corrupt war profiteer. Who would have thought?

 Martin, of course, never succeeded in catching bin Laden. He ran the CIA's bin Laden unit from 2002 to 2004, a fact that we now know only because he emerged to grab some credit for bin Laden's death and celebrate the agency's discontinued torture program: "We got beat up for it, but those efforts led to this great day," he told the Associated Press three weeks ago. Prior to that, he was just a nondescript former agency official who went into the security consulting business after retiring. The closest hint to just how key an official he was came from references to a "Marty M."—described as a sort of Jack Bauer of the bayou—in former CIA director George Tenet's memoir.

 Now that we know who Martin really is, we can get a sense of what kind of guy Bush turned to for arguably the most crucial job in the war on terror.

 1. The Kind of Guy Who Bilks Taxpayers for His Own Enrichment

 In 2007, after leaving the CIA, Martin joined International Oil Trading Company, a Florida company that delivered fuel to U.S. forces in the Middle East. In 2008, congressional investigators accused it of ripping off the Pentagon to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. This year, the Pentagon's own audit found that the company overcharged the government by as much as $204 million on a series of massive Iraq war fuel contracts.

 2. The Kind of Guy Who Bribes Foreign Officials

 According to a Florida lawsuit against International Oil's owner Harry Sargeant III, Martin paid a $9 million bribe to the head of the Jordanian intelligence service back in 2007 to secure his company's exclusive rights to ship fuel across Jordan to U.S bases in Iraq. (That allegation comes from the Jordanian king's brother-in-law, Mohammad al-Saleh, who is suing Sargeant for purportedly screwing him out of a $100 million stake in the company.)

 3. The Kind of Guy Who Helps Launder Illegal Political Contributions

 In 2008, the Washington Post reported that Sargeant, a billionaire, raised funds for John McCain's presidential campaign with help from an unnamed "former head of the bin Laden unit" who worked for him. The men reportedly skirted campaign finance laws by funneling the money through Arab-American "straw donors." McCain quickly returned $50,000 of Sargeant's lucre. The Post never named the ex-chief of the CIA bin Laden unit involved in the fundraising, but unless two former heads of the bin Laden unit were working for Sargeant at the time, that man was Marty Martin.

 4. The Kind of Guy Who Gets Totally Psyched When People Die In a War He Profits From

 In a court filing last week, attorneys for al-Saleh quoted from an e-mail that Martin wrote to Sargeant in 2008 in which he appeared to gloat over the escalation of violence in Iraq:

 Fyi, word of a 're-surge' is floating around amidst shit hitting the fan in Iraq today. ☺

 The "shit hitting the fan" was the Battle of Basra, the Iraqi Army's attempt in March 2008 to finally roll up militias loyal to Moqtada al Sadr. It was widely seen as a debacle and victory for al-Sadr, and many feared the conflict threatened to reignite the civil war. That month, 40 Americans died in Iraq. ☺!

 In other words, he's a former CIA agent. Anyway, that's Marty Martin, the guy Bush put in charge of the bin Laden hunt. Glad it worked out for him.

 Harry Sargeant's lawyers couldn't be reached for comment on this story. The CIA declined to comment. And Marty Martin's bin Laden-hunting predecessor, Michael Scheuer –- who served for two years as a special adviser to Martin's unit –- claims to have never heard of Marty Martin (which we can only presume is a CIA first-rule-of-Fight-Club omerta thing). Reached on his phone, Martin said: "No no, man. I don't want to talk to you, man," and hung up before we had a chance to ask a question.

 [Image via AP] ||||| A member of Jordan’s royal family is accusing an American oilman and former GOP fundraiser of bribing the Jordanian government to facilitate his fuel shipments through the country to U.S. forces in Iraq.

 The allegation emerged in a civil lawsuit pitting the billionaire American businessman, Harry Sargeant III, against an ex-business partner, Mohammad al-Saleh, the brother-in-law of Jordan’s King Abdullah II.

 Al-Saleh, the plaintiff in the case first reported by NBC News in May 2008, claims that he was cut out of a lucrative one-third share in Sargeant’s firm, the International Oil Trading Co., based in Boca Raton, Fla., and replaced by an ex-CIA official with deep contacts in the Jordanian government.

