Source:
APWASHINGTON (AP) — House leaders on Thursday announced the six members and two alternates who will make up the Office of Congressional Ethics, an outside independent group created to restore integrity to a flawed ethics process.
With the creation of the new office, said Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., who selected members of the bipartisan office with Republican leader John Boehner of Ohio, "we bring a new element of transparency and accountability to the ethics process."
The office will be charged with reviewing cases and referring them to the House ethics committee, which in recent years has often been inactive or ineffective because of partisan fighting. House Democrats pushed through the measure creating the outside panel last March.
The panel will be chaired by former Rep. David Skaggs, D-Colo., and co-chaired by former CIA director and Rep. Porter Goss, R-Fla. Other members are former Rep. Yvonne Braithwaite Burke, D-Calif.; former House Chief Administrative officer Jay Eagen; former Rep. Karan English, D-Ariz., and George Mason law professor and former Federal Election Commission chief of staff Allison Hayward.
The two alternatives are former federal judge and former Rep. Abner Mikva, D-Ill., and former Rep. Bill Frenzel, R-Minn.
Read more:
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5jSM0eJMgSJ3Gi549o4LSMmk5bOwwD924DGCG1
BREAKING: CIA Director Porter Goss ResignsFiled Under: Administration, Intelligence
By Think Progress on May 5th, 2006 at 1:49 pm BREAKING: CIA Director Porter Goss Resigns»
UPDATE: AP has the story.
UPDATE II: We’ve put together a primer on the connection between Goss and the Cunningham scandal:
For more than a decade, Cunningham-linked defense contractor Brent Wilkes curried favor with lawmakers and CIA officials by hosting weekly parties at lavish hospitality suites at the Watergate and Westin hotels in Washington. Guests would gamble, socialize, and sometimes receive prostitutes; according to Harper’s magazine, the festivities “began early with poker games and degenerated” into what one source described “as a ‘frat party’ scene — real bacchanals.”
GOSS’ NO. 3 ADMITS ATTENDING PARTIES: The highest-ranking CIA official to admit he attended the poker parties thrown by Wilkes is Executive Director Kyle “Dusty” Foggo, the agency’s third-ranking official. (Foggo even “occasionally hosted the poker parties at his house in northern Virginia,” though he denies ever seeing prostitutes at the gatherings.) Foggo’s connections to Wilkes and fellow contractor Mitchell Wade are now the focus of an investigation into CIA contracts by the agency’s inspector general, first made public in March. One of Wilkes’ companies, Archer Logistics, won a contract to provide supplies to CIA agents in Afghanistan and Iraq despite having “no previous experience with such work, having been founded a few months before the contract was granted.”
GOSS CONNECTED? Last week, Harper’s magazine reported that party-goers “under intense scrutiny by the FBI are current and former lawmakers on Defense and Intelligence committees — including one person who now holds a powerful intelligence post.” CIA Director Porter Goss is perhaps the only individual who fits such a description. (Goss denied the accusations through a spokesperson.) But the alleged links between Goss, Foggo, and Wilkes led some to return to questions raised when Goss initially selected Foggo to be executive director in November 2004. At the time, the decision was viewed with skepticism since Foggo’s previous position was as a “midlevel procurement supervisor,” and because following his unexpected selection, “Porter Goss lieutenant Patrick Murray went to then-Associate Deputy Director of Operations for Counterintelligence Mary Margaret Graham and informed her that if anything leaked about other Goss appointments — in particular, Foggo’s — she would be held responsible.”
more:
http://thinkprogress.org/2006/05/05/breaking-cia-director-porter-goss-resigns/?sortby=toprated
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
