Eideard

Whistleblowers earned more than $532 million in 2011 through lawsuits alleging fraud against the U.S. government, a record for such payouts…Private parties suing on the behalf of the government collected $140 million more than they did the previous year, even as the Justice Department’s total civil fraud sanctions remained consistent…

The DOJ recovered some $3.02 billion last year through cases under the False Claims Act – the third-largest recovery ever, just shy of the $3.09 billion it won through cases in 2010.

Golly gee. Anyone think enforcement has changed a little bit since the Bush/Cheney cabal left town.

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Just another flavor of Blackwater-style hired goons

Two whistleblowers will divide nearly a half million dollars following the latest settlement between the Justice Department and independent contracting firms working in Iraq.

DynCorp agreed to pay the U.S. government $7.7 million, and its subcontractor The Sandi Group promised to pay a bit more than $1 million dollars for overcharges they presented to officials, the Justice Department said Friday…

Drew Halldorson and Brian Evancho, both former Sandi Group employees who alerted authorities about the overcharges, will divide $481,710 as their share of the government’s recovery in the case, according to the federal department.

DynCorp was sued for inflated claims involving construction of camps from containers shipped to locations where contractors were able to set up temporary accommodations for fighting forces.

The Sandi Group was sued for improperly seeking reimbursement for “danger pay,” which it falsely claimed to have paid its employees in Iraq, the Justice Department claimed.

“The hard work of stabilizing Iraq is challenging enough without contractors and subcontractors inflating the cost of rebuilding by making false claims at taxpayer expense,” said Assistant Attorney General Tony West.

Good for you, dudes. There is no shortage of creeps and crooks profiteering from American wars – though the Bush/Cheney gang truly set new standards for corruption. It may come as no surprise, there are employers outside the Beltway who will hire honest folks.

At 4 a.m. last Thursday, at the end of an all-night session, Iceland’s Parliament, the Althing, voted unanimously in favor of a package of legislation aimed at making the country a haven for freedom of expression by offering legal protection to whistle-blower Web sites like WikiLeaks, which helped to craft the proposal…

…Iceland hoped to become “the inverse of a tax haven,” by offering journalists and publishers some of the most aggressive protections for free speech and investigative journalism in the world. “They are trying to make everything opaque,” she said. “We are trying to make it transparent…”

The plan to make Iceland a world leader in journalism protection took shape in December with the assistance of two leaders of the whistle-blower Web site WikiLeaks.org, Julian Assange and Daniel Schmitt, whose publish-nearly-anything ideology has given them personal experience with news media laws around the globe…

Monroe Price, who runs a program in comparative media law at the University of Oxford, told The Independent in London, “As an exercise in aspirations, it’s a bold and important endeavor.” But, he added, “if it’s a significant issue like a national security question, then the charging jurisdiction will figure out ways of asserting its power.”

Does he really mean that bastions of Free Speech and Liberty like the UK and US might be willing to break or band the law in pursuit of preserving their political will?

You betcha!

Former U.S. Special Counsel Scott Bloch has been charged with criminal contempt of Congress…

Longtime POGO fans will recall that Bloch was the head of the Office of Special Counsel (OSC), an independent federal agency tasked with protecting whistleblowers from retaliation. POGO and others were highly critical of Bloch for routinely ignoring and dismissing whistleblower complaints, abusing his authority, and turning the agency’s mission on its head by retaliating against his own staff.

The charges filed today allege that Bloch withheld key information from the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform as it was investigating Bloch’s use of a private tech company to delete files from OSC computers. Investigators suspected he was destroying evidence related to allegations that he had used his office for political purposes and retaliated against career staff. FBI agents raided his offices in May 2008, seizing computers and documents belonging to Bloch and his staff. Bloch was forced to resign from the OSC several months later…

Bloch’s other greatest hits include:

Distributing an internal newsletter in which he instructed his female employees to avoid wearing tight clothes, and advised both men and women to wear “conservative watches”;

Assembling a task force to help create the impression that the OSC was engaged in a multi-faceted investigation of the White House, as Bloch himself was under investigation;

Assigning interns to close out hundreds of whistleblower retaliation complaints; and

Ignoring federal air marshals and countless other whistleblowers who were the victims of retaliation.

Though a group of Republican Party hacks stretching back to Watergate days have already founded a “Scott Bloch Defense Fund” it appears that Bloch is going to plead guilty.

I guess even with the defense fund he couldn’t come up with a Dick Cheney-style army of lawyers.