 The crux of the bribery allegation involves a $9 million wire transfer from Sargeant’s firm, directed to a mysterious figure in Jordan’s intelligence agency identified in court documents only as “Pasha.”

 Sargeant’s lawyers acknowledge that “Pasha” was “possibly” Gen. Mohammad Dahabi, then head of the General Intelligence Directorate (GID), Jordan’s intelligence agency. A source inside the Jordanian government confirmed that.

 Kickback or legitimate payment?

 Al-Saleh’s lawyers argue in court documents that the money was a kickback to curry favor with the GID and secure Sargeant’s continued use of Jordanian thoroughfares to ship fuel to U.S. bases in western Iraq.

 Sargeant’s lawyers insist the $9 million was payment to a “quasi-government” Jordanian company that was a subcontractor for Sargeant’s firm and deny any wrongdoing by their client.

 Sargeant, a retired Marine pilot and former official of the Florida state GOP, was once among the Pentagon’s closest business partners, winning billions of dollars in fuel contracts in the Iraq war. But fallout from the contracts has eroded Sargeant’s reputation.

 A congressional probe led by Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., concluded in October 2008 that Sargeant had exploited his close ties with the Jordanian monarchy to win an exclusive license — a so-called letter of authorization that permitted his company to ship the fuel through Jordan to Iraq, as the contracts required.

 Sargeant used his “effective monopoly” over the supply routes to grossly overcharge the Pentagon, Waxman wrote in a letter to Defense Secretary Robert Gates. Waxman called it “the worst form of war profiteering.”

 Shortly after the probe, Sargeant resigned as the finance chairman of the Florida Republican Party.

 Last month, a Pentagon audit requested by Waxman found that Sargeant was overpaid by as much as $204 million for the fuel contracts, which were worth nearly $2.7 billion over six years. The Defense Department accepted Sargeant’s inflated prices because no other competitor could get the letter of authorization from the Jordanian government, the audit said.

 Ex-CIA agent hired

 Now Al-Saleh’s lawsuit is dredging up new information about Sargeant’s dealings with the Jordanian government.

 Among other things, court records indicate that Sargeant hired Marty Martin, a former member of the CIA’s Senior Intelligence Service, to help manage his oil firm in 2007. Martin — identified in court documents as a former Middle East CIA station chief — leveraged his contacts in the Arab world to cement Sargeant’s relationship with the Jordanian government, even as the king’s brother-in-law was being forced out of the oil company and defrauded, al-Saleh’s lawyers contend.

 The money transfer at the core of the bribery allegation is revealed in a November 2007 email from Martin to a representative of the Jordanian intelligence service. In it, Martin wrote that $4.5 million had been “transferred to the designated account for the Pasha’s attention.”

 Three days later, Martin wrote again to confirm that a “second tranche of $4.5 million should also hit your account today.” He added, “Please advise Pasha.”

 A high-placed source inside the Jordanian government confirmed that the “Pasha” alluded to in the emails was Dahabi, then head of the GID. The source, who requested anonymity, said the payments were “being made to the GID,” and added, “A simple trace on the wires will easily reveal who the beneficiaries were and the bank account details.”

 The GID is the Jordanian counterpart to the CIA, and the two agencies have reportedly cooperated in the secret rendition of terrorist suspects. In a report this year, Human Rights Watch portrayed the GID as a vast shadow force in Jordan, harassing dissidents and “influenc(ing) decisions in most aspects of Jordanian public life.”

 Violation of anti-bribery law alleged

 Al-Saleh’s lawyers allege in court documents that Martin’s payments to the GID may have violated the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

 But Sargeant’s lawyers, Mark Tuohey and Roger Kobert, said the wires were destined for Taurus Trading Co., a Jordanian firm that provided ground services for Sargeant as a subcontractor. The lawyers characterized Taurus Trading Co. as a “quasi-government entity” and said the Jordanian government was a paid third party in Sargeant’s defense work. Taurus Trading Co. did not respond to emails requesting comment, nor did the Jordanian Embassy in Washington.

 Asked why the director of the GID would be involved in the wire transfers, Kobert responded, “You’d have to ask him.”

 Dahabi, who was the GID’s director in 2007, did not answer calls to his cellphone.

 Martin did not reply to emails or phone calls seeking comment.

 Sargeant’s lawyers accuse al-Saleh’s side of taking the wire transfers out of context. “They try to make something very mundane and boring sound sexy,” said Kobert. “It’s not sexy.”

 Al-Saleh’s lawyers have cited another email that they argue shows Martin plotting to cut al-Saleh out of his one-third stake in the oil firm. ||||| WASHINGTON -- When one of Osama bin Laden's most trusted aides picked up the phone last year, he unknowingly led U.S. pursuers to the doorstep of his boss, the world's most wanted terrorist.

 That phone call, recounted Monday by a U.S. official, ended a years-long search for bin Laden's personal courier, the key break in a worldwide manhunt. The courier, in turn, led U.S. intelligence to a walled compound in northeast Pakistan, where a team of Navy SEALs shot bin Laden to death.

 The violent final minutes were the culmination of years of intelligence work. Inside the CIA team hunting bin Laden, it always was clear that bin Laden's vulnerability was his couriers. He was too smart to let al-Qaida foot soldiers, or even his senior commanders, know his hideout. But if he wanted to get his messages out, somebody had to carry them, someone bin Laden trusted with his life.

 In a secret CIA prison in Eastern Europe years ago, al-Qaida's No. 3 leader, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, gave authorities the nicknames of several of bin Laden's couriers, four former U.S. intelligence officials said. Those names were among thousands of leads the CIA was pursuing.

 One man became a particular interest for the agency when another detainee, Abu Faraj al-Libi, told interrogators that when he was promoted to succeed Mohammed as al-Qaida's operational leader he received the word through a courier. Only bin Laden would have given al-Libi that promotion, CIA officials believed.

 If they could find that courier, they'd find bin Laden.

 The revelation that intelligence gleaned from the CIA's so-called black sites helped kill bin Laden was seen as vindication for many intelligence officials who have been repeatedly investigated and criticized for their involvement in a program that involved the harshest interrogation methods in U.S. history.

 "We got beat up for it, but those efforts led to this great day," said Marty Martin, a retired CIA officer who for years led the hunt for bin Laden.

 Mohammed did not reveal the names while being subjected to the simulated drowning technique known as waterboarding, former officials said. He identified them many months later under standard interrogation, they said, leaving it once again up for debate as to whether the harsh technique was a valuable tool or an unnecessarily violent tactic.

 It took years of work for intelligence agencies to identify the courier's real name, which officials are not disclosing. When they did identify him, he was nowhere to be found. The CIA's sources didn't know where he was hiding. Bin Laden was famously insistent that no phones or computers be used near him, so the eavesdroppers at the National Security Agency kept coming up cold.

 Then in the middle of last year, the courier had a telephone conversation with someone who was being monitored by U.S. intelligence, according to an American official, who like others interviewed for this story spoke only on condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive operation. The courier was located somewhere away from bin Laden's hideout when he had the discussion, but it was enough to help intelligence officials locate and watch him.

 In August 2010, the courier unknowingly led authorities to a compound in the northeast Pakistani town of Abbottabad, where al-Libi had once lived. The walls surrounding the property were as high as 18 feet and topped with barbed wire. Intelligence officials had known about the house for years, but they always suspected that bin Laden would be surrounded by heavily armed security guards. Nobody patrolled the compound in Abbottabad.

 In fact, nobody came or went. And no telephone or Internet lines ran from the compound. The CIA soon believed that bin Laden was hiding in plain sight, in a hideout especially built to go unnoticed. But since bin Laden never traveled and nobody could get onto the compound without passing through two security gates, there was no way to be sure.

 Despite that uncertainty, intelligence officials realized this could represent the best chance ever to get to bin Laden. They decided not to share the information with anyone, including staunch counterterrorism allies such as Britain, Canada and Australia.

 By mid-February, the officials were convinced a "high-value target" was hiding in the compound. President Barack Obama wanted to take action.

 "They were confident and their confidence was growing: 'This is different. This intelligence case is different. What we see in this compound is different than anything we've ever seen before,'" John Brennan, the president's top counterterrorism adviser, said Monday. "I was confident that we had the basis to take action."

 Options were limited. The compound was in a residential neighborhood in a sovereign country. If Obama ordered an airstrike and bin Laden was not in the compound, it would be a huge diplomatic problem. Even if Obama was right, obliterating the compound might make it nearly impossible to confirm bin Laden's death.

 Said Brennan: "The president had to evaluate the strength of that information, and then made what I believe was one of the most gutsiest calls of any president in recent memory."

 Obama tapped two dozen members of the Navy's elite SEAL Team Six to carry out a raid with surgical accuracy.

 Before dawn Monday morning, a pair of helicopters left Jalalabad in eastern Afghanistan. The choppers entered Pakistani airspace using sophisticated technology intended to evade that country's radar systems, a U.S. official said.

 Officially, it was a kill-or-capture mission, since the U.S. doesn't kill unarmed people trying to surrender. But it was clear from the beginning that whoever was behind those walls had no intention of surrendering, two U.S. officials said.

 The helicopters lowered into the compound, dropping the SEALs behind the walls. No shots were fired, but shortly after the team hit the ground, one of the helicopters came crashing down and rolled onto its side for reasons the government has yet to explain. None of the SEALs was injured, however, and the mission continued uninterrupted.

 With the CIA and White House monitoring the situation in real time – presumably by live satellite feed or video carried by the SEALs – the team stormed the compound.

 Thanks to sophisticated satellite monitoring, U.S. forces knew they'd likely find bin Laden's family on the second and third floors of one of the buildings on the property, officials said. The SEALs secured the rest of the property first, then proceeded to the room where bin Laden was hiding. In the ensuing firefight, Brennan said, bin Laden used a woman as a human shield.

 The SEALs killed bin Laden with a bullet to the head. Using the call sign for his visual identification, one of the soldiers communicated that "Geronimo" had been killed in action, according to a U.S. official.

 Bin Laden's body was immediately identifiable, but the U.S. also conducted DNA testing that identified him with near 100 percent certainty, senior administration officials said. Photo analysis by the CIA, confirmation on site by a woman believed to be bin Laden's wife, and matching physical features such as bin Laden's height all helped confirm the identification. At the White House, there was no doubt.

 "I think the accomplishment that very brave personnel from the United States government were able to realize yesterday is a defining moment in the war against al-Qaida, the war on terrorism, by decapitating the head of the snake known as al-Qaida," Brennan said.

 U.S. forces searched the compound and flew away with documents, hard drives and DVDs that could provide valuable intelligence about al-Qaida, a U.S. official said. The entire operation took about 40 minutes, officials said.

 Bin Laden's body was flown to the USS Carl Vinson in the North Arabian sea, a senior defense official said. There, aboard a U.S. warship, officials conducted a traditional Islamic burial ritual. Bin Laden's body was washed and placed in a white sheet. He was placed in a weighted bag that, after religious remarks by a military officer, was slipped into the sea about 2 a.m. EDT Monday.

 Said the president: "I think we can all agree this is a good day for America."

 ___

 Associated Press writers Kimberly Dozier, Eileen Sullivan and Ben Feller in Washington and Kathy Gannon in Islamabad, Pakistan contributed to this report. |||||

– A CIA operative in charge of hunting down Osama bin Laden is a war profiteer who helped bilk the Pentagon out of some $200 million, reports Gawker. Marty Martin was put in charge of tracking down the terror mastermind from 2002-2004, and boasted to the AP that those early efforts "led to this great day" the day bin Laden was killed by Navy SEALs. After he left the CIA, Martin joined International Oil Trading Company, a Florida operation that delivered fuel to US forces in the Middle East, a company accused by both Congress and the Pentagon of grossly overcharging the government, to the tune of $204 million. Martin was also accused in a Florida lawsuit of paying a $9 million bribe to Jordanian officials to win exclusive fuel shipping rights, and has been linked to dirty campaign contributions given to (and returned by) John McCain during his bid for the presidency. Contacted by Gawker to comment on the various charges, Martin responded: "No no, man. I don't want to talk to you, man."


Article:

This undated photo provided by the U.S. Marshal's office shows Adel Daoud, of Hillside, Ill. Daoud is charged with terrorism for allegedly trying to set off what he thought was a car bomb Sept. 14, 2012, near a downtown Chicago bar. (AP/AP)

 Four days before a sweeping government surveillance law was set to expire last year, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the chairman of the chamber’s Intelligence Committee, took to the Senate floor. She touted the law’s value by listing some of the terrorist attacks it had helped thwart, including “a plot to bomb a downtown Chicago bar” that fall.

 “So I believe the FISA Amendments Act is important,” the California Democrat said before a vote to extend the 2008 law, “and these cases show the program has worked.”

 Today, however, the government is refusing to say whether that law was used to develop evidence to charge Adel Daoud, a 19-year-old Chicago man accused of the bomb plot.

 And Daoud’s lawyers said in a motion filed Friday that the reason is simple. The government, they said, wants to avoid a constitutional challenge to the law, which governs a National Security Agency surveillance program that has once again become the focus of national debate over its reach into Americans’ private communications.

 “Whenever it is good for the government to brag about its success, it speaks loudly and publicly,” lawyers Thomas Durkin and Joshua Herman wrote in their motion. “When a criminal defendant’s constitutional rights are at stake, however, it quickly and unequivocally clams up under the guise of State Secrets.”

 If the government acknowledged that it had used evidence derived from the FISA Amendments Act, Daoud would have standing to challenge the law’s constitutionality. Specifically, Daoud’s lawyers would be able to take on a provision known as Section 702. The law permits the interception of foreign targets’ e-mails and phone calls without an individual warrant, including when the foreigners are in communication with Americans or legal residents.

 The U.S. Supreme Court in February rejected a constitutional challenge to Section 702 by a group of journalists, lawyers and human rights advocates, saying they had no standing to sue because they had not proved that their communications had been intercepted.

 But the court also said that if the government intends to use information derived from the Section 702 surveillance in a prosecution “it must provide advance notice of its intent,” and a defendant may challenge the lawfulness of the surveillance. The government assured the court that it would give such notice to criminal defendants.

 In a filing this month in Chicago, U.S. Attorney Gary S. Shapiro refused to say whether the evidence was obtained under Section 702. Instead, he said, the government told Daoud the evidence was acquired pursuant to a traditional FISA court order, rather than under the expanded surveillance program authorized in 2008. A traditional order requires the government to go to a FISA judge and show probable cause that the target is an agent of a foreign power.

 Daoud’s attorneys say in their pleading that the government is being disingenuous. “We believe it is clear that the evidence . . . came from Section 702,” Durkin said in an interview. “Either Senator Feinstein’s information was correct in December 2012, or she was given wrong information. The government has never disputed what she said.”

 A spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office had no comment but noted that the office had replied to Daoud’s initial request for notice earlier this month in Shapiro’s filing.

 “The most troubling part of the case is the government seems to be trying to hide the ball,” said Alex Abdo, a staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union, which argued the Supreme Court case on behalf of the journalists, lawyers and activists. “They told the Supreme Court not to worry about reviewing the FISA Amendments Act because it would get reviewed in a criminal case. They said if they used the evidence in a criminal case, they’d give notice. Now they’re telling criminal defendants they don’t have to tell them. It’s a game of three-card monte with the privacy rights of millions of Americans.”

 Abdo said the original FISA statute, passed in 1978, requires the government to notify defendants when evidence being used against them is derived from surveillance authorized by the law. The court, he said, should require the government to abide by the law. “Otherwise,” he said, “the most sweeping surveillance program ever enacted by Congress will never be reviewed in public by a court.”

 Similarly, Stephen I. Vladeck, a law professor at American University, said, “Everyone knows the role that Section 702 is playing in a case like this.” But, he said, “thanks in part to the Supreme Court, the government can use Section 702 and then never have to defend its constitutionality.”

 The central problem with Section 702, critics say, is its breadth and lack of individual warrants. The law targets non-U.S. persons “reasonably believed” to be located outside the United States but does not require that the government obtain a warrant before intercepting communications.

 Moreover, the purpose of the collection is “foreign intelligence,” a broad category that may include everything from information on terrorism to nuclear proliferation to what a European journalist is writing on human rights abuses or an African businessman is saying about global financial risk, experts say.

 According to a criminal complaint filed by an FBI agent, Daoud received an e-mail in February 2012 regarding his registration with an online jihadi forum overseas. In May 2012, Daoud sent himself a link for nine issues of Inspire magazine, an online publication put out by al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, an al-Qaeda affiliate.

 That same month, two FBI undercover employees posing as jihadists contacted Daoud online in response to material he had posted. Between July and September, an undercover FBI agent met Daoud in Chicago and helped him plan the attack.

 Daoud was arrested in September after he attempted to detonate a bomb placed in a jeep outside a Chicago bar with a remote-triggering device.

 Durkin said that he thought the FBI used surveillance powers under Section 702 to identify Daoud and then got a traditional FISA order to conduct its sting against him.

 “Nonetheless,” he said in the motion Friday, “the government’s interest in confusing these two issues is obvious. If it can avoid giving proper notice to defendants, as it seeks to do here, the government can avoid a challenge to the [FISA Amendments Act] altogether.”

 U.S. District Judge Sharon Johnson Coleman has set a trial date for February. ||||| Lawyers in Chicago terror case question what sparked investigation

 Attorneys for Adel Daoud wrote that prosecutors are purposely hiding information to avoid a possible battle over the constitutionality of the secret spying program, which was authorized by Congress in 2008 under an amendment to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

 Lawyers for a west suburban teenager charged with plotting to set off a bomb outside a downtown Chicago bar accused prosecutors Friday of dodging questions about whether the investigation was sparked by a massive government surveillance program.

 From left, Defense attorney Thomas Durkin and father of the defendant Adel Daoud, speak with members of the press before attending a hearing for Daoud at the Dirksen U.S. Courthouse on Sept. 17, 2012. (Armando L. Sanchez )

 Daoud's attorney, Thomas Anthony Durkin, said he is asking only for a yes or no on whether evidence in his case was derived from the expanded law, not for the highly classified content or details of the searches.

 Prosecutors wrote in an earlier filing that they have no obligation to disclose the information unless ordered by the judge presiding over Daoud's case.

 The surveillance programs — including one that collects U.S. phone records and another that tracks Internet use by foreigners with possible links to terrorism — were exposed earlier this month by Edward Snowden, a former National Security Agency contractor who leaked details to news organizations.

 In the ensuing uproar, government officials have defended the programs as a highly effective weapon against terrorism. Testifying before the House Intelligence Committee earlier this week, an FBI official said Internet surveillance was pivotal in the arrest of Najibullah Zazi in 2009 for plotting to bomb a New York subway.

 The filing by Daoud's attorney scolded the government for trying to have it both ways.

 "Whenever it is good for the government to brag about its success, it speaks loudly and publicly," Durkin wrote. "When a criminal defendant's constitutional rights are at stake, however, it quickly and unequivocally clams up under the guise of state secrets."

 Daoud, 19, of Hillside, came under FBI scrutiny after posting messages online about killing Americans, authorities have said. FBI analysts posing as terrorists exchanged messages with him and ultimately helped him plan an attack. Daoud was arrested in September after being accused of trying to detonate what he thought was a powerful car bomb outside a bar in the Loop.

 Daoud, who has pleaded not guilty, is set to go on trial in February in federal court in Chicago.

 jmeisner@tribune.com |||||
What is a summary?

– Adel Daoud is a Chicago 19-year-old accused by the feds of trying to detonate a bomb outside a Chicago bar in 2012. His case, however, could serve as the first constitutional challenge to the government's sweeping surveillance techniques, reports the Washington Post. In a court filing yesterday, attorneys for the terror suspect demanded to know whether federal authorities used their expanded powers under a 2008 amendment to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to nab him. “Whenever it is good for the government to brag about its success, it speaks loudly and publicly,” they wrote, as per the Chicago Tribune. "When a criminal defendant’s constitutional rights are at stake, however, it quickly and unequivocally clams up under the guise of State Secrets.” Federal prosecutors say they're not obligated to say whether they used the law, and a judge will have the final say, reports WLS-TV. So did they use it? Here's a hint: Last year, when the Senate was debating whether to renew the 2008 law—it's formally known as the FISA Amendments Act—Dianne Feinstein made her case in favor by asserting that it had helped stop "a plot to bomb a downtown Chicago bar." If the judge rules that the government must acknowledge it used the FAA, Daoud's attorney's would then be able to challenge its constitutionality.